It's weird and somewhat unnerving at first but brilliant. I'd argue road-wise it is possibly even safer because headlights work so much better when it's pitch black by virtue of the human eye having so much dynamic range.

Pedestrians can't miss cars as they're blasting light through the dark; cars can't miss bikes because even passive reflectors are blaring in the surrounding darkness; even pedestrians end up being more visible because of the higher contrast, cast shadows, and movement that conspire to make them plainly pop out like cardboard props or Doom 3 flashlight jumpscares.

And when you go out of the dark zone into a major axis that's bathed in light that feels warm and safe it's like everything is suddenly muted and flattened as if reality went through a low contrast sepia-tinted desaturation filter. You feel like you see better but everything is muddled together in the sameness of uniform lighting.

The experience is highly cognitively dissonant and counterintuitive.

This seems to be totally oriented to cars. I find American cities incredibly dark by night. Walking around feels too dark and unpleasant.

It’s easier than ever to carry one.

(Or did you just factiously mean that people have smart phones on them which can function as torches?)

Here, if you go the the pub at night as the streetlights are turned off at midnight, so you take a torch (your phone as a backup). Its perfectly commonplace. To suggest this is "anti-pedestrian" is a bit silly. Rather, it's anti-light pollution.

Yes, generally the purpose of the light is so others can see you.

My god, we spend all of our lives blasting lights into our eyes (some people call these lights "screens"), we've forgotten how to live without it!

I'm in an urban area, but it's not as well-lit as a downtown environment. There's street lights every 2-3 houses and they're not super bright.

I personally prefer this over a downtown-like bright environment since it makes it easier to sleep and the ambience is just better at night.

You state this like it is a bad idea.

If you have a cell phone, you have a torch.

If you are walking in a place where there are cars, having a light on you is a great way to reduce your risk of being hit. So yes, you should absolutely be carrying a torch if you are walking near streets after dark. Nordic countries teach this in kindergarden.

When I'm crossing a street after dark, I always flash my torch at potentially oncoming cars. Even if I'm at a lit crosswalk.

If you are walking in a place without cars, then the place probably doesn't have the infra to provide street lighting. You may want a torch, depends on the phase of the moon and your comfort level with dim lighting.

This comment chain started with someone suggesting that in cities lighting be turned off almost everywhere, and someone replied that pedestrians won't be able to clearly see where they're going without a torch (and I agreed). Where I live, no pedestrian in a city would ever need to use a torch to see where they're going.

You've posted a couple of replies saying that pedestrians should carry a torch so that cars can see them. Well, maybe, maybe not. But that's a different matter.

During a normal night, you get used to the darkness surprisingly fast, and if there even a slight sliver of moonlight, your eyes will within seconds adjust and let you see things again without trouble.

At least that's my experience growing up in the dark countryside in Sweden and seemingly retaining this as an adult, YMMV.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/15/1096799/aging-hi...

I already do this at this point, so guessing that's a club I'm in already, even if my eye-sight is perfect :)

Well, I guess I'll report back in 10-20 years and I can finally have this confirmed for all of us.

Not everyone has excellent vision. In addition to those who are actually visually impaired, your eyesight simply gets worse as you get older even if you had perfect vision when you're young.

And even if you can adjust to the night, which is Moon and cloud-dependent anyway, that completely goes away every time a car goes past with its LED high beams.

LED lights have way more capacity to be directional. There's absolutely no reason why street lights can't mostly point down to light the street and sidewalks with minimal light pollution to any nearby houses.

Growing up on a island with 700 people where the most common mode of transportation is probably bicycle (besides walking, or possibly moped), it really isn't :) People are really eager to jump on the "ableist" accusation, aren't they?

> And even if you can adjust to the night, which is Moon and cloud-dependent anyway, that completely goes away every time a car goes past with its LED high beams.

It really doesn't, at least it didn't for me. It's true that for some seconds you'll see less, but your eyes will adjust faster after that than the initial adjustment when you go from a fully lit environment to unlit, even without direct moonlight.

I'm not arguing for black cities, that'd be bananas. I was just giving another perspective about how we can (usually) adjust to darkness if we let our eyes be used to it. Of course we should have lights in cities so everyone (not just us with good night-sight) can navigate without issues.

Then a car drives past and your sight instantly adjusts to that, but takes several minutes to adjust back. Then you're stuck in subjective total darkness for a while.

Or, if you're in an area with mixed lighting (e.g. you walk past a house that incidentally lights part of the street) then your eyes can never adjust and you have to walk through pools of total darkness. I know this experience from rare situations where a few streetlights go out in a row, and it's not as easy as you just portrayed it.

> At least that's my experience growing up in the dark countryside in Sweden

That's fair enough IMO. I don't think it's feasible or helpful to plaster every centimetre of every rural road in street lighting. But the comment we're replying to suggested removing them in cities "outside of ... active center areas". That's a different matter.

Bright lights on the street create more shadows. All you have to do is step out of the streetlight and no-one will see you, because the light-level contrast between the lit street and the surrounding space.

If there aren't any streetlights, so the surrounding space has the same illumination as the roadway, then that space is more present in more passerby's visual awareness.

So your proposed solution, "Streelights on every street" actually increases the risk you are so concerned about.

The night is not 'complete darkness', we can generally see fairly well.

Also, I suspect your presumption on assault risk and assault rates comes from media, which is designed around building fear. Fear sells.

So I agree that you find the natural world terrifying, I just wish you didn't. Because the natural world is what we are fit for.

Good thing we live in cities then!

Numerous studies show crime goes down when streetlights are turned off.

Simply put, you don't get scrotes hanging about in groups up to no good without lights, and anybody who is walking around is carrying a torch, making it obvious what they are doing (e.g. if you are breaking into a house, needing a torch instead of using a streetlight makes it obvious to everybody what you are doing).

No to mention a lack of streetlights makes if harder for somebody to hide in the shadows.

The real question to ask, is why people like yourself are 'terrified' [sic] of the dark. Statistics show the real truth of what you should be worried about.

Statistics show that people don't care about statistics but about confirmation bias and the media is eager to feed it.

Hitting the next homeless person and throwing them 10 meter in the space will be quite the experience.

Honestly, this is not shitty experience because of regulation, this is just councils cutting costs everywhere except their salaries. Los Angeles these last couple days has showed what it means to do that. You'll literally be on fire some day.

I really wish that wasn't the case. But removing lights is an uphill battle powered by irrational arguments and doomed to failure even on the cases where it's clearly the best option.

Even dimming the lights is hard.

Most of the people who understood the advantages of blue-free amber HPS light over white metal halide lights retired, and this little tidbit of information didn't get passed to the next generation of city employees.

> and because people do not care.

People care, but they don't know why they hate the blue-white LED replacement lights. I've complained to the city about their new lights, but have not gotten any responses about why they haven't deployed LED lights with a safe spectrum of color.

This comment about unsafe blue-white headlights got a few upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42444111

The problem is that for pedestrians, the reaction-time is irrelevant, they're butt-ugly, and plenty of people go on night walks because they can't sleep but want to.

Half of this article is basically about cities being overly car-centric.

Daily reminder that we live under capitalism where you're not allowed to just "take your time".

> residential streets mostly had lamps with white fluorescent lights,

… they used CFLs? The spiral fluorescents were invented in the 1980’s, I guess. I speculate the residential street lights used mercury vapor bulbs, which had a longer expected lifespan than fluorescents.

> But still, I'm wondering: what about curtains, window blinds etc.?

You need a good blackout curtain to deal with light pollution through your window.

I can't vouch for Germany, but there used to be long, high-output fluorescent tubes and fixtures for street lighting in the US. They seem to have largely disappeared by the 1980s. They weren't very common, but some cities used them. They tended to be used on main streets when I saw them.

Nah, the lamps used (I assume) standard fluorescent tubes. Although honestly I don't know how widespread they were. They were (and still are in some areas) all over the place in Munich (and also e.g. here https://maps.app.goo.gl/M3RPqkN5MHZuPG7f7). Hamburg (https://maps.app.goo.gl/fPGfeEwWXtUGFnTL7) and Berlin (https://maps.app.goo.gl/kSemA2Md84AEJ9Py8) also have similar-looking ones.

Of course. But that's the problem -- now black-out curtains are required. And maybe you hate those because you really enjoy waking up with the sun streaming in, and now you have to wake up every morning in blackness until you go open the curtains.

The onus shouldn't be on the residents. It's the same as saying, sure it's noisy but why don't you just wear noise-canceling headphones all day long?

Government services exist to serve the people, not make the people work around them.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-....

How much more energy efficient is it? If it's a tiny efficiency gain vs the negative effects of blue heavy white light then I would suggest it's a bad tradeoff. Some studies have suggested that blue light doesn't affect sleep [1] but the psychological effects of cold vs warm light has been used by lighting designers for decades. Cold light is less comfortable and discourages hanging around, the positive spin is "energizing", it's often used in supermarkets and budget stores that value faster browsing, and impulsive decisions under a greater feeling of urgency. Warm light has a relaxing effect and is used, for example, in luxury stores and restaurants where people are intended to take their time. [2] For outdoor areas where people are intended to enjoy relaxing after dark activities warmer light would be far superior an experience than colder light.

1. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/blue-light-may-not... 2. https://www.tcpi.com/how-lights-impacts-psychology-mood-in-r...

Edit: final clause

The main streets have a different LED with a slight yellow cast, but not the ugly orange of high pressure sodium. Yes, we can have nice LED street lighting.

This particular lane was done in 2018. https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs...

You can actually see the diagram here: https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/Maintenan...

The entire reason it goes up onto the multi-use-trail to connect to Alki Trail, is because that leaves room for a right turn lane; whereas, if Seattle narrowed the two lanes to nine feet, which is a perfectly fine width on an urban street according to AASHTO, then you could have an actual protected bike lane all the way through the intersection without any sort of shallow curve.

This failure is so severe that regardless of how it might be elsewhere, to me it seems like the people who decided to use these LED lights and continue to advocate for them really don't care about people.

With bulb it depends on how/how often you power cycle. A good way to extend its life is to not power cycle it and to underpower it. Dimming a bulb also saves electricity and easier on the eyes.

With LED it is up to manufacturer. People say LEDs are cheaper but those leds are exactly the ones you have to keep buying. And good LED prices can go pretty high compared to bulbs.

I am sure leds technically do live longer than bulbs. But the difference is not significant enough in real life.

https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...

I wonder how many tests are run in actual enclosures for example. Which for example might not dissipate enough heat.

I think it is too expensive to run tests in real changing conditions

Maybe spring the extra couple of dollars and get high quality LEDs.

People assumed that LEDs would last forever because the crystals essentially do, but the encasement and all of the heat issues you have to deal with for the electronics makes that pointless.

Sure, the actual LEDs might have a 50000 hour lifetime, but the crappy power supply they got from the lowest bidder and packaged with woefully inadequate thermal dissipation dies after a tiny fraction of that.

This is anecdata, but I haven't replaced a single LED bulb since I bought the current set ~7 years ago, and it's nothing fancy, just basic IKEA stuff.

in our civilization people observe and tell.

all that research is wonderful and helpful but how many percent of people can do that, can follow that, know where to find it, have an environment that enables them to get observations to the responsible people and how many of those have the trust to do that?

it doesn't matter how smart you are, any colony dies without enough people that fall into above "description".

and those people don't have to fall into that description, but smarter people rather figure out ......

I would suggest that "design standards" do not always make things uniformly better, certainly not for end users.

https://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl18004/chap03.cfm gives a decent overview of some of those things. They are much better for end users because someone over there cared. Whomever designed the ones in the article clearly does not.

This is kind of my point, at a very general level the statement "$thing follows design standards" may or may not mean that $thing is actually better for users.

But, responding to this particular example is missing the point of the article. Let me, for a moment, agree with you, and say that the ramp is within acceptable parameters: still, the author complains about a more general phenomenon, a lot of aspects of this phenomenon are very relatable. And it doesn't have to manifest itself uniformly and similarly everywhere in every detail.

For example, suburban houses in the Netherlands really show people care about the neighborhood. The want things to be nice. Windowsills are always decorated, have some art displayed in the windows, just for the passerby to enjoy. People mostly care to pick up after their dogs and to generally not litter. People even invest into community playgrounds, community garden patches etc. Life is good, at least in this respect.

But, when I go to work, things change. Not only people around me don't care, they very much want everyone to not care, because that would show them in a bad light. It's a convention of sorts, that people understand without saying anything out loud. Do the absolute minimum, waste a lot of time doing nothing of value, don't rock the boat. And it is, as the author says, demoralizing. It makes my blood boil when defects discovered in our product, and instead of being fixed they get documented in a bottomless pit of our multi-thousands pages PDF manual, and the product is shipped regardless. A lot of these defects resulted not from honest mistakes, but from a desire to do as little work as possible, and to do only the "pleasant" part of the work: programmers prefer writing new code to fixing existing code. Testing is for wimps. Adding more stuff without fixing existing problems results in simply having more problems.

* * *

Now, how to make people care?--I don't know. I know of some things that worked, but they have bad side-effects (religion works, but sometimes it detracts into killing a lot of people, communism works, as in kibbutzim, but then it loses momentum, and is very prone to be exploited by external forces also, doesn't work on a large scale.)

In your country this starts way back in middle school, where this phenomenon is worse than I've seen in any other place. It would be incredibly surprising if this suddenly changed in the workplace when it's all people have ever known.

As long as the culture doesn't change at that age, there's no hope for changing it later in life.

There's a large amount of peer pressure to idolize scraping by, and against actually doing your best and putting in effort. While this exists in certain other places too (see classic "jock vs nerd" Hollywood stereotypes), nowhere is it as widespread. Moreso than the intensity - which isn't particularly severe, in the sense that e.g. serious bullying isn't more common than in compare countries - it's how institutional it is that sets it apart, even among a lot of kids who have the potential to do very well and go places if they'd put in a little effort.

Of course YMMV and these things have a large degree of local variance, but there's a reason the linked term exists as a cultural phenemonon there.

If white LED lights were so awful you’d imagine at least somebody would have done a decent, fairly cheap paper to show the negative impacts in the last decade where the uptake of LED street lights has been so widespread.

You are demonstrating the problem very clearly btw: you assume people would have cared and that's why nothing was done.

Which is a puzzling thing to say. Because clearly, the people who care have no power.

"Ugly architecture" is subjective. A lot of architects care very much, but they follow the academic line and lack the imagination and empathy to understand why elements of that aesthetic are unpopular and impractical - a completely different problem, even if it causes related outcomes.

Bugs are easy to write and hard to fix. MBA culture as a whole is fixated on quick extractive shareholder returns, not on celebrating supreme engineering quality. MBAs care very much too, but not about the things the author (and probably most of us) care about.

Some people do care but are simply not good at their jobs.

Even if you do care, people will assume you don't. Anyone who's done direct customer facing work or even just sold stuff online will know that people love to nitpick.

And so on.

The problem is narcissism vs empathy. Caring means trying to have some insight the experience of others. Narcissism is on a scale from blank unawareness of others to outright hostility, whether overt or covert.

There's a lot more of the latter than the former around at the moment, and corporate and economic values provide some conveniently expedient justifications for it.

I think this actually illustrates the author's point and gets at the heart of the cultural malaise we are experiencing. If everything is subjective, nothing can be improved because nothing can be better than something else.

But this isn't the case.

The Mona Lisa is objectively better than anything I have ever painted.

Architecture is no different.

Some buildings quite literally are better than others and we can scientifically study this [1]. We can recognize that all opinions are valid, but that some are better than others. We do this in daily life too, if you are in the ER and the trauma team comes and tells you their opinion on your condition, you will value that opinion over the opinion of the person outside waiting for a ride. Art, music, architecture - no different.

Tens of millions of people visit the Notre Dame Cathedral.

Why?

Religious reasons of course, but many visit simply to marvel at the wonderful architecture. Contrast that with Rocky City Church [2] here in Columbus where I live. A big, bland, gray "modern" building that as our standards have dropped to nothing (remember everything is subjective so nothing can be better than anything else) we have come to accept as the norm.

This is the Nobody Cares phase of not just architecture but society as well.

  [1] https://annsussman.com 
  [2]https://rockcitychurch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/1.png

No it isn't. If I saw one of your paintings and liked it better, there would be no way for you to prove me wrong. My opinion might be highly unpopular, but that wouldn't make it objectively incorrect.

Well, no, a better quarterback is just a member of a team. They don't dictate whether the team wins or not, they just contribute to it if they are good. Though we can't say whether a given quarterback is good or not because we don't have objective criteria to determine that. It's all relative and arbitrary - as I'm sure you'd agree with.

> What does a better painting do—win art contests?

Maybe? Why not?

> Judged by what objective criteria? Art doesn't have rules the way football does.

Football rules are arbitrary criteria, not objective.

> A painting can't "win at being art";

Why not? The Mona Lisa has the most viewers so maybe that means it is the best art?

Some cities are more beautiful than others. Prague is more beautiful than Detroit.

That said, a few posts back a commenter mentioned that the Mona Lisa is "objectively better" than anything they made; while I won't comment on aesthetics and appreciation, the assertion that the artist is more skilled in the arts than the poster is something definitely objectively true, simply because of education and experience. That's no guarantee that the outcome is better, but still.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

If you look at historical architecture patterns (mostly pre-WWI) they mirror how art has changed over time.

It's not that Impressionism came about and Renaissance became shit, it's that both are good and important stylistic contributions.

It's not that Gothic architecture came about then all the Romanesque stuff sucked. Both were good and unique.

We run into the same problem as "all art is equal" when we tend to express the belief that because we live in the time period we're complaining about that if only we waited a few hundred years we would recognize that our current building patterns are actually really good. That's just not the case.

I dunno. At the first problem, impeding cyclists that want to merge into a walkway zooming at 20mph without paying enough attention to even see their lane is ending is a quite good reason.

Maybe he should be asking for some "cyclist-calming" measure instead, so they will slow down before not being able to make into the walkway.

Like, what an insane take.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/EcG7qKSNDDHjzWJk9

I can see why people get angry about it. But still, the article is asking for the wrong solution. And yeah, the people crashing on that fence at 30 km/h would just die hit by a car a few meters down if the article's fix was implemented.

It's not that the traffic engineer didn't care about a quality product, they didn't care to research who bikes (and have car brain), and have never traveled out of the US, to the Netherlands, or met a cyclist.

I am cyclist by the way. It is just that looking at picture, it is not exactly super difficult turn, if you have those breaks.

(Re "properly working LED": apparently many street lamps in the US were built by a single company, and that company's bulbs are prone to turning purple over time. But that wasn't a reason not to make the switch back when, because at the time no one knew this would happen. It's being fixed now by replacing the purple bulbs with better quality LED bulbs.)

[1] Light Use vs Population Density, WP Commons, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Earth_li...

They’re down the entire alleyway behind my place, and a walk to the grocery store at 7pm during the winter makes your body and mind think it’s sunrise.

People in Japan habitually kill themselves because of their stupid work culture. Maybe that's not the best example.

And besides it’s a strange take to argue that you shouldn’t acknowledge good thing A because unrelated thing B is bad there.

Also, I'm not sure where you got the idea that engineers don't care about the speeds of bikes (especially around pedestrians).

Your example is good, and the matching example of a bike lane is the opposite of what was shown in the article.

Yes, it is absolutely acceptable and it happens all the time in road design. It happens specifically because people (apparently in all vehicle types) will speed on the long straightaway down the hill into whatever comes next. Many, many suburban areas with hills will have sharp curves or T-intersections at the bottom of hills as a matter of course and it does work at slowing down the traffic going down the hill.

If you look at street view on the actual road, that is exactly this situation: a very straight road with a lot of visibility, leading toward a very long and complicated intersection where everyone needs to pay attention and go slowly. Nobody traveling a reasonable speed on a bike will be surprised by that turn since they can all see it coming for literally a mile.

I assume the alternatives to this specific merge are either:

* Merge the bikes into the car traffic and pray to god that they obey traffic signals at the upcoming intersection (we all know this isn't happening), while also accepting that they accelerate very slowly compared to cars.

* Set up a dedicated bike lane with dedicated signals (which is very expensive).

The engineers here clearly opted to instead merge the bike traffic with the pedestrian traffic through that intersection so that the existing pedestrian signals apply to them. You can see that the bike lane continues after this intersection, so they literally just did this to handle the intersection.

TFA on this point reads like "cyclist (or illegal moped user) doesn't want to be slowed down and doesn't care about anyone else."

Aren't there usually signs indicating the maximum safe speed when that sort of thing happens? We don't have context here but I doubt there is a sign telling bikers that they should slow down. And aren't roads in general much larger and easier to see from far away, vs this tiny little ramp? You also haven't explained why the big curb is vertical instead of sloped, or why the street sign needs to be where it is. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this thing is designed as a fuck you to bikers who don't obey the rules. We simply don't design roads that way, where it's designed to make you crash if you deviate from the standard even a bit.

There is a sign ahead of this ramp saying in very big letters "BIKE LANE ENDS." It's up to the bikers to decide how they want to use that information. The sign, the ramp, and the end of the bollards marking the bike lane are visible at quite a long distance.

As for the street sign, it's a street sign. It's where the street is. It also tells you exactly where to use Google street view to get full context.

And yes, roads for cars are intentionally build in a ways that makes high speed obviously unsafe at places.

On a side note, I would personally avoid sharing the sidewalk with pedestrians, keep my speed and remain on the road. I know it's legal in my country to bike on (not high-speed) road even if there is a bike lane available. I'd rather share space with the plentiful, the cars, and have them slow down a bit, which cost them nothing, than bothering pedestrians.

It forces the biker to slow down and reduces the collision risks with others in the line.

It is selfish to think only about the biker coming from the hill. The biker that thinks it is okay to drive 20mph in that situation.

But presumably real world limitations forced them to merge the two at this point, and forcing cyclists to slow before the merge is of obvious benefit to the safety of pedestrians and cyclists. Not to mention that road construction crews can't fabricate an infinite array of curbs and affordances as a simple practical limitation.

As others have cited, the author seems to have an "everything is an easy fix" perspective to the world, at least when viewed as their own requirements and needs being the only consideration. In reality, loads of people care immensely about all the things that they think are easy fixes, but the fixes aren't nearly as easy as they think. Like, anyone who has ever listened to a user tell them how their app could be made much better knows this, when all of their suggestions would diminish usability for almost every other user.

It is selfish to only think about the driver coming from the hill. The driver that thinks it is okay to drive 45mph in that situation.

Do you see the irony of your statement.

If you have a high-speed road merging into a slow one without some indication that it's ending and a sharp turn at the end, you have a road that kills people.

The light pollution has absolutely increased because of the amount of LEDs that have been installed. This is well documented.

Also, the sodium line spectrum is easy to filter out for astronomy, broad spectrum blue LEDs add light pollution there.

If you can't take a look around the U.S. and see that cynicism and apathy are running wild here, then you are either deceiving yourself or you live in an area that hasn't experienced collapse acceleration yet.

OP's point stands: nobody cares. Nobody even thought about it for a minute. Everything are items in a spreadsheet.

Took me less than a minute to ask a lady in the lights store I visited two months ago to sell me softer, more yellow, LED lights. I still save a ton of electricity but my lights are not blinding me. This awful bright-blue-ish white light is bad for our brains btw, but that's a much bigger topic that I will not engage in.

He didn't say everyone was stupid. He said that no body cares. There is a very big difference between the two.

I tend to agree with him. Yes we can find examples, most commonly when it comes to safety standards, where there are systems in place that prevent the really bad stuff from happening. But why do those systems and checks need to be put into place? Because a lot of people simply do not care and would cut corners if their jobs didn't depend on them following the standards.

The problem with broad sweeping generalizations is that they never apply to all individual cases. It doesn't change the fact that the broad generalization is, well, broadly and generally true. Most people don't care about almost anything other than getting home to their families or pets. Most people will even happily admit that. It's not even that they're lazy necessarily (though a few people are). It's that they are working in what is, to them, "just a job / pay cheque." That's not even always a problem. It's just a fact of life that is as true as taxes and death. It's worth acknowledging because it is something that needs to be accounted for after identifying or choosing your fault tolerances. The systems and standards that you cite are the result of acknowledging this fact of reality.

Animals are also more sensitive/more attracted to bluer light. These harsh white LED street lamps are a death sentence for moth species.

Really, you should be dismounting and walking your bike onto the sidewalk, but if you're going to ride your bike up that ramp, absolutely do not do it so quickly that you risk crashing.

It was a rant not a thesis. I get frustrated by a lot of what he talks about too and many of them could be made better and without much cost. It might even be a call to action, shine a light on the nonsense so people do better next time (hopeful thought).

I’m not trying to sound snarky at all but I really do think you should reread the first paragraph of the article.

Well thanks to all the replies below to prove may be he is not assuming it's because everyone is stupid.

I think this reply also amplifies what the author was saying. Just because the standard is like this and everyone is following the standard doesn't mean the standard is good.

Yes that bike lane follows some sort of standard. Still sucks.

DMV sucks. Know what doesn’t suck? AAA DMV services.

I think you’re right though. It’s not that people don’t care. It’s that we’ve painted ourselves into a corner of suck and we don’t know how to get out.