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Comment by lucidguppy | Hacker News Reader

There really needs to be a 2nd grid of roads to handle scooters, bikes, and pedestrians. Bikes and scooters should be allies not competitors.

It's the car that is the competitor - you have to maintain roads much more, you have to build large parking garages, global warming is an issue, you push people away from where they work, you have loss of exercise and rising obesity.

Sure it might not work in wintertime - but biking/scooting can surely put a dent in IC engine transportation for two or three seasons.

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> There really needs to be a 2nd grid of roads to handle scooters, bikes, and pedestrians. Bikes and scooters should be allies not competitors.

Pedestrians already have their 2nd grid of roads, it's called the sidewalk. Problem is that bikes also don't fit there, so basically they need a 3rd set of roads.

If we get rid of the cars, there's plenty of room.

I'd rather drive a car in this weather https://i.imgur.com/i5oLpec.jpg

You’ve clearly never lived anywhere that only occasionally gets snow. Driving a car in that weather is fender-bender city because most people have no clue how to drive with any kind of precipitation.

Even more reason to drive a car vs. a scooter / bike.

...and you'd rather be in a 15 mph scooter fender bender than a 15 mph car fender bender?

I'd rather stay home in that weather ;)

Still better on a bike :)

Jeep Wrangler?

Copenhagen has it. So do many cities in the Netherlands. It's great. There's the road for cars, a small curb, a lane for bikes, a small curb, and the sidewalk.

It's more than that. Denmark and the Netherlands have bike lanes all over the countries. Basically everywhere. It's weird when you can't find the bike lane. But Denmark and the Netherlands are also flat like pancakes and therefore just super bike friendly from the get go. So that might be a big reason why people were in favor of making bike lanes in the first place.

That 3rd set exists and functions fine in... Waterloo/Cedar Falls, IA, of all places.

When they took down the passenger rail way back in the day, they replaced the network with hiking/biking trails.

And in the winter, you have a cross-city skiing network.

Granted, there's plenty of space around those corn fields, but something tells me that if Cedarloo can pull it off, the richer cities can, too.

That 3rd set exists and functions fine in... Waterloo/Cedar Falls, IA, of all places.

Is it flat like Copenhagen?

It's not hilly.

In any case, the trails were laid over a former rail track, so the trails are very flat[1] - never steeper than 2% grade.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedar_Valley_Trail

Electric assistance on a bike makes every city flat.

Don't forget about buses, they need their own road section too!

In London there are special lanes for buses. There are fines for using them at certain times of the day if you are in a private vehicle (there are fixed cameras, and cameras in the busses too). Cyclists are free to use them

Pics: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=london+bus+lanes&source=ln...:

Inner city Bus lanes should naturally double as bicycle lanes, as they are in Paris.

Have you used them? Bicycles and buses aren't a great combination. Passing and being passed is not so pleasant. I think bus/bike lanes were put together for lack of space, and not because it's a natiral or fabulous solution.

It's ok if the bus lanes are mostly travel lanes (ok, not great, there's a pretty strong speed mismatch between bus speed and casual cyclist), but it falls down when it's an area with lots of stops. It can be wall to wall busses in some places in Dublin (quays) where many bus lines meet and there are literally continuous stops for several blocks.

Won't those be empty 99% of the time? Sounds wasteful.

You may have missed the recent article that made the front page about buses. But the idea is, if you put them in dedicated center lanes, provide civilian walk paths over the street, and give them priority over other vehicle traffic, then people treat them more like subways. Several cities in Latin America do this, the one I'm familiar with and used was TransMilenio in Bogota.

Of course, at this point, you might as well use streetcars. But I think buses are still cheaper at that point.

I did miss the article! Do you happen to have a link? Search for "buses" finds two articles from the past month, but I don't see the reference to that idea.

EDIT: Nevermind, this is it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17034100

It’s also easier to change a bus route than a streetcar route

No more wasteful than the passenger cars which clog the roads and are only 17-25% occupied.

No argument there, but "no more wasteful than [very wasteful thing]" is not great :)

I'm just wondering if a better use of the street could be achieved; that doesn't have to mean cars. What about a bus + moped lane? Electric mopeds seem like a pretty good alternative for people who need something faster than a scooter, and having ridden a bicycle in Amsterdam, where mopeds could use the bicycle lane, I can tell you they don't belong there!

Yes, Switzerland where everything is small doesn't often have space for separate bus lanes.

They use a trick: where the bus lane merges they have a traffic light. Cars have to wait for the bus -- literally -- and are only allowed to merge behind the bus. When the bus stops there are street baffles preventing the cars overtaking the bus. This way the bus has a free lane ahead. And the cars would have needed to wait in the traffic jam anyway, so why not let them wait intelligently behind buses?

Empty 99% of the time - no, they are generally used in busy areas of larger cities where multiple bus-lines overlap (at least that goes for Copenhagen)

They can also be used by taxis and other utility vehicles (e.g. the police) like here in Germany, but yes - it's a bit wasteful. This is why they only build them where there's space.

In the Netherlands this already exists in most places: A car lane, a large, separate cycle lane and a smaller pedestrian lane

example https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pAL4yr927e4/maxresdefault.jpg

Unfortunately for e-scooters and other novel vehicles, the government agency in the Netherlands that handles vehicle certification (RDW) is notoriously bureaucratic. By default any new type of vehicle is forbidden to use on public roads until they certified it. On several occasions, e-scooter owners had their vehicle impounded and in one case even scrapped. Which is a real shame, as the infrastructure is perfect.

Whenever i come back from the Netherlands to the UK, i get slightly depressed as I cycle to work, on bumpy, dangerous pot holed roads

Cars as they are today are certainly competitors, and noxious gasses are a problem too. But imagine if we saw a shift to much more compact, low-emission vehicles. Sharing the road with a bunch of these would be much less scary than the huge single-occupant vehicles we have now: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/the-eli-zero-might-make...

Put on skiing gear and you can do it in winter too. Works great.

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