I would love to see some real polling that has the liberal areas real feelings toward cyclists. All indications that they're unpopular in large cities when it comes to their face getting eaten streets getting ruined to the point when restoration is a major plus.
The level of vitriol indicates that they know this, otherwise there wouldn't be as much crying.
Since this thread is about cyclists and urbanism and they're deeply connected, I'm going to start by saying what follows is specifically about cyclists. Urbanism has a whole new wave of fans whose interest is mostly limited to finding solutions to housing costs. Next I'm going to do my best to say that I promise I'm not schizoposting.
Cyclists are a well organized lobby with a single issue that they focus on. Watch some video of public meetings involving cyclists. After you wade through the usual psychos who make a public comment on every item on the agenda that involves what the aliens told them about the issue, you'll find that the most nuts commenters are the bike people. Since you will almost never find a counter-lobby, just some old people saying "hey, you took away the nearest handicap parking to the ATM for the bike lane" and because there are all kinds of other incentives for bike shit—bike lanes encourage tourism! get certified as a bike friendly city!—it really doesn't even matter what the polling is. It could 90/10 and unless the 90 have prioritized the issue 1/9th as much as the other 10 nothing will happen.
They push and push and push some more and eventually will reach the outer limit of what people will take, but we're not there yet most places. Some of it gets lumped in with "pedestrian improvements" which obviously is much less of a special interest.
And look around. Who's on the bikes? Where I live at least, it's not commuters or people trying to share the road. It's a bunch of viagra aged doctors and dentists riding around in spandex with $20,000 bikes so they can LARP the Tour de France. These faggots are hanging out at Rotary and other gatherings with the politicians in the first place, shilling for the public to fund their hobby either explicitly or implicitly in the name of reducing carbon emissions and equity and whatever other buzzwords give the politicians the cover to mollify the apathetic 90%. Pickleball is almost the same thing. A little bit older, but just as rich and just as intent on converting playgrounds for families into public expenditures on their current meme hobby, but less successful than bikefags.
So when the whiny tranny faggot from the bike club shows up at the city council meeting, he's speaking for the Rotarians with the bikes that cost more than you car and the politicians know it.
