Governor to decide whether to let police write $50 tickets for parking in bicycle lanes

The man hit in the incident you cite crossed in the middle of the block between cars. It's hard to place the entirety of the blame on whomever, driver or cyclist, that hits a pedestrian in those circumstances. Plus, Menino served a long time; that incident occurred more than twenty years ago.

Summary: once in twenty some odd years a pedestrian dies in a collision with a cyclist that most people wouldn't hold the cyclist responsible for.

and get a ticket every time you break traffic laws

Doubles over laughing while watching traffic violations ever twenty seconds from office window without anyone getting ticketed by the cop in the car off to the side.

Show that there is harm or STFU.

I regularly bike with kids, always with at least one on their own bike, sometimes two or sometimes additional neighbor kids tagging along. So many of the bike lanes are impossible to use. The one across from the Roxbury YMCA is constantly FULL of cars parked in it (with plenty of legal parking spots within 300 feet). Sometimes these cars include cop cars. City Hall tells me there isn't traffic enforcement on weekends and to call 911. I call 911 and they tell me thanks for sharing. I've called them when my kids and I arrived at the Y (the side toward the Y is usually clear), told them we'd be headed home at such-and-such time, and we'd like the bike lane to be safe for children to use. They say they'll send an officer. Then they don't.

So why the fuck is there even a bike lane? The city clearly isn't remotely interested in having it usable as one. When we ride in the right lane (it's a four-lane street, so plenty easy to pass us), people honk and yell out car windows to get out of the road. Which we're legally allowed to use all of, but people don't know this, because honking and yelling at cyclists also isn't enforced. There tends to be less of this behavior in Roxbury than in the South End or Back Bay, but it still happens.

We continue to ride, because it's how we get most everywhere, but we're all stressed out by the time we get places that should be reachable entirely on dedicated bike lanes. Sometimes we're late because we end up walking our bikes. We walked them about a mile on Mass Ave last week because the bike lane was completely covered in the vehicles of inconsiderate assholes. And we annoyed all of the people on the sidewalk who had to move out of the way of us walking bikes on very narrow sidewalks.

"$500? That's a week's pay for some people"

Fine. Let's follow the example of some European nations and make it income based. How about 5% of your monthly take home?

The whole point is to deter people from doing stupid things (like consciously blocking the box or fire or bike lanes)

Imagine if drivers parked for 10 minutes in a "car" lane and blocked vehicular traffic.

Very different situation.
- Block a car-traffic lane on a one-lane road and NOBODY can get by.
- Block a car-traffic lane on a busy 2-lane road (think Mass Ave) and you can tie up half the city.

But block a bike lane while you make a delivery.... while I agree it's not ideal, even the bikes can keep getting through, maybe requiring a very brief pause.

I support bike-lanes, and agree that our focus has been too car-centric for +/- 50 years, but imposing more than a nominal fine is mis-guided. And I'll bet you all a cold one that even die-hard cyclists get an occasional delivery or have a guest stop by for 2 minutes and find the bike lane is the only possible place where a truck or car can pull over.

It would make it a lot easier to plow to the curb if cars were banned from the bike lane as their private vehicle storage location.