Comment by Tiktaalik

Knowing that there is a reason just boils down to the same thing.

You can overcome the forced working against you if you care enough, but nobody does.

That's partly true, but "competing interests and problems" have a tendency to accumulate in much the same way as technical debt.

Particularly so in a world of longer lifespans and careers, higher information connectivity and so on.

It's arguably one of the reasons nations tend to experience boom periods in the aftermath of major wars. The destruction has a way of clearing out the accumulated complexity, giving people a clean slate to decide what's _really_ important/valuable/productive.

(To avoid any doubt, this is not an argument in favour of major wars.)

I live on the fringes of an old European city which was damaged but, largely, not destroyed by WWII bombing. The difficulty of building new transit lines here is legendary, essentially they're almost entirely paralysed by the web of competing interests, and this grows more every year, not less, as new ones arise.

Places that suffered nearer total war damage have a two-fold advantage. First, they could build back a city-plan that was more suited to the modern era - and secondly, nobody had time to get all that attached to the new city-plan, so they've had the flexibility to iterate further, things like retrofitting trams, relocating the main traffic arterials further from the city centre, new metro lines to adjust to changing demographic/geographic patterns and so on.

To this specific example - it's not that the competing interests are worthless exactly, but their sum total value is surely orders of magnitude less than a new metro line. However, because of the due processes that hold sway in a peaceful, democratic and rights-based society, they're able to gum up the works to the point that we can only build about one genuinely new metro line every 30 years, despite being one of the richest cities in the Western world.

No, there are very specific regulations around infrastructure design, including what sorts of curves are safe in bike lanes at which speeds.

The reason that angle is that "sharp" (I don't think it's very sharp tbh) is because cyclists are explicitly not supposed to zoom up onto the sidewalk at 20 miles per hour. That's how you kill someone. If you're going too fast to make a 30-degree turn and avoid crashing, you're going too fast to be on the sidewalk. It's like complaining that the tight curves on a residential street make it unsafe to drive down it at 60mph.

Anyway, the influence of the auto lobby on urban infrastructure is really well-established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_dependency

Minority groups are not the same thing as special interest groups. Special interest groups usually have undue money, resources, or power given their size.

Many cyclist are also drivers.

Yeah, they shouldn't. Cars are a terrible mode of urban transit. They should all get bikes and bus passes, and then everyone would get everywhere quickly and cheaply and without deadly collisions.

Everyone complains about traffic, but nobody realizes that traffic is just what it's like to drive in a city. Stop driving.

Well damn I guess I’m living in the 1% /s