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Most of the PCN I ride on isn't converted from streets. Usually, it's part of a park or a sidewalk. So it's pretty much like biking on a sidewalk, including having to dodge pedestrians who zig zag around while staring at their phones.
Down from Singapore too. At first, I thought they had finally blocked facebook at work.
I recently finished reading the book mentioned in the article and in the book, they have a chapter focused on ways to improve the situation for people living in poverty. What I got from it was that programs to help poor people need to be tweaked to not tax their bandwidth as much and there is no real one size fits all solution.
One example in the book is the computer skills programs that are often offered by employment services offices. These programs are usually several weeks long and build on knowledge from previous weeks. For someone who is struggling financially, attending these classes weekly could be difficult. You miss one class, and the next class makes no sense and you feel like you're wasting your time. The authors' suggestion is to restructure these classes to be more modular and allow people to attend these classes based on their schedules.
I think it's not so much that people don't want the poor to solve their problems. It's that they don't want to make it easier for them. People feel that they themselves did just fine without all the benefits that the poor get, so why should we make it easier for them?