Quote:
Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru
I really thought our society was built around "a human being is a human being like the next." I didn't realize the sheer amount of manufactured materials built around oneself boosted one's position on the social hierarchy while making one's way around the public sphere—and the capacity for velocity being a great boon to that.
The bottom line is that there are laws in place to ensure we all have relatively equal rights of travel and passage in the areas within which we live. And thank goodness for that.
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Big, fast moving things have had the 'right of way' since the beginning of time. It has nothing to esoteric deconstructions of society or our materialistic association with manufactured materials.
It has to do with me traveling 60 miles per hour, 88 feet per second, with a stopping distance over
three hundred feet and bicycles who think that they are somehow legally entitled to travel on the same thoroughfare. It's just as much about my safety as theirs, and has nothing to do with our respective moral or human worth. I recognize that bicycles MAY travel on these roadways in a legal sense, but that doesn't mean (as aptly characterized above) that they OUGHT to, or that the law should allow them to. By extension, neither should I make it comfortable for them to endanger themselves and myself in such a way.
It's worth nothing that there are less than a dozen streets within a 15 mile radius from my home or workplace with mean speeds below 30 mph, yet I see as many bicycles in that same journey; I'm not talking about bumper-to-bumper cars and bicycles here.