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hatts t1_jd1noh1 wrote

longwinded reply incoming:

when i say we "prioritize" cars i'm talking about the amount of space we give to cars in our urban design in the USA. cars are far and away the top priority. NYC is no exception, despite a majority of households not owning a car.

most NYC streets have 1+ lanes for car travel, plus at least 1 lane for side parking (usually 2). bikes are lucky to get a lane, usually unprotected, and usually full of double parked cars. peds get pushed onto to narrow sidewalks and have to dart across intersections like frogger, despite being the dominant mode of transportation. so it's in the space allocation that we see the (warped) priorities.

your citibike reference is a perfect example of how cars are favored. a citibike rack packs in dozens of bikes in the space of just a few parked cars. this works out to servicing dozens or hundreds of riders a day. parked cars would have accommodated far fewer people in the same space, and might have had little or no turnover during the same time period. so we give (and subsidize!) more space to cars despite them moving fewer people, less efficiently, and with higher pollution and cost. again: priorities. (this article sums it up well.)

of course parking should be available, but alot of drivers get awfully entitled to free & easy parking as far as the eye can see, despite living in the densest city in the nation, where 55%+ people don't own cars, and where we already carve out a huge portion of our very valuable & scarce resource (space).

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