Friday Videos: The Global Bikelash

We spend a lot of time at Streetsblog with our heads exploding about all the lies we hear at community board meetings. But to paraphrase our favorite UFO enthusiasts, we are not alone.

Across the globe, bike lanes are at the center of the culture war. A decade or two ago, the main right wing-left wing battles were over housing, racy lyrics in popular music, gentrification, health care or the appropriate color of a president’s suit, today, people go to community board meetings to decry the notion that someone might want to get around on a bike (or sometimes just to scream expletives at safe-streets-friendly reporters).

Fortunately, we’re not the only outlet that’s seeing where this is all headed, so today, we present a very special edition of Friday video aimed at helping us see that the War on Bikes is a global one — but that cool heads can, indeed, prevail.

Take the first video from Oh The Urbanity, which covers a community hearing over what seems to be a very not-controversial-at-all bike lane in Montreal.

It’s all here: The claims that bike lanes are dangerous. The claims that bike lanes cause traffic. The claims that bike lanes are ableist (reminder: kids can’t drive, so in that sense, cars are ableist). The claim that the bike lane is a new and radical design. The claim that opponents actually like bike lanes … just not this one.

The bottom line: car drivers tend to oppose bike lanes because they fear that the lanes will undermine their convenience and are unable to see that bike lanes may dramatically improve convenience, safety and livability for everyone else.

As Oh The Urbanity puts it, are all bike lanes ableist and ageist — or just the ones that take away your parking? Or better still: is the entire country of the Netherlands ableist?

The question of why cyclists are so hated was also looked at by the Global Cycling Network after a local Facebook group posted a photo of a cyclist going the wrong way down a British street. It’s an interesting discussion featuring great British accents and a very important perspective: Driving a car is so normalized that when someone drives recklessly, other drivers call that person one of the “few” bad apples. But when a cyclist bikes recklessly, drivers say that all cyclists are reckless.

It has to do with the windshield perspective, but it’s so much more than that:

And finally, we always liked this City Nerd video that gets to another heart of the global revanchism, which is spurred in part by host Ray Delahanty’s frustration with the way that social media and other modern trends have empowered people of bad faith to undermine expertise.

As Delahanty points out, “Whether you believe in something or not has not impact whatsoever on whether that thing is actually true.”