speaking as a professional cyclist for 20yrs I agree a million percent, I despise bike lanes-nothing but magnets for everything detrimental to biking safely & the only person riding on a sidewalk should be supervised 6 to 10 yr olds
As a far less experienced cyclist, I concur. Bike lanes are of the Devil.
People who can't be counted on to avoid bicycles and pedestrians should not be behind the wheel of a car.
Yes, there are lots of those people, but that's a problem with our licensing system and a cultural penchant for treating recklessness on the road less harshly than other types of lethal recklessness.
Because of the way our economy is set up, it just isn't feasible to train every driver and certify that they're actually safe on the road. My vote goes to better road engineering as a solution.
Better road engineering is most definitely in order. WAY to many interchanges that are death traps for almost everyone involved.
Part of the price for liberty is risk. The risk-averse need to crawl their azzes to a nanny state and ask, "Mother may I?"
These measures don't work on people who cannot live adult lives without driving - they just drive anyway, because there's no other way to get by. And they'll drive crappy, less safe cars to minimise the loss when they do get pulled over...which makes the roads even worse.
QFT.
Also, LEOs on the road know and understand this. Illegals many times get a pass, if they otherwise appear clean. Poor Americans, too. ESPECIALLY poor folks in generally poor areas who look like they are driving work trucks. As part of the way to pay for school, I worked for a tree removal company several summers from age 15 until graduating from college. Towards the last few years, my part-time employer went through Hard Times
TM. None of the vehicles had plates or the requisite commercial truck verbiage on the exterior. I was never,
ever pulled over. I drove the speed limit & obeyed the laws, so the municipal, county, and state LEOs passed me over.
At the end of the day, any real crack down would net a huge number of illegals and their boosters in America would squawk like wet hens. Yeah, they drive drunk and generally kill more folks on the road than Americans, but so long as the affluent can have their gardeners & nannies and crooked businessfolk can have their laborers, it is all worth it, I'm sure.