alt Hacker NewsYes, 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.
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The US is happy creating laws for everything that are impossible to follow, but only selectively enforced.
Do you consider this insane? Your assertions that "everyone always must break the law" and "there are effectively no laws" seem a bit extreme. Ultimately, with any messy human affair, there is always going to be discretion involved, and I don't think implicitly codifying that is a bad thing. It does tend to work by and large. I've personally had much worse experiences with officials following the letter of the law than with them using discretion, but I admit I am not in any class that is often discriminated against.
It's because the bike lanes are great PR but bad for votes, at least in the short term. City leaders love the greenwashing effect, but in the short term the percentage of people actually biking everywhere is very low, so it doesn't make sense for them to spend a ton of time and money to do it right.
In a few years they'll get to put together a committee to discuss "learnings" and maybe they'll fix it if there are enough complaints, or maybe they'll just spend their time elsewhere as usual.