#And there's that presumption that drivers are the main users of the road and everyone else should inconvenience them as little as possible

[doubletamponne]

Dont ask me what I was doing scrolling through the comment section of a fucking LinkedIn post at 3 a.m., but recently a cyclist was straight-up murdered by a driver -- the automobilist was driving on a bike lane, ran over the foot of a cyclist, who punched the car in order to alert him. When the driver backed off and stopped, the cyclist went up to the driver to protest, upon which the driver turned the car towards him and ran him over. The author of the post mostly deplored the fact that 48h hours later, the ministry of Transportation had yet to make a statement (he has since met with representatives from various cycling collectives), while TV and radio discourse tended heavily towards blaming cyclists. The comments were a delightful mix of :

Honing in on the first sentence "Paul was murdered by a man driving an SUV" to either brandish la présomption d'innocence or jump to defend SUVs -- and honestly the people in the comments comparing this to US gun discourse don't seem far off, whether it's "the SUV didn't kill anyone, a madman did, and he would've done it all the same with a Twingo", "stop appropriating tragedies for the sake of an ecolo-bobo agenda", "umm, actually, there's no such thing as an SUV" or "I'm a housewife and mother, I need an SUV to drop my children to school BC that's all you can buy today, and *I* never wanted to run over anyone!", occasionally with people pointing out that sure, any car has the potential to be deadly, but SUVs are deadlier in a variety of ways, their much-touted safety features being only for the benefit of the driver and passengers

Bonus round: blaming the outcry against motorists and SUV drivers in particular on a culture of victimhood that depicts cyclists as poor innocent angels against the big bad SUVs

That very same cyclist-blaming, complete with anecdotes of badly behaved cyclists sometimes severely injuring friends or relatives of the commenters, which I don't mean to downplay, but I'm not sure how they relate to a cyclist being run over by someone driving in a bike lane. Also sometimes throwing in stuff about electric scooters. And people who identify as pedestrians taking the side of drivers???

"Sure, Scandinavian countries have robust biking infrastructure and a strong biking culture but they're culturally homogenous"

Since this happened in Paris, blaming it on Anne Hidalgo's anti-car dictatorship. There's one lady in particular who commented about a hundred times that back in her day, everyone was respectful of each other and the code de la route.

For that matter, denying the notion of vehicular violence and saying it's only a matter of lack of "respect" from all sides

The cherry on top: pointing out that the cyclist was a pro-bike activist as a manner of saying that he kinda had it coming.