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The story
The mayor of Como, in northern Italy, banned bicycles from the city center after being injured in a collision with a cyclist. The news sparked discussion in the European Lemmy community “c/europe,” where many comments pushed back with “cars are far more dangerous — why ban only bikes?” The thread mixed frustration at reckless cyclists in pedestrian zones with broader criticism of car-centric urban planning.
Como mayor bans bikes in city centre after being hit ‘by one of these beasts’
Source: theguardian.com / Read the original article
What people said
In my experience, people like that are just miserable folks who hate exercise in general. Sorry if my spandex kit made you uncomfortable.
https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/b121c826-0272-48ca-9c23-2d8bcb2db6a7.png
No, he hasn't actually been hit by a bike yet
Unfortunately, that's not entirely wrong either. There really are cyclists out there who treat the downtown pedestrian-only zone as their personal training course.
A lot of cyclists get pretty nasty when passing pedestrians, honestly.
I hate guys like that just as much as the car-first weirdos. Either way, a selfish jerk is a selfish jerk.
Bikes fit the old town just fine, and so does public transit. E-scooters might need a few tweaks, but I think they'd work too.
Cars, though, are a no. They hog way too much space for way too few people.
And honestly, having a bike nearby doesn't bother me, but a car does. People aren't just pedestrians — they also ride bikes and use public transit.
Getting hit by a car doing 20 km/h would be way worse than getting hit by a bike, I'd think.
Honestly, I can't picture a car doing more than 20 km/h in central Como. Those streets are barely wide enough for a car to squeeze through.
That's true. I got hit by a bike once myself.
One night in the hospital, a week to recover, and that was the end of it.
But a car? No way — I'd be dead.
The average car weighs around 1,950 kg, while a bike plus rider comes to about 82 kg combined. At the same speed, a car's kinetic energy is roughly 24 times that of a bike's.
Background and Key Points of the Debate
Car restrictions in Italy’s narrow-streeted old towns are nothing new — what sparked debate here is that this time it was cyclists, not drivers, who got banned from the cramped pedestrian zone. The thread split over whether it’s fair to weigh the quantitative argument (“cars are more dangerous than bikes”) against the qualitative one (“cyclists behaving badly in pedestrian zones”) on the same scale. The comments comparing kinetic energy based on the mass difference between cars and bikes are physically sound, but that holds only when speeds are equal — and this article gives no indication of the actual speed or circumstances of the mayor’s own collision. Underneath it all is a disagreement over whether one injury to the mayor personally should be enough to justify rewriting the rules for the whole pedestrian zone.
※This article is a condensed summary, translated by our editorial team, of the overseas forum thread “Como mayor bans bikes in city centre after being hit ‘by one of these beasts’” from Lemmy’s c/europe. This site is responsible for the translation.
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