> once they’re behind the wheel

Keep in mind that most cyclists are also drivers, and in the latter role many of them also don't seem to care. These debates often sound like we're talking about two disjoint groups of people, with one having a grievance against the other, but in reality they're just different transport modalities that people switch between.

Where I'm at there is a major project to overhaul a road, let's call it "Broadway", with conservation drainage, walkability(like 10ft wide sidewalks), medians, trees, and bike paths.

The project kept getting derailed due to bicycle special interests having a literal fit because a section of the road was too narrow to have the walkable sidewalks(priority number 1), the cycle lanes with adequate safety, and not congest the rest of the road. A consulting company made recommendations based on traffic simulations and the requirements to have the bicycle route go off onto a parallel side street through this section.

Oh man, what a shit show it turned into. But most of the pushback against what the cyclist special interests wanted(lanes through this section, fuck everything else) had to do with the practicalities of balancing the requirements. Not the meme arguments people who hate cars often throw out as scarecrows.

From my totally uninformed perspective, it seems like the thing to lose should be the cars. If you’re having 10 ft wide sidewalks on a (guessing from the name) important street so that more people can walk there, then maybe you should deliberately make it worse for cars to discourage high speeds or unnecessary journeys. Of all modes of transport, cars are best able to make detours because they are fast and require little of the drivers energy to move. But (again guessing from the name) maybe this is a North American city and so cars must be properly cared for—it seems the car advocacy group didn’t even get the chance to complain about a single lane system because there wasn’t enough width, though maybe they already lost parking spaces or traffic lanes to the project and they did complain about it.

The term for "deliberately make it worse for cars" is "Traffic Calming", and it works quite well, prevents accidents, and saves lives:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming

>Traffic calming uses physical design and other measures to improve safety for motorists, pedestrians and cyclists. It has become a tool to combat speeding and other unsafe behaviours of drivers in the neighbourhoods. It aims to encourage safer, more responsible driving and potentially reduce traffic flow. Urban planners and traffic engineers have many strategies for traffic calming, including narrowed roads and speed humps. Such measures are common in Australia and Europe (especially Northern Europe), but less so in North America. Traffic calming is a calque (literal translation) of the German word Verkehrsberuhigung – the term's first published use in English was in 1985 by Carmen Hass-Klau.

https://www.wired.com/2004/12/traffic/

>HANS MONDERMAN is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn't done his job. "The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a road, they always try to add something," Monderman says. "To my mind, it's much better to remove things."

>[...] In Denmark, the town of Christianfield stripped the traffic signs and signals from its major intersection and cut the number of serious or fatal accidents a year from three to zero. In England, towns in Suffolk and Wiltshire have removed lane lines from secondary roads in an effort to slow traffic - experts call it "psychological traffic calming." A dozen other towns in the UK are looking to do the same. A study of center-line removal in Wiltshire, conducted by the Transport Research Laboratory, a UK transportation consultancy, found that drivers with no center line to guide them drove more safely and had a 35 percent decrease in the number of accidents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Monderman

Hans Monderman: Rethinking the design of streets and public space.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjBGokenEhQ

>An Urban Design London and Urban Design Group Lecture

>Hans Monderman has been one of the most significant influences on the current debate about the design of streets and spaces in the UK. A traffic engineer and road safety specialist from Northern Holland, he is celebrated as the pioneer of shared space as a means to influence speed and driver behaviour.

>Monderman has been the inspiration behind scores of towns and villages which work without road markings, traffic signs, signals, kerbs, barriers and bollards. ‘Most engineers, when faced with a problem, try to add something,’ he says. ‘My instinct has always been to take something away.’ Following a short introduction by Rob Cowan, Hans explains his approach, work and experiences.

So the alternative to making the bikes take a detour was that there would be more congestion, not that the road would be closed to cars entirely?

It sure doesn't sound like the "bike special interests" were the ones being unreasonable here.

The parallel road is not a full city block away as you might imagine. More like an ally but an actual road; the businesses have back entrances and there is foot traffic.

The congestion would not just be on that section of road, it would propogate out and cause major issues. The bikes are not going to experience congestion.

It should reduce the number of people driving. Sounds like a win.

In the gold standard countries for cycling, this sort of design is done on purpose. Pedestrians get the best route, followed by cyclists, and vehicles have what's left.

Elsewhere, doing the easy work to accommodate cycling, then ignoring anything that would cause even the slightest inconvenience to cars, is the norm.

It’s interesting to note that the cyclists in your example have the same interest as the rest of the parties: an equal and safe share of the available road space and yet, you all them “special interests” and they’re supposed to yield and take a detour.

“Think of the children” usually only works when the idea is that children could be violently harmed by something, and thus only works when deployed in cases where freedom is being restricted. It’s not a good faith argument that can be “use your enemy’s force against them”-ed for other causes.

And free baths on rainy days.