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Comment by armada651 | Hacker News Reader

The 'Dutch Reach' isn't universally taught drivers in the Netherlands, I'm Dutch and I've never heard of it before. Though everyone is taught about the dangers of opening your car door without looking.

What's keeping cycling deaths low in the Netherlands is simply keeping cyclists off the road and putting them on separate bicycle paths.

The article links to an article with this video: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2016/dec/15/trans...

The traffic situation for cyclists in that video is what we would refer to here as a death trap. It's a busy road with not even a bicycle lane marked on the road. In the Netherlands you would either get off your bike and walk or risk a fine and cycle on the sidewalk.

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I have a driving theory book in front of me at the moment. It does actually teach you to open the door with the right hand:

https://i.imgur.com/9Aq9WQN.jpg

Though it isn't mentioned further, and there's no explanation given.

Indeed, I don't think that particular video was a good choice for the article. Too many people will notice that the cyclist who got doored, and the one with the camera, were passing improperly.

What is the correct way, on that road?

The cycle lane resumes a hundred metres beyond the collision point.

That's a good question. It looked to me like there was simply no cycle lane before the collision point. If there's no cycle lane, then for better or worse, the default is to do what you'd do in a car: Wait behind the red bus.

If they were actually in a cycle lane, then of course the correct thing to do would be to ride in it. Either way, nobody deserves to get doored, and if it were me in the car, I'd have been extremely cautious about getting out.

I have to flip the picture left-to-right in my mind, to get a sense of it. Where those cyclists were riding, a narrow slot at the edge of a lane, is possibly near the top of my list of situations to avoid. Buses make me even more nervous. I'd have hopped up onto the sidewalk, or found a different route. Of course that's easy to say, not knowing if there are even any alternatives.

The video starts at [1], going north along Abingdon Street, though the Streetview car was driving in the other direction.

In central London, there's simply no other reasonable option to cycling past stationary traffic if you wish to proceed by bicycle. I've looked up the rules, and it's neither recommended nor forbidden, and both drivers and cyclists are advised to be cautious.

There's also no other practical route, since the cyclist was probably heading to (or from) a bridge over the Thames.

At this location, it seems the problem is the anti-terrorism barriers. The traffic engineers should have insisted that the road be closed to motor traffic when they were installed, but it was probably long enough ago that only motor vehicles were considered. Closing the south and east sides of Parliament Square (just ahead), and this road, would be great.

[1] https://www.google.dk/maps/@51.4987954,-0.1258692,3a,60y,350...

Ah, thanks for the context. It looks like a pretty bad situation all around.

In the Netherlands, you wouldn't have converted the once-beautiful "garden" outside your national parliament building into a five-lave gyratory system[1].

Khan has promised to pedestrianize it [2], and that seems more likely to actually happen after the terrorist attack.

There were plans to pedestrianize it a decade ago, but Boris Johnstone cancelled them as soon as he became mayor in 2008.

[1] https://www.google.dk/maps/@51.5005545,-0.1264029,143m/data=...

[2] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/mayor/sadiq-khan-i-ll-make-p...

https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/motorway-remov...

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