Originally Posted by
spelger
i really don't know why you are berating me. i only asked a question and posed a counter argument.
You made the utterly false claim that in sidewalk cycling "speed is a strawman argument"
Riding around with such a false belief is a great way to get yourself killed.
Since you brought up laws in Nevada, here's one you want to keep in mind:
484B.283 (b) A pedestrian shall not suddenly leave a curb or other place of safety and walk or run into the path of a vehicle which is so close that it is impossible for the driver to yield.
If you are riding on the sidewalk, you have the same responsibility to check for approaching traffic, and the faster you go, the harder it is to achieve the necessary traffic check.
Nor is speed just an issue of traffic checks: whatever the original "cause" of conflict, many crashes have the cyclist's own speed as the "final factor" that makes it impossible to avoid contact rather than successfully react. While pedestrians certainly get killed in crossings too, even a jogger moving at comparable moderate cycling speed has a greater chance of avoiding such a crash, or more safely absorbing an unavoidable impact and rebounding rather than flipping over or slipping underneath.
(But the problem for the OP and daughter seems to be less the apparently quite slow sidewalk riding, than the illicit bike lane salmoning they describe as resulting when they need to move off the sidewalk to yield to the pedestrians it is actually there for)