Of course, we also suffer from just having fragments of cycle infrastructure that don't join up and most of the time, the infrastructure consists of "magic" paint that is somehow going to prevent motorists from parking and blocking the lane (it doesn't and they do).
Edit: Thought I'd share the sheer incompetence that we're faced with. Here's a "cycle lane" in the centre of Bristol that doesn't even use a different colour, so pedestrians aren't particularly aware of it which just leads to unnecessary confrontation - peds and cyclists fighting over the scraps left over from designing for motorists.
Moreover, bike paths are usually built on only one side of the road as a two-way path. It's dangerous for everybody involved, especially when a car has to stop and give way to both sides (spoiler: cars don't do it).
Everything makes biking on a bike path a slower and horrible experience, so nobody uses bike paths and then a vicious circle ensues.
We should all learn from the Ducth and the Danes.
Naples is almost a perfect example of how to cram in cars into the smallest possible streets and a lot of the streets have to have metal bollards to provide some kind of protection for the pedestrians from the cars and mopeds.
Milan, Ferrara, Bolzano, Modena, Bologna are just some Northern cities where cycling is encouraged and I can see them trying to get a better infrastructure; but unfortunately there's still a long way to go.
First we have to understand that, all things being equal, cars "win" by default on the roads. They are bigger, heavier, faster and more powerful (thanks to burning fossil fuels), and the operators are more reckless and inconsiderate due to being shielded from the outside world. That means their presence on the roads automatically makes it more dangerous and unpleasant for everyone else.
Second notice that primary routes are always designed for cars first. Every two places has a primary route connecting it. Depending on the importance of the route that route will have some level of protection against things like flooding, subsidence etc. and also be generally higher quality. That primary route is always for cars. Due to the above, that generally makes it undesirable or often practically unavailable for non-motorised traffic. See, for example, dual carriageways. Technically everyone has a right to use them by any means (they have paid for it, after all), but you'd be crazy to walk/cycle down one.
Third notice that cars are basically untouchable. It's considered a perfectly acceptable and normal part of driving to put people's lives in danger by driving too close and too fast etc. But nobody dares touch a car. They have the capability of killing or seriously injuring people, but people don't have the capability of killing them (the cars). The police will laugh at you if you report a car driving too closely. But scratching a car or something? Police will be on your case. Basically, we value metal boxes on wheels more than people's bodies.
Fourth notice that every part of the road network is designed to make it easier for cars at the detriment of pedestrians and cyclists. Why does a pedestrian need to press a button to cross the road? Why, upon pressing the button, must the pedestrian wait to cross? Why doesn't the light cycle start immediately? There is absolutely no sense at all in making the pedestrian wait. But everyone is used to it and doesn't question it; it's just the way it is. But what it does is makes being a pedestrian a third class status. It's these little things, like having to sit at the back of the bus, that chip away at people's ability to feel like an equal member of society. If you walk or cycle you are under no illusion that you come second to cars. It's little wonder people choose the car if they can.
I regularly cycle along the dual carriageway part of the A370. Whilst I get that it can be unnerving for most cyclists, dual carriageways are well designed for cycling along as they typically have great visibility (drivers can see you from a distance) and there's a whole lane for drivers to overtake safely.
> Fourth notice that every part of the road network is designed to make it easier for cars at the detriment of pedestrians and cyclists. Why does a pedestrian need to press a button to cross the road? Why, upon pressing the button, must the pedestrian wait to cross? Why doesn't the light cycle start immediately? There is absolutely no sense at all in making the pedestrian wait. But everyone is used to it and doesn't question it; it's just the way it is. But what it does is makes being a pedestrian a third class status. It's these little things, like having to sit at the back of the bus, that chip away at people's ability to feel like an equal member of society. If you walk or cycle you are under no illusion that you come second to cars. It's little wonder people choose the car if they can.
I think a big part of the problem is that politicians are heavily influenced by car/oil lobbyists. What we need are brave politicians that are forward looking and have a vision.
By the way, I like to refer to the pedestrian crossing buttons as "beg buttons".
But do they actually use it? Last time I biked on a dual carriageway I had cars and lorries passing at 60+mph with a centimetre gap. I've given up cycling for the most part as I disliked basically every ride feeling like it was almost my last.
I run forwards and rear cameras so that I can report dangerous/close passes. Strangely enough, I've had more issues with driver aggression (e.g. horn sounding) along the A370 than I've had with close passes. Of course, I've reported a fair few close passes in other areas (Avon & Somerset Police seem to be one of the few pro-active forces when it comes to dealing with video submissions).
When there is an accident between a car and a bike it is always the fault of the car. Its the driver who gets the insurance claim no questions asked.
Cyclists get special protection. This is not something other countries can adapt because it requires a deep moral shift.
It's a bit more complicated than that. The car is only 0% responsible in the case of 'force majeur'. Which means that it was impossible for the driver of the motorized vehicle to avoid the accident.
https://letselschade.com/kennisbank/wat-is-overmacht-zoals-b...
Note that (translated): "an appeal to force majeur will rarely by successful in practice, because it's rarely the case that the driver cannot be reproached.
IANAL, but e.g. when a cyclist crosses a red light and gets hit by a car. Even though the cyclist is responsible, in most cases the car driver could have avoided the accident by looking carefully and not accelerating too quickly near bike/pedestrian crossings. This has always been my understanding of Dutch law and is also how all Dutch drivers I know drive - acutely aware and careful near bikes and pedestrians.
And this is how it should be, because to pedestrians and bikes, cars are like a continuous stream of bullets.
Someone recently had a nice description of the law: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41625337
Quoting it here:
I briefly studied law in the Netherlands and it was used as an example. Our lecturer told us that if "A person on a bike would jump out of an airplane on a bike, land with a parachute on a highway and get hit by a car, just maybe would the car have a case." The reasons for this are varied. Cars are insured, bikes are not. But most importantly, in basically all traffic situations with cars and bikes the car introduces the danger and should thus bear the responsibility of any accidents.
While not going into details: 1. This only concerns liability for damages. 2. It is not necessarily the case that the cyclist is exempt from (fully) compensating the motorized driver for their damages, even if the cyclist is reimbursed for (a portion of) their own damages.
Also note that most cyclists are insured!
Or perhaps thanks to a DC motor and a battery? Not sure exactly why you’re singling out ICEs in this point you’re making. Would be curious to know if there is some particular reason? I’d argue EVs are more powerful on average, if not the staggering majority of cases.
This makes for a more chill ride - I'm much more aware in EVs than I am in my remaining ICE vehicle (a minivan).
That said, poorly laid out bike lanes are systemically dangerous.
The regenerative braking force is generally much stronger than engine braking in ICE vehicles, as long as the battery isn't full.
We're not talking EVs that are double the mass (usually 10% increase over ICE), so a 20% reduction in speed (probably more) on an impact is more important than that 10% weight increase (impact force is roughly equal to mass x speed).
The reason I mention it is because it's unfair from the start. That we ever allowed such unsustainable transport to become the norm is a huge part of the problem.
The easiest thing is to stay on topic, wouldn't you agree?
I'd put it as more of a pragmatic, forwards-looking viewpoint that a moral stance.
How did the Netherlands manage to overcome this back in the 70s and the UK has not?
The UK didn't build good infrastructure to capitalize on the cyclist interest so could not ride the positive wave of a new status quo bias.
Also your point about being "near" is kinda ridiculous. The police would take an interest if someone cut your skin deliberately, but would equally not take any interest if you just walked near a car. You're comparing apples to oranges.
I agree on your point about waiting to cross as a pedestrian though. It is often quite unreasonable for multiple people to be standing there - often in rain or other inclement weather - waiting for a single person in their nice dry car to drive past.
Life is too short to care about these trifling matters really though isn't it? Sure, die on this hill if you want but for most people it is easier to just buy an electric car, pay the taxes, and move on with the important things in life. Life isn't fair - if you want to dedicate your ire to something unjust then there are IMO better causes to champion than the first world problem of not having nice cycle lanes in an otherwise safe and secure developed first world democratic country with low infant mortality, high quality water, universal free healthcare, and high adult literacy levels. You have already won the life lottery, but many tens/hundreds of millions around the world are not so lucky. Or you can just moan about the white lines on your cycle lane being a bit crappy. Up to you.
The bulk of road funding is from general taxation in most places (including the UK, I think?). To put a bit of a spin on your argument, most tax is paid by urban areas, with rural areas generally being a funds sink. So, should rural areas really get roads at all?
See how silly that is?
YES, PLEASE let me pay for only bicycle infrastructure, I hate having to pay for your car.
I wonder if you've thought about the logical conclusion of your "ideas" when applied to electric vehicles? They don't pay VED (emmissions tax, which is often referred to as "road tax" by idiots) and they don't pay fuel tax, so what are they doing on "your" public roads?
Most cyclists in the US also have cars, and are paying for license, registration, and insurance. Higher insurance rates are necessary because cars get in more crashes.
Meanwhile, bikes take up less space and do negligible damage to roads, and to other things like vehicles and stationary objects.
A more useful model is that we all pay to subsidize heavy trucking.
But also, each person paying for goodies that they don't use but someone else does, is kind of how a modern society works. It would be vastly more expensive to administer a society in which each person is charged a fee in precise proportion to the facilities and services that they use. Maybe in the future with AI.
I wouldn't call people's ability to be mobile a "trifling matter". In fact, I'd say it's fundamental to a free and equitable society. People should be able to move around safely and freely and the car is failing to be the solution to that.
Life is too short to spend it in a car. People hate driving. But they do it because there's no other choice. The infrastructure is car first and their bodies have atrophied to the point they can't get around without assistance.
I've seen people literally lose their minds as they sit in their car stuck in congestion day in, day out. Driving has become an adversarial pursuit that leads to anger and frustration. This is your life, and it's happening one traffic jam at a time.
A good life is not one where you utter "you absolute bellend" at least once every single day as you make your way to work.
(For the car that I also own, to be clear)
Your attitude is also deeply sad and cyclical. People wanting to improve the communities they live in is a bad thing. How about the 1000s of people dying every year is not an important topic.
Imagine if there were 1 major commuter trains going into london crashing and killing everybody in the train, and this happened multiple times a year? Would you consider that an important problem?
> there are IMO better causes to champion
Like what?
Transportation, and cycling as part of that has a major influence on climate change, energy consumption, public health, accessibility, retail shopping, community building and much more.
Have ever engaged with that research?
I said we all pay via general taxation, so yes you me everyone pays for roads if we use them or not. Vehicle users also pay in addition to general taxes the direct taxes for their usage in terms of road tax and fuel duties (N.b. that road usage fees per mile are on the cards for EVs). Cyclists pay none of these (unless they also own a car)
If there is a huge government subsidy for something, you'd be a fool to ignore it
1. The damage caused to a road surface is governed by the fourth power law [1]:
"This means that after 160,000 crossings, the bicycle causes as much damage as the car does when driving on the road only once. From this it can be deduced that a large part of the damage in the streets is caused by heavy motor vehicles compared to the damage caused by lighter vehicles."
2. Dedicated cycling infrastructure has the lowest cost of all vehicle infrastructure [2]:
"The annual infrastructure costs per traveller kilometre are 0.03 euros for bicycles, 0.10 euros for cars, 0.14 euros for buses, and 0.18 euros for trains."
3. The implication that whatever extra taxes motorists pay cover all externalities of driving, like death and injuries (40 000 deaths per year in the US alone) and health complications from brake dust and tire rubber seems laughably naive to me but perhaps there are some hard numbers that say otherwise?
I too yearn for the day motorists pay for the damage they cause.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
[2]: https://www.government.nl/binaries/government/documenten/rep...
Maybe isolated recreational paved bike paths, needlessly expensive public lockup places, and smaller scale urban infrastructure to avoid accomodate only pedestrians and bikes in forward thinking places? If cars weren't so common, would cyclists require 8+ lane highways, or even relatively wide roads? Seems like we pay into a pool of infrastructure funding that is often already very expensive and that has little to do with cars, if they didn't exist we'd broadly be saving public money, both on direct and indirect costs such as pollution, deaths, traffic control devices, public policy, or accommodating the demands of everything but personal cars as necessary. They should be treated as an expensive luxury, which they should be, but in some cases they're a necessary burden that the poor should be releaved of.
If cars weren't default, EV or not, we'd all be like "who's going to pay for that!?"
Likewise with trains, we all pay for them with taxes, but the people who use them often pay directly for the continued operation in terms of what is not their personal obligation (maintenance, construction, staffing), usually a relatively marginal source of revenue, but it keeps it going. You pay for trains through general taxation, and you pay somehow for the continued operation of your personal vehicle, and so do bikes, but cars demand much more from external sources like trains do, and like trains, there's no free ride, unless you bike, which has relatively minimal external demands. You pay for the continuance of the operation of a uniquely burdensome private luxury, and it's not subsidizing anything.
Roads also open up some amount of significant economic commercial and personal opportunity, which should also be factored in, but also paid for like others. If it's a problematic amount, then you make different choices, and if that didn't balance out at a system level, we'd make different infrastructure choices.
bicyclists, pedestrians and transit users in fact subsidize motorists, in all countries, everywhere. this isn't up for debate. so under your own logic, motorists should have no right to the roads, because they're "freeloading" and "not paying their fair share". sigh.
ironically, even the most ardent bike infra advocates don't actually think that. they just think the money they're paying shouldn't be expropriated exclusively for motorists, while they themselves get close to nothing, especially when bika infra is so comparatively cheap and efficient (it actually SAVES the government and the public money)
the benefits of bike infra are obvious and self evident. less pollution, less noise, more mobility for children and the disabled. it benefits motorists too, because it takes traffic off the roads, and saves parents time and money having to ferry their kids around all the time etc etc.
tbh people like you seem just like hateful selfish misanthropes.
Separately, a national project, Busconnects, is putting in its own bike lanes. Some of these are... interesting: https://irishcycle.com/2023/03/23/busconnects-approach-to-cy...
Of course, it doesn't help that the UK seems to keep producing highly aggressive drivers that want to punish cyclists that dare to use the public roads.
- That it's not feasible to incorporate this style of traffic design elsewhere since cultures differ
- That we need to consider how traffic engineering (eventually) shapes user behavior.
I'm convinced the second one is the one that quite quickly is much more predictive of outcomes. These Dutch-style intersections make the safe behavior natural and intuitive, and habits will adapt quickly where they're used _consistently._
To be explicit: the whole point of road design like this is that it does _not_ rely a lot on training users on details of the rules of the road. In fact, precisely those remaining quirks (e.g. scenarios when traffic approaching on-road white yield triangles nevertheless has the right of way in the Netherlands) are the exceptional vestigial weakness that proves just how obvious the rest is.
Of course, if every town picks it's own patterns to follow, that's going to be less predictable for road users, and thus frustrating and ultimately dangerous.
It really works! "When you don't exactly know who has right of way, you tend to seek eye contact with other road users. You automatically reduce your speed, you have contact with other people and you take greater care."
It started as a one-lane-each-way road like we all know.
Later ome space was shaved off the sides for bike lanes.
Later the lanes were repainted (without being moved) to appear much narrower. Drivers are more careful when they find it difficult to successfully stay within the paint.
Later (mind blowing part), the one-lane-each-way was repainted as a single narrow lane shared by both directions. So the only supported line of travel guaranteed a head-on collision. This causes drivers to drive very carefully...
It's notable how RLJing differs between cyclists and drivers. RLJing drivers will see a light turn to amber and then speed up so that they can get through the junction before the other directions can start moving. Obviously, speeding up to RLJ is very dangerous to pedestrians who might be crossing.
Equally if something happens (e.g. pedestrian knocked down), they're still liable; not having insurance doesn't remove that.
https://www.cycling-embassy.org.uk/blog/2013/07/03/how-does-...
For some more giggles, here's one of my favourite bits of "infrastructure" that's further along that same road (Coronation Rd, A370) on the other side. 5m of faded paint.
OTOH I did wonder how feasible it is to transfer such a well-designed system to UK towns and cities where it seems like available space would be too cramped to recreate all those nice features though
Based on where I have been, I guess the big difference is that the Dutch allocate continuous space to bikes and the British have a patchwork of bike space and parked cars.
The Dutch use of space seems more effective, the space they use for bikes is connected, rather than unconnected/ineffective bits.
But note that on the first photo, you see four streets meeting at an intersection, that's eight sides, and there are cars parked on only two of the eight. Look at the the next intersection you pass on the way somewhere and compare the number of sides with parking space with that "two".
Problems can be solved with enough time, rough consensus and effort. It seems like such a weirdly outdated modernist view when living in other places.
Its as if drivers benefit just as much from good driving alternatives as non-drivers. But somehow this is consistently ignored by the 'pro-driving' crowd.
You are literally improving the overall efficiency of the whole system at minimal cost.
Just like the UK, most towns and cities weren't designed for a mix of cars and low-speed traffic. They predate cars by quite a bit, so they are now pretty cramped. The average urban area in The Netherlands back in the 1960s-1970s looked very much like the UK does now.
Infrastructure has to be designed case-by-case, because no two neighborhoods are ever exactly the same. You might start out with a menu of a few dozen common designs, but they are always modified to fit the specific location. Often that means making compromises, but achieving 90% of your goals is already a lot better than 0%.
If it can be done in The Netherlands, there's no reason it can't be done in the UK as well.
The flip side of that is that it's pretty feasible to transform existing car infrastructure into much nicer infrastructure - shave off a single lane, and there's a lot that you can do with that.
The Netherlands is more densely populated than the UK, I think, especially in the Randstad.
Driving lessons for me consisted for 80% of learning how to ALWAYS ALWAYS track all the cyclists and pedestrians in urban environments, how to approach an intersection and have complete visual on whatever the weaker parties might be doing. A very defensive "assume weird shit can happen any time, and don't assume you can just take your right of way" attitude, and I think our cities are better for it.
In America, it seems that a pedestrian is a second rate cititzen. Conversely, here if you hit the "weaker" party as a driver and it's almost always on you in terms of liability.
(for some reason this always is controversial with a lot of Americans whenever it is brought up in on-line discussions)
Because a car is essential for economic survival in the USA, it's probably difficult for some to accept alternate realities from the status quo.
Where I live, today's high temperature is lower than the low temperature in Amsterdam.
In August the average low temperature is higher than the average high temperature in Amsterdam.
Nobody, not even the hardiest Dutchman is going to walk or cycle when it is 27C at midnight in the summer and 0C at the warmest in the winter with four months of "Amsterdam weather" sprinkled between summer and winter.
Plus there's geography. My house is 21m above sea level, 3m higher than the highest point in Amsterdam, and I live 500m from the sea at the very beginning of the rollercoaster of hills and valleys the glaciers carved into the landscape here.
To walk or cycle to a store would require several Col du Tourmalet-class hill climbs (that's only a slight exaggeration) along the route.
Everywhere south of me is hotter, everywhere north of me is hillier.
https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-8pl51/Amsterdam/
Compare Amsterdam to DC a well-known "swamp" in the US that most people would consider one of its flatter cities.
https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-kfds8/Washington/
Don't be thrown off by the scale: yellow in Amsterdam (of which there is none) is 25m and yellow in DC (of which there is much) is 78m.
At 3km, anything but the most extreme weather/elevation can be tolerated, I've seen people cycling in what is effectively tornado weather (orange alerts -> 100+ km/h gusts of wind). As distances get larger, the tolerance for these factors diminishes significantly, are you sure it's not the distances that are the problem?
Also the Netherlands is not the only region where people bike a lot. There are places in Finland for example, with more hills and more extreme weather that have loads of people biking.
https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/u-s-cities-with-th...
https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT5Y2019.B08006?t=Commuting...
In the summer most people do not want to show up to work reeking like the Anacostia. I get it. In the evenings you walk from your apartment to Madam's Organ to pay $20 for a beer.
Every trip to a grocery store, restaurant, bar, friend's house, transit station, etc. that can be done by walking or cycling is one car trip off of the roads. That has benefits.
Of course some places are not suited to this. But there are places that could be, and those places combined have a lot of people living in them.
Dismissing the idea in all of America as an absolute is missing a lot of potential, and a lot of what is already happening.
And from my experience looking at real estate prices, houses in areas with good scores for walkability, cycling, and transit are very much in demand and priced higher than those without. There is at least some segment of the market that very much wants these qualities.
The anecedata is I see far more people biking year round in Chicago (even in the pretty brutal subzero January/February temps) than I ever can recall.
Granted it's a very flat city without much elevation changes, but there's definitely the spectrum of extreme heat in the summer and extreme cold in winter that doesn't seem to stop anybody
[0] https://chi.streetsblog.org/2024/05/28/cdot-built-it-they-ca...
everyone in America walks. They simply happen to do most of their walking in parking lots.
Seeing as a tram (nearly) always has right of way, if you get hit by one you clearly weren't paying attention.
Makes sense to me.
"Jaywalking" is a pejorative slur popularized by some people in the USA to justify their road supremacy.
I've lost friendships with my american friends (and a canadian, living in america) because of how evident their dangerous driving is, with regard to non-drivers is.
I can stomach approximately one mean thing to be said about someone walking on a street before I am unable to be in friendship with the person who says that mean thing.
Pedestrians in america are not "second rate citizens", they are seen as _not having dignity or humanity_. the kinds of people in america likely to be walking around certain roads have generally been of the groups of people some Americans have pointed ethnic cleansing energies at, which obviously requires lots of dehumanization already.
I have such beef with the various powers and authorities that influence american mobility networks.
American traffic planners are functional flat-earthers. not great.
In practice this means drivers tend to do a much better job anticipating cyclists, e.g. by checking for cyclists before making a turn.
I can't see why it's not taught and used everywhere as it encourages and facilitates the checking behind you when opening a car door. Rather than focussing on "left" or "right" hand, I find it more useful to just always use the furthest hand from the door so the same idea applies if you're driving or a passenger.
People have little situational awareness anyway, but perhaps a bit moreso when they are Dutch.
There is an actual traffic light design I really like. It has a circle of small white leds that switch off one by one as a count down to green
https://www.maxvandaag.nl/sessies/themas/reizen-verkeer/hoe-...
These are absolutely wonderful on busy roads with tons of (car) traffic. Before they had the count down one would just stand there waiting for what seems forever. It can go green any moment, you have to pay attention. The entire state of mind is different. You can just zone out. I even pull out my phone knowing I have time to answer a message or look up at what time a store closes.
I just learn I've only seen the highly predictable ones, apparently in other locations they also have heat sensors to detect how many cyclists are standing there. It may speed up if there are enough. If 1% of the cyclists know what is really going on it would be a lot. Until now I was just happy it turns green when I'm the only traffic for as far as the eye can see.
-Traffic fatalities have been falling for years now anyway - the 2022 figure per capita is around 20% higher than in the Netherlands, but used to be much, much worse.
-Polish cities are sparsely populated due to adminstrative changes and little of the old architecture surviving the war. Official numbers say that Warsaw has a density of 3.6k/km2, while the runner up is much smaller Białystok with ~2.9k/km2. Most hover in the region of 2.0-2.5k/km2. Real numbers might be different, but it's sparse compared with say Amsterdam's ~5k/km2.
And the trend of less people dying isn't some magical automated machine, you have to continue to improve, otherwise the trend can reverse, see the US as an example.
And even if you don't care about people and children dying, even if you don't care about 1000s of people being injured impacting their lives and their families, about the massive amount of property damage, about the massive amount of tax payer cost for policy and firefighter, all the money sucked up by insurance companies that can be used to do something useful.
Even if you don't care about any of those things, it simply makes the system more efficient. By literally any way you look at, its one of the single best money invested compared to return you can get.
> Those are just two out of many points.
Both points you mentioned are nonsense, but I guess you have other points in your head that you don't want to tell. I mean if you said what they are, people might bring up facts in response.
In the west. Over here it has only been a thing since the 90s.
> And the trend of less people dying isn't some magical automated machine, you have to continue to improve,
Which is happening without the involvement of cycling infrastructure and arguably the mentioned isn't that much of a factor. A while ago here pedestrians finally gained right of way when approaching crossings - there was some groaning, but safety improved. This is the level of legislation we're at.
Case in point: the traffic fatality rate in Poland is currently at the level seen in the Netherlands around 20 years ago, but by then the Dutch had a much more robust cycling network.
> Even if you don't care about any of those things, it simply makes the system more efficient.
Efficiency for efficiency's sake is not enough of an argument, especially if you optimise for only a subset of factors. There's always a tradeoff and people here are unwilling to make it.
> Both points you mentioned are nonsense
Perhaps to you, but they're relevant here.
Anyway, other points:
-Smog in the winter, heatwaves in the summer. In 2018 the sale of furnaces where you could throw just anything was banned, but much of the heating is still done using solid fuels, particularly coal ash. Meanwhile summer heatwaves lately have been approaching 36°C - I've attempted commuting by bike in such an environment - not worth the trouble.
-Urbanisation having peaked in the early 2000s at 62% and falling since(~60% currently). Many factors contributing to that, but the two main being generational trauma of living in cramped commie blocks along with barely anyone having the credit score to live within city limits. Dense living is a (dubious) privilege of those who have generational wealth. In the EU only Romania has the same trend and likely for similar reasons.
-Demographics. My city of 650k people has a shortage of 100 bus/tram drivers. Financial incentives that the city can afford don't work as the people who are qualified moved west long ago, when the west was solving such problems with immigration. We can't compete with say Germany on that front.
I could do this all day, but none of us has the time for that.
If efficiency isn't relevant for you then I don't know what to tell you. Transporting more people, getting them where they need to go at low cost to the person and to society is something most people think is a good thing.
There are not tradeoff, research is pretty clear, improving in biking improves the situation for drivers as well. And the claim that 'people are not willing' is simply because, people are misinformed.
To claim Poland is to hot for biking is freaking ridiculous, its equally ridiculous to claim its to cold. Biking is much more common in places Finland and in the Nordics. And in some places in Switzerland. Poland is mostly flat. Netherlands are also flat and rainy. In places where Poland has improve their bike infrastructure, they have seen adoption. Poland in literally every way is like other nations, so get out of here with your Polish exceptionalism.
Not all post-communist nations are de-urbanizing. Superannuation is a direct result of policy not some 'cultural will'. Infrastructure and policy is deterministic to a far, far greater degree them 'cultural memory'.
Demographics are why you can't have bike lanes? Now you are just flat out ridiculous.
Poland growing economically and many people are moving to Poland, including many poles who left. And in regards to drivers, that an equally crazy claim. Driving a vehicle is not some intellectual job that only a brilliant physicists can do. And the claim that the city can't afford it is equally wrong, much, much poorer society then Poland have managed to run a bus system. Are you fully pricing the roads and the parking? If not then that's how you can get some money, and improve the system.
The "buffer" reduces decision complexity even more because people treat them like train blocks. The only annoyance I have is when people actually break-and-check at these points even though its better to roll the car slowly trough to save the people right behind from brake checking entire queues.
To eliminate this you could turn the buffer into a whole extra lane with room for say 5 cars to queue, but this would compromise on the nice feature where the partially turned car gets to completely turn and have great vision of the cycle lanes in both directions.
It's an interesting article, but from a systems design perspective I'd be much more interested in how they handle a change in requirements like "there are now five times more cars turning left here than the intersection was designed for".
To an extent, it's a self-solving problem. If you have great non-car transport options and an increase in traffic makes car driving less appealing, then more people will use those non-car transport options rather than joining the queue.
The problem is that you may not have the room for it. The US might often have more room to retro-fit bike lanes, due to their roads be generally pretty wide. European cities, like Copenhagen have a massive issue as more and more people get things like cargo bikes and electric bikes. The bike lanes needs to be expanded to accommodate them, but there's no room. You'd have to remove cars from large parts of the city, which sounds great, except you do need to have the option to drive, either due to distances, public transport or deliveries. You can't do parking and have people walk, because there's also no room for parking.
For some cities I also don't see bike lanes as solving to much. Some cities, again often in the US have a huge area and millions of people. Distances in cities like Houston, New York, Los Angeles or Atlanta are just insane, taking up enough space to cover half of a small European nation.
Without the buffer, a single car wanting to turn that way when there is a cycle in the lane would block traffic, unless of course the car takes priority and just expects the cyclist to deal with them cutting in front (which is my experience too often at junctions with or without cycle lanes…). In either case, with or without this design, the car slowing down to turn is going to create some back pressure if the road is busy, there is no avoiding that and this design might even actually slightly reduce that issue.
Looking at the picture I assume that most vehicles are going to be going straight on, and when someone is turning the only extra delay is when their need to turn coincides with there being cyclists or pedestrians in range of crossing, so it is likely that none of this back pressure is a problem the vast majority of the time.
If it becomes structural, say the neighbourhood becomes larger and substantially more cars will go there now, then the intersection will be redesigned. Money isn't infinite of course, but this sort of thing is a big part of planning new development.
I don't know any concrete example, but since road engineers have been using queueing theory, originally invented for telecommunication networks, for more than 70 years, I would be surprised if models and tools designed for one use case had not been reused for the other.
It's cheaper to maintain extra fat sidewalks and stuff than 2 more lanes of asfalct also.
4 lane roads are the worst, you can get the same effect with a 2 lane with a turn.
It really depends on how many intersection you have, having a single lane that only branches to 2 in front of an intersection can be more efficient, then constantly 2 lanes.
The US style of many lanes, many intersections, is horrible from safety and a flow perspective.
Example: https://zuidas.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/groenstrook-bee...
Look at the video in [0]: how much space would you need if every single cyclist was driving a large SUV? Look how smooth the traffic flows through the intersection, how many flyovers would you need to achieve this with cars?
Yes, cycle infrastructure does indeed take up a nonzero amount of space. But it easily pays for itself by reducing the need for far more space-consuming car infrastructure.
This is a logical leap of enormous magnitude.
My parents told me later that they secretly followed me the first few times (I never noticed).
Just try to image that you live in a country that is so safe you can let small kids walk to school. Try to imagine what a society could look like if it's designed for people first, not traffic.
Ha, not in the Netherlands, but we started doing exactly the same with our 5-year old recently. She wanted to walk to a friend's house alone a few weeks ago and my wife followed her in spy-like fashion to make sure she arrived safely. We also started dropping her off a few blocks before kindergarten so that she can walk the remaining distance "alone" (again secretly followed).
Meanwhile here in Canada they attach colored ribbons on their backpacks so they won't be allowed off the bus unless an adult is there to escort them home. Watching a 10yo being escorted back and forth to the bus stop is so sad.
Personally, I blame the speed and amount of car traffic in our streets. Drivers routinely break the speed limits and oftentimes by the time they come to a stop they are already blocking the crosswalk.
My daughter’s commute https://youtu.be/UWp7YiM3rzM?si=QoF4BgLEbnltcyg6
It's just that parents nowadays forgot that kids are functioning humans, can learn stuff and can do stuff on their own.
edit: for the downvoters, look at what Japan does or how women in Denmark do with their kids, instead of thinking "this man must be crazy, how in the hell I can leave my kids alone in this world full of dangers, they will surely die" and react like i tried to kidnap your kids to boil them and then eat them.
There's a say in my country "chi male pensa male agisce" which roughly translates to “those who think badly act badly”
Your kids are humans and can learn stuff, if you think they can't learn to cross a street or that drivers are out there to chase and kill specifically your children or that the probability of being run over is higher than falling off a bike and dying (ironically in recent years, more cyclists were killed in the Netherlands than car occupants [1]) you are a very anxious parent, hence a bad parent.
Sorry.
Yeah, it might be true that bike accidents are caused by cars (even though the stats of your Country say that only half of them are due to a motorized vehicle) but teaching them to walk to school it's still an order of magnitude safer than any other means of transport.
Don't you want them to be free and independent? why?
p.s. as a side note, in the Netherlands road deaths are growing (despite what the bike heaven propaganda says) [1]
Maybe, just maybe!, it's safer for your kids to walk to school.
[1] https://etsc.eu/dutch-road-safety-thrown-back-in-time-15-yea...
The USA is already that safe.
> Try to imagine what a society could look like if it's designed for people first, not traffic.
The normal approach is to build overpasses or underpasses so that pedestrians have no need to go into the road.
So, there would be an adjustment period for the population of your country, and it might take a while, and depending on culture might not be easy.
Which I found surprising, as their hiking trails are awesome and very well kept! For example I loved hiking on the Jurasic Coast and Cornwall. (Even signed up a for a National Trust memberships)
My memories of living in the UK is that there's a weird disconnect where "everyone walks" so walkers are treated as in-group and supported in their hobbies of walking, while "only lycra-clad fitness freaks cycle" so they're an out-group and demonised. This also extends to "how dare cyclists not need to pay road tax" when pedestrians also don't and also have essentially the same requirements for road surface quality, and lead to the same resurfacing requirements, as a bike.
Also, the UK romanticises the countryside — not just because it has some nice bits, but as part of its own national identity — and the imagined ideal when I was a kid was some old guy with a flat cap and a walking stick wearing tweed as they walk through it, not a cyclist.
Basically the imagery of 1974 J. R. R. Tolkien Calendar[0] (how did that ever happen?) crossed with Last of the Summer Wine[1].
[0] https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/1974-calendar/aut...
This romanticist nonsense also means that adequately lit and drained paths - for walking, cycling and wheeling at all hours - inevitably attract rural NIMBY ire.
"Preserve the character of our rural village with its 5000 SUVs and its manor house built by plantation owners".
Presumably someone's done a Tolkien fanfic where it turns out the hobbits have a bunch of plantations in Numenor or somewhere populated by enslaved Uruks, and the twee-ness is a front for general assholeness and moral hypocrisy?
It's 18th(ish) century rural England, without all the stuff that made 18th century rural England a relatively comfortable place, which is to say colonies, the slave trade, the early industrial revolution and so on.
In the direction I travel frequently, I have to stop in the middle of the bike lane which is sandwiched between two pedestrian crossing to wait for a light. Once the light turns I cross over three lanes of vehicle traffic and immediately am thrown into a bike lane crossing my path. The cars here give you no leeway so if you are slightly late in crossing (and there's only about 3 seconds between the "hurry up the lights gonna change soon" flashing light to the cars getting a green light) then you have no place to stop / slow and look if there's any bikes coming.
After that you are directly in a pedestrian crossing zebra zone in the island, which then throws you into anther bike crossing, another pedestrian zone and then finally crossing the other three lanes of traffic. Of course on the other side you t-bone directly into another bike lane, and then the lane I'm on turns into a "mixed use" lane (just paint on the sidewalk).
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.4670503,-0.3900646,95m/data=...
To be fair, driving in SF is a challenge even for many people coming from other parts of California, due to the high density plus the steep and narrow topography of the city. Whereas someone coming from Pittsburgh might not find it strange due to the similar topography.
Until regenerative braking came around with hybrid and electric cars, SF cars needed very frequent brake pad changes.
When I visit one of those larger cities, I am also constantly looking for bikes everywhere not to be crashing into me.
And that's how it should be.
I always regret not taking the very advice I gave yesterday about European cities and parking on the outskirts!
And no they do not like it, we have consciously prioritized pedestrians and cyclists at the expense of car drivers patience, fuel, and even congestion when the cars behind them all have to stop for a cyclist to cross.
Drivers get mad, regularly complain, cyclists abuse their privilege by rolling into intersections without even turning their heads towards traffic.
And you know what? I wouldn't have it any other way. I think a healthy society should prioritize healthy alternatives to cars.
Being able to bike everywhere — safely, quickly, without any cultural baggage of "being one of those bicycle people" — is a total game-changer.
It's one of those things that sounds kooky to people who haven't actually experienced it. When American friends and family ask me what I love most about living here and I say "the bike infrastructure," reactions range from a polite smile to eye-rolling.
On paper it doesn't sound particularly sexy, but in reality the impact on your day-to-day life is immense. Your health, your connection to the immediate environment, your cost savings, your time/stress savings, your sense of freedom of movement.
And remember, the bike infrastructure was only built in the past 30-40 years. Before that, the Netherlands had a super car-focused infrastructure. It was only after the “stop murdering our children” political campaigns that the car focus shifted. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollan...
What really amazes me is motorists' dislike of cyclists (common here in Ireland, also). If that cyclist you see wasn't cycling, they'd be in a car in front of you, and your traffic queue would be worse. Every cyclist is doing every motorist a favour.
The things is this is not some liberal, 15 min city conspiracy. This is how life has always been…
But somehow the bullshit built in the 60s is 'the true national expression' or whatever.
Arguably you technically do have that cultural baggage, it's just that it's a core part of the Dutch national identity so it doesn't stand out ;)
I get the same eye rolling when people ask me what I like most living in the centre of a major urban metropolis (Toronto) and I respond with "not having to own a car". Having everything (work, my daughter's school, groceries, cultural amenities, etc) within a 15 minute walk is fantastic and there's ample car-sharing for occasions where a car is required. People think I'm this eccentric hippie or something when I just don't want to spend time in a car on a daily basis.
Compared to other European countries, driving in NL definitely requires extra attention. There are many small & vulnerable participants sharing the space, moving in different directions with much less inertia than cars. On the other hand there are plenty of buffer zones, the lanes are cleverly organised and clearly marked, and there's 30 kmh (18 mph) limit in most streets in the city. A smaller car with great visibility is really useful here.
Apparently World War 2 is to blame for the shift in food culture. Somehow we never recovered from that.
I think we just internalized that Dutch cuisine sucks and focus on getting good food from other cultures (don't complain about our pannenkoeken or stroopwafels though, unless you're looking for a fight).
Stroopwafels are ok in small amounts. The Pannenkoeken are great, but pretty much the same experience as what I ate growing up in Germany, so they are practically 'invisible' to me.
> [...] focus on getting good food from other cultures [...]
That's a good coping mechanism, yes. But alas, even the Indian and Cantonese food I had in the Netherlands was comparatively bland: adapted to the local tastes.
Then again, skimming through the article: Greece and Austria did have a famine (with more deaths than the Netherlands too), Germany experienced a famine in 1918, and in Italy "food consumption fell from a pre-war mean of about 2,600 calories a day to 1,900 calories by 1944; classic famine symptoms may have been absent, but both infant mortality and deaths from infectious and respiratory diseases rose"
So clearly this isn't the whole story since I've never heard anyone complain about Austrian or Greek food. One thing that stands out to me is that the "bad food" countries the religiocultural heritage is mainly protestantism, whereas in the "good food" countries it is catholic (or orthodox in the case of Greece). I can't speak for England, but Dutch Protestantism has the mentality of "having fun is a sin, so don't", whereas Catholicism is more like "sure, but Jesus died for our sins so bring on the indulgences!" if I understand correctly. So that might be a part of it. At the very least the protestants lack events like carnival that celebrate good food!
How does Germany's northern (protestant) food culture compare to its southern food culture? That might be a decent litmus test for this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_famine_of_1944%E2%80%931...
Huh? England had more food than Europe under Nazi occupation.
Though crucially, the Brits kept their food under rationing for long after the war had ended, and the rationing actually got worse. They were on a major socialist bender.
(France perhaps kept their food culture better, because even though officially they had rationing for quite some time after the war too, people didn't actually follow the rules in France, at least not as much as in Britain. So the 'black' market alleviated the worst of the effects of rationing.)
after being here for 2y, holy shit it's true. one dutch coworker said "we just eat for fuel, not for taste".
thankfully it's quite easy to buy amazing ingredients and just do really tasty home meals.
> (don't complain about our pannenkoeken or stroopwafels though, unless you're looking for a fight).
i would also say dutch bar/finger food is delicious. it's impossible not to have bitterballen while having a beer.
(although technically bitterballen and kroketten are local variations of the croquette, which originated from France[0], so even there we can't quite claim originality, haha)
The weather is fine, it's basically the same as you get in Northern Germany or London, too. (Very nice and comfortable compared to eg Singapore.)
Dutch supermarkets offer an impressive variety of products, and there’s no shortage of specialty or “ethnic” shops where you can find virtually any ingredient for any type of cooking. Major cities are brimming with restaurants serving world cuisines, and people with diverse dietary restrictions are well catered to, with a plethora of options available. Plus, Indonesian and Surinamese food can be considered "local" by this point (if you ignore the historical complexity of the topic) and are simply delicious.
While it’s true that the availability of cheap street food might not be as prominent, to say the food here is “bland” couldn’t be further from the truth.
it's super easy to go to albert heijn and get really tasty ingredients and cook amazing food. it's also super easy to find great restaurants that are not dutch, and get incredible food (shout out to tacolindo, in amsterdam west).
but dutch food is incredibly bland, focuses way too much in things like mashed vegetables with sausage. you can only eat so many stamppot until you are done with it.
even dutch people say that while yes, you can cook literally anything you want (my wife and i cook brazilian food literally every day), natives in general do not do that.
Local produce is fine, too. They export some great fruit and veggies and cheeses to the rest of the world, too.
But being more like the Italians or French in terms of food would mean being more like the Italians or French...
> But being more like the Italians or French in terms of food would mean being more like the Italians or French...
Singapore shows that you can combine amazing cuisine and a culture of efficiency.
Flanders also has much better food than the Netherlands, and is otherwise fairly similar (to an outsider that is, I'm sure the locals will find plenty to disagree about).
In London motorcyclists drive to the front by the traffic lights. The motorists accept this. I found London quite safe in this respect for motorcyclists.
In the other hand, riding a motorcycle in the Netherlands doesn’t feel nearly as safe. If you ride to the front by the traffic lights the motorists will get angry and more likely to lead to road rage and increased risk.
Having said that of course the Netherlands is full of cycles lanes.
But in terms of intersections I’m not impressed. On long roads where every other country would give right of way to the long road because it works together with the natural psychology of driving on a long continuous road, in the Netherlands they will give right of way to small side streets. It’s like they have a policy of throwing vehicles into the path of free flow traffic. It’s absurd. And did people coming from other countries results in a few heart stopping moments.
Where was this? In my experience, this only applies to 'access roads', smaller roads not intended for through traffic. Roads intended to move traffic over longer distances do generally prioritize through traffic by giving right of way.
Ljubljana, Slovenia, where I live, has decent cycling infra (cycling paths in almost every street, not as good as Amsterdam), but the drivers are way more considerate, so it's overall much nicer to cycle around, at least to me.
There are costs and benefits to everything. In London you can walk ten minutes, jump on the train, get where you want, have a walkable (ish) town centre, go home drunk, and it's accessible to the poor (if we assume away rents which are theoretically solvable).
But then in various American cities you can drive 20 minutes in your own bubble from your suburban house to a parking lot around the corner from the bar/restaurant/whatever. You're shielded from weather and don't have to socialise with undesirables.
Neither of those systems feel inherently "wrong" or "right" to me, they feel like different opinions. I've enjoyed both at different stages of my life for different reasons.
If anything I feel that the "worst case" is when you try to mix both because then you either have hilarious congestion (because cars are too big to fit on medieval streets) or huge walking distances / public transport dead spots (because trains can't cover large areas with low population density).
One of those options is clearly much, much worse for the planet. That's not just my opinion.
Realistically it doesn't matter what we do - we can't make the world "more untouched" than it would be if we didn't exist.
People have differing opinions on the level of modification that's reasonable to support their own life, their goals, their happiness etc.
We desperately need this principle of elevated bike lanes that cars should be worried to cross.
I have code an open-source framework to assess the cyclability of territories : https://villes.plus
It only takes into account quality bike lanes, based on OSM data, run every trimestre.
For instance, painted bike lanes or shared bus lanes are excluded.
Amsterdam's score is around 90 %.
The best French city, Strasbourg, has around 45 %. There is some inherent variability as each run takes random points among a data set to build the segments to be tested.
We once cycled from Germany to Colmar in France. Cycling through Colmar is indeed a scary experience, especially if you have a trailer with a small child in it: https://maps.app.goo.gl/wJU4GLWrmqF9EDes8
Of course it isn't much better in Germany.
I don't mean to detract anything about what you just said.
At the same time, my first thought when I clicked on the link was something like: "Woah, that is pretty nice; a painted bike lane and a single narrow main lane each way so cars can't go very fast".
We have a long way to go for most of North America to become friendly to cyclists.
Also for pedestrians, in my experience. When I first visited the US 10 years ago, I wanted to leave the hotel to get to a nearby public transit stop to go into town. On the map, it was a distance of around 500m from hotel to transit stop (Market Center in Dallas). But getting there was quite an ordeal. This was the pedestrian walkway: https://maps.app.goo.gl/gvduBGYMQfxSVxcFA, it ended in a dirt path by the side of the road after a few meters. There was a better walkway on the other side of the road, but it was impossible to safely cross it without walking for nearly 700 meters into the other direction.
That bike lane is a nightmare.
Let me reiterate that I don't say this to dismiss the importance of improving that street. On the contrary, I am simply lamenting how bad things are here [0].
You're underestimating French drivers here ;) . Also on that picture the main lane is not considered narrow at all in France/Europe, it's quite comfortable to speed.
The only way to limit speed is speed cameras and speed bumps (both are also becoming ubiquitous in the UK).
China is what I imagine the US with bike lanes would look like.
Nice project though, might ping you for something related :)
From another non-native speaker, the term you are looking for is "quarter". As in: a quarter of a year, as 12/4=3 months.
(as a Dutchie living in Malmö: I love Copenhagen, and I'm already happy that it's a million times better than 99% of the rest of the world. Still, it's also true that the Netherlands has a head-start of a few decades on everyone else and that it does show if you look closely)
But...for the small niche of cycling infrastructure, the top 10 list is The Netherlands in places 1 to 10, then no country in places 11 to 50, and then Denmark in place 51.
What is important to consider is that cycling infrastructure is all around great in The Netherlands everywhere. Not just in the center of Amsterdam. Industrial estates, villages in the middle of nowhere, roads through forests, popular attractions or theme parks, islands: everything is reachable by bike, usually with bike lanes that are well maintained and physically separated from the main road, and often with bicycles having right of way on roundabouts etc.
I try to frame it more like a friendly rivalry with Denmark (or more accurately, Copenhagen), since nobody else even tried to rival us until very recently. Looking forward to everyone else catching up though!
(also, I live in Sweden, making fun of the Danes is a legal requirement to be considered integrated into local society)
Look around, they are everywhere.
Case in point, I've literally cycled across the country diagonally basically using the Fietsersbond (national cycling association that advocates for this cycling infra) route planner and on mostly dedicated cycling paths.
Even proper, separated bike lanes often terminate in right turn lanes for cars (even in places where there is a lot of bikes and in places where there would be a lot of space), leading to weird situations where a car is trapped in a wall of cyclists from every side.
In practice it mostly works but I'm not surprised car ownership in the city is on the rise, because the city still prioritizes cars way too much. Copenhagen is mostly a regular city with consistent bike lanes.
Am I blind or does it only work for just one or maybe two cars?
This specific turn is onto a street that the article describes as "traffic volume here is low, since only residents will use this street." They probably expect the 1-car buffer to be enough for this intersection. You can see in the video that the 1-car buffer is empty most of the time.
For intersections where they expect more turning traffic (where the one car buffer wouldn't be enough), they add turning lanes that can accomodate more than one car. You can see an example of this a few hundred meters northeast when Graafseweg intersects the Van Grobbendocklaan: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZmURqawr3oeBX5Sq9
America Has No Transportation Engineers
https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/america-has-no-transporta...
Swedish bike lanes are the absolute worst I've cycled on - and I've cycled in England, Denmark, Spain and (briefly) the Netherlands.
Disregarding the pitiful maintenance of a lot of the bike lanes in Stockholm (which is another discussion), the current model where a bike-lane has been carved from the pedestrian pavement, but which then throws the cyclist out to the road immediately before a junction is a deadly design which I've found to be nerve-wracking both when I'm cycling or driving. The cyclist is hidden behind parked cars, and is in the blindspot of turning trucks, until the very last seconds before suddenly emerging into the flow of traffic when crossing the side-street. I see near-misses almost every day.
It amazes me that anyone ever thought this was a good idea - but even more egregious to me is that Swedes seem to think their own invention is somehow so good they want to export it.
However one of the downsides is that often the front space is a too bit small in cities, so not always easy to fully go on it without blocking the bike path. And in busy bike paths at times cars will get impatient.
FYI if you are ever biking here in NL, the thing to remember is that if the "haaientanden" point at you, watch out!, as that means you do not have the right of way.
Edit: The side roads are for cars as well, which means you have a strange turning lane in the middle of the intersection where traffic might back up. A simple roundabout seems like a much better solution here unless the goal is to keep cars moving quickly and the turn lane is rarely used.
It's literally a painted give way sign.
>> When you approach from the side street, as a driver, the order of dealing with other traffic is different, but the priority is similar. First you will notice a speed bump. The complete intersection is on a raised table. Pedestrians would not have priority if the street was level, but now that it isn’t the “exit construction” rule could apply and in that case a crossing pedestrian would have priority. But for that rule to apply the footway should be continuous, and that is not the case here.
Almost universally the following two rules hold: pedestrians walk on a raised pavement next to the road, and through roads have priority.
To compliment those existing rules, exits from side streets where pedestrians on the through road have priority include a raised hump that brings motorists up to pavement level. That emphasizes that it is the motorist who is crossing into a pedestrian area, where pedestrians have priority. The pedestrian footpath is continuous, while the car road is interrupted.
Here's a typical example of the "exit construction" with continuous footway: https://rijbewijshulp.nl/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Uitrit-7...
And an obvious added benefit is that motorists will slow down for the speed bump.
The author phrases this a bit awkwardly without really making a point. But what I think they are saying is that because the footpath isn't continuous despite the raised bump this is not a typical exit construction, and pedestrians on the through road don't have priority. Even though most motorists would yield to them anyway because of the shark's teeth on the cycle path.
I think it's debatable if the pavement is continuous or not, I would say "kinda". But either way the intersection in the article is not a "typical" example of the exit construction.
See the pictures in this article:
https://www.anwb.nl/juridisch-advies/in-het-verkeer/verkeers...
The first two examples are how it should be done. The third is similar to your link, and is ambiguous.
I've had a cyclist curse me to hell and back for taking priority on one of those raised tables as a pedestrian because the paving didn't match the sidewalk. :)
An entrance or exit construction is a place on a road where you aren't just turning onto the road but exiting the road entirely. The most common example from any country would be a private driveway. Pedestrians, cyclists and cars going along the sidewalk, bike path or road have priority against anyone turning into the driveway or turning onto the road from the driveway.
The Netherlands generalizes this concept to some low-priority side streets. If there is a continuous sidewalk (i.e., the cars go up a bump to the level of the sidewalk as opposed to the pedestrians stepping down from the sidewalk to the level of the street). This is not the case in this specific intersection.
All intersections have signs indicating priority.
All intersections have road markings indicating right of way.
All intersections have a level change indicating priority. Either you bump up to pedestrians, which also reduces your speed. Or pedestrians step down to asphalt.
All intersections have/dont have color change to indicate right of way.
All intersections have/dont have pavement type indicating right of way (usually bricks for street or pedestrians, black asphalt for roads, red asphalt for cyclists.)
Although you could probaly find some rulebreakers in there, its universally accepted as such.
You're more likely to see this if you go to places with more space, such as suburbs built in the last century (which basically means going to another town or city that Amsterdam grew into, because in the Netherlands city distribution is also compact). As you can see from the picture this street is in such a neighborhood.
Also, the general concept of having a distance of one car between crossing and bike lane is universal whenever there is space. I can give you a personal anecdote (at the cost of doxxing myself). I grew up in Oldeberkoop, a tiny village with around 1500 people in it that somehow has its own wikipedia page[0].
Just outside of the village is a crossing with an N-road, which is Dutch for "provincial national road but not quite highway". In the early nineties it was still a simple crossing, no separate bike lanes, and I recall traffic accidents happening once or twice every year. For context, nowadays the speed limit on provincial roads is 100 km/h[2], although in the early nineties it was still 80 km/h. That didn't matter though: everyone was speeding as if they were on a highway and going 120 to 140 km/h.
In mid nineties the crossing was changed to a roundabout, solving the speeding problem, and separate bike lanes were added (this also reduced traffic noise a lot). In the early 2000s the roundabout was changed to the safer design described in the article: more space between corner and bike lane, and a bigger island in the middle of the road for pedestrians[3]. I haven't heard of any incidents in the years since.
Recall: this is a village of 1500 people. When the article says:
> I would like to emphasise that this intersection is not special in any way. You can find many similar examples all over the country. That is because the design features stem from the design manuals which are used throughout the country.
... it is not exaggerating. This is the norm with any new intersection that is being built, or any existing one that is due for its two-decade maintenance.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldeberkoop
[1] https://www.wegenwiki.nl/Provinciale_weg
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_Netherland...
[3] https://www.google.com/maps/@52.9331081,6.1326563,3a,75y,49....
I'd speculate that the metric of "injuries per kilometer cycled" wouldn't budge because of a helmets requirement.
Can't find a good summary of this now, but some bits of this are googleable.
[1]: "Cycling UK wants to keep helmets an optional choice. Forcing - or strongly encouraging - people to wear helmets deters people from cycling and undermines the public health benefits of cycling. This campaign seeks to educate policy makers and block misguided attempts at legislation."
[2]: "Even if helmets are 85% effective (and assuming q = 0.5 as above), the number of cyclists’ lives saved will still be outnumbered by deaths to non-cyclists if there is a reduction in cycle use of more than 2%"
[3]: "Enforced helmet laws and helmet promotion have consistently caused substantial reductions in cycle use (30-40% in Perth, Western Australia). Although they have also increased the proportion of the remaining cyclists who wear helmets, the safety of these cyclists has not improved relative to other road user groups (for example, in New Zealand).
The resulting loss of cycling’s health benefits alone (that is, before taking account of its environmental, economic and societal benefits) is very much greater than any possible injury prevention benefit."
[...]
"Evidence also suggests that even the voluntary promotion of helmet wearing may reduce cycle use."
[...]
"Even with very optimistic assumptions as to the efficacy of helmets, relatively minor reductions in cycling on account of a helmet law are sufficient to cancel out, in population average terms, all head injury health benefits."
[4]: "With 290 cyclist fatalities in 2022, cyclists were the largest group of road casualties. Of these, most were killed by collision with a vehicle (206 bicycle deaths)."
[5]: "Cycling levels in the Netherlands have substantial population-level health benefits: about 6500 deaths are prevented annually, and Dutch people have half-a-year-longer life expectancy. These large population-level health benefits translate into economic benefits of €19 billion per year, which represents more than 3% of the Dutch gross domestic product between 2010 and 2013.3.
The 6500 deaths that are prevented annually as a result of cycling becomes even more impressive when compared with the population health effects of other preventive measures. In an overview, Mackenbach et al.11 showed that the 22 new preventive interventions that have been introduced in the Netherlands between 1970 and 2010 (e.g., tobacco control, population-based screening for cancer, and road safety measures) altogether prevent about 16 000 deaths per year.
Still, our results are likely to be an underestimation of the true total health and economic benefits."
[6]: "Riding a bicycle to work every day reduces the risk of premature death by 41% (risk of dying from heart disease: -52%; risk of dying from cancer: -40%)."
[...]
"Regular cycling boosts physical fitness and compares to 1 to 2 weekly gym sessions."
[...]
"Bicycle use not only improves physical health, but also has a positive impact on mental health and subjective well-being."
[1]: https://www.cyclinguk.org/campaign/cycle-helmets-evidence
[2]: https://www.cyclehelmets.org/1249.html
[3]: https://www.cyclinguk.org/article/why-should-highway-codes-a...
[4]: https://english.kimnet.nl/publications/publications/2023/11/...
[5]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4504332/
[6]: https://www.government.nl/binaries/government/documenten/rep...
I live in Denver, and daily appreciate how much self-harming behavior is built into American road network design standards. It's truly stunning.
Consider reading the book "Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System"[0]
I wish he'd titled it as "the transportation system of the Greater United States". I emphatically disagree with the use of "our".
Anyway, american road networks were designed, funded, built by people who wanted to accomplish ethnic cleansing, and I think it's plainly obvious that this is the case, so it feels strange to even talk about it sometimes.
to my knowledge, no one in the netherlands road design system has been recently thing to accomplish ethnic cleansing, so their road networks can develop towards/with mutuality.
in the USA, at minimum the founders/originators of these systems were openly supremacist and spoke openly about what and how they were doing. I.E:
> If we [road funding authorities, municipal authorities, and their political supporters] could build a highway through their neighborhood, we could get rid of some of them, and make it harder for the rest of them to exist, and we'd see less of them either way.
the "they" was always an ethnic group. The playbook of these supremacists was to squish all people within that group into a tiny compression of humanity, then attack it directly, using the normal tools of colonial empires.
Where i live (in Rome) the streets are like this
https://as1.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/04/93/42/24/1000_F_493422444_Hw...
edit: anyway the simplest solution is to turn every intersection into a roundabout, no traffic lights needed, clear right of way, cars can't go fast and in the end it also makes it easier for pedestrians to cross the street.
The “urban” in the title is a bit misleading, this intersection is definitely more suburban, or on the boundary of an urban center. (Or rather, the author has a different definition of urban - in my definition cities like den Bosch are really just a small medieval urban core surrounded by continuous medium-density suburban neighborhoods.)
The result is that people use their car (if they have one, still quite common esp. for families) to get out of the city, or big errands, but use bike or public transport for day to day trips.
Actual car free zones exist in cities across Europe but tend to be pretty small and constrained to the hyper centre, like the church square and the major shopping streets. Not that I’m opposed to them being bigger but that seems rare at this point.
that's the hardest part that everyone always ignores.
first you have to remove cars from the streets, than it's becomes easier to implement biking infrastructures.
I've been a long time petitioner to completely ban car traffic from the neighborhood where I live, but it's been a lost battle in the past 20 years.
Changing human habits it's harder than it looks.
And in those parts of the city where space is basically free, people live too far from where they need to go by bike anyway.
It's a cat and mouse game, you need very dense, very small, almost flat cities, to get to the point where Amsterdam is, which is not that typical especially in Europe.
disallowing something doesn't make it non existent.
In the neighborhood where that picture was taken live approximately 15 thousand people and many more come every night to hang out.
I know it's bad, I do not approve people going everywhere with their cars even when it's obviously wrong, but it is what it is, and it doesn't make the problem go away.
Street space is premium space in cities.
I wish we could simply stop this car madness by wishful thinking, but we can't.
But as a pedestrian and as a car driver too, there are still a hard-core of dangerous cyclists who refuse to use them and will instead be willfully breaking the law (going through red lights, wrong way/wrong side of the street etc). And just to add insult to injury, they literally add insults! Aggressive shouting, gesticulating etc if your dare to e.g. use a pedestrian crossing or drive on a green light but you are in their way.
Tl;Dr you can build all this stuff but it seems like the aggressive pricks won't use it and will just carry on with no accountability or consequences and we all suffer from it.
I find the Chinese model of bike/scooter lanes w/ barriers integrated into the main road a superior model. The other critical point is integrating bus stops into "islands" in the road so the bike lanes go behind the bus stops is critical. (a stopped bus with passengers going on/off essentially closes off the shoulder for an extended amount of time). Granted the main roads in Chinese cities are generally much wider so I'm not sure if it can be miniaturized the same way. The "turning area" is very useful concept for unblocking traffic and helping with visibility, though it does take up a lot of space. However the one in the example only accommodates one turning car at a time
Source ? Here's mine: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2024/15/684-road-traffic-death...
1199 cyclists killed in 4 years, 658 of these being from collisions with various motor vehicles. 262 pedestrians killed in 4 years, 11 of these being from collisions with bicycles. Before any "oh but there's few deaths but more accidents it's still unsafe": no, it is not.
I know your username sets high expectations, but stop bullshitting and look at facts.
Well, most European countries have a relatively simple solution for that ;)
>If the pedestrian gets a broken arm who pays for medical services?
The... Insurance of whoever is responsible? I know this concept is weird to the US, but personal insurances in Europe are about covering the damage you inflict on others first, then eventually you. They're also mandatory. In addition, well, a broken arm is not a financial catastrophe in Europe. Should it prevent you from doing your job, the insurance also covers that.
> Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars
As far as I'm aware, more or less everywhere, both the frequency & severity of bicycle vs pedestrian crashes is much lower than bicycle vs car crashes. Do you have any statistics that say otherwise?
I think in terms of deaths, the most dangerous issue is getting t-boned at an intersection by a car going fast through the intersection. I'm not sure how either setup really addresses that. You need to decrease overall traffic speed somehow. Chinese do this with speed cameras everywhere and electric scooters being much slower than gas powered ones (which are illegal most places now)
As a cyclist, I also hate them. In my experience, what is even more dangerous than small children is dogs. Even if they are on a leash, there is nothing stopping them from just suddenly jumping a meter to the left, right in front of your bike.
After a few weeks people just learn to be mindful of bicycles and bicycle lanes as they are normally mindful of roads. In particular, one learns to never change direction suddenly (crossing a bike lane, but also on a shared road) but to stop first and check behind their back for potential cyclists.
it's effectively another road - with the same dangers as a car-road. But it's just some painted asphalt
There actually commonly is a barrier; a gentle curve between the foot path and bike path, with the bike path being lower. The bike path is also red asphalt making it visually distinct.
Do you have any empirical evidence for this? Because every single study I have seen suggest that speed and weight of the participants matters most. And a bike and a person are simply, much less likely to cause serious harm.
A car can kill a biker easy, for a bike to kill anybody, you need to really be incredibly unlucky.
The Dutch are doing a lot of empirical work, and they have not adopted anything like you describe.
NL always goes for the transit stops that poke out like you mention as well when possible.
I guess it takes some getting used to, or maybe the Dutch simply avoid walking and take the bike instead.
what? there are many orders of magnitude more injuries and deaths from bikes being hit by cars than there are from pedestrians being hit by bikes. Even when a pedestrian is hit (which is rare- both are highly nimble), it is very rare that it is problematic because a bike carries so little momentum
That's blatantly not true. Have you seen any KSI statistics?
Pedestrians are more likely to be killed by a driver mounting the pavement and hitting them than they are by a cyclist. The facts suggest that in a cyclist/pedestrian collision, it's often the cyclist that gets more injured.
