Students at my university in Berlin need to cross a busy road to travel between campus areas, which meant jaywalking or a long trip to a crossing with traffic lights down the road. A steady stream of students late to their next class sprinting across a six lane road is not great.
At some point students started painting their own crosswalk, which would be removed again and again by authorities, until the city eventually got the hint and installed a permanent crosswalk with a traffic light and a pedestrian island.
Sometimes the way to get something is fixed is by demonstrating the fix.
Guerrilla urbanism is pretty much illegal to do everywhere, including in the article's subject city of San Francisco. The goal is to not get caught by authorities while doing it
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stvo_2013/__25.html
"(3) Pedestrians must cross roadways quickly and by taking the shortest route perpendicular to the direction of travel, taking care to avoid vehicular traffic. If traffic density, speed, visibility, or traffic flow so requires, a roadway may only be crossed at intersections or junctions, at traffic lights within markings, at pedestrian crossing aids, or at pedestrian crossings (sign 293). When crossing the roadway at intersections or junctions, pedestrian crossings or markings at traffic lights must always be used."
Maybe there's no penalty, but a 6 lane road probably has traffic density/speed/flow enough to get to the "may only be crossed at intersections or junctions"
> And then…nothing. Caltrans didn’t notice. Passing motorists were thrilled but figured the improvement had taken place at the direction of Caltrans. It wasn’t until Ankrom leaked his actions to the press that the true story was known.
> The original sign with Ankrom’s artwork remained until 2009 when the whole thing was replaced by Caltrans. The paint had faded, but the message remained with a lasting impact. The replacement sign erected by the Department of Transportation proudly sports the 5 North placard exactly where Ankrom had put it nearly a decade prior, and it remains there to this day to help motorists that would otherwise be just as confused as he was.
And an update from 2023:
> In 2001, artist Richard Ankrom posted a "5 North" sign on the 110 N. in DTLA to alert drivers to get in the left lane for the 5 turnoff. His work was so impeccable (and helpful), Caltrans at first didn't notice, then allowed it to stay. "5 North" is now part of permanent signage.
This is an intractable problem with normal sidewalk/streets. Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between. This is why both drivers and pedestrians hate bikers.
Ideally we have entirely separate paths for bikes. Of course this is infeasible for most established cities. Doesn't mean they are't inherently a problem in these cases though.
Entirely separate paths for bikes are absolutely feasible in established cities (see New York which has huge protected bike lanes running north and south up and down manhattan) with little cost to car infra
>Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between.
The NYC bike lanes are inherently problematic. These are the "in between" that I'm talking about. They are not entirely separate paths in the way that I mean. They are a new lane within the existing path. What I mean by a separate path is something that is above, below, or in an entirely different location than the road/sidewalk.
Normally, if you’re turning right you’re in the rightmost lane, so nobody to your right is going straight. And likewise for left. A bike lane puts straight-through traffic to the right of turning cars so they come in from your blind spot. A "yield to bikes" rule doesn’t help much when you can’t see who you’re yielding to. And car traffic presents the same problem for bikes. They have to deal with this by merging all the way across traffic or cross and become a pedestrian. The fact that they may have to become a pedestrian is a major flag that they inherently dont fit.
Parking and buses have the same problem. The sidewalk and the road were designed to touch. When you put a bike lane between them, every trip from curb to car, bus, etc. has to cross it.
It’s essentially splitting 1 road into 2 with separate rules. It's inherently problematic. You can't introduce bikes without increasing the rule complexity and worsening the experience for everyone else.
There is plenty of basic intuition here.
- Pairs. Each pair of modes (car,bike,pedestrian) needs its own set of rules. Two modes is one pair. Three modes is three pairs, so adding one mode triples the relationships.
- Introducing a "middle": Every segment of one street crosses every segment of the other. Adding a middle lane on both sides takes an intersection from 9 overlap zones to 25, and from 4 where different modes meet to 16.
- Fixed width: The street doesn’t get wider. Any space dedicated to bikes costs car lanes, parking, or sidewalk.
> A bike lane puts straight-through traffic to the right of turning cars, coming up from behind in your blind spot.
Bike lanes making riders less safe has been known for decades. John Forrester’s book “Effective Cycling” [1] catalogues a lot of these dangers and warns cyclists to not assume that bike lanes are safer.
John Forester is globally recognized as a clown who's conclusions have never been supported by real world evidence. He was employed by DOTs to tell them what they wanted to hear ("don't build infrastructure for bikes") and in doing so set US infrastructure back decades.
Vehicular cycling techniques can help in situations where there is no bicycle infrastructure, but they are not safer than good bicycle infrastructure.
I just looked it up and this is exactly what I mean by a separate location. Minneapolis has a bit of this too. I mean you could also use 3 dimensions space and put bikes up or down to resolve the core tension. All of these are of very limited viability so I understand from a pragmatic perspective why cities arent just doing this.
Have you been to NYC recently? 2 years ago it was utter chaos with delivery folks and crazies in rental bikes gunning at full throttle. It was quite scary compared to something like Paris or Munich.
I’ll take a full lane here in Miami. Screw these thin bike lanes next to the curb with F-150s and Cybertrucks. I’ve seen too many bike falls. Pass me safely and that’s that.
In Seattle, local residential streets are often designated as "stay healthy" streets, where bikes and pedestrians have right-of-way. You can drive a car there, but it will be slow (intersections are narrowed to discourage fast driving). Cars take parallel streets if they're going more than a block or two.
I haven't checked the statistics but it seems to work. There's one near me that's packed with bikes during coomute hours, and I think the cost to the city was negligible.
This is more in the direction of what I'm talking about. I think it's a pretty good model and affirms not contradticts what I'm saying because you do have to sacrifice drivability (unless you can just add streets like this - but I assume not).
It's pretty easy to do in most cities, you just have to eliminate a lane of traffic and/or parking spots. It's quite rare for a modern city to have streets too narrow to do that.
Bike lanes don't just compete against car lanes. They also compete against sidewalks and bus/tram lanes.
There is also the question of what you are going to do with your bike once you are at your destination, where are you going to park it?
For those who went to Amsterdam as a pedestrian, I don't know how it felt, but to me, it was not great. Lots of narrow sidewalks littered with stuff, the stuff in question is often bikes, so you have to step onto the adjacent bike lane, where you are usually greeted by an angry cyclist, because for some reason, parking your bike on the sidewalk is fine but stepping on the bike lane is not.
So, as a pedestrian, I wished Amsterdam converted its car lanes into trams and sidewalks rather than bike lanes. And yes, I hated bikes for as long as I stayed in Amsterdam, and so did everyone in my group.
The cars vs bikes debate tend to get a lot of attention, but the bikes vs pedestrians and public transit aspect matters too.
Note that bikes + buses can be a particularly dangerous combination. Buses are long and can block off the path of a careless cyclist as they turn, who may fall right under the wheels of the bus.
To provide a different anecdote, Amsterdam is the best city I've ever had the pleasure of exploring as a pedestrian.
There were well-maintained sidewalks everywhere I needed to go. The reduced amount of automobile traffic made it easier to cross smaller roads and intersections without risking my life. At larger intersections, I often received a crossing signal almost immediately upon requesting one, instead of waiting multiple minutes.
Negotiating interactions with cyclists was trivial, because I could always make eye contact with them. Unlike drivers, who barely pay attention to those outside of cars, have their heads buried in their phone, or are obscured behind tinted glass.
It was also the quietest major city I've ever visited, which I largely attribute to the prevalence of bikes instead of automobiles. Some of the semi-tractors / HGVs I saw making deliveries were even electric, which is a great reduction in noise and other forms of pollution.
If I ever have the pleasure of visiting Amsterdam again, I intend to rent a bike. I hope to explore more of the city via the obviously superior mode of transportation, as demonstrated by so many locals.
> eliminate a lane of traffic and/or parking spots
It's out of the question in most places, it slows car traffic down and makes it harder for people to park in places where parking is already scarce. Then residents and customers of local businesses have nowhere to park.
>It's out of the question in most places, it slows car traffic down
If you actually make a sufficiently high-quality bike network to convince people to bike that would otherwise drive, I would expect this to speed car traffic up by taking a lot of cars off the road.
Not everywhere is San Francisco. Where I live, it's below freezing almost half the year. No one wants to add bike lanes that will only get lightly used 3 months a year.
This is very geography/climate dependent though. There are conditions where most people would not bike regardless of how high quality the bike network is.
Are these conditions that typically can't be found in the Netherlands?
I guess heavy snow isn't too common there, maybe if we plowed the bike paths? Ok, now I'm getting distracted imagining a bike-path-plow, it would presumably be mounted on a powered bike of some sort, or maybe on those little parking enforcement trikes.
There should be more friction added to car travel. More walkable neighborhoods with local business around the corner would pop up right where people are if the norm wasn't "everyone make endless individual trips to Walmart."
So stupid all the suburbanites blocking my driveway to come eat at nice restaurants because all they have out there is fast food; such a huge waste of resources
It's a self-fulfilling situation. It's that way only because those places have designed their infrastructure to be car dependent.
The opposite is also true: If you take a place where people primarily walk and bike, and take out the sidewalks and bike lanes to widen the road, people will also be pissed.
All you're pointing out is that humans are resistant to change. We already know that is true. The question is not whether people don't like change, the question is: which is better urban planning? What is a better environment to live in?
It's absolutely impossible everywhere except where it has been tried and works great. Car centric design is a poor match for dense urban development and reverting the city to be more transit and pedestrian focused almost always improves the situation, bringing more people to shops and restaurants and revitalizing previously moribund downtown districts.
> This is why both drivers and pedestrians hate bikers
Drivers and pedestrians hate each other too. Everyone gripes about any minor impediment to their own travel, particularly other modalities, but also their own. I mean, drivers universally complain about being "stuck in traffic", but they are traffic.
Can't recall which European city it was (not AMS) where it was impossible to ride bikes on footpath but easy for padestrians. Very interesting hurdles were added. I wish I was more enthusiastic about taking photos. I had seen it on a very small stretch though. Somehwere in Belgium? I can't recall. In fact some of those hurdles/obstacles looked very artsy :)
And also there were dedicated bike lanes which should be a must in any self-respecting place.
Insulating bicycles from other vehicles is not the only path to road safety. When forced to interact with bikes more often, car drivers drive more safely and conservatively. Not sure that works everywhere or depends on better driver education and general empathy.
Natives might have a different take, but I was recently in Berlin (which you might consider an 'established city'), and this seemed like a solved problem there. Bike lanes are at sidewalk grade, above the curb, with rumble strip or other tactile indicator for the boundary. You do NOT walk in the bike lane, it's just like walking in the car lane.
Considering the rise of additional micromobility vehicles, this is such an obvious solution when you see it in practice.
It's a method for a cyclist turning left at an intersection. Turning left from the bike lane on the right is of course impossible, because the land is on the right, despite being a basic function of biking somewhere.
So the cyclist wants to turn left. They go through the intersection and move off to the side, near any pedestrians waiting to cross. When the light turns they and the pedestrians can cross.
Otherwise the biker must leave the bike lane and merge across traffic.
In either case the bike lane is inherently problematic.
They do have good urban cycling design, but I think a big part of it is merely the expectancy of both drivers and pedestrians that bikes are everywhere.
>It's not really infeasible, we have this in Holland everywhere and our cities are a lot narrower than the US ones.
I said it is inherently problematic, not exactly that it's infeasible.
The Netherlands is excellent support for my claim because of what you just said. The cities support less car traffic and slower driving speeds. Something has to give and in that case its drivability. In fact there are a lot more streets where cars can't go at all, or are just mostly bikes correct?
And the 3 modes/lanes in one place is still not even solved while minimizing cars. Cyclist are more than 1/3rd of Dutch road deaths and the Fietsersbond has even argued that the middle lane. https://swov.nl/sites/default/files/bestanden/downloads/FS%2...
usually at the expense of one or the other, usually cars.
FWIW I think that is a fine trade-off. I think people don’t truly realise how poorly cars scale until they take a really large step back and take a holistic view on infrastructure- which is inherently difficult for most people as they are so close and bought-in that they can’t even conceive of life being different than what they’re used to.
And they reach for exceptions to prove the requirement, when less cars in cities frees up the roads for those that truly need it (LGV and disabled access, but slow thus disincentivised unless actually required and thus less likely to cause accidents).
It's not necessarily at the expense of cars; the people riding bicycles on the bike lane are no longer driving cars blocking the way ahead of you, and parking their car in your favourite spot. Since bicycles use space more efficiently than cars, this can actually be a win for both the cyclists and the remaining drivers (who now have one less lane, but even less traffic). However this only happens if cycling adoption is high enough, which is why the bike routes have to be well connected.
Sometimes it doesn't even require sacrificing a lane, because many North American cities have lanes that are wildly larger than necessary or even appropriate given the posted speed limits. The lanes can simply be narrowed, and then this also causes the drivers to naturally drive at safer speeds, reducing traffic accidents, speeding tickets, and the unplanned delays that those both cause.
The bike lane space has to come from somewhere, parking space for bikes has to come from somewhere, intersections have to be set up to disadvantage one for the other.
Street space really is zero-sum, though more people in bikes and out of cars free’s up so much infrastructure that it can make less space work even better for cars- I’m sure urban designers are aware of this.
The major issue I presume that is faced in urban design is how to handle people coming from far away, the regional hub/spoke design (with train stations around a radial that have good parking allowing train access into the city) is not something actively pursued by advanced economies for some (presumably good) reason.
The bit you are missing is the space efficiency. Cars take up the most space by a large margin and getting people into more dense forms of transit (anything else) frees up space to be more efficiently used. Space is the most precious commodity in a city as many people are competing for every square meter.
This is also why suburbs and rural areas are a better fit for cars. Space is much more available and you can afford to be wasteful with it.
Bikes do pretty well on roads, especially in cities or quiet roads outside. We will all live in peace once we have self-driving cars instead of careless and violent human drivers. This already works pretty well in many cities in for example Spain.
In Geneva, activists painted bike lanes in three streets in 2023, causing about 2000 swiss francs in damages (or improvements, depending on your view).
The Swiss police under prosecutor Walther Cimino proceeded to investigate as if they were a crime syndicate, gathering forensics but also identifying 96 sympathizers and putting them under heavy surveillance, which included requesting total records from their banks, employers, phone companies, email providers (Google through the US DoJ), and even CCTV and purchases from their local supermarket.
I'm afraid of the possibility that what used to be "grassroots civil disobedience" will now be labeled "eco-terrorism" and prosecuted accordingly.
Some DOTs have given official support to Tactical Urbanism, with methods for communities to propose and implement small projects themselves on accelerated timelines like bike lanes or pedestrian crosswalks.
It’s effectively crowdsourcing urban planning, I’m in support.
I honestly think if we invited this type of empowerment/interaction in the physical world a bit more it would probably be good for spurring creativity in society (I think we do a pretty good job of it in software). It’s just a nice reminder that everything is just made up by someone else, likely no smarter than you.
Also I can’t believe this was 10 years ago, I remember being super involved in SPUR in SF (and getting coffee there almost every day) and going to talks about this kind of thing
It's admittedly appealing because it feels far closer to ordinary citizens having an influence, but I can't help feel like this is a failure on the part of the professionals whose responsibility the planning and implementation of this is.
Have we really gotten to the point where we can't trust public infrastructure to be properly implemented, and so the only solution is to take it into our own hands? What are the tax dollars paying for then?
I think in many places we have gotten to the point where the planning, processes, and public approval process for some of these simple projects is more costly in time and money than just building it as a temporary experiment and revisiting it in a year or two to measure the outcome.
Not that there shouldn't still be some kind of standards and community approval, but I think we can afford to set that at a lower bar for certain categories of easily reversible projects.
And hopefully incorporating more of these ideas can teach us to be more efficient on transit infrastructure projects in general, where the US often significantly trails other countries on cost and implementation time.
We kind of have reached that point. You can look at the cost overruns and public consultation before every new project as failures of the system to deliver what people want.
In my region of the world this exists and every year residents can vote for projects in their immediate vicinity.
I use a 5km stretch of bike lane daily going to work and back which was built this way. It runs along a railway line, so while it was navigable previously, off-season (so now) it would be covered in mud.
The initiative was spearheaded by just one lady who had an idea and a concrete proposal how to implement it.
Similar grassroots (heh, quite literally) activism is the idea of guerrilla gardening. Around here, a local nonprofit Villi vyöhyke (Wild Zone) [1] started as a small group of guerrillas but is now advocating, consulting and involved in many major rewilding projects initiated by municipalities and private companies.
This is similar to The Oval at Ohio State University. Instead of planning walkways across a field of grass, they looked where students actually walked and then paved those routes.
I think this applies to so many things. Centrally planned things rarely work exactly as planned, especially if the people doing the planning are separate from those executing the plan.
Much of the time, it's better to observe what's working in practice (even if in a messy way) and systemize it rather than have a perfect concept that disintegrates upon contact with reality.
It's very easy to save money when you don't pay workers and aren't worried about safety or accessibility. They'd made and were using several wooden bridges before this one, but all of them failed and were washed away. Maybe they get lucky and this one will stay up for a long time, and be continuously maintained by volunteers, but I'm very glad that the bridges in my city are more expensive because they were built by engineers who have to get designs approved and their work inspected and maintained regularly.
This happened where I live over 10 years ago, a huge investment that collapsed when they tried to hammer the support off. This was overseen by Cowan and had many engineers signing off.
The bottom line is when there is political interest, even guerrilla infra might work, but nothing survives corruption and neglect. The case of the makeshift bridge is only a matter of making the required tests and adaptations to make it legal or condemning the structure and building a new one.
There's another side of stuff like this. People living up in the hills above LA near trail heads will put up fake no parking zones in front of their houses. People have gotten real tickets in fake zones.
a counterexample of good tactical urbanism in Los Angeles People's Vision Zero, a group painting crosswalks where the city itself won't budge on safety demands (motonormativity is the rule)
If you haven't noticed this entire thread is about illicit infrastructure. There could be a moral argument to be had (which you are not making) but no one is denying the vandalism aspect.
Thats such a wild assumption. Your saying the government always folows the will of the public? Theres nothing people want that governments are giving them?
unless the city governance is in the pocket of the wealthiest members of the city's population, and those members don't want the goods. I witnessed this first hand in Los Angeles when I lived there.
The return of Civil Disobedience as a tool for inspiring social change.
Maybe not as profound or important as the Civil Rights movement. But important nonetheless for public safety. (Assuming the guerrilla bike lanes themselves are safe and well thought out.)
Students at my university in Berlin need to cross a busy road to travel between campus areas, which meant jaywalking or a long trip to a crossing with traffic lights down the road. A steady stream of students late to their next class sprinting across a six lane road is not great.
At some point students started painting their own crosswalk, which would be removed again and again by authorities, until the city eventually got the hint and installed a permanent crosswalk with a traffic light and a pedestrian island.
Sometimes the way to get something is fixed is by demonstrating the fix.
That's essentially a desire path, in crosswalk form:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path
Actively painting the desire path is next level though ':)
There's a cool project where desire paths were intentionally planned and paved later: https://popupcity.net/radar/elephant-paths-paving-the-way-fo...
Dangerous game. In Romania at least, even fixing a pothole would get you a fine, possible jail time and requirement to unfix it.
[0] https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/actualitate/comuna-unde-fostul...
[1] https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/actualitate/situatie-absurda-i...
[2] https://www.antena3.ro/actualitate/locale/satul-sa-astepte-d...
Guerrilla urbanism is pretty much illegal to do everywhere, including in the article's subject city of San Francisco. The goal is to not get caught by authorities while doing it
Nor California!
There is no such thing as 'jaywalking' in Germany.
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stvo_2013/__25.html "(3) Pedestrians must cross roadways quickly and by taking the shortest route perpendicular to the direction of travel, taking care to avoid vehicular traffic. If traffic density, speed, visibility, or traffic flow so requires, a roadway may only be crossed at intersections or junctions, at traffic lights within markings, at pedestrian crossing aids, or at pedestrian crossings (sign 293). When crossing the roadway at intersections or junctions, pedestrian crossings or markings at traffic lights must always be used."
Maybe there's no penalty, but a 6 lane road probably has traffic density/speed/flow enough to get to the "may only be crossed at intersections or junctions"
Downvoted, but true. If there is no crosswalk, you can cross. But, it might be dangerous or impossible as cars have right of way.
It reminds me of The Guerrilla Artist Who Fixed L.A.'s Worst Freeway Sign
https://thelandmag.com/richard-ankrom-guerrilla-public-servi...
https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-an-artist-helped-millions-...
> And then…nothing. Caltrans didn’t notice. Passing motorists were thrilled but figured the improvement had taken place at the direction of Caltrans. It wasn’t until Ankrom leaked his actions to the press that the true story was known.
> The original sign with Ankrom’s artwork remained until 2009 when the whole thing was replaced by Caltrans. The paint had faded, but the message remained with a lasting impact. The replacement sign erected by the Department of Transportation proudly sports the 5 North placard exactly where Ankrom had put it nearly a decade prior, and it remains there to this day to help motorists that would otherwise be just as confused as he was.
And an update from 2023:
> In 2001, artist Richard Ankrom posted a "5 North" sign on the 110 N. in DTLA to alert drivers to get in the left lane for the 5 turnoff. His work was so impeccable (and helpful), Caltrans at first didn't notice, then allowed it to stay. "5 North" is now part of permanent signage.
The short film he and his friends made about the process is definitely worth a watch: https://youtu.be/Clgl63CWOkM
The logical escalation of desire paths - https://99percentinvisible.org/article/least-resistance-desi...
This is an intractable problem with normal sidewalk/streets. Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between. This is why both drivers and pedestrians hate bikers.
Ideally we have entirely separate paths for bikes. Of course this is infeasible for most established cities. Doesn't mean they are't inherently a problem in these cases though.
Entirely separate paths for bikes are absolutely feasible in established cities (see New York which has huge protected bike lanes running north and south up and down manhattan) with little cost to car infra
You misread me.
>Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between.
The NYC bike lanes are inherently problematic. These are the "in between" that I'm talking about. They are not entirely separate paths in the way that I mean. They are a new lane within the existing path. What I mean by a separate path is something that is above, below, or in an entirely different location than the road/sidewalk.
Normally, if you’re turning right you’re in the rightmost lane, so nobody to your right is going straight. And likewise for left. A bike lane puts straight-through traffic to the right of turning cars so they come in from your blind spot. A "yield to bikes" rule doesn’t help much when you can’t see who you’re yielding to. And car traffic presents the same problem for bikes. They have to deal with this by merging all the way across traffic or cross and become a pedestrian. The fact that they may have to become a pedestrian is a major flag that they inherently dont fit.
Parking and buses have the same problem. The sidewalk and the road were designed to touch. When you put a bike lane between them, every trip from curb to car, bus, etc. has to cross it.
It’s essentially splitting 1 road into 2 with separate rules. It's inherently problematic. You can't introduce bikes without increasing the rule complexity and worsening the experience for everyone else.
There is plenty of basic intuition here.
- Pairs. Each pair of modes (car,bike,pedestrian) needs its own set of rules. Two modes is one pair. Three modes is three pairs, so adding one mode triples the relationships.
- Introducing a "middle": Every segment of one street crosses every segment of the other. Adding a middle lane on both sides takes an intersection from 9 overlap zones to 25, and from 4 where different modes meet to 16.
- Fixed width: The street doesn’t get wider. Any space dedicated to bikes costs car lanes, parking, or sidewalk.
> A bike lane puts straight-through traffic to the right of turning cars, coming up from behind in your blind spot.
Bike lanes making riders less safe has been known for decades. John Forrester’s book “Effective Cycling” [1] catalogues a lot of these dangers and warns cyclists to not assume that bike lanes are safer.
[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516945/effective-cycling/
John Forester is globally recognized as a clown who's conclusions have never been supported by real world evidence. He was employed by DOTs to tell them what they wanted to hear ("don't build infrastructure for bikes") and in doing so set US infrastructure back decades.
Vehicular cycling techniques can help in situations where there is no bicycle infrastructure, but they are not safer than good bicycle infrastructure.
the beltline on Atlanta comes to mind
I just looked it up and this is exactly what I mean by a separate location. Minneapolis has a bit of this too. I mean you could also use 3 dimensions space and put bikes up or down to resolve the core tension. All of these are of very limited viability so I understand from a pragmatic perspective why cities arent just doing this.
Have you been to NYC recently? 2 years ago it was utter chaos with delivery folks and crazies in rental bikes gunning at full throttle. It was quite scary compared to something like Paris or Munich.
I’ll take a full lane here in Miami. Screw these thin bike lanes next to the curb with F-150s and Cybertrucks. I’ve seen too many bike falls. Pass me safely and that’s that.
In Seattle, local residential streets are often designated as "stay healthy" streets, where bikes and pedestrians have right-of-way. You can drive a car there, but it will be slow (intersections are narrowed to discourage fast driving). Cars take parallel streets if they're going more than a block or two.
I haven't checked the statistics but it seems to work. There's one near me that's packed with bikes during coomute hours, and I think the cost to the city was negligible.
This is more in the direction of what I'm talking about. I think it's a pretty good model and affirms not contradticts what I'm saying because you do have to sacrifice drivability (unless you can just add streets like this - but I assume not).
It's pretty easy to do in most cities, you just have to eliminate a lane of traffic and/or parking spots. It's quite rare for a modern city to have streets too narrow to do that.
Bike lanes don't just compete against car lanes. They also compete against sidewalks and bus/tram lanes.
There is also the question of what you are going to do with your bike once you are at your destination, where are you going to park it?
For those who went to Amsterdam as a pedestrian, I don't know how it felt, but to me, it was not great. Lots of narrow sidewalks littered with stuff, the stuff in question is often bikes, so you have to step onto the adjacent bike lane, where you are usually greeted by an angry cyclist, because for some reason, parking your bike on the sidewalk is fine but stepping on the bike lane is not.
So, as a pedestrian, I wished Amsterdam converted its car lanes into trams and sidewalks rather than bike lanes. And yes, I hated bikes for as long as I stayed in Amsterdam, and so did everyone in my group.
The cars vs bikes debate tend to get a lot of attention, but the bikes vs pedestrians and public transit aspect matters too.
Note that bikes + buses can be a particularly dangerous combination. Buses are long and can block off the path of a careless cyclist as they turn, who may fall right under the wheels of the bus.
To provide a different anecdote, Amsterdam is the best city I've ever had the pleasure of exploring as a pedestrian.
There were well-maintained sidewalks everywhere I needed to go. The reduced amount of automobile traffic made it easier to cross smaller roads and intersections without risking my life. At larger intersections, I often received a crossing signal almost immediately upon requesting one, instead of waiting multiple minutes.
Negotiating interactions with cyclists was trivial, because I could always make eye contact with them. Unlike drivers, who barely pay attention to those outside of cars, have their heads buried in their phone, or are obscured behind tinted glass.
It was also the quietest major city I've ever visited, which I largely attribute to the prevalence of bikes instead of automobiles. Some of the semi-tractors / HGVs I saw making deliveries were even electric, which is a great reduction in noise and other forms of pollution.
If I ever have the pleasure of visiting Amsterdam again, I intend to rent a bike. I hope to explore more of the city via the obviously superior mode of transportation, as demonstrated by so many locals.
> eliminate a lane of traffic and/or parking spots
It's out of the question in most places, it slows car traffic down and makes it harder for people to park in places where parking is already scarce. Then residents and customers of local businesses have nowhere to park.
>It's out of the question in most places, it slows car traffic down
If you actually make a sufficiently high-quality bike network to convince people to bike that would otherwise drive, I would expect this to speed car traffic up by taking a lot of cars off the road.
Not everywhere is San Francisco. Where I live, it's below freezing almost half the year. No one wants to add bike lanes that will only get lightly used 3 months a year.
Denmark has excellent bike infrastructure and terrible weather.
This is very geography/climate dependent though. There are conditions where most people would not bike regardless of how high quality the bike network is.
The effect is a lot less pronounced that you might expect. See, for example, this video talking about Oulu, Finland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
Are these conditions that typically can't be found in the Netherlands?
I guess heavy snow isn't too common there, maybe if we plowed the bike paths? Ok, now I'm getting distracted imagining a bike-path-plow, it would presumably be mounted on a powered bike of some sort, or maybe on those little parking enforcement trikes.
There should be more friction added to car travel. More walkable neighborhoods with local business around the corner would pop up right where people are if the norm wasn't "everyone make endless individual trips to Walmart."
So stupid all the suburbanites blocking my driveway to come eat at nice restaurants because all they have out there is fast food; such a huge waste of resources
It's a self-fulfilling situation. It's that way only because those places have designed their infrastructure to be car dependent.
The opposite is also true: If you take a place where people primarily walk and bike, and take out the sidewalks and bike lanes to widen the road, people will also be pissed.
All you're pointing out is that humans are resistant to change. We already know that is true. The question is not whether people don't like change, the question is: which is better urban planning? What is a better environment to live in?
Eliminating parking on a single street is hardly a death sentence for nearby businesses.
And the whole idea is to encourage biking, ergo less parking is a good thing.
It's absolutely impossible everywhere except where it has been tried and works great. Car centric design is a poor match for dense urban development and reverting the city to be more transit and pedestrian focused almost always improves the situation, bringing more people to shops and restaurants and revitalizing previously moribund downtown districts.
> This is why both drivers and pedestrians hate bikers
Drivers and pedestrians hate each other too. Everyone gripes about any minor impediment to their own travel, particularly other modalities, but also their own. I mean, drivers universally complain about being "stuck in traffic", but they are traffic.
Cars turn people into psychopaths. They're the only mode of transport that essentially wishes other people simply didn't exist.
Can't recall which European city it was (not AMS) where it was impossible to ride bikes on footpath but easy for padestrians. Very interesting hurdles were added. I wish I was more enthusiastic about taking photos. I had seen it on a very small stretch though. Somehwere in Belgium? I can't recall. In fact some of those hurdles/obstacles looked very artsy :)
And also there were dedicated bike lanes which should be a must in any self-respecting place.
Insulating bicycles from other vehicles is not the only path to road safety. When forced to interact with bikes more often, car drivers drive more safely and conservatively. Not sure that works everywhere or depends on better driver education and general empathy.
https://time.com/archive/6683576/signal-failure/
https://bikecity.amsterdam.nl/en/experiment-traffic-lights-d...
http://dutchcycling.nl/get-inspired/sarphatistraat-amsterdam...
Natives might have a different take, but I was recently in Berlin (which you might consider an 'established city'), and this seemed like a solved problem there. Bike lanes are at sidewalk grade, above the curb, with rumble strip or other tactile indicator for the boundary. You do NOT walk in the bike lane, it's just like walking in the car lane.
Considering the rise of additional micromobility vehicles, this is such an obvious solution when you see it in practice.
Copenhagen does this quite well: https://ramblershighway.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/201...
Have you heard of "The Copenhagen left"?
It's a method for a cyclist turning left at an intersection. Turning left from the bike lane on the right is of course impossible, because the land is on the right, despite being a basic function of biking somewhere.
So the cyclist wants to turn left. They go through the intersection and move off to the side, near any pedestrians waiting to cross. When the light turns they and the pedestrians can cross.
Otherwise the biker must leave the bike lane and merge across traffic.
In either case the bike lane is inherently problematic.
They do have good urban cycling design, but I think a big part of it is merely the expectancy of both drivers and pedestrians that bikes are everywhere.
It's not really infeasible, we have this in Holland everywhere and our cities are a lot narrower than the US ones.
>It's not really infeasible, we have this in Holland everywhere and our cities are a lot narrower than the US ones.
I said it is inherently problematic, not exactly that it's infeasible.
The Netherlands is excellent support for my claim because of what you just said. The cities support less car traffic and slower driving speeds. Something has to give and in that case its drivability. In fact there are a lot more streets where cars can't go at all, or are just mostly bikes correct?
And the 3 modes/lanes in one place is still not even solved while minimizing cars. Cyclist are more than 1/3rd of Dutch road deaths and the Fietsersbond has even argued that the middle lane. https://swov.nl/sites/default/files/bestanden/downloads/FS%2...
Minneapolis is very successfully demonstrating that this is not infeasible.
> Of course this is infeasible for most established cities.
It simply is not. The problem is sacrificing an unreasonable amount of space to drivers. There is a ton of space for human-scale vehicles.
Chicago is putting these in everywhere to varying degrees of robustness based on traffic flows and it's fabulous.
It is not at all infeasible. Many cities do this successfully.
usually at the expense of one or the other, usually cars.
FWIW I think that is a fine trade-off. I think people don’t truly realise how poorly cars scale until they take a really large step back and take a holistic view on infrastructure- which is inherently difficult for most people as they are so close and bought-in that they can’t even conceive of life being different than what they’re used to.
And they reach for exceptions to prove the requirement, when less cars in cities frees up the roads for those that truly need it (LGV and disabled access, but slow thus disincentivised unless actually required and thus less likely to cause accidents).
It's not necessarily at the expense of cars; the people riding bicycles on the bike lane are no longer driving cars blocking the way ahead of you, and parking their car in your favourite spot. Since bicycles use space more efficiently than cars, this can actually be a win for both the cyclists and the remaining drivers (who now have one less lane, but even less traffic). However this only happens if cycling adoption is high enough, which is why the bike routes have to be well connected.
Sometimes it doesn't even require sacrificing a lane, because many North American cities have lanes that are wildly larger than necessary or even appropriate given the posted speed limits. The lanes can simply be narrowed, and then this also causes the drivers to naturally drive at safer speeds, reducing traffic accidents, speeding tickets, and the unplanned delays that those both cause.
In Chicago, more people ride the Ashland bus than drive down Ashland every day. We still couldn’t take a lane for bus rapid transit.
People are already stupid, put them in a car and their brains start leaking out of their ears.
The bike lane space has to come from somewhere, parking space for bikes has to come from somewhere, intersections have to be set up to disadvantage one for the other.
Street space really is zero-sum, though more people in bikes and out of cars free’s up so much infrastructure that it can make less space work even better for cars- I’m sure urban designers are aware of this.
The major issue I presume that is faced in urban design is how to handle people coming from far away, the regional hub/spoke design (with train stations around a radial that have good parking allowing train access into the city) is not something actively pursued by advanced economies for some (presumably good) reason.
The bit you are missing is the space efficiency. Cars take up the most space by a large margin and getting people into more dense forms of transit (anything else) frees up space to be more efficiently used. Space is the most precious commodity in a city as many people are competing for every square meter.
This is also why suburbs and rural areas are a better fit for cars. Space is much more available and you can afford to be wasteful with it.
> The bike lane space has to come from somewhere
> though more people in bikes and out of cars free’s up so much infrastructure that it can make less space work even better for cars
Yes, you've reiterated my point...
And how many do it thoroughly, not just in small parts?
The cars are the problem, not the bikes or pedestrians.
Great, then you agree with me that its problematic to have all three in the same place.
The same person is a driver, biker or pedestrial at different times of the same day.
Toxic entitled drivers hate bikers. Some bikers are toxic on sidewalks. Most sane people are actually able to exist with all three.
> Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between.
Bikes belong both on road and in between. Childrens bikes belong on side walk. Bikes moving in small speed can be on sidewalks too.
Bikes do pretty well on roads, especially in cities or quiet roads outside. We will all live in peace once we have self-driving cars instead of careless and violent human drivers. This already works pretty well in many cities in for example Spain.
Maybe not so well on roads, but streets are a good place for bikes. Especially E-Bikes that can keep up with city traffic.
Tho Onion should have also had “'Infeasible,' Says Only Nation Where This Does Not Happen” to link to.
In Geneva, activists painted bike lanes in three streets in 2023, causing about 2000 swiss francs in damages (or improvements, depending on your view).
The Swiss police under prosecutor Walther Cimino proceeded to investigate as if they were a crime syndicate, gathering forensics but also identifying 96 sympathizers and putting them under heavy surveillance, which included requesting total records from their banks, employers, phone companies, email providers (Google through the US DoJ), and even CCTV and purchases from their local supermarket.
I'm afraid of the possibility that what used to be "grassroots civil disobedience" will now be labeled "eco-terrorism" and prosecuted accordingly.
Someone's eco-terrorist is someone else's eco-freedom fighter
You can remove eco.
well yes, that's the original quote.
Some DOTs have given official support to Tactical Urbanism, with methods for communities to propose and implement small projects themselves on accelerated timelines like bike lanes or pedestrian crosswalks.
It’s effectively crowdsourcing urban planning, I’m in support.
I honestly think if we invited this type of empowerment/interaction in the physical world a bit more it would probably be good for spurring creativity in society (I think we do a pretty good job of it in software). It’s just a nice reminder that everything is just made up by someone else, likely no smarter than you.
Also I can’t believe this was 10 years ago, I remember being super involved in SPUR in SF (and getting coffee there almost every day) and going to talks about this kind of thing
It's admittedly appealing because it feels far closer to ordinary citizens having an influence, but I can't help feel like this is a failure on the part of the professionals whose responsibility the planning and implementation of this is.
Have we really gotten to the point where we can't trust public infrastructure to be properly implemented, and so the only solution is to take it into our own hands? What are the tax dollars paying for then?
I think in many places we have gotten to the point where the planning, processes, and public approval process for some of these simple projects is more costly in time and money than just building it as a temporary experiment and revisiting it in a year or two to measure the outcome.
Not that there shouldn't still be some kind of standards and community approval, but I think we can afford to set that at a lower bar for certain categories of easily reversible projects.
And hopefully incorporating more of these ideas can teach us to be more efficient on transit infrastructure projects in general, where the US often significantly trails other countries on cost and implementation time.
> a failure on the part of the professionals whose responsibility the planning and implementation of this is.
Don't forget the short-sighted NIMBYism.
We kind of have reached that point. You can look at the cost overruns and public consultation before every new project as failures of the system to deliver what people want.
In my region of the world this exists and every year residents can vote for projects in their immediate vicinity.
I use a 5km stretch of bike lane daily going to work and back which was built this way. It runs along a railway line, so while it was navigable previously, off-season (so now) it would be covered in mud.
The initiative was spearheaded by just one lady who had an idea and a concrete proposal how to implement it.
Similar grassroots (heh, quite literally) activism is the idea of guerrilla gardening. Around here, a local nonprofit Villi vyöhyke (Wild Zone) [1] started as a small group of guerrillas but is now advocating, consulting and involved in many major rewilding projects initiated by municipalities and private companies.
[1] https://www.villivyohyke.fi/en/
110 comments
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23325319>
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Guerrilla Public Service Redux (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23325319 - May 2020 (110 comments)
Guerrilla Bike Lanes: San Francisco Makes Illicit Infrastructure Permanent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12953150 - Nov 2016 (137 comments)
Guerrilla Bike Lanes in San Francisco - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12333604 - Aug 2016 (266 comments)
Title needs (2016) appending
This is similar to The Oval at Ohio State University. Instead of planning walkways across a field of grass, they looked where students actually walked and then paved those routes.
I think this applies to so many things. Centrally planned things rarely work exactly as planned, especially if the people doing the planning are separate from those executing the plan.
Much of the time, it's better to observe what's working in practice (even if in a messy way) and systemize it rather than have a perfect concept that disintegrates upon contact with reality.
Reminds me of https://translate.kagi.com/www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-366...
It's very easy to save money when you don't pay workers and aren't worried about safety or accessibility. They'd made and were using several wooden bridges before this one, but all of them failed and were washed away. Maybe they get lucky and this one will stay up for a long time, and be continuously maintained by volunteers, but I'm very glad that the bridges in my city are more expensive because they were built by engineers who have to get designs approved and their work inspected and maintained regularly.
Actually it's easy to inflate prices when politicians are corrupt, also https://translate.kagi.com/globoplay.globo.com/v/3474112
This happened where I live over 10 years ago, a huge investment that collapsed when they tried to hammer the support off. This was overseen by Cowan and had many engineers signing off.The bottom line is when there is political interest, even guerrilla infra might work, but nothing survives corruption and neglect. The case of the makeshift bridge is only a matter of making the required tests and adaptations to make it legal or condemning the structure and building a new one.
I like guerrilla housing. City does not build enough flats, so you occupy unused parking lot or sidewalk, and build house there!
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20261104150424/https://99percent...
There's another side of stuff like this. People living up in the hills above LA near trail heads will put up fake no parking zones in front of their houses. People have gotten real tickets in fake zones.
a counterexample of good tactical urbanism in Los Angeles People's Vision Zero, a group painting crosswalks where the city itself won't budge on safety demands (motonormativity is the rule)
https://www.reddit.com/r/BikeLA/comments/1pl8guj/i_started_a...
>painting crosswalks where the city itself won't budge
So, political vandals?
direct action gets the goods.
If you haven't noticed this entire thread is about illicit infrastructure. There could be a moral argument to be had (which you are not making) but no one is denying the vandalism aspect.
But people obviously don't want the "goods", by and large. Otherwise the city would budge.
Thats such a wild assumption. Your saying the government always folows the will of the public? Theres nothing people want that governments are giving them?
unless the city governance is in the pocket of the wealthiest members of the city's population, and those members don't want the goods. I witnessed this first hand in Los Angeles when I lived there.
Huh? Are cities near you known for quick and easy-to-navigate bureaucratic processes?
[citation needed]
The return of Civil Disobedience as a tool for inspiring social change.
Maybe not as profound or important as the Civil Rights movement. But important nonetheless for public safety. (Assuming the guerrilla bike lanes themselves are safe and well thought out.)
if you want it done right, you often have to do it yourself
what an absurd the hipster population taking over spaces of deadly, noisy and polluting vehicles and having the state collaborating with them /j