u/trainedstork

Inspired to write this after my daily commute, which usually involves 5+ narrowly avoided collisions along a 4 mile stretch of Venice Blvd, constant shoulder checks, and high stress, I have a hot take. With significant experience riding both, I would rather take Santa Monica Blvd with its unprotected paint and 0 street parking than Venice Blvd and its parking "protection." I'm not saying Venice was better before, or the sections where the bike lane are to the left of the parking are better: that is by far the worst bike lane design imo. I'm saying that parked cars and bike lanes do not mix safely and certainly do not act as bike lane "protection" except for a false sense of security.

1. Surprise pedestrian conflicts: I cannot see through cars. People walk around their cars to the sidewalk, I cannot see them, and they cannot see me. Yes, I prefer this to door zone conflicts in painted lanes to the left of cars, but it is still quite dangerous for everyone involved. This isn't a hypothetical risk, it happens every day that I won't see someone who walks into the bike lane until the last second.
2. FOOD TRUCKS: These are the holy grail of surprise pedestrian conflicts, and just general annoyance. The surprise comes from the many customers and employees walking around the far side of the truck and suddenly appearing in front of me. The general annoyance comes from the people standing in the bike lane to place their order at a food truck or reading the menu. A bit of a gripe, but oh well: It is the parking lane, they're not doing anything illegal afaik. Now, however, they're setting up half of their kitchen on the sidewalk and half in the truck. Charcoal grills and a register on the sidewalk, employees darting back and forth between the truck and the grill. Food truck door will fly open or a cook will take a step back from the grill and they're in front of you. These food trucks literally use the bike lane as the area between their sink/fridge (in the truck) and their cooking station (on the sidewalk).
3. Turn invisibility. Intersections and their 90 degree angles have always been the most dangerous part of riding a bike (and driving, of course). Parking "protection" only applies to the straight segments, where you are protected from the off-chance of a wayward car hitting you. At intersections and driveways, the parking "protection" makes everything worse. Cars have to pull into the bike lane and completely block it to make right turns, (unavoidable, it's not even the driver's fault). Having driven many times on Venice, I know that when turning right from Venice into many of the driveways, you often have no visibility on the bike lane before you must cross it. You just have to accept that you might cut someone off, or else get out of your car and walk in front of the hood to assess the bike lane, while blocking traffic.

There's simply no way around the fact that bikes and bikers need to be visible, and parked cars block visibility. I would love it if all street parking along major boulevards were removed, but until then, there is no way to make these bike lanes actually safe.

The restaurant is super dirty and run down. The experience is really terrible. You have to sit on some plastic folding chair and eat off a grimy table. Let's wrap that all up into one word: authentic. Hopefully the food is still good and cheap. It's usually fried sysco slop and we just pretend it's good instead. That grandma sitting there has better culinary taste than the finest bourgeois food critics. You must endlessly enthuse about it to your friends as a show of worldliness.

You're not really gentrifying this neighborhood. You're one of the good ones.

Words like "right" or "sword" (among many, many more) have vestigial orthographies that reflect a pronunciation that once existed but has since ceased. However, these sounds often disappeared long before English dictionaries with standardized spelling were produced. It seems that there would be plenty of time for spelling to shift before then to reflect accurate pronunciation. Shakespeare would oft'n write as he wished a word to be pronounced (pronounc'd?), for example.

Further on in history, Noah Webster famously tried to reform English spelling and created American standard spelling, which tried to correct some inconsistencies between spelling and pronunciation. He did not, however, go so far as to correct silent "gh," "w" "h" "b" or "k." Why not right our wrongs? Did he not wish to write as we talk?

Shakespeare used apostrophes to contract words to reflect desired pronunciation. For example, he often changed -ed to -'d for the past tense to indicate that the ending should not be pronounced as a distinct syllable, when my understanding is it commonly would be pronounced during his time. Followed would be pronounced fo-llow-ed, thus the two-syllable fo-llowd would be written as "follow'd"

Many times, his contractions represent common pronunciation among most English dialects today. Why has this contracted spelling fallen out of fashion instead of becoming standard?

For another example, the adjective "every" would have 3 syllables. If the author in Shakespearean times (whether that be the man himself or a contemporary) wished it to be pronounced with 2, they would write "ev'ry." Yet today, though we pronounce it "ev'ry," we still write "every." As the language gravitated towards the 2-syllable spelling, it seems authors would naturally use the contracted form more in writing, eventually omitting the apostrophe altogether, hence "evry" instead of "every." Yet we have kept the longer version.