Hacker News Reader

Comment by sinieovercosie | Hacker News Reader

But you can't expect every road to have a dedicated bike lane, right?

In Copenhagen or Amsterdam that's just the case. (Not literally every road, they don't have bike lanes in residential areas, but almost every major road with significant traffic has a bike lane in these cities.)

Not just Amsterdam, the whole of the Netherlands is like that. But more than that, there is the cultural aspect that cyclists and pedestrians are the number 1 priority on the road, then cars. None of these fancy hi-tech solutions work if the drivers don't care, and the laws don't protect cyclists.

Of course you can. Unless it's low-traffic enough that it's not needed, every road here has a dedicated bike lane, and usually it's a separate path. I think it's a legal requirement to do so.

This product feels like attempting to put a technological band-aid over a poor infrastructure planning problem.

>> But you can't expect every road to have a dedicated bike lane, right?

> Of course you can.

The road has to be wide enough to accommodate a bike lane. The absolute minimum width for a bike lane is 4 feet (not including the gutter adjoining the curb).

In my town, they recently restriped a 4 lane road with a concrete raised median and sidewalks on both sides to include bike lanes. They basically narrowed the 2 general purpose traffic lanes from 12 feet to 10 feet in width and added a 4 foot wide bike lane.

With the bike lane, if my bike with a 3 foot wide trailer is centered in the bike lane, I have about 0.5 feet to each side of me. A car with a mirror span of 7.5 feet centered in the 10 foot wide general purpose lane has about 1.25 feet on each side. 1.25 + 0.5 = 1.75 feet of clearance between a car in the right lane and a cyclist in the bike lane.

With the old configuration, a cyclist centered in the 12 foot wide general purpose traffic lane would have 4.5 feet of space on each side. A car centered in the lane would have 2.25 feet of space on each side. 4.5 + 2.25 = 6.75 feet of space between the car in the left lane and a cyclist in the right lane.

In that case, having a bike lane substantially decreased the possible passing distance between cars and bicycles. If they wanted to add the bike lane, then the road should have been at least 2 to 3 feet wider than it is now.

> every road here has a dedicated bike lane, and usually it's a separate path.

Those lead to issues at intersections where turning vehicles or vehicles entering the road may not see you in time when you're crossing.

I mean, you can say it doesn't work all you like, but the reality is that it does, and there is concrete (well, asphalt) evidence right outside my window and all over the rest of the city and country that it works and works well. It just requires the will to design things properly.

Separated paths improve safety, they don't cause issues at intersections that I've noticed (and I've been biking through them every days for years), probably because things were designed well to account for this. It's one of those situations where good design becomes mostly invisible so it's hard to spot.

> I mean, you can say it doesn't work all you like, but the reality is that it does

Not really. This document describes the crashes involving cyclists in a bidirectional separated bike path[1] which for a couple of years was having close to one crash per month.

Here's an example[2] of a drive-out collision.

Here's an example[3] of a right-hook near miss.

Here's an example[4] of a left-cross collision.

[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o9UFZiSnBUOYsCBeY-nhnxboQgF...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k6-AI_X1qE

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Yea-yFRGHg

[4] https://vimeo.com/32887898

That looks to my mostly uneducated eye like a badly designed intersection. You can't just slap a cycle lane (especially two-way) in and expect it to work, that's a poor solution.

Compare to here, https://goo.gl/maps/F1mufzKACT3XpDZa6, just as a fairly random example. You see that the car traffic is forced, via traffic calming (i.e. the raised footpath) to slow, has obvious lower priority than bikes and pedestrians, and can't really proceed without being strongly encouraged to look first. A couple more interesting samples at the bottom that are designed with safety in mind, and in my experience work well.

Taking an existing road, slapping a bike line on one side, and calling it a useful test is not really effective. This is why I mentioned design is important.

What is interesting from your PDF (which I just skimmed, so don't know if it's representative) is that the number of people cycling increased, so it looks like people felt it was safer even if it really wasn't. I suspect that if you managed to get that up to real numbers of people cycling, then drivers would naturally become a lot more aware also.

* https://goo.gl/maps/DLHUVjadJcM2y8tG7 - light controlled, bikes tend to sit slightly forward of the cars in order to be visible.

* https://goo.gl/maps/bhLYgqiVBccnq2i27 - roundabout with (in order of priority) trams, bikes, busses/cars

Why not? It doesn’t have to happen overnight but can be a gradual thing. Other cities have managed it.

Pretty much, except for small residential (or city centre) roads.

A dashed blue edge to the road means a lane separated by a kerb from cars and pedestrians. A solid blue edge means a line of paint on the road. There are also off-road paths with dashed, blue lines.

The thick, translucent lines are just signed, long-distance routes; they are likely to be mostly good, but not necessarily.

https://osm.org/go/0H54ISC?layers=C (Odense, a town in Denmark, just to show it isn't only Copenhagen.)

In some (few) places in the world that's already the case. Pretty great for getting around and safe.

Yes you can. In fact you should demand it. Our survival as a species depends upon it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com