I PARKED IN A BIKE LANE stickers

Have you considered a disclaimer?

Mine is : reactive

I suggest: wants it both ways, for you.

Have you considered a disclaimer?
Mine is : reactive
I suggest: wants it both ways, for you.

You stopped making sense to me several replies ago and seem to really to not want to understand what I have written above, so please, get in one last word and then save your energy, at least as it relates to me.

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Iā€™m here to say if I parked in a bike lane (I donā€™t do this as a rule but we all make mistakes) and someone put a sticker like this on my window, I would take it the intended way. I would be more careful of doing such an shitty thing in the future.

All the people in this thread getting bent out of shape about vandalism and whatnot are hilarious.

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Also, I have on occasion put a ā€œnice park job assholeā€ note on someoneā€™s windshield if theyā€™re especially deserving. Clearly, Iā€™m just a passive aggressive jerk. I should either wait in the parking lot so I can be properly aggressive-aggressive, or get LEO involved, or write my congressman or something. /s

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Considering that the uk road tax for vehicles that produce CO2 emissions of <=100g/km is Ā£0 Iā€™d say thatā€™s reasonable enough.

Iā€™ll leave the fact that there is no actual ringfenced road fund tax in the UK, and that everyoneā€™s taxes fund road maintenance for another time.

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I suggest not getting out of their way, and saying so when they get aggressive and try to accuse you of giving them a hard time. Their passive ignorance of the law is passive aggression, and their problem. Not yours or mine.

I donā€™t yield to people in the wrong whose impoliteness is somehow justified by their rush, which is also not my emergency. Fuck em.

As far as the stickers go, I would prefer it to breaking their taillights. Which would not offend me much were i to see it done to a car so offensively parked.

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You stopped making sense at your second sentence, and I said so. Go look!

Every other thing said by you in here has been a contradiction of a prior statement you made, with an accusation of me not getting your irony, and now somehow you think I am not here in any good faith.

Oh friend, do what you need to do. Itā€™s one thing to be a bit incorrect. Itā€™s a choice to be so wrong about it.

Isnā€™t this just basically rephrasing what you said before? In many places, a persons legal culpability when they witness unlawful activity is debated and applied in inconsistent ways. If I witness somebody threatening anotherā€™s life, it can be argued that I have not just a right, but an obligation to intervene. Why is there a double standard if I knock a knife out of somebodyā€™s hand, versus pulling a driver out through their window when they try to plow through a busy intersection? The difference from the police angle is mainly one of legal semantics - in many areas, criminal law and traffic law are separate, and handled differently. Traffic law only becomes criminal after the fact, once vehicular homicide has occurred, which doesnā€™t help people while theyā€™re on the road. Traffic law is mostly seen as a revenue stream, where liability is measured in property damages and fines.

Your implicit assumption that enforcing laws yourself cannot be as effective as using police has a lot of baggage behind it, and doesnā€™t jive with my experiences. Most police I have spoken with have paradoxically not been familiar with law - go figure! When I worked as a bike messenger in Boston, there was a time when I had to go to the central Boston Police Department regularly, and they actually had posters up, encouraging police to unlawfully harass bicyclists in a campaign to ā€œcontrolā€ them. And I often witnessed police in casual conversation stating that they would rather cyclists were run over and killed, because of police resentment that they wanted more control of cycling, despite having no legal pretext for it. Itā€™s not their place to make laws, or decide who lives and who dies for purposes of their own petty aggrandizement.

Then, thereā€™s the practical consideration. When Iā€™m in the street at 30 MPH in three lanes of traffic, and somebody does something stupid, I donā€™t have time to call police and beg them for help - help which would, in all probability, never manifest.

If the person is not present, the sticker is as direct as you can get. And Iā€™d argue that it not only annoys them, but also indicates the cause of the complaint/annoyance in the first place. This communicates information they may have disregarded, or simply been oblivious to. Once they are informed, it is their responsibility to choose their future course of action accordingly.

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Again, I donā€™t really see what point there is in giving me examples of bad police work. I already know that system is shit, but itā€™s shit precisely because the police force is so often unprofessional.

Your implicit assumption seems to be that enforcing laws yourself (in extreme cases, vigilante justice) gets better results than professional law enforcement. It really doesnā€™t. Also, please donā€™t conflate this with acting in self-defense or acting to prevent an ongoing crime (although the latter often has disastrous consequences).

To expand my previous response: the solution to bad law enforcement is better training, better management, better accountability, and better oversight. This does not include taking it upon yourself to enforce the law.

So, not only is it an ineffective deterrent, but itā€™s also an ineffective means of raising awareness? What exactly is the information communicated in ā€œI Parked in a Bike Laneā€? Pretty sure they already know they parked in a bike lane.

You know what? I take it back These things are even worse than anonymous letters. At least, in an anonymous letter you can take the time to explain your point-of-view.

I recollect hearing a story, some decades back, of someone (friend-of-a-friend) putting bumper stickers on monster trucks that read, ā€œIf your dick was as small as mine, youā€™d drive one of these, too.ā€ Sadly, Iā€™m pretty sure the story was apocryphal.

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http://www.bicyclepaper.com/articles/389-Kill-a-Cyclist-and-Get-Away-With-It-

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It seems like, when I bike, most of the cars in bike lanes are police cruisers, so I think Iā€™ll pass on sticking these on the offending vehicles. Mostly I donā€™t get too worked up about cars in the bike lane, though - Iā€™m too busy being worried about the moving vehicles that decide to drive in the bike lane. Although I did once have someone who parked their big-ass SUV three feet out from the curb, taking up most of the bike lane, who then added insult to injury by opening their car door right in front of me. I barely managed to avoid it, and luckily there was no traffic in the nearest lane, otherwise I would have been dead or seriously injured. I donā€™t know if the driver even noticed - my heart was too firmly lodged in my throat to get any swearing out.

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And yours seems to be that a ā€˜better resultā€™ is that users goal, and also that stickering is an act of ā€˜law enforcementā€™ in their opinionā€¦ and i wager neither of those are true about @popobawa4u.

If you stop telling people what they assume, and instead ask them, you magically go from acting arrogant to acting curious. If you were not aware of that before, maybe you are now?

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that seems a bit expensive

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I understand that most of these hyper-aggressive sidewalk riding bicyclist are bike messengers. They are generally young, male, and highly pressured to ride as fast as possible to their destination, driving laws, pedestrians, and even physics be damned. They may be giving everyone else on pedals a bad name (witness many of the comments here), but they will also be impervious to whatever ā€˜lessonā€™ you are trying to impart. More impervious then yourself.

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Would you like to actually engage me instead of answering with an angry, low-content post on behalf of another person? Youā€™re certainly willing to assume a lot about me, while asking that I give someone else the benefit of the doubt.

Oh, so itā€™s not cool when itā€™s done to you. NOTED.

[quote=ā€œsblundy, post:76, topic:51557, full:trueā€]
I understand that most of these hyper-aggressive sidewalk riding bicyclist are bike messengers. They are generally young, male, and highly pressured to ride as fast as possible to their destination, driving laws, pedestrians, and even physics be damned.[/quote]

You understand that about my experience? Or you understand that about everyone elses experince? How arrogant are you being there? hard to tell.

Iā€™ll assume youā€™ve come up against these hooligans you describe. Ignore them.

The laws of physics, I believe, do not need the assistance of @sblundy for the universe to be made right because people you think might exist MIGHT be getting away with rudeness, somewhere, on bikes, in your imagination at least. I think most of the work can be done there.

They may be giving everyone else on pedals a bad name (witness many of the comments here), but they will also be impervious to whatever ā€˜lessonā€™ you are trying to impart. More impervious then yourself.

They may well be. Why the hell are you griping to me about them?

My ā€˜lessonā€™ is that you are making a lot of assumptions about other people, and me, but boo hoo if someone does it to you you. OTHER PEOPLE are just SO FORWARD? AMIRITE?

Go find your straw-messenger and give them a good talking to. Seems you might be the one with the lesson to impart, an not I.

All I want is for aggressive people to recognize that people like me only SEEM to be coming at youā€¦ because YOU are moving so fast. On your bike. In your car. In conversation. At the supermarket.

Stop making assumptions and then calling other people aggressive, itā€™s just clownish.

In terms of law enforcement response, its good news bad news. Police can ticket or tow these people, but emphasis on parking tickets is way down. And thats a big departure from when I joined the force fifteen years ago (back then my training officer told me that five parkers and a mover a day would keep my Sgt happy). I have had big time bosses blatantly tell my officers that they donā€™t care about ā€œparkers,ā€ they want you stopping bad guys. I think thats a good attitude, but it means that parking enforcement will lag in fast neighborhoods.

The answer seems to be a resounding ā€œnoā€.

Content:

This is really unfortunate. American cities are generally built in a way thatā€™s unfriendly to non-motorists. As a pedestrian, I havenā€™t felt particularly ā€œvulnerableā€ (outside of places like Miami), but (understandably) itā€™s worse for bikers.