07-15-2018, 10:25 PM
(07-15-2018, 09:58 PM)tomh009 Wrote: Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating more car parking, I would be happy to see less.
But locking your bike to a tree in the bike lane because there is no rack directly in front of your destination is weak in my mind, we don't allow (or at least shouldn't allow) drivers to break the rules for convenience, either. I would advocate having sufficient number of bike racks -- but I would then expect bicyclists to also use them, not just lock to the tree closets to the shop they are visiting.
I don't think they're equivalent. Drivers parking illegally often endanger other people. People locking bikes to signs or trees isn't really in the same class. At a very minimum (driver parking in a legal parking, say without paying), is still, geometrically, at least 10x as bad as parking a bike in the same way.
The second thing is that locking to signs or the like is pretty much par for the course for cyclists, plenty of places I visit have no bike parking whatsoever (or only wheel benders). If there was reliable parking everywhere, then I'd be willing to argue that cyclists should be expected to find proper parking (this was the situation I experienced and lived when visiting the Netherlands) but if it's expected that there isn't parking and cyclists just improvise, then we can hardly blame them for improvising.
It's also worth noting that the when it comes to legality, is there even a bylaw against parking your bike like that? I doubt it.