@luis_in_brief

Yes, excellent point

I think it's highly contigent on this stuff

Here in NYC, it's heavily infrastructural: There was a noticeable increase in cycling propelled by COVID -- plus the consistent rollout of bikeshare stands -- that has continued to this day; it's made a couple of major bike routes in and out of manhattan surprisingly congested during peak periods ...

... with conflicts between bikes and regular bikes

@clive yeah, I wonder how much some of the concern about "ebikes" is really concern about infrastructure. (I hate having to drive on sidewalks, for example, but sometimes that's far and away the safest thing...)

There's also status quo bias. It drives me nuts the number of SFans who genuinely believe that cyclists in SF are as dangerous to pedestrians as cars, when cars have killed nearly 300 people since the last time a cyclist killed a pedestrian in the city. But those deaths are normalized.

@luis_in_brief

I think these arguments are very heavily propelled by infrastructure yeah

A few years ago I spoke to the folks at Citibike, the bikeshare firm here in NYC

They were talking to the city about the overwhelming popularity of the ebike option in citibike -- only 20% of the bikes are ebikes but they are disproportionately preferred by riders

The city and citibike were realizing, damn, ideally, we need two-by-two bike lanes

One "slow" and one "passing" lane in each direction

@luis_in_brief

No room for that, though, without a more substantive reallocation of streets from ICE vehicles to things-roughly-the-size-of-a-bike-or-smaller