US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1542

On June 11 2019 02:26 Artisreal wrote:
Bike lanes take away valuable space for cars. By sacrificing a lane we add to the congestion problem and that leads to higher pollution levels compared to a bike lane free street as traffic can move more fluidly without bikes present.

/s

I've travelled anti cyclical to the majority of the residents of the Germany city of Stuttgart quite often this year and I would be horrified to face this kind of congestion that appeared on the opposite lane on a daily basis. Early when going into the city and late when getting out of it. As clearly many workers are dependent on their car for mobility and the public transport in Stuttgart being rather horrible, they face little alternative right now. This can only be ameliorated by something different to individual car-based mobility.
Being it lift sharing, better public transport or company-sponsored coworking spaces outside of the city boundaries.
The status quo is bound to fail if we don't start implementing alternatives.

On June 11 2019 06:04 Stratos_speAr wrote:


People don't like bikes in cities because bikers are atrocious in some cities.

For example, in my city (Minneapolis-St. Paul), bikers are the absolute worst. They don't follow traffic laws. Ever. Anyone who claims that they do are full of shit. They regularly cut cars off, weave through traffic, and just cause all kinds of hell for those of us that need to drive (American commuting distances are unrealistic for our public transportation infrastructure to cover if you're not in a place like NYC). It slows down traffic and causes all kinds of safety problems.

Your mileage varies by city, but traffic has gotten exponentially worse over the past 10 years in the Twin Cities, and we've been adding plenty of bike lanes. They do not help. At all. Maybe if there was actually some enforcement of safe biking practices it would help, but I've lived here my entire life and I have yet to see any.

The goal of it all is great; get more cars off the road, reduce pollution, save money, reduce traffic overall, etc. etc. etc. The problem is the execution. As others have alluded to, businesses don't like it at all. It also sinks a lot of money into something that only relatively few can take advantage of (those of us who can't afford to live in the actual city itself or need to live farther out can't use public transportation or bike with any regularity). Finally there isn't a huge benefit when bike lanes are basically unusable 6 months out of the year due to the weather.

On June 11 2019 07:03 IgnE wrote:


Do you ride a bike ever?

Are you one of those people who think bicycles should always, in every circumstance, stop at stop signs?

Can anyone point to research which shows that adding bike lanes actually causes “safety problems”?

On June 11 2019 07:16 Sermokala wrote:

I mean at the least you can take common sense arguments for this.

Telling people that in some cases they can just ignore stop signs and providing specific bike lanes will lead to more people getting in collisions with a form of transportation that is dangerous alone and a population that is hard enough already to get to wear the helmets that should be a basic level to begin with.

Not to mention in northern states it would be silly to not tell them to stop every time when you have ice issues during the winter.

I mean I guess I'm just against advocating that more people should die to remove a slight inconvenience.

On June 11 2019 07:42 IgnE wrote:


Do you ride a bicycle as a significant mode of transport? The reality is that car drivers feel entitled to the road. They hate being inconvenienced. Bikers who obey traffic laws identically to cars (ie full stop — putting their feet down — at stop signs, waitig in traffic lines at red lights, etc.) annoy the fuck out of drivers who end up trying to pass them at the nearest opportunity. This is what is truly dangerous. Not bikers who roll through stop signs and pass cars in lines.

Good bikers ride so as not to get hit even if they were invisible because even if they behaved like a car drivers may not see them. Drivers who have never ridden a bike see bikes behaving unlike cars and incorrectly assume that bikers are riding dangerously.

It is not immediately obvious that it is less dangerous to unnecessarily stop a bike in wet and icy conditions than it is to allow the rider to slow and roll through. The fact, obvious to anyone who has actually commuted to work, is that it is safer for everyone if bicylists are not forced to kill their momentum at every stop sign.

If someone actually presents evidence showing that adding bike lanes makes the road less safe for everyone I wil revise my views. But most of the criticism comes from 1) a sense of entitlement to the road and 2) misunderstanding the differences between biking and driving.

On June 11 2019 08:50 IgnE wrote:
@serm
Non-drivers also pay for the roads. That’s a total dead end. You said you live in the burbs right? Are you even paying for city roads? The rest of your post is either outright immoral (i don’t give a shit about bikers etc) or ignores the obvious parallel: sidewalks. We could make roads bigger if we just got rid of sidewalks too, yet curiously, we have pedestrian lanes.

edit: I’m still waiting for evidence that bike lanes are unsafe. if we sre at the point where you concede, and admit you just don’t like bikes and don’t want to be inconvenienced, then fine, i guess this conversation is over

@farv
Bikers who bike on sidewalks are horrible. Cars:bikes::bikes:pedestrians

Interestingly, the effect works in reverse, too. Whenever some city proposes taking lanes away from a road, residents scream that they’re going to create a huge traffic snarl. But the data shows that nothing truly terrible happens. The amount of traffic on the road simply readjusts and overall congestion doesn’t really increase.

Mexican negotiators persuaded President Trump to back down from his tariff threat by agreeing to an unprecedented crackdown on Central American migrants and accepting more-expansive measures in Mexico if the initial efforts don’t deliver quick results, according to officials from both governments and documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

The enforcement measures Mexico has promised include the deployment of a militarized national guard at the Guatemalan border, thousands of additional migrant arrests per week and the acceptance of busloads of asylum seekers turned away from the U.S. border daily, all geared toward cutting the migrant flow sharply in coming weeks. The measures, described by officials from both sides and included in Mexican negotiating documents reviewed by The Post, appear to be more substantial than what the Mexican government has attempted thus far during the precipitous rise in migration to the U.S. border.

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U.S. officials say they were particularly impressed with Mexico’s pledge to deploy up to 6,000 national guard troops to its border region with Guatemala. Mexico described its plan to U.S. officials as “the first time in recent history that Mexico has decided to take operational control of its southern border as a priority,” according to Mexican government documents.

***

Most asylum seekers who reach U.S. soil now are processed and released into the U.S. interior to await court proceedings, something that can take months or years. The proposal would make asylum seekers instead apply for protection in the first foreign country they reach after departing their homeland, potentially allowing the United States to send Guatemalans back to Mexico, and Hondurans and Salvadorans back to Guatemala. Department of Homeland Security officials were in Guatemala last month discussing such a plan.

Mexico has repeatedly said that it will not agree to a “safe third country” accord that would require it to take in U.S.-bound asylum seekers transiting its territory. But Mexican officials have been willing to negotiate something that would function similarly, if responsibility for asylum seekers were shared among other nations in the region.

They say such asylum changes would require approval from Mexican lawmakers, and Trump said in a tweet Monday that he will impose tariffs if the regional asylum overhaul doesn’t pass: “If for any reason approval is not forthcoming, Tariffs will be reinstated!” he warned.


***

Mexican officials in March had pledged to expand the security deployment along the Guatemala border, but the proposal for 6,000 troops was far larger than the contingent to which they had previously committed. They also presented a detailed plan for more checkpoints, detention centers and ramped-up deportations — all aimed at preventing migrants from moving north and at deterring others from trying.

The Mexican officials said their enforcement measures would reduce U.S. border arrest totals closer to 50,000 per month by October, with the goal of reducing migration to where it was in mid-2017, when detentions dropped to their lowest level since the early 1970s.


***

Mexico also agreed to a border-wide expansion of the Migrant Protection Protocol program, informally known as “Remain in Mexico,” that requires Central American asylum seekers to wait outside the United States while their claims are processed, placing significant strain on Mexican resources.

Since MPP began this year, Mexico had been resisting U.S. pressure to expand the program, which so far has sent at least 10,000 asylum seekers back to Mexican border cities that are among the most dangerous in the country. In recent weeks, U.S. officials have been sending roughly 250 asylum seekers per day back to Mexico. Under the deal reached Friday, U.S. officials said they expect to increase the rate to 1,000 per day.

***

Those deportations, combined with Mexican pledges to increase arrests of Central Americans from about 700 per day to as many as 2,000 per day in coming months, would potentially stop nearly half of Central American migrants headed north.

Mexico also has pledged to increase patrols and arrests along its side of the border with the United States, and Mexican officials have asked for location coordinates of the busiest crossing points used by smugglers — a “first,” according to one U.S. official.

“These are things Mexico had never agreed to do before,” Pence said Monday on Fox News.

Pence added that the United States also had reached a “safe third country” agreement with Guatemala that ostensibly would force Hondurans and Salvadorans to seek asylum there instead of in the United States. He said the deal would be implemented only “if it’s necessary.”

The agreement, Pence said, would “essentially say that if people are looking for asylum, that they ought to be willing to apply for asylum in the first safe country in which they arrive.”

U.S. officials say that will get them close to a deterrent “tipping point” that will cause a larger number of would-be migrants to reconsider the journey. But they say it will require Mexico to fully implement the deal and target the smuggling organizations and the corrupt officials they partner with.

Pompeo said Monday that the United States might still impose tariffs on Mexico if it doesn’t make progress on stemming illegal immigration, noting that the agreement is more expansive than previous discussions with Mexico.

“The scale of the effort, the commitment here, is very different,” Pompeo said, noting that the United States probably would be able to judge success within a month or 45 days. “We will evaluate this literally daily.”

Until last week, Mexico also had rebuffed offers of U.S. financial assistance to cope with the migration surge, but American officials say that too has changed. To shelter, feed and care for an increasing number of Central Americans who could wait months in Mexico for an asylum decision, the United States is willing to provide “tens of millions” of State Department dollars that have gone unspent as a result of plunging refu­gee admissions, officials said.

Mexico also is considering plans to transport migrants away from border cities to house them in relatively safer cities that have more government services, they said.

Pushing back at critics, Trump said in an interview with CNBC that he has been keeping additional elements of his deal under wraps to let Mexico go public first.

“We purposely said we wouldn’t mention it for a little while,” Trump said in the interview, declining to offer more details.

In Mexico City, López Obrador and Ebrard acknowledged for the first time Monday that the full scope of their agreement with the United States was not disclosed in a joint declaration the two governments released Friday.

The two officials said the need for a regional asylum realignment would not be necessary because their plans for a massive enforcement push in southern Mexico would deliver the swift reductions in migration Trump is demanding.

“If these measures are not successful, we will sit down to discuss with different countries a regional strategy,” said Ebrard. “But we trust that the measures will be successful.”

Asked for more detail, Ebrard told reporters that the countries in the region would “need to make a pact so that the number of migrants doesn’t rise,” because if numbers rise, the United States will impose the tariffs. He said a regional agreement would include Latin American countries that migrants currently use as transit points, citing Brazil, Panama and Guatemala.

“We need their solidarity,” Ebrard said of other nations. “Brazil because that’s where people arrive from outside of the continent. Panama because that’s where Cubans and Haitians arrive, Guatemala because that’s where Hondurans and Salvadorans pass through. It’s a regional system.”

López Obrador said he and Trump spoke over the weekend and agreed to “maintain contact in 90 days to await results.” The Mexican president said he is optimistic.

On June 11 2019 12:08 Stratos_speAr wrote:


I'm all for policies that phase out cars completely. They cause a whole host of problems. I just empathize with the frustration that drivers can have with this subject and that bikers often have a "Holier-than-thou" attitude that makes it sound like they think they are morally superior just because they bike. Public transportation, biking, or other "green" options simply aren't viable for a huge chunk of the American public at this time.

Also, "but drivers" is pure whataboutism. Everyone knows the problem with drivers and all of the danger that driving in general puts people in. This is discussion is specifically about biking and why people are frustrated with it.