McSweeney’s bringing some hard truths with this one. We could all be doing better.
You forgot to go back in time and tell people that subsidizing the oil industry might be a bad idea.
When the oil and auto industries teamed up to bend public policy to their will, making a system of roads and parking lots that now function as a continuous subsidy and magnificent symbol of the normalization of injury and pollution, you had a lot of options. You could have objected. You could have shifted public opinion. Instead, you weren’t even born yet. And, rather than go back in time, all you’ve been doing is riding to get groceries and occasionally saying, “Please stop killing us.” On the effort scale? 1/10.
I will say that, especially in college towns, this does not always hold up legally. My buddy got hit by a car on a crosswalk (they rolled down the window and told him to watch where he was going, while he was on the ground); and even though he was on his bike, the cops took his side.
Courts have also ruled that cops don’t have to know the laws, and they are given broad discretion to ticket/arrest on any pretense that seemed reasonable to them at the time. It doesn’t mean the law allows cycling in a crosswalk. Everywhere I’ve lived treats bicycles as non-pedestrians and doesn’t afford the same considerations to them as someone on foot.
I don’t think that’s totally ridiculous, but there are some effects that are: running a stop sign on a bike can be a moving violation that counts against your driver’s license, and cycling while drunk can and has been charged as DUI. I think that’s absurd.