* Lots of construction employees are mandated by unions to stay around (crane greasers I believe are an example) even though these employees do no work, and then managers have to be hired to manage more employees, etc.
* Sometimes employees are hired to do no work at all
* Highly experienced employees will be given menial jobs like coffee-fetcher sort of deal, but get paid very highly for it due to their experience.
* The MTA has no negotiating power, the unions and the construction contractors agree on a price and then give it to the MTA
* They might be first in the queue on a price-time exchange, and so naturally get the order
* They might be on a price-size exchange, and so get some of the fill simply by being present.
* They probably participate in the auction process, and will naturally get some portion of orders that IB initiates
> You're not restricted to the bike lane if there's an obstruction.
These comments proves my whole second point. If a car were to just park in the car lane because it felt like it, there would be outrage, tickets, and the car would get towed immediately. Nobody would say "no big deal, just change lanes". But when a biker says "I don't like using the street because it's dangerous", it's just dismissed like this.
You also ignore that bikers DO just change lanes into the street, which can be quite dangerous somewhere like New York. I don't know if you've ever ridden a bike in New York, but drivers, especially taxis, are at best ignorant of you and often antagonistic. There's a reason bike lanes exist in the first place, and it's because the car lanes are dangerous.
> It's far easier to take responsibility for your own safety than to rely on others to do it for you
Imagine somebody saying this when a car driver complains about somebody else running a red light, or cutting them off in a lane - you would get laughed out of the room. But when drivers act dangerously towards a biker it's the biker who should be taking responsibility.
When bikers do all the terrible biker things like roll through stop signs, or "act like pedestrians", or roll to the front of the line, that IS taking our own safety into our hands by doing legally dubious things that make biking much safer, yet everybody hates that as well.
> There's a reason why drivers of motor vehicles don't typically drive in the door zone.
Have you ever been in New York? Plenty of car lanes themselves are near the door zone, not to mention bike lanes themselves ARE the door zone usually.
I don't mean to be aggressive, but the endless victim blaming towards bicyclists gets really tiresome. I really wish that people who just dismiss these complaints out of hand would bike to work in NYC for just a week.