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Comment by jasonjamerson | Hacker News Reader

Not as clever as the usual fare there, but the issue is valid.

Unfortunately drivers are so checked out, starting even before cell phones, that safe biking probably means a future with good self driving cars.

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Replacing all cars with self driving cars is a lot more expensive than just adding proper bike infrastructure.

A space program is a lot more expensive than either.

Why do we have one?

unless if a space program came out of city budgets I am unsure why this is relevant

Developing self driving cars don't come of city budgets

The NASA budget is $25B. It'd cost a lot more than $25B to put in proper bike infrastructure in every city.

That's why there are multiple levels of government with their own funding sources

And the interstate highway system cost $550B (in todays dollars) to construct. Useful things are often expensive…

I don’t follow. A space program isn’t really relevant to transportation…

And developing self driving cars aren't that relevant to bike lanes.

I was responding to the original comment.

But they’re both forms of urban transportation that share the same infrastructure.

Or you know... Public transportation. Electric trains, electric buses using overhead cables, etc. We could probably take over 1 lane on every interstate and replace it with a train going that direction. The amount of utility that could provide is vastly superior to some mystical self driving open world car system. It's something we can do right now with the money and will power and modern technology

Agreed! But bike infrastructure is still important. Transit plus bikes are a great combo.

I was just visiting Bergen and snapped a photo showing light rail, a dedicated 2-lane bike path, and a dedicated pedestrian path all in parallel. Certainly unheard of in my US town.

One of those things is far more useful than the other - specifically the one that lets you travel at 50mph+ from point A to point B and has air conditioning.

That's a false dichotomy. You can still travel at 50mph with air conditioning (in a car) either way.

In fact, building proper bike lanes doesn't mean you can't have self driving cars too. It just means the people who didn't spend tons of money for a self driving car are less likely to hit the cyclists.

Depends on your purpose. Bikes are great in cities, are better for the environment, are much quieter (better for others outside), are safer for pedestrian, and are great exercise.

But anywhere you could be safely traveling 50mph+ is probably not the type of road I’m advocating building bike lanes on…

It's not even just driver inattention/distraction in general (which is also a problem), it's also that the attention they are paying to the road is overwhelmingly focused on recognizing and predicting the movement of other motor vehicles. So much so that in some cases, they will functionally "not see" a cyclist or pedestrian directly in their line of sight [1].

[1] https://www.bicycling.com/news/a20043758/drivers-dont-see-cy...

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