by bsimpson | 2025-07-30 17:52:16+00:00
The other part that's missing in the US is infrastructure.

It's taken a generation for acoustic bike lanes to be standard infrastructure in the US, and they've mostly been an exhaust valve. I spent the 2010s bike commuting in SF, and even at rush hour you'd have at-most a dozen bikes waiting at a stoplight. In part because we still need to do so much to make urban cycling as safe as it is enjoyable, even in inner cities, cars outnumber bikes.

Over the last few years, motorbikes have become desirable at a scale the US is unfamiliar with and unequipped to service. They're a cool toy for kids, a useful tool for commuters, and the lowest barrier to entry for deliveries. In the same way it's not safe to mix someone in the foam hat we call a bicycle helmet with multiton metal vehicle traffic, it's not safe for motorbike riders either. They have too much speed and inertia to mix comfortably with bicycle riders, but not enough protection to mix with cars and trucks. Worse, car drivers seem to have forgotten how to drive. Red light running is no longer rare, and more drivers seem to be watching the phone in their laps than the traffic ahead.

Filtering and lane splitting doesn't solve the big-car-vs-tiny-motorbike problem, but it at least helps. Unfortunately it's mostly a California thing. A few states are experimenting with reduced flavors of it, but safety (in the form of filtering/splitting) is still at odds with the law in most states.

There's a principle in Dutch traffic engineering that each grade of mass/vulnerability needs its own right of way: Pedestrians have crosswalks. Bicycles have cycletracks. Cars have roads. Trains have rails. Each one is vulnerable to all the bigger ones and a threat to all the smaller ones, so they each have a solution. Our cities need to bring that approach to motorbikes.

Unfortunately, this goes against the grain of race/class/tradition. The people in power tend to move through the world in cars, so accommodating other modes is an unfamiliar nuisance to them. (See also: the decades it took for bike lanes to become standard.) NYPD has been actively harassing cyclists this year because the nepobaby chief of police's heiress mom is afraid of them.

Delivery riders tend to be immigrants. They're willing to work hard jobs for low wages, and there's a black market of Uber Eats profiles that they can rent without work permits [1]. They can be intimidating - looking foreign and not speaking English. They learned to ride in places with less regimented road cultures than the US (places where motorbikes are expected to filter to the front of traffic). Being sandwiched between cars is both dangerous and slow - both counter to the instincts of someone who gets rewarded for completing a delivery quickly. Of course they break the law - filtering, riding on sidewalks, riding the wrong way…

What cities need to do is give well behaved motorbikes a practical avenue. Maybe there's a motorbike lane next to the bike lane. Maybe filtering is legalized. There's plenty of room to find a solution here. Give them a safe and reasonable option, then ticket the people who continue to break the law.

Instead, we're likely to be stuck with obsolete laws for a while. Immigrants speeding through traffic and riding on the sidewalk are not a sympathetic constituency. But until the law catches up to the technology and the culture, this is going to be a mess.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V9ypoULc0I