So, there would be an adjustment period for the population of your country, and it might take a while, and depending on culture might not be easy.
Which I found surprising, as their hiking trails are awesome and very well kept! For example I loved hiking on the Jurasic Coast and Cornwall. (Even signed up a for a National Trust memberships)
My memories of living in the UK is that there's a weird disconnect where "everyone walks" so walkers are treated as in-group and supported in their hobbies of walking, while "only lycra-clad fitness freaks cycle" so they're an out-group and demonised. This also extends to "how dare cyclists not need to pay road tax" when pedestrians also don't and also have essentially the same requirements for road surface quality, and lead to the same resurfacing requirements, as a bike.
Also, the UK romanticises the countryside — not just because it has some nice bits, but as part of its own national identity — and the imagined ideal when I was a kid was some old guy with a flat cap and a walking stick wearing tweed as they walk through it, not a cyclist.
Basically the imagery of 1974 J. R. R. Tolkien Calendar[0] (how did that ever happen?) crossed with Last of the Summer Wine[1].
[0] https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/1974-calendar/aut...
This romanticist nonsense also means that adequately lit and drained paths - for walking, cycling and wheeling at all hours - inevitably attract rural NIMBY ire.
"Preserve the character of our rural village with its 5000 SUVs and its manor house built by plantation owners".
Presumably someone's done a Tolkien fanfic where it turns out the hobbits have a bunch of plantations in Numenor or somewhere populated by enslaved Uruks, and the twee-ness is a front for general assholeness and moral hypocrisy?
When I visit one of those larger cities, I am also constantly looking for bikes everywhere not to be crashing into me.
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=...
We desperately need this principle of elevated bike lanes that cars should be worried to cross.
I have code an open-source framework to assess the cyclability of territories : https://villes.plus
It only takes into account quality bike lanes, based on OSM data, run every trimestre.
For instance, painted bike lanes or shared bus lanes are excluded.
Amsterdam's score is around 90 %.
The best French city, Strasbourg, has around 45 %. There is some inherent variability as each run takes random points among a data set to build the segments to be tested.
We once cycled from Germany to Colmar in France. Cycling through Colmar is indeed a scary experience, especially if you have a trailer with a small child in it: https://maps.app.goo.gl/wJU4GLWrmqF9EDes8
Of course it isn't much better in Germany.
I don't mean to detract anything about what you just said.
At the same time, my first thought when I clicked on the link was something like: "Woah, that is pretty nice; a painted bike lane and a single narrow main lane each way so cars can't go very fast".
We have a long way to go for most of North America to become friendly to cyclists.
Also for pedestrians, in my experience. When I first visited the US 10 years ago, I wanted to leave the hotel to get to a nearby public transit stop to go into town. On the map, it was a distance of around 500m from hotel to transit stop (Market Center in Dallas). But getting there was quite an ordeal. This was the pedestrian walkway: https://maps.app.goo.gl/gvduBGYMQfxSVxcFA, it ended in a dirt path by the side of the road after a few meters. There was a better walkway on the other side of the road, but it was impossible to safely cross it without walking for nearly 700 meters into the other direction.
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.
That bike lane is a nightmare.
Let me reiterate that I don't say this to dismiss the importance of improving that street. On the contrary, I am simply lamenting how bad things are here [0].
Nice project though, might ping you for something related :)
From another non-native speaker, the term you are looking for is "quarter". As in: a quarter of a year, as 12/4=3 months.
(as a Dutchie living in Malmö: I love Copenhagen, and I'm already happy that it's a million times better than 99% of the rest of the world. Still, it's also true that the Netherlands has a head-start of a few decades on everyone else and that it does show if you look closely)
But...for the small niche of cycling infrastructure, the top 10 list is The Netherlands in places 1 to 10, then no country in places 11 to 50, and then Denmark in place 51.
What is important to consider is that cycling infrastructure is all around great in The Netherlands everywhere. Not just in the center of Amsterdam. Industrial estates, villages in the middle of nowhere, roads through forests, popular attractions or theme parks, islands: everything is reachable by bike, usually with bike lanes that are well maintained and physically separated from the main road, and often with bicycles having right of way on roundabouts etc.
I try to frame it more like a friendly rivalry with Denmark (or more accurately, Copenhagen), since nobody else even tried to rival us until very recently. Looking forward to everyone else catching up though!
(also, I live in Sweden, making fun of the Danes is a legal requirement to be considered integrated into local society)
Case in point, I've literally cycled across the country diagonally basically using the Fietsersbond (national cycling association that advocates for this cycling infra) route planner and on mostly dedicated cycling paths.
Even proper, separated bike lanes often terminate in right turn lanes for cars (even in places where there is a lot of bikes and in places where there would be a lot of space), leading to weird situations where a car is trapped in a wall of cyclists from every side.
In practice it mostly works but I'm not surprised car ownership in the city is on the rise, because the city still prioritizes cars way too much. Copenhagen is mostly a regular city with consistent bike lanes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My parents told me later that they secretly followed me the first few times (I never noticed).
Just try to image that you live in a country that is so safe you can let small kids walk to school. Try to imagine what a society could look like if it's designed for people first, not traffic.
Ha, not in the Netherlands, but we started doing exactly the same with our 5-year old recently. She wanted to walk to a friend's house alone a few weeks ago and my wife followed her in spy-like fashion to make sure she arrived safely. We also started dropping her off a few blocks before kindergarten so that she can walk the remaining distance "alone" (again secretly followed).
Meanwhile here in Canada they attach colored ribbons on their backpacks so they won't be allowed off the bus unless an adult is there to escort them home. Watching a 10yo being escorted back and forth to the bus stop is so sad.
Personally, I blame the speed and amount of car traffic in our streets. Drivers routinely break the speed limits and oftentimes by the time they come to a stop they are already blocking the crosswalk.
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.
My daughter’s commute https://youtu.be/UWp7YiM3rzM?si=QoF4BgLEbnltcyg6
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.
FYI if you are ever biking here in NL, the thing to remember is that if the "haaientanden" point at you, watch out!, as that means you do not have the right of way.
Edit: The side roads are for cars as well, which means you have a strange turning lane in the middle of the intersection where traffic might back up. A simple roundabout seems like a much better solution here unless the goal is to keep cars moving quickly and the turn lane is rarely used.
It's literally a painted give way sign.
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....
>> 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.
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.
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.
Almost universally the following two rules hold: pedestrians walk on a raised pavement next to the road, and through roads have priority.
To compliment those existing rules, exits from side streets where pedestrians on the through road have priority include a raised hump that brings motorists up to pavement level. That emphasizes that it is the motorist who is crossing into a pedestrian area, where pedestrians have priority. The pedestrian footpath is continuous, while the car road is interrupted.
Here's a typical example of the "exit construction" with continuous footway: https://rijbewijshulp.nl/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Uitrit-7...
And an obvious added benefit is that motorists will slow down for the speed bump.
The author phrases this a bit awkwardly without really making a point. But what I think they are saying is that because the footpath isn't continuous despite the raised bump this is not a typical exit construction, and pedestrians on the through road don't have priority. Even though most motorists would yield to them anyway because of the shark's teeth on the cycle path.
I think it's debatable if the pavement is continuous or not, I would say "kinda". But either way the intersection in the article is not a "typical" example of the exit construction.
See the pictures in this article:
https://www.anwb.nl/juridisch-advies/in-het-verkeer/verkeers...
The first two examples are how it should be done. The third is similar to your link, and is ambiguous.
I've had a cyclist curse me to hell and back for taking priority on one of those raised tables as a pedestrian because the paving didn't match the sidewalk. :)
It's cheaper to maintain extra fat sidewalks and stuff than 2 more lanes of asfalct also.
4 lane roads are the worst, you can get the same effect with a 2 lane with a turn.
It really depends on how many intersection you have, having a single lane that only branches to 2 in front of an intersection can be more efficient, then constantly 2 lanes.
The US style of many lanes, many intersections, is horrible from safety and a flow perspective.
Example: https://zuidas.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/groenstrook-bee...
Being able to bike everywhere — safely, quickly, without any cultural baggage of "being one of those bicycle people" — is a total game-changer.
It's one of those things that sounds kooky to people who haven't actually experienced it. When American friends and family ask me what I love most about living here and I say "the bike infrastructure," reactions range from a polite smile to eye-rolling.
On paper it doesn't sound particularly sexy, but in reality the impact on your day-to-day life is immense. Your health, your connection to the immediate environment, your cost savings, your time/stress savings, your sense of freedom of movement.
And remember, the bike infrastructure was only built in the past 30-40 years. Before that, the Netherlands had a super car-focused infrastructure. It was only after the “stop murdering our children” political campaigns that the car focus shifted. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollan...
The things is this is not some liberal, 15 min city conspiracy. This is how life has always been…
But somehow the bullshit built in the 60s is 'the true national expression' or whatever.
Arguably you technically do have that cultural baggage, it's just that it's a core part of the Dutch national identity so it doesn't stand out ;)
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.
Am I blind or does it only work for just one or maybe two cars?
This specific turn is onto a street that the article describes as "traffic volume here is low, since only residents will use this street." They probably expect the 1-car buffer to be enough for this intersection. You can see in the video that the 1-car buffer is empty most of the time.
For intersections where they expect more turning traffic (where the one car buffer wouldn't be enough), they add turning lanes that can accomodate more than one car. You can see an example of this a few hundred meters northeast when Graafseweg intersects the Van Grobbendocklaan: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZmURqawr3oeBX5Sq9
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
-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.
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.
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).
after being here for 2y, holy shit it's true. one dutch coworker said "we just eat for fuel, not for taste".
thankfully it's quite easy to buy amazing ingredients and just do really tasty home meals.
> (don't complain about our pannenkoeken or stroopwafels though, unless you're looking for a fight).
i would also say dutch bar/finger food is delicious. it's impossible not to have bitterballen while having a beer.
(although technically bitterballen and kroketten are local variations of the croquette, which originated from France[0], so even there we can't quite claim originality, haha)
But being more like the Italians or French in terms of food would mean being more like the Italians or French...
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.
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.
Separately, a national project, Busconnects, is putting in its own bike lanes. Some of these are... interesting: https://irishcycle.com/2023/03/23/busconnects-approach-to-cy...
Of course, it doesn't help that the UK seems to keep producing highly aggressive drivers that want to punish cyclists that dare to use the public roads.
https://www.cycling-embassy.org.uk/blog/2013/07/03/how-does-...
OTOH I did wonder how feasible it is to transfer such a well-designed system to UK towns and cities where it seems like available space would be too cramped to recreate all those nice features though
Based on where I have been, I guess the big difference is that the Dutch allocate continuous space to bikes and the British have a patchwork of bike space and parked cars.
The Dutch use of space seems more effective, the space they use for bikes is connected, rather than unconnected/ineffective bits.
But note that on the first photo, you see four streets meeting at an intersection, that's eight sides, and there are cars parked on only two of the eight. Look at the the next intersection you pass on the way somewhere and compare the number of sides with parking space with that "two".
First we have to understand that, all things being equal, cars "win" by default on the roads. They are bigger, heavier, faster and more powerful (thanks to burning fossil fuels), and the operators are more reckless and inconsiderate due to being shielded from the outside world. That means their presence on the roads automatically makes it more dangerous and unpleasant for everyone else.
Second notice that primary routes are always designed for cars first. Every two places has a primary route connecting it. Depending on the importance of the route that route will have some level of protection against things like flooding, subsidence etc. and also be generally higher quality. That primary route is always for cars. Due to the above, that generally makes it undesirable or often practically unavailable for non-motorised traffic. See, for example, dual carriageways. Technically everyone has a right to use them by any means (they have paid for it, after all), but you'd be crazy to walk/cycle down one.
Third notice that cars are basically untouchable. It's considered a perfectly acceptable and normal part of driving to put people's lives in danger by driving too close and too fast etc. But nobody dares touch a car. They have the capability of killing or seriously injuring people, but people don't have the capability of killing them (the cars). The police will laugh at you if you report a car driving too closely. But scratching a car or something? Police will be on your case. Basically, we value metal boxes on wheels more than people's bodies.
Fourth notice that every part of the road network is designed to make it easier for cars at the detriment of pedestrians and cyclists. Why does a pedestrian need to press a button to cross the road? Why, upon pressing the button, must the pedestrian wait to cross? Why doesn't the light cycle start immediately? There is absolutely no sense at all in making the pedestrian wait. But everyone is used to it and doesn't question it; it's just the way it is. But what it does is makes being a pedestrian a third class status. It's these little things, like having to sit at the back of the bus, that chip away at people's ability to feel like an equal member of society. If you walk or cycle you are under no illusion that you come second to cars. It's little wonder people choose the car if they can.
I regularly cycle along the dual carriageway part of the A370. Whilst I get that it can be unnerving for most cyclists, dual carriageways are well designed for cycling along as they typically have great visibility (drivers can see you from a distance) and there's a whole lane for drivers to overtake safely.
> Fourth notice that every part of the road network is designed to make it easier for cars at the detriment of pedestrians and cyclists. Why does a pedestrian need to press a button to cross the road? Why, upon pressing the button, must the pedestrian wait to cross? Why doesn't the light cycle start immediately? There is absolutely no sense at all in making the pedestrian wait. But everyone is used to it and doesn't question it; it's just the way it is. But what it does is makes being a pedestrian a third class status. It's these little things, like having to sit at the back of the bus, that chip away at people's ability to feel like an equal member of society. If you walk or cycle you are under no illusion that you come second to cars. It's little wonder people choose the car if they can.
I think a big part of the problem is that politicians are heavily influenced by car/oil lobbyists. What we need are brave politicians that are forward looking and have a vision.
By the way, I like to refer to the pedestrian crossing buttons as "beg buttons".
But do they actually use it? Last time I biked on a dual carriageway I had cars and lorries passing at 60+mph with a centimetre gap. I've given up cycling for the most part as I disliked basically every ride feeling like it was almost my last.
I run forwards and rear cameras so that I can report dangerous/close passes. Strangely enough, I've had more issues with driver aggression (e.g. horn sounding) along the A370 than I've had with close passes. Of course, I've reported a fair few close passes in other areas (Avon & Somerset Police seem to be one of the few pro-active forces when it comes to dealing with video submissions).
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.
(For the car that I also own, to be clear)
I wonder if you've thought about the logical conclusion of your "ideas" when applied to electric vehicles? They don't pay VED (emmissions tax, which is often referred to as "road tax" by idiots) and they don't pay fuel tax, so what are they doing on "your" public roads?
Most cyclists in the US also have cars, and are paying for license, registration, and insurance. Higher insurance rates are necessary because cars get in more crashes.
Meanwhile, bikes take up less space and do negligible damage to roads, and to other things like vehicles and stationary objects.
A more useful model is that we all pay to subsidize heavy trucking.
But also, each person paying for goodies that they don't use but someone else does, is kind of how a modern society works. It would be vastly more expensive to administer a society in which each person is charged a fee in precise proportion to the facilities and services that they use. Maybe in the future with AI.
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?
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.
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.
Moreover, bike paths are usually built on only one side of the road as a two-way path. It's dangerous for everybody involved, especially when a car has to stop and give way to both sides (spoiler: cars don't do it).
Everything makes biking on a bike path a slower and horrible experience, so nobody uses bike paths and then a vicious circle ensues.
We should all learn from the Ducth and the Danes.
Naples is almost a perfect example of how to cram in cars into the smallest possible streets and a lot of the streets have to have metal bollards to provide some kind of protection for the pedestrians from the cars and mopeds.
Milan, Ferrara, Bolzano, Modena, Bologna are just some Northern cities where cycling is encouraged and I can see them trying to get a better infrastructure; but unfortunately there's still a long way to go.
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.
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.
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
After a few weeks people just learn to be mindful of bicycles and bicycle lanes as they are normally mindful of roads. In particular, one learns to never change direction suddenly (crossing a bike lane, but also on a shared road) but to stop first and check behind their back for potential cyclists.
it's effectively another road - with the same dangers as a car-road. But it's just some painted asphalt
NL always goes for the transit stops that poke out like you mention as well when possible.
> Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars
As far as I'm aware, more or less everywhere, both the frequency & severity of bicycle vs pedestrian crashes is much lower than bicycle vs car crashes. Do you have any statistics that say otherwise?
I think in terms of deaths, the most dangerous issue is getting t-boned at an intersection by a car going fast through the intersection. I'm not sure how either setup really addresses that. You need to decrease overall traffic speed somehow. Chinese do this with speed cameras everywhere and electric scooters being much slower than gas powered ones (which are illegal most places now)
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.
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.
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
I guess it takes some getting used to, or maybe the Dutch simply avoid walking and take the bike instead.
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.
Source ? Here's mine: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2024/15/684-road-traffic-death...
1199 cyclists killed in 4 years, 658 of these being from collisions with various motor vehicles. 262 pedestrians killed in 4 years, 11 of these being from collisions with bicycles. Before any "oh but there's few deaths but more accidents it's still unsafe": no, it is not.
I know your username sets high expectations, but stop bullshitting and look at facts.
Well, most European countries have a relatively simple solution for that ;)
Driving lessons for me consisted for 80% of learning how to ALWAYS ALWAYS track all the cyclists and pedestrians in urban environments, how to approach an intersection and have complete visual on whatever the weaker parties might be doing. A very defensive "assume weird shit can happen any time, and don't assume you can just take your right of way" attitude, and I think our cities are better for it.
In America, it seems that a pedestrian is a second rate cititzen. Conversely, here if you hit the "weaker" party as a driver and it's almost always on you in terms of liability.
(for some reason this always is controversial with a lot of Americans whenever it is brought up in on-line discussions)
Because a car is essential for economic survival in the USA, it's probably difficult for some to accept alternate realities from the status quo.
Where I live, today's high temperature is lower than the low temperature in Amsterdam.
In August the average low temperature is higher than the average high temperature in Amsterdam.
Nobody, not even the hardiest Dutchman is going to walk or cycle when it is 27C at midnight in the summer and 0C at the warmest in the winter with four months of "Amsterdam weather" sprinkled between summer and winter.
Plus there's geography. My house is 21m above sea level, 3m higher than the highest point in Amsterdam, and I live 500m from the sea at the very beginning of the rollercoaster of hills and valleys the glaciers carved into the landscape here.
To walk or cycle to a store would require several Col du Tourmalet-class hill climbs (that's only a slight exaggeration) along the route.
Everywhere south of me is hotter, everywhere north of me is hillier.
https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-8pl51/Amsterdam/
Compare Amsterdam to DC a well-known "swamp" in the US that most people would consider one of its flatter cities.
https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-kfds8/Washington/
Don't be thrown off by the scale: yellow in Amsterdam (of which there is none) is 25m and yellow in DC (of which there is much) is 78m.
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.
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?
https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/u-s-cities-with-th...
People have little situational awareness anyway, but perhaps a bit moreso when they are Dutch.
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.
America Has No Transportation Engineers
https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/america-has-no-transporta...
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!
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.
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.
