alt Hacker NewsI’m pretty sure it went something like “so where are we allowed to pickup and drop off riders” and the city couldn’t answer. The problem isn’t really enforcement, the problem is that there are simply no alternatives, and the city shies away from enforcement because they know that. If they started enforcing the rules strictly, people would again ask questions that they aren’t prepared to answer.
If you compare that to a country like the Netherlands, which is not only strict, but provides “solutions” so breaking the law isn’t necessary in the first place (they use explicit drop off and pickup locations instead of American chaos).
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Blocking the right car lane for a drop off is perfectly legal outside of No Stopping zones. This is how taxis have always worked.
It's just that other drivers get pissed off if you block a car lane when there's a bike lane next to it. That needs to be trained away by enforcing the rules.
One question the city probably can't answer is what disabled persons in the taxi are supposed to do. If you strictly enforce bike lanes the result is probably the rider needing to walk a few blocks. If the rider is disabled, that could actually be a huge burden. Since I've got an 80+ year old disabled parent with a walker this is an issue for me that does compete pretty aggressively with my support for bikes.
> The problem isn’t really enforcement
The problem is street-side parking.
Yes, in sane countries the rules are attempted to be defined in a fair way, and you can follow them. Not perfectly of course, but with that goal.
Like the Netherlands, it is (A) not possible to park in bike paths without going intentionally out of your way, and (B) there are reasonable alternatives, such as specific “loading zones” for passengers on nearly every block, on major roads. On minor neighborhood roads, you can just block the road for a few seconds and it doesn’t matter
The US is happy creating laws for everything that are impossible to follow, but only selectively enforced. It makes it so everyone always must break the law to exist in society, but will only face repercussions at the discretion of a police officer.
It means that there are effectively no laws, because everyone has slightly different definitions of when something is “right” or not, and the police only enforce the most egregious cases, but they can also target you specifically for some other reason (discrimination, bias, etc) with no repercussions, since you were breaking the law after all.