>>1678695A lot of them are arrogant, paranoid busybodies who have an idealized society in their head that could be achieved if only THEY were the one in charge to simply outlaw all the things they don't like.
The car thing is this attitude but following dumb propaganda that goes back almost century.
It spawned from the auto industry. At first it was an attempt to scare people off bikes and into cars by overtly saying that little timmy would at worst die or at best see his (at the time expensive) bicycle flattened.
Then it turned into trying to portray bicycles as extensions of pedestrian traffic and toys for children, again pushing serious road use into the "dangerous, unfashionable and retarded" category.
Now the fearmongering and wedge-driving has reached new heights with making anyone who rides a bike seem like a lunatic activist ("probably also a vegan and a communist too"), inconveniencing the regular people with shitty painted bike lanes, and then following it up with "we need barriers and bollards!" for making the congestion worse.
All of this serves to paint cars as evil death machines to people succeptible to propaganda and make those people seem crazy to your everyday person (who may not even drive if they live in some cities!)
In reality, none of that is needed. The risks of getting hit by a car while riding a bike are so small that it's wasted effort, wasted municipal budgets, and only serves to make bicycles LESS socially-acceptable. Vastly more cyclists die from crashing and/or while inebriated than die from being hit by a car while sober and alert. You have a statistically greater risk of deal from falling out of a tree.
