This design highlights a major failing with UK cycle "infrastructure". Here, we often have shared use pavements with sometimes a bit of white paint to designate the pedestrian and cycle lanes, but they cede priority at every single side road. The problem is that it makes cycling using them really awkward as it takes significant energy for cyclists to slow down and then speed up multiple times. The irony is that if you just use the main road instead, then you have priority over all the side roads, so the bike "lane" is pretty much useless.
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.
Italy has exactly the same problem. Not only we have a horrible infrastructure (the quality of our asphalt is abysmal), but cycle paths are pretty much always shared with pedestrians, and they're filled with obstacles (manholes, poles, chicanes...).
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.
Italy is often associated with cycle sport and I believe there are some excellent rides over there, but certainly the cities that I've been to (only Rome and Naples) don't look at all encouraging to cycle around.
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.
Yes, both Rome and Naples are in the "South" of Italy, and the situation is worse there than in the North.
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.
That's also the case in other places. The reason is easy. Cycle paths are not build for cyclist, but to them away from the main street and not be an "obstacle" to cars.
In Ireland, Dublin City Council has mostly gone with lanes which are either on the side of the road (with or without bollards), or entirely separate, whereas South Dublin County Council prefers shared use pavements. The two local authorities are contiguous, so it's all a bit jarring when you go between them.
It's astounding that we can't seem to just copy successful ideas from other countries and then ensure that all the councils etc. adhere to the standards.
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.
ideas are only one part of a successfully functioning sociotechnical system. The bike intersections won't work if users behave differently (just like how automobile traffic is terrible if you get different driving styles mixing).
You might interpret that clearly true statement in two different ways:
- 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.
One of my favorite moves is when the Dutch simply don’t provide any guidance whatsoever in certain intersections. No signs. Brick or stone paving.
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."
I once saw a mind blowing series of slides from a Dutch transport engineer at a conference, showing the succession of steps taken over the years on a single country lane to reduce the chance of collisions to essentially zero.
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...
Haha, I know many roads like that! Often along waterways. There is enough room to navigate (unlike many Irish country roads) but you definitely drive much more cautiously
One point is that traffic lights are designed for the benefit of drivers. Most of the time, cyclists can easily and safely navigate through a red light as they take up so much less space than cars. e.g. turning left at a junction (assuming UK driving on the left) can be done without causing any inconvenience for drivers and will often be safer for a cyclist than having to wait at a red light and then deal with drivers who've only just looked up from their phone and might not have seen you.
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.
Car drivers potentially face consequences in terms of loss of license, and should be carrying insurance if something happens. No equivalence for cyclists and honestly the Netherlands is the least safe I've felt as a pedestrian in regards to hostile cyclists.
That path has been there a long time and is actually quite popular with cyclists as it goes alongside a very busy road that has an almost permanent queue on one side and lots of big lorries/coaches coming along the other side, so it's quite challenging to filter past the stationery vehicles without getting in the way of oncoming traffic.
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.
lol that's a place where a modal filter would be perfect; they could make a "hole" in the curb to only let bikes go straight through. Instead, they decided to put 5 metres of white paint in a random way. Great!
Its interesting how my brain immediately sees the ambiguous bike lane mixed in with pedestrians spaces, and thinks 'That's dangerous', but i am not conditioned to think the same way about bicycles being forced to mix with car traffic, or pedestrians forced onto very narrow sidewalks in the clearzone of roads.
And yet when we have "bike lanes" like this, people complain that it's too much, too intrusive, ruins local business, or should be a parking spot or lane for deliveries.
I was pleasantly surprised to find one of the major London cycle lanes that goes from Tower Bridge to Greenwich gives priority to cyclists crossing side roads https://maps.app.goo.gl/b3SweRqzvNehTcE38
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.
> 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.
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".
Dual carriageways are ok for cycling when the AADT for a particular road is below about 30k. Above that, cyclists would be an impediment to traffic flow as a following motorist would be waiting a long time for a safe gap in the second lane to overtake, especially when the speed difference is above 100%.
> and there's a whole lane for drivers to overtake safely.
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).
Thats absoluyely not true. There is the so called principle of dual causality. If you hit a car you might have to pay 50% depending on situation. If its clearly the biker its still 0% for the car.
If its clearly the biker its still 0% for the car.
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.
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.
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.
> They are bigger, heavier, faster and more powerful (thanks to burning fossil fuels)
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.
EVs are much safer - they both accelerate and decelerate faster and most EVs have regen braking by default - this means a) they get up to speed quickly b) drivers aren't worried about slowing because they can get back up to speed much faster c) as soon as the foot comes off the pedal the car start decelerating immediately.
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.
EVs most definitely do not decelerate faster. Their increased weight leads to decreased braking capabilities, which, combined with their faster acceleration, makes them potentially harder to control and more deadly in collisions due to the greater force of impact.
The regenerative braking force is generally much stronger than engine braking in ICE vehicles, as long as the battery isn't full.
In a sudden stop event, assuming the driver does the same tasks (lifts foot off accelerator pedal, moves to brake, then presses brake) - an standard ICE vehicle simply stops accelerating (minimal engine braking). An EV starts decelerating as soon as the foot is lifted from the accelerator.
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).
Based on a cursory glance at google results, 10% is at the lower bound of weight increase, and in sudden stop scenarios I would assume tyre grip is the main factor in speed reduction potential, not engine/regenerative braking. I'm not aware of any convincing studies showing a clear advantage for EVs in these scenarios.
Petrol engines have a nontrivial amount of engine braking due to the throttle. If you have a manual car you can easily compare it to coasting by disengaging the clutch. Bicycles also naturally coast thanks to the freewheel. If you're used to a bicycle then the engine braking of a car is quite surprising.
I understand that and I don't reject this sentiment outright, but one makes enemies when engaged in a good faith argument but feels the need to shoehorn their moral stance when nobody asked about it. It is, in fact, not at all relevant to the conversation.
The easiest thing is to stay on topic, wouldn't you agree?
I'm not sure that it's necessarily a moral stance for the OP to point out that the most common form of transport is partially responsible for dumping lots of CO2 into the environment, when the discussion is about junctions that prioritise active travel (walking/cycling). In motornormative countries such as the UK/USA (many others too), people are conditioned to only get from A to B via polluting methods (recognising that electric cars produce large amounts of tyre pollution which somewhat offsets their possible lack of fossil fuel use). The use of enlightened designs that work well for the Netherlands is part of the toolkit that we need to change people's mindsets if we can get past all the seductive advertising of the motor industries.
I'd put it as more of a pragmatic, forwards-looking viewpoint that a moral stance.
The electricity mostly comes from fossil fuels too.
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 roads are paid for in a large part by road taxes and fuel taxes. Cyclists pay zero towards it in direct taxation, apart from general taxation that everyone pays anyway. Why should cyclists be able to free load off of infrastructure paid for by tax-paying vehicles, and dictate that they are built to favour cyclists when they are not contributing a single penny?
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 roads are paid for in a large part by road taxes and fuel taxes. Cyclists pay zero towards it in direct taxation, apart from general taxation that everyone pays anyway. Why should cyclists be able to free load off of infrastructure paid for by tax-paying vehicles, and dictate that they are built to favour cyclists when they are not contributing a single penny?
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?
I always find this argument really funny because I wholeheartedly agree that taxes should be relative to the usage/damage of roads. But when you actually look at the numbers pretty much anywhere in the world it's always the cars and trucks being subsidised by the rest of the population.
YES, PLEASE let me pay for only bicycle infrastructure, I hate having to pay for your car.
Here in the UK, roads are paid for by general taxation. The fuel duty has been frozen for a long time (15 years?) so the general public are in fact subsidising motorists. "Road Tax" was abolished in 1937 due to the ridiculous attitude that some motorists get about "owning" the roads - this seems to be exactly your kind of attitude.
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?
In my locale, in the US, local roads are paid for by property taxes. The higher traffic state and Federal roads are paid for through a combination of fuel and income taxes. Cyclists tend to avoid those roads due to safety and distance. Cycles are prohibited on our equivalent of the motorways.
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.
Just to reply to myself instead of each post calling me dumb individually:
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
I couldn't agree more, we should make sure cyclists and motorists pay their fair share.
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.
In what way do cyclists require unique and expensive infrastructure that both isn't the consequence of interactions with cars and that wouldn't be covered by general taxation unless general taxation literally didn't pay for any infrastructure?
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.
this argument against common sense bike infrastructure is one of the most common, most wrong, and most dumb
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.
> Life is too short to care about these trifling matters really though isn't it?
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.
You can really tell when somebody just repeats motorist propaganda and has never actually looked at the finical structure behind infrastructure.
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.
Yeah it really strikes me when reading the OP article that this is what a country that's "got it's shit together" looks like...
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
Have been there, have also been to the Netherlands. There isn't really a big difference in the total space available, in my limited experience. You can find a big difference for a photo op, sure.
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".
The Netherlands really does a great job on infrastructure. It's not like they're even particularly anti-car: driving there is a pretty decent experience too. It's extremely depressing driving onto the ferry in Hook of Holland and then driving off at Harwich.
I’ve always thought of the Netherlands as Infrastructire Country, so much of that territory has been significantly altered over the last four or five thousand years that it’s leaked into their world view.
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 amazing, its almost as if driving is better when a huge amount of trips are instead done with transportation systems that require far less space and are far better for the environment.
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.
The space isn't the problem. It just means you can't use an off-the-shelf design.
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 UK isn't alone in having old narrow streets, so it's just a case of re-allocating space. However, it does require a change in mindset so that rather than designers focussing on how to maximise driver speeds, they need to minimise driver speeds at junctions and make it clear that pedestrians have priority.
Keep in mind that this looks like it's using a lot of spaces, but there's only one lane for cars each way. Cyclists and pedestrians use way less space than cars, so if a significant part of the population uses those modes of transportation that would otherwise have been in cars, that's a far more efficient use of space.
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.
It's the urban planning, but I'll point out that it's the requirements and responibilities put on the drivers as well.
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.
It also helps that "the car driver is to blame until proven otherwise" is the actual law in the Netherlands, which is motivated precisely because of that power dynamic. Essentially, the responsibility defaults the more dangerous vehicle.
(for some reason this always is controversial with a lot of Americans whenever it is brought up in on-line discussions)
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.
In Amsterdam, you usually don't cycle more than ~3km for a "normal destination" (groceries, a generic bar or cafe, stores) and in general, ~7km is the limit for "specific destinations" (going to bar X, ), above that, usually people take transport, though there are some that often cycle >50km
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?
Electric bicycles basically solve the hill issue. Dutch people bike in any weather. We have a ton of terrible weather, both hot and cold but mostly wet. Our summer heat might not be very hot, but the summer heat is very humid, it feels hotter than it is.
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.
New York City and its surrounding combined statistical metropolitan area (which includes semi-rural commuter suburbs where people do not walk) makes up approximately 6% of "America" and was accounted for in the average "royal we" American who does not, statistically, walk.
A lot of Americans I know in real life (rightfully) complain that non-Americans treat their culture as if it's a homogeneous monolith, despite its enormous geographical and cultural diversity. So you have to excuse me for chuckling at blanket statements like "Americans will never walk"
DC might not be the best comparison here as far as American cities go. I - and most people I know - walk around the city year round and I live on the top of a pretty steep hill.
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.
You are the one saying no-one would do it. I was explaining that wasn't a fact.
I live now in Toronto and people are fine cycling in the summer (40º) and winter (-5º) all year long because of better infrastructure. Which is the point of the article.
Some additional anecdata (and actual data) is that Chicago has the highest cyclist increase out of any city in the US as a result of better infrastructure being installed [0]
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
As a Dutch person living in the US, a big difference is also that almost every driver in the Netherlands is also a cyclist themselves. In the US there is this almost cultural divide between drivers and cyclists where it becomes part of people's identity. In the Netherlands most people will just choose their mode of transportation depending on the specifics of the trip.
In practice this means drivers tend to do a much better job anticipating cyclists, e.g. by checking for cyclists before making a turn.
In the greater united states, the first people to get cars were also those who had various forms of power. Those people (moneyed european americans who believed in the myth of industrialization, supremacists) used power to shape the legal regime of cities to claim more space for themselves.
"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.
Driver's ed in the US in any state with much urbanization to speak of is like that too (there's 50 states with 50 different curriculums with differing levels of specificity so generalizing is ill advised unless you're looking to intentionally mislead) unless perhaps one took it long ago or in somewhere so rural that other traffic wasn't relevant.
I took my driving test in Palo Alto in 2008. It was a total joke. We drove around the block; drove onto the freeway; took the first exit and immediately back to the DMV and that was it. Took ~5 minutes. My driving test in Germany was 45 minutes. We drove all over town through all kind of street types. I had to perform several different parking maneuvers, stop and start on a steep hill.
Driving lessons in NL also teach you to open your door with your _right_ hand (left is right side drive), that way you turn your shoulder a bit and get in perfect position for controlling blind spot and mirror for eventual bike incoming (or whatever vehicle you missed).
Ive heard this repeated on the BBC before, but it isn't true, at least not for my driving lessons 2 decades ago. I just got told everytime to look over my shoulder for cyclists before opening the door. But never have I heard of anyone being taught to specifically open their door with their right hand
To be fair, the BBC is institutionally anti-cyclist, so they may have mis-represented the "Dutch Reach".
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.
I think it depends on the teacher, but mine didn't teach it either. However, I have been taught from a young age to watch out before I open the door, which is still very relevant even if you're not in the driver's seat.
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.
Yeah these ‘predictors’ only make sense if they can give a countdown at a constant rate.
The idea is nice but often they countdown at say 1dot/sonly to have the last 5 dots disappear in the last second so they miss their purpose.
on the other hand, a consequence on predictable ones is that people will start cycling on the last 2 dots or so instead of waiting for the green light.
I wish urban designers in Poland learned from this. Our bike lanes are terribly designed, cars turn right into them with very poor visibility. The "solution" is that lawmakers introduce additional restrictions for bikers, which are unclear to everyone, so right now nobody really knows if bikes have priority on bike lane crossings or not.
It’s good to realise the Dutch cycling infrastructure did not came out of nowhere. There were huge protests in the 70’s about traffic safety. At that time cars ruled the roads and there a lot of accidents, also involving children. From those protests an culture shift started, towards better cycling infrastructure.
There are many reasons why this is unlikely to happen in Poland, but from the top of my head:
-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.
Those are just two out of many points. I stand corrected on the second, but the first holds - road safety has been improving for 20 years now, why bother?
Why bother to improve the safety of a transportation system? Road safety has been improving since the 1940. Would you have said 'why bother' in 1970? Or 1980?
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 defense of urban planners, we get good design and want to see more of it, but are usually beholden to the elected officials in the municipality who we require to vote in and ratify new design standards, or funding for projects.
Isn't it funny how part of the solution is a bit like introducing a one-car buffer into the queue, reducing back pressure? Makes me wonder how much traffic planning and distributed systems could learn from each other (or perhaps already have, I'm not an expert in either).
As someone living in the netherlands, primary use is for decoupling risk. Look at the pedestrian side, they only cross a single lane where they have to look in a single direction. This makes pedestrian behaviour so obvious that its hard to miss someone looking straight at you while you're crossing. Same with car behaviour, no matter where the car is, the nose is pointing straight at you before crossing the conflict zone. The line of communication you have before a potential accident is insanely useful. It does not matter wether a stop sign or right of way was there if you're dead.
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.
The article doesn't deal with what happens when the queue gets bigger than one. It looks like a second car would queue on the main road, blocking traffic.
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.
At least where I live, such a type of intersection is used when a residential street branches off a large main road. You do not have a high volume of traffic going into this residential street, and "waiting for a crossing cyclist" does only take 1-2 seconds. So a buffer size of 1 is usually enough.
> when the queue gets bigger than one. It looks like a second car would queue on the main road, blocking traffic.
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 that happens rarely, then the cars just have to queue for a few seconds, no big deal.
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 agree. The photo description for "Here you can see that a car drivers waiting for people cycling are never in the way of other people in cars" would not hold true in my area of a US. There would quickly be at least two additional cars waiting in the main lane.
Yeah, it's important to note that this design is specifically for local side streets that are only expected to get destination traffic. If it's a busier street, there would typically be a separate turning lane, i.e. a bigger buffer.
> Makes me wonder how much traffic planning and distributed systems could learn from each other
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.
Think it was the Tannebaum Networking book which has a chapter on queuing theory. Couple of lectures on that, only to find the chapter was concluded with something like: "Empirical evidence has shown that network traffic doesn't follow a possion distribution", so was left with a feeling that the chapter was only relevant for exams.
The article points out very nicely that it is expensive (in space terms) to have cars integrate safely with the pedestrian and bicycle traffic of dense urban areas. The mismatch in size and speed requires buffer zones that must be dedicated to this function only.
Roughly the same size as if the street had 2 car lanes on each side. In fact this is what I've seen living here in Amsterdam for a few years, every once in a while they remove a lane or two from some street and beef up these security features as well as add more pedestrian space.
It's cheaper to maintain extra fat sidewalks and stuff than 2 more lanes of asfalct also.
Even better, the gemeente is actively converting streets into fietsstraat. It is amazing and I love it. It makes my commute through the city so much faster and less stressful. When they did the knip experiment on that big through-road near Waterlooplein and there was no car traffic, it was also fantastic. At that time, I was commuting that direction and it was wild how quiet that part of the city became. Cars really are a terrible nuisance and do not belong in the city.
Also, very often it doesn't reduce flow even for cars. There are tons of times when you remove lanes and it improves are keeps flow constant.
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.
As a Dutch citizen, I love the expanse in terms of space. Lately, they have been allocating a lot more green areas as well, making the whole experience very enjoyable.
On the other hand, the reduction in cars due to people switching to cycling makes the infrastructure incredibly cheap.
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.
A bidirectional bike lane takes about as much space as one lane of on-street car parking, which american cities have plenty of. Swap half the parking to bike lanes and that gets you most of the way there.
I wish more urban areas were as good as The Netherlands. Where I live, there are occasionally some footpaths on the sides of the roads that are half a cycle lane. People constantly walk in the cycle lanes and cycle on the footpaths. Other than that, its just normal urban roads
As a semi regular tourist to the Netherlands from North America it took a bit to adjust to all the modes of traffic at once but now I can easily navigate and stay safe around bikes, mopeds, trams, skinny cars etc. But I’m also a seasoned traveller in the region.
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.
The first day in Netherlands I learned that when surface under my feet changes, when I'm crossing the line between two surfaces I need to look back over my shoulder because there might be someone coming in fast. I apply this rule since I learned it in every country I live and it works great.
I live in England, so there are already bike lanes and such, they're just not as widespread as I wish they were and its almost always part of a car lane or a pedestrian lane
My mother cycled from NL -> -> BE -> FR -> UK Stone henge and back again.
Never again she said. It's a lovely country but the cycling infrastructure was ... questionable to say the least (according to her).
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)
Can confirm, I've done quite a lot of walking and properly marked trails are generally very well kept. I've walked quite a lot of the Cornwall coastline and there are active efforts to improve the walkability in certain areas in response to storms and such like. But yeah, you're very unlikely to find any kind of cycling infrastructure outside of cities, and even then its not amazing
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].
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?
Decent amount of manufactured goods, always enough food, no sign of a serf labouring class or any manufacturing to speak of.
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.
My city (Valencia, Spain) generally has good biking infrastructure but recently they redid an intersection and came up with this monstrosity. Even for locals it's confusing / dangerous.
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).
Probably any change in country takes some time to adjust to traffic. Coming from the Netherlands, I got quite confused when driving in San Francisco, by many wide roads without any clear road markings. Which parts are meant for overtaking, pre-sorting for turns, parking on the side of the road or just parallel driving lanes? On several roads that could fit 3-6 cars I couldn't tell the direction of traffic on the middle lane(s) or the lane separations.
> Probably any change in country takes some time to adjust to traffic. Coming from the Netherlands, I got quite confused when driving in San Francisco,
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.
I live in The Netherlands (actually in the same city as the photo's were taken): There is a very large difference in traffic density and complexity between the larger cities such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht and the rest of the country (including middle sized cities).
When I visit one of those larger cities, I am also constantly looking for bikes everywhere not to be crashing into me.
Although this was in the '80s I remember that I (Dutch) walked to school at the age of 5, in a town (technically a city (Enkhuizen)), mostly through a pedestrian area but I had to cross one busy street.
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.
> My parents told me later that they secretly followed me the first few times (I never noticed).
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).
That is how it worked when I was a kid on the 80s in Spain. I took the bus to school alone as an 8yo -- and I was considered a wimpy kid; my sister walked to school alone at 6.
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 kids walked to school from about age 7 or so. Same as when I was young. When I do drop them off (because we are late or there is a blizzard or whatever) I'm a bit ashamed and hope no one sees me driving. Now we have 2 pedestrian crossings on the way to school. one really busy, but luckily it has lights. The one without lights is designed so the road shrinks to single file so cars can't meet at the crossing, but have to take turns passing.
it was the 80s, I used to walk to school at 6, passing through an hospital, in a town, quite a big one, named Rome.
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.
I'm a parent trying to show the reasons why treating your kids as disabled people will make them grow up as disabled people.
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.
The reality is that due to zoning laws children have to travel by car or bus, which is inherently less safe. Zoning laws have made USA into a terrible environment for everyone. People don’t even know what it’s like to run errands and just walk or bike.
There are no zoning laws separating residential areas from schools. The civil rights laws are what caused American children to need to be driven to school.
Driving in towns and cities in the Netherlands is frightening as a foreigner not used to it as you're constantly afraid about hitting a cyclist. I drive like a grandma there.
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!
My hometown of Malmö is very bike friendly but let me be frank, no it does not flow smoothly. Cars are required to stop for cyclists and pedestrians on most crosswalks.
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.
The question is: is the flow worse for people in general, or only the ones in cars. If those cyclists and pedestrians would've been in cars (i.e. if there wasn't good bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure), would the flow for the average person be better? Would it even be better just looking at people in cars?
Only daft tourists and provincials use a car in a city like Amsterdam. You are right, car traffic doesn't flow, but that is kinda the point. Bikes and pedestrians first, cars second.
Very interesting article. After 12 years of almost daily cycling in the Netherlands, I recently started driving a car as well. I always appreciated the Dutch civil infrastructure, and this new experience only adds to my admiration.
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.
I moved from the U.S. to the Netherlands nine years ago, and I can attest that the bike infrastructure is amazing and has an outsized impact on your quality of life and general happiness.
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.
1000% agree. We moved 7 years ago and now have 4 kids. It is so valuable that my preteens can bike to tennis, friends, etc safely, even at night. Or that you can pop a toddler to childcare without a car seat and parking. Last year we finally got a car. I hardly ever use it.
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.
Here in town, there is a place where cyclists cross the oncoming lane to enter a bike pathway. The cyclists go downhill and thus have quite some speed. For the cyclists, they are catching a gap between cars. No big deal. From the perspective of a car driver, you have oncoming traffic in the same lane. Bonus point if the cyclist didn't signal their left-turn. I'm sure this location alone is producing a dozen of cyclist haters every day. I think the cyclists lack awareness that cars are bulky and heavy and thus require some free area ahead of them for breaking.
The underground (plus partly underwater) bicycle parking garage at Amsterdam Centraal is also pretty amazing to experience. So much nicer than the old outdoor one.
I live in Amsterdam. The freedom to do all your errants and entertainment by bike or walking is amazing. I can literally walk to the zoo, walk to the market, and walk to endless bars and restaurant.
The things is this is not some liberal, 15 min city conspiracy. This is how life has always been…
If find it hilarious that 'conservatives' made up this '15min city conspiracy' when traditional actual conservative cities, before the 60s were exactly those kind of 15min cities.
But somehow the bullshit built in the 60s is 'the true national expression' or whatever.
I have some American "bicycle people" as colleagues, and most Dutch people certainly aren't "bicycle people" like they are, even if they cycle every day, just like how people just driving a car aren't necessarily "car people".
Ah, those kind of "bicycle people". I suppose survivor bias makes that kind of inevitable. The bicycle people who aren't scared off by environment that is extremely hostile to bikes and pedestrians are more likely to be really into bikes.
> 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.
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.
I love the Netherlands, and not just for their livable street design, I just wish they food weren't so bland. They make even German cuisine look adventurous in comparison.
As a Dutch person... this is sadly not just 100% accurate, it's almost part of our culture by now, hahaha. For example, in Gerard Reve's "De Avonden" ("The Evenings", a literary classic in the Netherlands from 1947) the daily bland dinners are described like a recurring cynical joke.
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).
From what I've heard, people also blame Britain's modern bland food on WW2. I wonder why Belgium (and France and Germany etc) didn't suffer as much long term damage to their cuisine?
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.
The Netherlands had a famine (created by the Nazi occupiers) that lasted for one winter[0]. England had to ration their food. I did a quick look for famines in WW2, and Germany, Belgium and France are not mentioned as having similar experiences[1].
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.
when i moved here, people told me the greatest issue with the country was not the weather, it was the food. and i remember saying "there's no way it's that bad".
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.
> when i moved here, people told me the greatest issue with the country was not the weather, it was the food. and i remember saying "there's no way it's that bad".
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.)
Right, I guess the distinction is between "Dutch cooking" and "Dutch snacks". We're not too terrible in the latter department.
(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)
I seriously moved out of the country because the food was making me depressed. The bread is just so bad I couldn’t take it. I loved the infrastructure though.
I really wish this tired cliché would disappear, and I say this as someone who has emigrated from a country renowned for its cuisine.
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.
you are talking about two different things here: availability vs cuisine.
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.
Even the 'foreign' food is adapted to Dutch tastes and considerably toned down. That being said, it's perhaps better than the Dutch cuisine (though more disappointing, because I had expected better from eg the Indian restaurants, whereas I had no great expectations of the Dutch cuisine).
Local produce is fine, too. They export some great fruit and veggies and cheeses to the rest of the world, too.
This is true. I can recommend the Indonesian and Surinam restaurants, both are former colonies so many people from there moved to NL. Their food is much better, the Dutch like it so much that you could almost call them part of Dutch culture.
I live in Singapore these days, and nearby Indonesia has great food. I just wish the Dutch would have taken more lessons from them, when they colonised around here.
That's why I was saying that even German food is adventurous in comparison. (Old-fashioned English food from before the 20th century is also good.)
> 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).
A lot around this is culture. The Dutch have been living with cyclists for years so they work with them.
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.
> 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.
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.
Despite the cycling infrastructure being second to none, I hated my time cycling in Amsterdam earlier this year. The drivers (taxis in particular) are just terrible, very violent, at least in the city center. Having a lot of cycling paths that don't intersect or run along motorways (the ones through parks are especially nice) improves the situation and I did enjoy that part, but I can't shake the first impression of crazy aggressive drivers.
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.
That's probably an Amsterdam thing, smaller Dutch cities are lovely and awesome to cycle in. Rotterdam was also not enjoyable to cycle due to aggressive drivers when I visited.
Very cool, but to me it kind of illustrates a common pattern of thought on here which is that there's theoretically some sort of "optimum" city design which works for everyone which is a fallacy.
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).
Sure. The world would be more biodiverse, have less CO2 in the atmosphere, be less "touched" in general if you or I moved into a mud hut, or furthermore pulled out the old KMS card.
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.
Most people get their Bossche Bol at Jan de Groot, which is like a 15 minute walk or 5 minutes by bike from the intersection. Beware that there always is a big queue at Jan de Groot because it's very popular. You can also go to a Jumbo supermarket in 's-Hertogenbosch or Rosmalen as they usually sell the exact same Bossche Bol from this bakery.
The problem in the Netherlands nowadays is not the interaction between motorists verus cyclists, but ebikes versus normal bikes. Lot of accidents happen on the bycicle roads
By far the largest amount of cyclist deaths and injury are still caused by cars. The ebikes just get more news coverage because they're novel. But cars are heavier and go faster so will almost always be more dangerous to other cyclists and pedestrians.
When I rode an ebike in the Netherlands I still frequently got overtaken by people on omafietsen. It was the mopeds using the bike paths that were causing problems.
Bikes are small and fast, and only a small fraction of cars will need to turn here as this is a street going in to a neighborhood. The chances of multiple cars wanting to take this turn and there being a long stream of bikes that holds them up is small. So 'never' is not the right word here, but the times this happens is negligible.
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
Bike lanes are everywhere in most big cities in France too... But they're bad, very bad.
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.
> Bike lanes are everywhere in most big cities in France too... But they're bad, very bad.
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
> Cycling through Colmar is indeed a scary experience, especially if you have a trailer with a small child in it
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.
> 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.
The way this looks it could be more dangerous than having no bike lane at all. Drivers will see this as a sign that the big lane belongs to them. Bike riders must expect someone in the parked car to unexpectedly open the door at any time and hit them. There have been many deadly accidents where bike riders got "doored" just like that. Also imagine you have two trucks crossing paths and bikes on the side. Or a trailer with a child like the user said.
I agree with most of what you've said, and yet as a utility cyclist I can tell you that this is nicer than many of the streets I need to ride when I leave my home.
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].
> and a single narrow main lane each way so cars can't go very fast
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.
I agree, the bike infrastructure in Paris is now quite good. If only cyclists in Paris would start to stop at red lights, especially at pedestrian crossings (this is a problem everywhere, of course, but in Paris it seems to be particularly bad).
I'm still failing to understand why the urbanism departments are so bad in councils of even our big metropolitan areas. We could just contract with corps like Copenhaguenize to get to the state of the art right away when rebuilding roads, but "on a des idées" so why not improvise? Or it's just corruption and favoritism...
Nice project though, might ping you for something related :)
Is this intentional bait for the somewhat notorious "Copenhagen is Great ... but it's not Amsterdam" video by the Not Just Bikes channel? ;)
(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)
In general I try to avoid nationalism - a lot of what one perceives as "my country ABC is the best at XYZ!" is just "I was born in ABC so I am used to XYZ!".
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.
Haha, same! I think the most nationalistic thing I ever did was when I went on a "field trip" to Copenhagen with the classmates of my international master studies, and constantly complain that the bike infrastructure was so disappointing. I have to admit Copenhagen hasn't been sitting still and improved in the last decade though!
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)
> What is important to consider is that cycling infrastructure is all around great in The Netherlands 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.
Bike lanes yes. But where are all the safety features you can see here? Bike lanes are often separated, but not always. On many streets they are just painted on. They are rarely color marked, which is fine when you know where the bike lane but in new places you sometimes miss that there is a bike lane because it is not obvious at the crossing.
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.
The one thing lacking is marking for pedestrian crossings on the bike lanes. It feels fine in this low-traffic intersection, but in my area (not netherlands), it has become a bit hard to cross bike lanes with high trafic from both pedestrians and cyclists.
This is 1950's Swedish solution, imho. Modern fad is that there shall be no separate bicycle crossings in intersection areas. Bicycles are equal to other vehicles so it makes sense to concentrate the intersecting traffic to one flow, so it is easier to observe.
> Bicycles are equal to other vehicles so it makes sense to concentrate the intersecting traffic to one flow, so it is easier to observe
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.
The image is not very common, most of the time they have elevated the space before and after the bikepath, forcing cars to slow down before going on 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.
The notch for the cycle path is actually really interesting to me in that it allows a single car to wait without blocking the flow of the road they are departing. I imagine a lot of RL taillights get clipped but that’s fine at the end of the day.
That pretty much never happens. The vast majority of cars just aren't big enough to stick out, and people generally have enough self-preservation to not drive at full speed into a full-sized box truck.
Interesting that very few (any?) people in the pictures are wearing helmets. In the US, I think it's a lot more common for cyclers to wear helmets. Maybe that comes with a fear of getting clobbered by a car.
From what I can remember, the overseeing bodies (whatever they are) are not convinced that requiring helmets would reduce serious incident rates, and in fact convinced that this would decrease overall bike ridership.
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."
I'm not sure how common this type of intersection is. I live and bike daily in Amsterdam and it took me about a minute to fully understand what's going on here. The picture seems to show a special case where the intersecting road is bike only, and instead of the normal painted arrows that show where bikes should queue up when making a left, there's an open area off to the left where one would wait behind the "shark teeth".
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.
Can someone explain this, the italicized part below, in more detail?
>> 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.
This is a part of the national design language of the roads in The Netherlands.
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.
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.
The linked photo actually shows a really bad example. For the 'exit construction' to be valid, the footway must continue uninterrupted with the same surface. In this example, different pavers where used, making the situation ambiguous.
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. :)
Is there priority for the pedestrian if they are already crossing the side street when a car driving down the side street approaches the intersection, or can the pedestrian be run over by the car without consequence to the driver?
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.
And yet the photo in the article shows piano teeth markings before the shark teeth, which indicates a level change for the car. In that case I would assume that cars are required to yield to pedestrians crossing the side street even though the sidewalk surface is not continuous.
That's some word salad but let me make things clear,
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.
I haven't read the entire article, but this is a very common situation: main road with two cycle paths crosses a minor road (or has two side roads at the same place). All roads are also for cars. I'm not sure why the article makes such a difference between the two side roads: they seem quite similar apart from the one-car waiting space before the cycle path.
These types of interactions are pretty much everywhere outside of historical city centers and the like where you don't have space for it. You might not find them in the old town of Ams, but as soon as you head out a bit, you see them everywhere. Same in Delft and pretty much anywhere else with historic architecture.
Yeah there is not really space for these eleborate intersections in central Amsterdam. Most are signal controlled or pure spaghetti with trams coming from four directions with almost absolute priority, like this one https://www.google.com/maps/place/52%C2%B021'49.1%22N+4%C2%B...
In general, separate bike lines are nothing special in the Netherlands, even in Amsterdam. However, it's an old, compact city with narrow streets, so you're unlikely to see these types of intersections in those streets. Same is true for other old city centers with compact layouts.
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.
It is completely beyond me why other EU countries simply don’t copy the dutch. It’s clearly way better designed, it’s a pleasure for cyclists, drivers and pedestrians and way safer.
I appreciate and approve of this detail applied to many interesting design features of an otherwise banal collection of junctions.
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.
you need space to do that, not many cities in Europe have the luxury of being built from scratch and having so much space to dedicate to a single intersection.
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.
Such old urban places would just be car-free in the Netherlands (sometimes with limited access for delivery and emergency vehicles), a trend fortunately becoming popular in other European cities now.
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.)
In my experience, cars are discouraged from city centres, but not banned. You can drive your car all around Amsterdam, although you’ll have many one way streets and parking is going to very expensive for non-residents… and it’s hard (but not impossible) to find street level parking. Amsterdam has a number of car parks in the outskirts that are cheap if you can show that you used public transport afterwards.
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.
I'm not saying that Amsterdam was built from scratch, nor that Rome is somewhat so special that you can't apply solutions used elsewhere, but that urban space is an hard requirement and the more dedicated infrastructures you build, the more the value of the area goes up and so we end up with those beautiful walkable, green, neighborhoods in Milan where the "Vertical Forest" is that only the very rich can afford.
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.
A street like your picture would make it incredibly difficult for a car to obtain a dangerous speed, so would by itself largely eliminate the need for dedicated cycling space.
Here in the Netherlands also in small streets and areas bike lanes are common. They are literally drawn on the street and a car is basically not allowed to ride on them when a bike is passing.
cars are not allowed to hit pedestrian or bikes on any street, but they do all the time.
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.
There are lots of dedicated cycle lanes in London now which is good. I feel much safer cycling in those.
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 bikelanes that are integrated with sidewalks incredibly dangerous and give a false sense of safety. Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars. Taipei uses the sidewalk model and I recommend never using them
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
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.
If a bicycle hits a pedestrian and the pedestrian was on cycling path in The Netherlands, who's fault is it? If the pedestrian gets a broken arm who pays for medical services?
If NL laws are anywhere close to the rest of European countries: the bike is responsible. The pedestrian is never responsible, unless they do something absurd like jumping in front of the bike without leaving any way to react to the bike.
>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.
I broadly agree that I'd like standalone separated bike lanes, but I think this is dubious:
> 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 only have my personal experience. Biking on the sidewalk lanes in Taipei creates a lot of scary close calls esp with children and dogs. On the road I only rarely have some issues with buses. Everyone is moving in the same direction so it's generally less scary.
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)
> I find bikelanes that are integrated with sidewalks incredibly dangerous and give a false sense of safety.
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.
The dreaded multi-use path where pedestrians, joggers, dog walkers, parents with strollers, bike commuters, e-scooters, roadies, kids with training wheels and older folks on 4 wheel scooters are forced to share the same 2.5m strip of asphalt, while cars get 2 lanes to drive and 2 for storage
Not sure if you mean the Dutch style cycle lanes: in that case, it's just tourists that risk impact with bikes, simply because they're conditioned to ignore them (i.e. the brain is trained to consider dangerous only what's beyond the curb).
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.
I guess this conditioning just doesn't happen in Taipei .. I guess then I don't really understand why the sidewalk and bikelane are on the same level at all. Why not have an actual barrier or curb and places to get on/off?
it's effectively another road - with the same dangers as a car-road. But it's just some painted asphalt
Being used to Dutch bike infrastructure, the bike lanes in Taipei made no sense to me. The ones I've seen mostly are barely distinguishable from the actual sidewalk and at large intersections the "bike lanes" seem to overlap with the logical/natural spot for pedestrians to wait for a green light.
> Why not have an actual barrier or curb and places to get on/off?
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.
> Bikes hitting pedestrians is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars.
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.
I think if you tried them out you'll find these bike paths are not unsafe (and I bet the accident numbers back that up), because it's a whole system. Design like this will have features to force drivers to take slow turns when crossing the bike paths, and they are raised so that it's clear to drivers they don't have right of way.
NL always goes for the transit stops that poke out like you mention as well when possible.
When we visited Amsterdam as pedestrians, we absolutely hated these bike lane / sidewalk combinations. The problem are the often narrow, obstructed sidewalks forcing you to step into the bike lane. I wouldn't call that "incredibly dangerous" though, after all, we didn't witness any accident, but certainly annoying, especially considering that the most common obstruction is parked bikes.
I guess it takes some getting used to, or maybe the Dutch simply avoid walking and take the bike instead.
> Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars.
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.
"Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars."
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
This design highlights a major failing with UK cycle "infrastructure". Here, we often have shared use pavements with sometimes a bit of white paint to designate the pedestrian and cycle lanes, but they cede priority at every single side road. The problem is that it makes cycling using them really awkward as it takes significant energy for cyclists to slow down and then speed up multiple times. The irony is that if you just use the main road instead, then you have priority over all the side roads, so the bike "lane" is pretty much useless.
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.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/JjfG1YJBwaqyov5H8
Italy has exactly the same problem. Not only we have a horrible infrastructure (the quality of our asphalt is abysmal), but cycle paths are pretty much always shared with pedestrians, and they're filled with obstacles (manholes, poles, chicanes...).
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.
Italy is often associated with cycle sport and I believe there are some excellent rides over there, but certainly the cities that I've been to (only Rome and Naples) don't look at all encouraging to cycle around.
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.
Yes, both Rome and Naples are in the "South" of Italy, and the situation is worse there than in the North.
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.
That's also the case in other places. The reason is easy. Cycle paths are not build for cyclist, but to them away from the main street and not be an "obstacle" to cars.
In Ireland, Dublin City Council has mostly gone with lanes which are either on the side of the road (with or without bollards), or entirely separate, whereas South Dublin County Council prefers shared use pavements. The two local authorities are contiguous, so it's all a bit jarring when you go between them.
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...
It's astounding that we can't seem to just copy successful ideas from other countries and then ensure that all the councils etc. adhere to the standards.
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.
ideas are only one part of a successfully functioning sociotechnical system. The bike intersections won't work if users behave differently (just like how automobile traffic is terrible if you get different driving styles mixing).
You might interpret that clearly true statement in two different ways:
- 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.
One of my favorite moves is when the Dutch simply don’t provide any guidance whatsoever in certain intersections. No signs. Brick or stone paving.
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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_space
I once saw a mind blowing series of slides from a Dutch transport engineer at a conference, showing the succession of steps taken over the years on a single country lane to reduce the chance of collisions to essentially zero.
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...
Haha, I know many roads like that! Often along waterways. There is enough room to navigate (unlike many Irish country roads) but you definitely drive much more cautiously
Which in turn means only most aggressive cyclists stay on the road. In London more than half cyclists jump the red light.
This sort of comment always comes up. Cars break rules too and there is a more of them. What’s the point being made?
One point is that traffic lights are designed for the benefit of drivers. Most of the time, cyclists can easily and safely navigate through a red light as they take up so much less space than cars. e.g. turning left at a junction (assuming UK driving on the left) can be done without causing any inconvenience for drivers and will often be safer for a cyclist than having to wait at a red light and then deal with drivers who've only just looked up from their phone and might not have seen you.
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.
Car drivers potentially face consequences in terms of loss of license, and should be carrying insurance if something happens. No equivalence for cyclists and honestly the Netherlands is the least safe I've felt as a pedestrian in regards to hostile cyclists.
Cyclists that RLJ are breaking the law, and police do stop them. Admittedly they won't be caught by a camera, like a car would.
Equally if something happens (e.g. pedestrian knocked down), they're still liable; not having insurance doesn't remove that.
Here is a related article from a UK perspective:
https://www.cycling-embassy.org.uk/blog/2013/07/03/how-does-...
It's even worse in my UK village. they don't even paint white lines, just the white outline of a bike every few hundred meters on the road.
Here's a premium shared use pavement in Bristol (allegedly a "cycling city") that shows what you're missing
https://maps.app.goo.gl/Gw3SBWT9WdYLDTN3A
lol are you serious? A "bike path" with f*cking trees and lightposts right in the middle? It looks like one of those EU-funding scams.
That path has been there a long time and is actually quite popular with cyclists as it goes alongside a very busy road that has an almost permanent queue on one side and lots of big lorries/coaches coming along the other side, so it's quite challenging to filter past the stationery vehicles without getting in the way of oncoming traffic.
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.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/znjzJ7bphdqhH5Sk7
lol that's a place where a modal filter would be perfect; they could make a "hole" in the curb to only let bikes go straight through. Instead, they decided to put 5 metres of white paint in a random way. Great!
I'm picturing a wrecked bike and a broken body every few hundred meters, painted in reflective white paint
Its interesting how my brain immediately sees the ambiguous bike lane mixed in with pedestrians spaces, and thinks 'That's dangerous', but i am not conditioned to think the same way about bicycles being forced to mix with car traffic, or pedestrians forced onto very narrow sidewalks in the clearzone of roads.
It is so adorable when Europeans complain about bike/transit infrastructure. Here’s my bike lane. It’s that white strip of paint on the right there:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/HHcHi3u5xbAM4jxY7?g_st=ic
And yet when we have "bike lanes" like this, people complain that it's too much, too intrusive, ruins local business, or should be a parking spot or lane for deliveries.
I was pleasantly surprised to find one of the major London cycle lanes that goes from Tower Bridge to Greenwich gives priority to cyclists crossing side roads https://maps.app.goo.gl/b3SweRqzvNehTcE38
These are death trap bike lanes. Not actually suitable for cycling by an adult operating their vehicle beyond a walking pace.
The problem in the UK is a deep cultural one.
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.
> 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.
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".
Dual carriageways are ok for cycling when the AADT for a particular road is below about 30k. Above that, cyclists would be an impediment to traffic flow as a following motorist would be waiting a long time for a safe gap in the second lane to overtake, especially when the speed difference is above 100%.
> and there's a whole lane for drivers to overtake safely.
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.
Some of them do - it varies.
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).
What makes the Netherlands special is not the bike paths. Its the law.
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.
Thats absoluyely not true. There is the so called principle of dual causality. If you hit a car you might have to pay 50% depending on situation. If its clearly the biker its still 0% for the car.
If its clearly the biker its still 0% for the car.
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.
It's a bit more complicated than that even.
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!
I think the problem is numerical. There are way more voters riding bikes in the Netherlands than in the UK.
But once upon a time the UK had higher cycling rates than the Netherlands.
How did the Netherlands manage to overcome this back in the 70s and the UK has not?
> They are bigger, heavier, faster and more powerful (thanks to burning fossil fuels)
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.
EVs are much safer - they both accelerate and decelerate faster and most EVs have regen braking by default - this means a) they get up to speed quickly b) drivers aren't worried about slowing because they can get back up to speed much faster c) as soon as the foot comes off the pedal the car start decelerating immediately.
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.
EVs most definitely do not decelerate faster. Their increased weight leads to decreased braking capabilities, which, combined with their faster acceleration, makes them potentially harder to control and more deadly in collisions due to the greater force of impact.
The regenerative braking force is generally much stronger than engine braking in ICE vehicles, as long as the battery isn't full.
In a sudden stop event, assuming the driver does the same tasks (lifts foot off accelerator pedal, moves to brake, then presses brake) - an standard ICE vehicle simply stops accelerating (minimal engine braking). An EV starts decelerating as soon as the foot is lifted from the accelerator.
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).
Based on a cursory glance at google results, 10% is at the lower bound of weight increase, and in sudden stop scenarios I would assume tyre grip is the main factor in speed reduction potential, not engine/regenerative braking. I'm not aware of any convincing studies showing a clear advantage for EVs in these scenarios.
Petrol engines have a nontrivial amount of engine braking due to the throttle. If you have a manual car you can easily compare it to coasting by disengaging the clutch. Bicycles also naturally coast thanks to the freewheel. If you're used to a bicycle then the engine braking of a car is quite surprising.
Probably something about the worldwide climate catastrophe caused by humanity continuing to burn fossil fuels at an ever increasing rate.
I understand that and I don't reject this sentiment outright, but one makes enemies when engaged in a good faith argument but feels the need to shoehorn their moral stance when nobody asked about it. It is, in fact, not at all relevant to the conversation.
The easiest thing is to stay on topic, wouldn't you agree?
I'm not sure that it's necessarily a moral stance for the OP to point out that the most common form of transport is partially responsible for dumping lots of CO2 into the environment, when the discussion is about junctions that prioritise active travel (walking/cycling). In motornormative countries such as the UK/USA (many others too), people are conditioned to only get from A to B via polluting methods (recognising that electric cars produce large amounts of tyre pollution which somewhat offsets their possible lack of fossil fuel use). The use of enlightened designs that work well for the Netherlands is part of the toolkit that we need to change people's mindsets if we can get past all the seductive advertising of the motor industries.
I'd put it as more of a pragmatic, forwards-looking viewpoint that a moral stance.
The electricity mostly comes from fossil fuels too.
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 roads are paid for in a large part by road taxes and fuel taxes. Cyclists pay zero towards it in direct taxation, apart from general taxation that everyone pays anyway. Why should cyclists be able to free load off of infrastructure paid for by tax-paying vehicles, and dictate that they are built to favour cyclists when they are not contributing a single penny?
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 roads are paid for in a large part by road taxes and fuel taxes. Cyclists pay zero towards it in direct taxation, apart from general taxation that everyone pays anyway. Why should cyclists be able to free load off of infrastructure paid for by tax-paying vehicles, and dictate that they are built to favour cyclists when they are not contributing a single penny?
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?
I always find this argument really funny because I wholeheartedly agree that taxes should be relative to the usage/damage of roads. But when you actually look at the numbers pretty much anywhere in the world it's always the cars and trucks being subsidised by the rest of the population.
YES, PLEASE let me pay for only bicycle infrastructure, I hate having to pay for your car.
Wouldn't know about 'pretty much anywhere', but assuming you're from the Netherlands you might want to reconsider: https://www.kimnet.nl/binaries/kimnet/documenten/rapporten/2...
Here in the UK, roads are paid for by general taxation. The fuel duty has been frozen for a long time (15 years?) so the general public are in fact subsidising motorists. "Road Tax" was abolished in 1937 due to the ridiculous attitude that some motorists get about "owning" the roads - this seems to be exactly your kind of attitude.
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?
In my locale, in the US, local roads are paid for by property taxes. The higher traffic state and Federal roads are paid for through a combination of fuel and income taxes. Cyclists tend to avoid those roads due to safety and distance. Cycles are prohibited on our equivalent of the motorways.
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 am a (UK) cyclist, and I pay both road taxes and fuel taxes.
(For the car that I also own, to be clear)
Just to reply to myself instead of each post calling me dumb individually:
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
I couldn't agree more, we should make sure cyclists and motorists pay their fair share.
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...
In what way do cyclists require unique and expensive infrastructure that both isn't the consequence of interactions with cars and that wouldn't be covered by general taxation unless general taxation literally didn't pay for any infrastructure?
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.
Out of interest, where do you pay direct road taxes? (I've heard that some countries do this, but I don't know which ones).
this argument against common sense bike infrastructure is one of the most common, most wrong, and most dumb
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.
> Life is too short to care about these trifling matters really though isn't it?
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.
You can really tell when somebody just repeats motorist propaganda and has never actually looked at the finical structure behind infrastructure.
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?
Yeah it really strikes me when reading the OP article that this is what a country that's "got it's shit together" looks like...
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
Have been there, have also been to the Netherlands. There isn't really a big difference in the total space available, in my limited experience. You can find a big difference for a photo op, sure.
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".
The Netherlands really does a great job on infrastructure. It's not like they're even particularly anti-car: driving there is a pretty decent experience too. It's extremely depressing driving onto the ferry in Hook of Holland and then driving off at Harwich.
I’ve always thought of the Netherlands as Infrastructire Country, so much of that territory has been significantly altered over the last four or five thousand years that it’s leaked into their world view.
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 amazing, its almost as if driving is better when a huge amount of trips are instead done with transportation systems that require far less space and are far better for the environment.
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.
The space isn't the problem. It just means you can't use an off-the-shelf design.
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 UK isn't alone in having old narrow streets, so it's just a case of re-allocating space. However, it does require a change in mindset so that rather than designers focussing on how to maximise driver speeds, they need to minimise driver speeds at junctions and make it clear that pedestrians have priority.
Keep in mind that this looks like it's using a lot of spaces, but there's only one lane for cars each way. Cyclists and pedestrians use way less space than cars, so if a significant part of the population uses those modes of transportation that would otherwise have been in cars, that's a far more efficient use of space.
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.
It's the urban planning, but I'll point out that it's the requirements and responibilities put on the drivers as well.
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.
It also helps that "the car driver is to blame until proven otherwise" is the actual law in the Netherlands, which is motivated precisely because of that power dynamic. Essentially, the responsibility defaults the more dangerous vehicle.
(for some reason this always is controversial with a lot of Americans whenever it is brought up in on-line discussions)
Having recently read "Amerikanen Lopen Niet" (Americans Don't Walk), the power dynamic you describe seems to be entirely real.
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.
Americans will never walk.
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.
In Amsterdam, you usually don't cycle more than ~3km for a "normal destination" (groceries, a generic bar or cafe, stores) and in general, ~7km is the limit for "specific destinations" (going to bar X, ), above that, usually people take transport, though there are some that often cycle >50km
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?
Electric bicycles basically solve the hill issue. Dutch people bike in any weather. We have a ton of terrible weather, both hot and cold but mostly wet. Our summer heat might not be very hot, but the summer heat is very humid, it feels hotter than it is.
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.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
55% of NYC residents do not own a car. But of course everybody knows NYC is not America :)
https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/u-s-cities-with-th...
New York City and its surrounding combined statistical metropolitan area (which includes semi-rural commuter suburbs where people do not walk) makes up approximately 6% of "America" and was accounted for in the average "royal we" American who does not, statistically, walk.
27C at night is uncommon, but I can tell you there is no weather that stops Dutch people from walking or biking. It is mind ingrained.
A lot of Americans I know in real life (rightfully) complain that non-Americans treat their culture as if it's a homogeneous monolith, despite its enormous geographical and cultural diversity. So you have to excuse me for chuckling at blanket statements like "Americans will never walk"
DC might not be the best comparison here as far as American cities go. I - and most people I know - walk around the city year round and I live on the top of a pretty steep hill.
DC isn't even close to the top of the list of cities where commuters walk.
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.
Walking doesn't mean never driving.
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.
I biked year round for 4 years in Washington DC. Biking by 40ºC and in the snow in the winter wasn't difficult.
Congratulations for being in the microscopically-miniscule statistically-irrelevant minority of people.
You are the one saying no-one would do it. I was explaining that wasn't a fact. I live now in Toronto and people are fine cycling in the summer (40º) and winter (-5º) all year long because of better infrastructure. Which is the point of the article.
Some additional anecdata (and actual data) is that Chicago has the highest cyclist increase out of any city in the US as a result of better infrastructure being installed [0]
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...
er, every car driver is a carless driver before they enter and after they exit, their vehicle.
everyone in America walks. They simply happen to do most of their walking in parking lots.
The reason: lobbying from auto manufacturers!
https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history
Except for trams. They never seem to get the blame, however with their braking distance, I suppose it makes sense.
As a Dutch person living in the US, a big difference is also that almost every driver in the Netherlands is also a cyclist themselves. In the US there is this almost cultural divide between drivers and cyclists where it becomes part of people's identity. In the Netherlands most people will just choose their mode of transportation depending on the specifics of the trip.
In practice this means drivers tend to do a much better job anticipating cyclists, e.g. by checking for cyclists before making a turn.
In the greater united states, the first people to get cars were also those who had various forms of power. Those people (moneyed european americans who believed in the myth of industrialization, supremacists) used power to shape the legal regime of cities to claim more space for themselves.
"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.
Driver's ed in the US in any state with much urbanization to speak of is like that too (there's 50 states with 50 different curriculums with differing levels of specificity so generalizing is ill advised unless you're looking to intentionally mislead) unless perhaps one took it long ago or in somewhere so rural that other traffic wasn't relevant.
I took my driving test in Palo Alto in 2008. It was a total joke. We drove around the block; drove onto the freeway; took the first exit and immediately back to the DMV and that was it. Took ~5 minutes. My driving test in Germany was 45 minutes. We drove all over town through all kind of street types. I had to perform several different parking maneuvers, stop and start on a steep hill.
The CA DMV test is 20 minutes. Whatever it was in 2008 I sincerely doubt it was five minutes.
Driving lessons in NL also teach you to open your door with your _right_ hand (left is right side drive), that way you turn your shoulder a bit and get in perfect position for controlling blind spot and mirror for eventual bike incoming (or whatever vehicle you missed).
Ive heard this repeated on the BBC before, but it isn't true, at least not for my driving lessons 2 decades ago. I just got told everytime to look over my shoulder for cyclists before opening the door. But never have I heard of anyone being taught to specifically open their door with their right hand
To be fair, the BBC is institutionally anti-cyclist, so they may have mis-represented the "Dutch Reach".
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.
I think it depends on the teacher, but mine didn't teach it either. However, I have been taught from a young age to watch out before I open the door, which is still very relevant even if you're not in the driver's seat.
I live in NL close to a border. Guess where tourists tend to stop their car, when coming in from the left in situation of the fine article?
People have little situational awareness anyway, but perhaps a bit moreso when they are Dutch.
We have lots of smooth infrastructure that I never noticed until various foreign experts on the internet expressed how wonderful it is.
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.
Oh wow, I never even consciously realised the zoning-out benefit - I already just appreciated them for being able to take off more quickly.
Yeah these ‘predictors’ only make sense if they can give a countdown at a constant rate. The idea is nice but often they countdown at say 1dot/sonly to have the last 5 dots disappear in the last second so they miss their purpose. on the other hand, a consequence on predictable ones is that people will start cycling on the last 2 dots or so instead of waiting for the green light.
I wish urban designers in Poland learned from this. Our bike lanes are terribly designed, cars turn right into them with very poor visibility. The "solution" is that lawmakers introduce additional restrictions for bikers, which are unclear to everyone, so right now nobody really knows if bikes have priority on bike lane crossings or not.
It’s good to realise the Dutch cycling infrastructure did not came out of nowhere. There were huge protests in the 70’s about traffic safety. At that time cars ruled the roads and there a lot of accidents, also involving children. From those protests an culture shift started, towards better cycling infrastructure.
There are many reasons why this is unlikely to happen in Poland, but from the top of my head:
-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.
There are plenty of places in the Netherlands with much lower density. They have great cycling and urban design even in tiny towns.
Those are just two out of many points. I stand corrected on the second, but the first holds - road safety has been improving for 20 years now, why bother?
Why bother to improve the safety of a transportation system? Road safety has been improving since the 1940. Would you have said 'why bother' in 1970? Or 1980?
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.
I do imagine those places benefited from the cultural mindshift originating in dense areas. Just a guess, of course.
There's an excellent documentary about "Stop De Kindermoord" (Stop Killing Our Children)
https://vimeo.com/361286029
In defense of urban planners, we get good design and want to see more of it, but are usually beholden to the elected officials in the municipality who we require to vote in and ratify new design standards, or funding for projects.
Isn't it funny how part of the solution is a bit like introducing a one-car buffer into the queue, reducing back pressure? Makes me wonder how much traffic planning and distributed systems could learn from each other (or perhaps already have, I'm not an expert in either).
As someone living in the netherlands, primary use is for decoupling risk. Look at the pedestrian side, they only cross a single lane where they have to look in a single direction. This makes pedestrian behaviour so obvious that its hard to miss someone looking straight at you while you're crossing. Same with car behaviour, no matter where the car is, the nose is pointing straight at you before crossing the conflict zone. The line of communication you have before a potential accident is insanely useful. It does not matter wether a stop sign or right of way was there if you're dead.
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.
The article doesn't deal with what happens when the queue gets bigger than one. It looks like a second car would queue on the main road, blocking traffic.
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".
Build more bike lanes.
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.
And an often forgotten point: this benefits people who have to drive cars too, since there are less cars on the car road!
> Build more bike lanes.
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.
ebikes mean you dont need to be that fit (or sweat) either.
At least where I live, such a type of intersection is used when a residential street branches off a large main road. You do not have a high volume of traffic going into this residential street, and "waiting for a crossing cyclist" does only take 1-2 seconds. So a buffer size of 1 is usually enough.
The backpressure is a feature and ensures people like me take a bike and train to work instead of driving
> when the queue gets bigger than one. It looks like a second car would queue on the main road, blocking traffic.
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 that happens rarely, then the cars just have to queue for a few seconds, no big deal.
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.
Ideally more density leads to more public transport.
It leads to more traffic of all types, I guess.
I agree. The photo description for "Here you can see that a car drivers waiting for people cycling are never in the way of other people in cars" would not hold true in my area of a US. There would quickly be at least two additional cars waiting in the main lane.
Yeah, it's important to note that this design is specifically for local side streets that are only expected to get destination traffic. If it's a busier street, there would typically be a separate turning lane, i.e. a bigger buffer.
> Makes me wonder how much traffic planning and distributed systems could learn from each other
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.
Think it was the Tannebaum Networking book which has a chapter on queuing theory. Couple of lectures on that, only to find the chapter was concluded with something like: "Empirical evidence has shown that network traffic doesn't follow a possion distribution", so was left with a feeling that the chapter was only relevant for exams.
Models based on Poisson distributions are the simplest type of queue from a mathematical point of view. Introductory courses rarely go beyond that.
The article points out very nicely that it is expensive (in space terms) to have cars integrate safely with the pedestrian and bicycle traffic of dense urban areas. The mismatch in size and speed requires buffer zones that must be dedicated to this function only.
Roughly the same size as if the street had 2 car lanes on each side. In fact this is what I've seen living here in Amsterdam for a few years, every once in a while they remove a lane or two from some street and beef up these security features as well as add more pedestrian space.
It's cheaper to maintain extra fat sidewalks and stuff than 2 more lanes of asfalct also.
Even better, the gemeente is actively converting streets into fietsstraat. It is amazing and I love it. It makes my commute through the city so much faster and less stressful. When they did the knip experiment on that big through-road near Waterlooplein and there was no car traffic, it was also fantastic. At that time, I was commuting that direction and it was wild how quiet that part of the city became. Cars really are a terrible nuisance and do not belong in the city.
Also, very often it doesn't reduce flow even for cars. There are tons of times when you remove lanes and it improves are keeps flow constant.
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.
As a Dutch citizen, I love the expanse in terms of space. Lately, they have been allocating a lot more green areas as well, making the whole experience very enjoyable.
Example: https://zuidas.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/groenstrook-bee...
On the other hand, the reduction in cars due to people switching to cycling makes the infrastructure incredibly cheap.
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.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RQrKP9a0XE
> the reduction in cars due to people switching to cycling makes the infrastructure incredibly cheap
This is a logical leap of enormous magnitude.
A bidirectional bike lane takes about as much space as one lane of on-street car parking, which american cities have plenty of. Swap half the parking to bike lanes and that gets you most of the way there.
I wish more urban areas were as good as The Netherlands. Where I live, there are occasionally some footpaths on the sides of the roads that are half a cycle lane. People constantly walk in the cycle lanes and cycle on the footpaths. Other than that, its just normal urban roads
As a semi regular tourist to the Netherlands from North America it took a bit to adjust to all the modes of traffic at once but now I can easily navigate and stay safe around bikes, mopeds, trams, skinny cars etc. But I’m also a seasoned traveller in the region.
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.
The first day in Netherlands I learned that when surface under my feet changes, when I'm crossing the line between two surfaces I need to look back over my shoulder because there might be someone coming in fast. I apply this rule since I learned it in every country I live and it works great.
I wish everyone who was born here also stuck to this rule.
I live in England, so there are already bike lanes and such, they're just not as widespread as I wish they were and its almost always part of a car lane or a pedestrian lane
My mother cycled from NL -> -> BE -> FR -> UK Stone henge and back again. Never again she said. It's a lovely country but the cycling infrastructure was ... questionable to say the least (according to her).
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)
Can confirm, I've done quite a lot of walking and properly marked trails are generally very well kept. I've walked quite a lot of the Cornwall coastline and there are active efforts to improve the walkability in certain areas in response to storms and such like. But yeah, you're very unlikely to find any kind of cycling infrastructure outside of cities, and even then its not amazing
Surprising, sure.
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...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-65715855
Accurate.
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?
I did always wonder about the general standard of living in the Shire - always seemed suspiciously high to me.
Decent amount of manufactured goods, always enough food, no sign of a serf labouring class or any manufacturing to speak of.
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.
Because it's attempting mythisimilitude, not verisimilitude.
That’s amusing. Not anywhere near the same but The Last Ringbearer has Mordor as an industrializing society unfairly maligned.
My city (Valencia, Spain) generally has good biking infrastructure but recently they redid an intersection and came up with this monstrosity. Even for locals it's confusing / dangerous.
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=...
Probably any change in country takes some time to adjust to traffic. Coming from the Netherlands, I got quite confused when driving in San Francisco, by many wide roads without any clear road markings. Which parts are meant for overtaking, pre-sorting for turns, parking on the side of the road or just parallel driving lanes? On several roads that could fit 3-6 cars I couldn't tell the direction of traffic on the middle lane(s) or the lane separations.
> Probably any change in country takes some time to adjust to traffic. Coming from the Netherlands, I got quite confused when driving in San Francisco,
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.
I live in The Netherlands (actually in the same city as the photo's were taken): There is a very large difference in traffic density and complexity between the larger cities such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht and the rest of the country (including middle sized cities).
When I visit one of those larger cities, I am also constantly looking for bikes everywhere not to be crashing into me.
Where I live there will be pedestrians on left side of asphalt roads and street food stalls on footpaths if the footpaths exist at all.
India?
yep easy to guess
Although this was in the '80s I remember that I (Dutch) walked to school at the age of 5, in a town (technically a city (Enkhuizen)), mostly through a pedestrian area but I had to cross one busy street.
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.
> My parents told me later that they secretly followed me the first few times (I never noticed).
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).
That is how it worked when I was a kid on the 80s in Spain. I took the bus to school alone as an 8yo -- and I was considered a wimpy kid; my sister walked to school alone at 6.
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 kids walked to school from about age 7 or so. Same as when I was young. When I do drop them off (because we are late or there is a blizzard or whatever) I'm a bit ashamed and hope no one sees me driving. Now we have 2 pedestrian crossings on the way to school. one really busy, but luckily it has lights. The one without lights is designed so the road shrinks to single file so cars can't meet at the crossing, but have to take turns passing.
I will say that my daughters are five and seven and I don’t let them bike or walk to school alone here in Hilversum, which is choking on SUV’s.
My daughter’s commute https://youtu.be/UWp7YiM3rzM?si=QoF4BgLEbnltcyg6
Dat is waanzinnig stom, en is zou willen dat er een Europees verbod zou komen op SUVs
it was the 80s, I used to walk to school at 6, passing through an hospital, in a town, quite a big one, named Rome.
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.
You won’t kidnap them, you’ll drive over them and then blame the kid for being in your way
I usually walk my friend, but nice try to shove your American way on me
There's a say in my country "chi male pensa male agisce" which roughly translates to “those who think badly act badly”
I am a parent and trying to show the reasons I don’t want my kids walking on the streets. And I live in the Netherlands
I'm a parent trying to show the reasons why treating your kids as disabled people will make them grow up as disabled people.
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...
> Just try to imag[in]e that you live in a country that is so safe you can let small kids walk to school.
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.
https://tylervigen.com/the-mystery-of-the-bloomfield-bridge
If your kids happen to survive walking to school in the US, then they get shot instead, thanks to the NRA and the Republican party.
The reality is that due to zoning laws children have to travel by car or bus, which is inherently less safe. Zoning laws have made USA into a terrible environment for everyone. People don’t even know what it’s like to run errands and just walk or bike.
There are no zoning laws separating residential areas from schools. The civil rights laws are what caused American children to need to be driven to school.
Driving in towns and cities in the Netherlands is frightening as a foreigner not used to it as you're constantly afraid about hitting a cyclist. I drive like a grandma there.
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!
It's much easier if you also cycle or just walk. People in cars in a city is pretty weird, we just got way too much used to it.
Absolutely. And I do most of the time in the Netherlands. But like many Dutch people, I occasionally drive too ;)
My hometown of Malmö is very bike friendly but let me be frank, no it does not flow smoothly. Cars are required to stop for cyclists and pedestrians on most crosswalks.
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.
The question is: is the flow worse for people in general, or only the ones in cars. If those cyclists and pedestrians would've been in cars (i.e. if there wasn't good bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure), would the flow for the average person be better? Would it even be better just looking at people in cars?
Only daft tourists and provincials use a car in a city like Amsterdam. You are right, car traffic doesn't flow, but that is kinda the point. Bikes and pedestrians first, cars second.
Very interesting article. After 12 years of almost daily cycling in the Netherlands, I recently started driving a car as well. I always appreciated the Dutch civil infrastructure, and this new experience only adds to my admiration.
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.
I moved from the U.S. to the Netherlands nine years ago, and I can attest that the bike infrastructure is amazing and has an outsized impact on your quality of life and general happiness.
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.
1000% agree. We moved 7 years ago and now have 4 kids. It is so valuable that my preteens can bike to tennis, friends, etc safely, even at night. Or that you can pop a toddler to childcare without a car seat and parking. Last year we finally got a car. I hardly ever use it.
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...
> "being one of those bicycle people"
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.
Here in town, there is a place where cyclists cross the oncoming lane to enter a bike pathway. The cyclists go downhill and thus have quite some speed. For the cyclists, they are catching a gap between cars. No big deal. From the perspective of a car driver, you have oncoming traffic in the same lane. Bonus point if the cyclist didn't signal their left-turn. I'm sure this location alone is producing a dozen of cyclist haters every day. I think the cyclists lack awareness that cars are bulky and heavy and thus require some free area ahead of them for breaking.
The underground (plus partly underwater) bicycle parking garage at Amsterdam Centraal is also pretty amazing to experience. So much nicer than the old outdoor one.
I live in Amsterdam. The freedom to do all your errants and entertainment by bike or walking is amazing. I can literally walk to the zoo, walk to the market, and walk to endless bars and restaurant.
The things is this is not some liberal, 15 min city conspiracy. This is how life has always been…
If find it hilarious that 'conservatives' made up this '15min city conspiracy' when traditional actual conservative cities, before the 60s were exactly those kind of 15min cities.
But somehow the bullshit built in the 60s is 'the true national expression' or whatever.
> without any cultural baggage of "being one of those bicycle people"
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 have some American "bicycle people" as colleagues, and most Dutch people certainly aren't "bicycle people" like they are, even if they cycle every day, just like how people just driving a car aren't necessarily "car people".
Ah, those kind of "bicycle people". I suppose survivor bias makes that kind of inevitable. The bicycle people who aren't scared off by environment that is extremely hostile to bikes and pedestrians are more likely to be really into bikes.
> 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.
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.
I love the Netherlands, and not just for their livable street design, I just wish they food weren't so bland. They make even German cuisine look adventurous in comparison.
As a Dutch person... this is sadly not just 100% accurate, it's almost part of our culture by now, hahaha. For example, in Gerard Reve's "De Avonden" ("The Evenings", a literary classic in the Netherlands from 1947) the daily bland dinners are described like a recurring cynical joke.
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).
From what I've heard, people also blame Britain's modern bland food on WW2. I wonder why Belgium (and France and Germany etc) didn't suffer as much long term damage to their cuisine?
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.
The Netherlands had a famine (created by the Nazi occupiers) that lasted for one winter[0]. England had to ration their food. I did a quick look for famines in WW2, and Germany, Belgium and France are not mentioned as having similar experiences[1].
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...
[1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/famines-wwii
when i moved here, people told me the greatest issue with the country was not the weather, it was the food. and i remember saying "there's no way it's that bad".
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.
> when i moved here, people told me the greatest issue with the country was not the weather, it was the food. and i remember saying "there's no way it's that bad".
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.)
Right, I guess the distinction is between "Dutch cooking" and "Dutch snacks". We're not too terrible in the latter department.
(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)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquette
I seriously moved out of the country because the food was making me depressed. The bread is just so bad I couldn’t take it. I loved the infrastructure though.
Their savory dishes aren't great (looking at you stamppot) but they do sweets well! Poffertjes, oliebollen, stroopwafels, etc.
Surinamese is what you are looking for.
I really wish this tired cliché would disappear, and I say this as someone who has emigrated from a country renowned for its cuisine.
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.
you are talking about two different things here: availability vs cuisine.
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.
Food in general in the Netherlands is fine. If we're talking about Dutch cuisine, even us Dutch people complain about how terrible it is.
Even the 'foreign' food is adapted to Dutch tastes and considerably toned down. That being said, it's perhaps better than the Dutch cuisine (though more disappointing, because I had expected better from eg the Indian restaurants, whereas I had no great expectations of the Dutch cuisine).
Local produce is fine, too. They export some great fruit and veggies and cheeses to the rest of the world, too.
This is true. I can recommend the Indonesian and Surinam restaurants, both are former colonies so many people from there moved to NL. Their food is much better, the Dutch like it so much that you could almost call them part of Dutch culture.
I live in Singapore these days, and nearby Indonesia has great food. I just wish the Dutch would have taken more lessons from them, when they colonised around here.
I admire it to an extent in that it is a part of their healthy culture. I think they take it a bit far though
But being more like the Italians or French in terms of food would mean being more like the Italians or French...
That's why I was saying that even German food is adventurous in comparison. (Old-fashioned English food from before the 20th century is also good.)
> 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).
They should also improve the landscape. It's too flat. What happened to the proposal to build a mountain in the North Sea?
The dikes are enough for me.
I had some decent ramen in Utrecht recently!
A lot around this is culture. The Dutch have been living with cyclists for years so they work with them.
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.
> 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.
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.
Despite the cycling infrastructure being second to none, I hated my time cycling in Amsterdam earlier this year. The drivers (taxis in particular) are just terrible, very violent, at least in the city center. Having a lot of cycling paths that don't intersect or run along motorways (the ones through parks are especially nice) improves the situation and I did enjoy that part, but I can't shake the first impression of crazy aggressive drivers.
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.
That's probably an Amsterdam thing, smaller Dutch cities are lovely and awesome to cycle in. Rotterdam was also not enjoyable to cycle due to aggressive drivers when I visited.
Hilversum is pretty bad
Very cool, but to me it kind of illustrates a common pattern of thought on here which is that there's theoretically some sort of "optimum" city design which works for everyone which is a fallacy.
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).
> Neither of those systems feel inherently "wrong" or "right" to me, they feel like different opinions.
One of those options is clearly much, much worse for the planet. That's not just my opinion.
Sure. The world would be more biodiverse, have less CO2 in the atmosphere, be less "touched" in general if you or I moved into a mud hut, or furthermore pulled out the old KMS card.
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.
Cool to see my hometown ('s-Hertogenbosch) appear on the front page of HN. I use this intersection almost every week: AMA ;)
How far is it from the intersection to the nearest place you can get a Bosche Bol? :)
Most people get their Bossche Bol at Jan de Groot, which is like a 15 minute walk or 5 minutes by bike from the intersection. Beware that there always is a big queue at Jan de Groot because it's very popular. You can also go to a Jumbo supermarket in 's-Hertogenbosch or Rosmalen as they usually sell the exact same Bossche Bol from this bakery.
How funny it is to hear foreigners try to pronounce it?
Not as funny as you would think :) They usually pronounce it pretty well: shertokenboss
The problem in the Netherlands nowadays is not the interaction between motorists verus cyclists, but ebikes versus normal bikes. Lot of accidents happen on the bycicle roads
By far the largest amount of cyclist deaths and injury are still caused by cars. The ebikes just get more news coverage because they're novel. But cars are heavier and go faster so will almost always be more dangerous to other cyclists and pedestrians.
When I rode an ebike in the Netherlands I still frequently got overtaken by people on omafietsen. It was the mopeds using the bike paths that were causing problems.
> Here you can see that a car drivers waiting for people cycling are never in the way of other people in cars.
Am I blind or does it only work for just one or maybe two cars?
Bikes are small and fast, and only a small fraction of cars will need to turn here as this is a street going in to a neighborhood. The chances of multiple cars wanting to take this turn and there being a long stream of bikes that holds them up is small. So 'never' is not the right word here, but the times this happens is negligible.
Correct, only one.
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
Correct. That is enough 95% of the time. (I made that number up, but it's not far from the truth.)
It's not that much different from Copenhagen where I live. Bike lanes are everywhere.
Bike lanes are everywhere in most big cities in France too... But they're bad, very bad.
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.
> Bike lanes are everywhere in most big cities in France too... But they're bad, very bad.
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.
> Cycling through Colmar is indeed a scary experience, especially if you have a trailer with a small child in it
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.
> 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.
The way this looks it could be more dangerous than having no bike lane at all. Drivers will see this as a sign that the big lane belongs to them. Bike riders must expect someone in the parked car to unexpectedly open the door at any time and hit them. There have been many deadly accidents where bike riders got "doored" just like that. Also imagine you have two trucks crossing paths and bikes on the side. Or a trailer with a child like the user said.
That bike lane is a nightmare.
I agree with most of what you've said, and yet as a utility cyclist I can tell you that this is nicer than many of the streets I need to ride when I leave my home.
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].
[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/nurAWCzcBW98TxFm8?g_st=ac
> and a single narrow main lane each way so cars can't go very fast
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.
Remember that the east of France is considered the top place to cycle... Well except Paris and its recent revolution.
I agree, the bike infrastructure in Paris is now quite good. If only cyclists in Paris would start to stop at red lights, especially at pedestrian crossings (this is a problem everywhere, of course, but in Paris it seems to be particularly bad).
I'm still failing to understand why the urbanism departments are so bad in councils of even our big metropolitan areas. We could just contract with corps like Copenhaguenize to get to the state of the art right away when rebuilding roads, but "on a des idées" so why not improvise? Or it's just corruption and favoritism...
Nice project though, might ping you for something related :)
> run every trimestre
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.
Thanks ! I wonder though if native english speakers understand it instantly, or no.
Of course they do, unless they've been skipping their biology classes. Trimester is a common word for the three month periods of a pregnancy:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trimester
Is this intentional bait for the somewhat notorious "Copenhagen is Great ... but it's not Amsterdam" video by the Not Just Bikes channel? ;)
(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)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjzzV2Akyds
In general I try to avoid nationalism - a lot of what one perceives as "my country ABC is the best at XYZ!" is just "I was born in ABC so I am used to XYZ!".
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.
Haha, same! I think the most nationalistic thing I ever did was when I went on a "field trip" to Copenhagen with the classmates of my international master studies, and constantly complain that the bike infrastructure was so disappointing. I have to admit Copenhagen hasn't been sitting still and improved in the last decade though!
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)
Although, in Sweden i am pretty sure the crossing from the example it would have had a pedestrian/cycling tunnel beneath it.
Look around, they are everywhere.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/BxEh3gBhooeH9Pfe7?g_st=ac
> What is important to consider is that cycling infrastructure is all around great in The Netherlands 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.
Hahah, I would never! :D It definitely shows that the Netherlands had an early start and still an advantage. Kudos on that!
You have the advantage of being able to learn from the mistakes we made along the way and skipping those, so should be able to catch up quickly!
Bike lanes yes. But where are all the safety features you can see here? Bike lanes are often separated, but not always. On many streets they are just painted on. They are rarely color marked, which is fine when you know where the bike lane but in new places you sometimes miss that there is a bike lane because it is not obvious at the crossing.
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.
Berlin is full of bike lanes, but they're built ass-backwards and inconvenient for everyone - motorists, pedestrians and cyclists alike.
I also recommend this article, on why in the US, innovation in this area isn't pushed:
America Has No Transportation Engineers
https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/america-has-no-transporta...
The one thing lacking is marking for pedestrian crossings on the bike lanes. It feels fine in this low-traffic intersection, but in my area (not netherlands), it has become a bit hard to cross bike lanes with high trafic from both pedestrians and cyclists.
This is 1950's Swedish solution, imho. Modern fad is that there shall be no separate bicycle crossings in intersection areas. Bicycles are equal to other vehicles so it makes sense to concentrate the intersecting traffic to one flow, so it is easier to observe.
> Bicycles are equal to other vehicles so it makes sense to concentrate the intersecting traffic to one flow, so it is easier to observe
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.
These are the things you can do when you don’t give away both sides of every street to fully-subsidized car storage.
The image is not very common, most of the time they have elevated the space before and after the bikepath, forcing cars to slow down before going on 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.
We could just copy the Dutch road design manual, flip it for the UK and be done with it. This is basically perfect.
The notch for the cycle path is actually really interesting to me in that it allows a single car to wait without blocking the flow of the road they are departing. I imagine a lot of RL taillights get clipped but that’s fine at the end of the day.
That pretty much never happens. The vast majority of cars just aren't big enough to stick out, and people generally have enough self-preservation to not drive at full speed into a full-sized box truck.
Interesting that very few (any?) people in the pictures are wearing helmets. In the US, I think it's a lot more common for cyclers to wear helmets. Maybe that comes with a fear of getting clobbered by a car.
From what I can remember, the overseeing bodies (whatever they are) are not convinced that requiring helmets would reduce serious incident rates, and in fact convinced that this would decrease overall bike ridership.
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.
Some sources:
[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'm not sure how common this type of intersection is. I live and bike daily in Amsterdam and it took me about a minute to fully understand what's going on here. The picture seems to show a special case where the intersecting road is bike only, and instead of the normal painted arrows that show where bikes should queue up when making a left, there's an open area off to the left where one would wait behind the "shark teeth".
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.
I never understood why people have a tough time understanding the lovely shark teeth signs.
It's literally a painted give way sign.
Fellow Amsterdam resident here, this kind of layout is very common all over the city (I live in the south of the city but I have seen these all over).
Can someone explain this, the italicized part below, in more detail?
>> 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.
This is a part of the national design language of the roads in The Netherlands.
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.
The linked photo actually shows a really bad example. For the 'exit construction' to be valid, the footway must continue uninterrupted with the same surface. In this example, different pavers where used, making the situation ambiguous.
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. :)
Is there priority for the pedestrian if they are already crossing the side street when a car driving down the side street approaches the intersection, or can the pedestrian be run over by the car without consequence to the driver?
https://www.theorieexamen.nl/theory-exam/what-is-a-entrance-...
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.
And yet the photo in the article shows piano teeth markings before the shark teeth, which indicates a level change for the car. In that case I would assume that cars are required to yield to pedestrians crossing the side street even though the sidewalk surface is not continuous.
That's some word salad but let me make things clear,
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.
I haven't read the entire article, but this is a very common situation: main road with two cycle paths crosses a minor road (or has two side roads at the same place). All roads are also for cars. I'm not sure why the article makes such a difference between the two side roads: they seem quite similar apart from the one-car waiting space before the cycle path.
These types of interactions are pretty much everywhere outside of historical city centers and the like where you don't have space for it. You might not find them in the old town of Ams, but as soon as you head out a bit, you see them everywhere. Same in Delft and pretty much anywhere else with historic architecture.
Yeah there is not really space for these eleborate intersections in central Amsterdam. Most are signal controlled or pure spaghetti with trams coming from four directions with almost absolute priority, like this one https://www.google.com/maps/place/52%C2%B021'49.1%22N+4%C2%B...
In general, separate bike lines are nothing special in the Netherlands, even in Amsterdam. However, it's an old, compact city with narrow streets, so you're unlikely to see these types of intersections in those streets. Same is true for other old city centers with compact layouts.
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....
It is completely beyond me why other EU countries simply don’t copy the dutch. It’s clearly way better designed, it’s a pleasure for cyclists, drivers and pedestrians and way safer.
Yeah almost everybody copied our airport signage system. Why not the road system... NL is very flat though
The problem nowadays is not the interaction between cyclists and motorists but more between ebikes and normal bikes (on the same pathway)
It also includes a car driving on the cycleway and turning over the full white line at 1:35 and use of the phone while cycling at 1:44
I appreciate and approve of this detail applied to many interesting design features of an otherwise banal collection of junctions.
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.
you need space to do that, not many cities in Europe have the luxury of being built from scratch and having so much space to dedicate to a single intersection.
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.
Such old urban places would just be car-free in the Netherlands (sometimes with limited access for delivery and emergency vehicles), a trend fortunately becoming popular in other European cities now.
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.)
In my experience, cars are discouraged from city centres, but not banned. You can drive your car all around Amsterdam, although you’ll have many one way streets and parking is going to very expensive for non-residents… and it’s hard (but not impossible) to find street level parking. Amsterdam has a number of car parks in the outskirts that are cheap if you can show that you used public transport afterwards.
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.
> Such old urban places would just be car-free in the Netherlands
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.
I know few cities beat Rome when it comes to their age, but Den Bosch has had city right since 1185 AD...so it is not exactly "built from scratch".
I'm not saying that Amsterdam was built from scratch, nor that Rome is somewhat so special that you can't apply solutions used elsewhere, but that urban space is an hard requirement and the more dedicated infrastructures you build, the more the value of the area goes up and so we end up with those beautiful walkable, green, neighborhoods in Milan where the "Vertical Forest" is that only the very rich can afford.
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.
A street like your picture would make it incredibly difficult for a car to obtain a dangerous speed, so would by itself largely eliminate the need for dedicated cycling space.
Here in the Netherlands also in small streets and areas bike lanes are common. They are literally drawn on the street and a car is basically not allowed to ride on them when a bike is passing.
cars are not allowed to hit pedestrian or bikes on any street, but they do all the time.
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.
There are lots of dedicated cycle lanes in London now which is good. I feel much safer cycling in those.
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.
Needs (2018) in the submission title.
Meanwhile, in France: https://tinyurl.com/yjvsm9x9
I find bikelanes that are integrated with sidewalks incredibly dangerous and give a false sense of safety. Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars. Taipei uses the sidewalk model and I recommend never using them
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
>Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars.
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.
If a bicycle hits a pedestrian and the pedestrian was on cycling path in The Netherlands, who's fault is it? If the pedestrian gets a broken arm who pays for medical services?
> If the pedestrian gets a broken arm who pays for medical services?
Well, most European countries have a relatively simple solution for that ;)
If NL laws are anywhere close to the rest of European countries: the bike is responsible. The pedestrian is never responsible, unless they do something absurd like jumping in front of the bike without leaving any way to react to the bike.
>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.
I broadly agree that I'd like standalone separated bike lanes, but I think this is dubious:
> 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 only have my personal experience. Biking on the sidewalk lanes in Taipei creates a lot of scary close calls esp with children and dogs. On the road I only rarely have some issues with buses. Everyone is moving in the same direction so it's generally less scary.
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)
And also car vs pedestrian is much larger than bike vs pedestrian, and in most places, higher than car vs bike also.
> I find bikelanes that are integrated with sidewalks incredibly dangerous and give a false sense of safety.
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.
The dreaded multi-use path where pedestrians, joggers, dog walkers, parents with strollers, bike commuters, e-scooters, roadies, kids with training wheels and older folks on 4 wheel scooters are forced to share the same 2.5m strip of asphalt, while cars get 2 lanes to drive and 2 for storage
Not sure if you mean the Dutch style cycle lanes: in that case, it's just tourists that risk impact with bikes, simply because they're conditioned to ignore them (i.e. the brain is trained to consider dangerous only what's beyond the curb).
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.
I guess this conditioning just doesn't happen in Taipei .. I guess then I don't really understand why the sidewalk and bikelane are on the same level at all. Why not have an actual barrier or curb and places to get on/off?
it's effectively another road - with the same dangers as a car-road. But it's just some painted asphalt
Being used to Dutch bike infrastructure, the bike lanes in Taipei made no sense to me. The ones I've seen mostly are barely distinguishable from the actual sidewalk and at large intersections the "bike lanes" seem to overlap with the logical/natural spot for pedestrians to wait for a green light.
> Why not have an actual barrier or curb and places to get on/off?
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.
A curb is just a sign, at least for pedestrians. If a curb can help you not to cross into a bicycle lane, so can a clearly painted lane.
> Bikes hitting pedestrians is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars.
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.
I think if you tried them out you'll find these bike paths are not unsafe (and I bet the accident numbers back that up), because it's a whole system. Design like this will have features to force drivers to take slow turns when crossing the bike paths, and they are raised so that it's clear to drivers they don't have right of way.
NL always goes for the transit stops that poke out like you mention as well when possible.
When we visited Amsterdam as pedestrians, we absolutely hated these bike lane / sidewalk combinations. The problem are the often narrow, obstructed sidewalks forcing you to step into the bike lane. I wouldn't call that "incredibly dangerous" though, after all, we didn't witness any accident, but certainly annoying, especially considering that the most common obstruction is parked bikes.
I guess it takes some getting used to, or maybe the Dutch simply avoid walking and take the bike instead.
> Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars.
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.
"Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars."
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