Something special is happening in Barcelona
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A role model implementation as far reducing car traffic issues go. Many people use these electro kind skateboards(forgot name) and scooters. And many people just walk. Of course , it needs to be mentioned that Barcelona is not built like American suburb areas, it's all apartment blocks of 3-7 stories, all blocks glued together. It's tight, they even have a convention on how to dry your clothes on balconies and how not to do it. Barcelona has many other issues, the typical ones for large cities, but transport and car traffic, I haven't seen better in Europe.
Only in some streets. Many streets don't have cycle lanes. Or only in one direction, and it's not really clear where to find one in the direction you're going. It's a bit of maze trying to figure it out and in the end you just end up in between the cars..
The crossings aren't that safe either because turning traffic doesn't have their own green timeslot, they're supposed to turn when straight gets green but give way to crossing traffic. But drivers often don't check very well, I often see near misses.
Coming from the Netherlands the bicycle lanes there are really much better with their dedicated green lights, lanes everywhere (almost always in both directions) and separate crossings. They're also better marked and uninterrupted (in some barcelona streets they suddenly just stop or move to another side without clear indication). I definitely don't feel safe cycling in Barcelona. I mainly walk here and take the metro.
I hope the bicycle network will improve going forward as cars are excluded from the city more. They make a good effort so far but it's definitely not great :)
The area is just highly constrained by the canals and even as a car driver it's a nightmare to go there. It's a maze of one-way streets, closures and blocks etc. Not representative of a typical Dutch city at all. Nor comparable to Barcelona which has wide streets (ciutad vella etc excluded of course)
All other Dutch cities are very different (except perhaps for a tiny area in the center). Much more boring too though. Mostly new buildings.
But don't consider Amsterdam (the centre at least) as a measure for the rest of the Netherlands, they're very different things :)
Before the bike lanes were common, you had to cut your teeth zipping between the cars in the narrow roads, keeping up with traffic speeds, annoying every driver who gave you an inch, terrifying bewildered tourists, and watching your face get smashed by door after door after door.
When the cycle lanes were rolled out, things became much safer between bikes and cars, but now all bikes are herded together and you experience a bike lane traffic as Mr Expensive Latex seems to have no idea how to pull over to let others pass whilst he's busy clicking in his shoes.
It's very safe now. I kind of miss the mad chaos London used to be when cycling, when only the dumb and the brave dared to battle the busses. When you'd get to work pumped with the adrenaline and the knowledge that you survived the journey
I didn't even experience that and I miss it! Years ago, I watched some TV programme where the protagonist tried to cycle through central London and had multiple terrifying near-misses.
Then I moved there, went for a bike ride and was thinking "what are they on about? there's not _that_ much traffic on the road, there's tons of cyclists, all the buses are pretty cautious, and there's cycle lanes everywhere!"
That's a bit like soldiers missing the war period. You damn adrenaline junkies...
Should Barcelona learn from the Netherlands? Yes.
Should Barcelona be blamed for not being as good as The Netherlands? No.
A friend of mine works there as security and after all the stories he told me I rather get in a car and deal with the traffic.
And I'm saying this as someone who uses the subway to commute but in a safer city. I literally get in, close my eyes and open them after 20 minutes.
Personally public transport in Barcelona felt safer than the equivalent in most major North American cities. For example there’s what I believe is a bullet hole in the glass at one of the stations I frequently use — and I know for a fact that several people have been shot dead directly outside that station.
They got me once and I've busted them trying a couple of times. Whenever you grab them they always just drop the phone or wallet and walk off, they never fight. But I did notice they always work in groups so they probably do attack if you get violent yourself.
It feels less safe than London, I have lived in 3 not so good boroughs in London.
Barcelona is really not bad at all for violent crime :)
There's some places that really are a bit unsafe but it's more out. Like La Mina, there's been some shootings there recently: https://www.lavanguardia.com/sucesos/20210908/7706383/tirote... (Though technically that's not Barcelona anymore but Sant Adria de Besos)
As far as the general sense of unease goes, Barcelona takes the first place. Some people there are outright creepy. I generally like the city, but I would not dare venture into the old centre's small alleys after dark.
Also, pickpockets. All touristy places have them, but Barcelona, man...
Shame, because the city is otherwise a jewel.
Btw , I fully agree that the particular rambla de Raval Is tacky, overpriced and the food is just bad. The places on the beach are much better. Ah, now thinking about it, kinda miss the city, it has many good parts and things.
It's seemed very far from the "ideals" of say this channel's opinions on cities designed to be "anti-car"
Most cities I know have Park & Ride facilities at the outskirts near ring roads. Barcelona doesn't seem to have these (though perhaps I'm missing them as I don't own a car).
But I know my colleagues who come from outside are always struggling to find a parking spot, and they tell me there is no P&R.
Park & Ride is something that rarely makes economic sense. If you have a location with good public transport connections to the city, you probably want to build housing there. Alternate uses of the land – and parking in particular – are less valuable. Because people don't want to pay the market price for the land for parking, Park & Ride only works with heavy subsidies. The subsidies are usually implicit and implemented via zoning regulations, because taxpayers would revolt instantly against explicit subsidies.
It does work for tourists and other occasional visitors, but then the challenge is to make them aware it is an option when they plan the trip.
But then do nothing else! You have to find an alternative for people to not take their car (closer grocery shop for instance).
Meanwhile the money goes to some pension fund for underperforming, unionized municipal workers...
But if I had kids I wouldn't really let them participate. Even with the police escort, they might lose the group and be on their own in this busy city.
I'm from near Amsterdam myself and there cyclists are the kinds of the road. Here it's very different.
The mayor is very green and she's trying to pedestrianise a lot, but it's limited to a few lane closures and a handful of "superilla" test blocks. I think there is a lot of resistance to it. I really support her efforts but sadly she doesn't seem to be that popular. She also tried to clean up an area near the seafront with seedy nightclubs and casinos but got a lot of flak for that. I often see graffiti blaming her for stuff :(
At what age would you be comfortable with them biking on their own?
It also depends on the area. If they'd just cycle to school in a quiet area it'd be ok more easily than if they have to cross roads like Passeig de Gracia, Arago or Gran Via, or some of the busier Rondas of course.
I rarely cycle here anyway. I mainly walk, I don't feel safe enough cycling. There's some cycle lanes but not in every street, and often not well connected, or they suddenly jump to another side (the ones on Diagonal tend to do this), mix with pedestrians etc.
Don't underestimate the resourcefulness of kids - in many ways, Goonies was a documentary ;)
I would have been comfortable with my kids doing something like this at 7 years of age. I recently had to chaperone on a schoolbus for a week - the 5 and 6 yo are still "small" and easily scared, but from 7 up they are basically fearless balls of energy.
Sadly, as society, we don't give kids the level of independence they deserve, because we've been shocked and somewhat indoctrinated by 50 years of newscycle scaremongering. We expect every kid to end up like James Bulger if we let them roam - except statistically there will be one Bulger in millions, maybe billions, of kids. When I think of what I could do at the age my kids are now, I feel like I've let them down - but if I'd done anything differently, I would have had social services on my ass.
Also, she is leading the highest amount of council driven evictions, which does not help either. (for context she reached office on her first time thanks to the anti eviction associations.)
She is green, yes.
But she is over promising and under delivering.
I'm still a big fan of her :)
Also you make it sound like Valls was a fringe far-right nutjob, when C's has two major parties to its right in the political spectrum, and Valls himself left because the party was steering rightwards too much to his liking.
I'm a left-wing voter but honestly these ultra-partisan, polarizing views are a scourge that poisons politics.
It was called "Cycle Pods", which would be mini-critical mass rides for commuters. You'd probably need between five and ten riders who cycle the same route each day at a roughly similar pace, so you could register with a route and see whose rides were similar to yours.
The other idea was even more loose, where you'd wear something like a tabard with an identifiable "cycle pods" logo where anyone who was wearing one was effectively advertising that they were open to riding with other people. I preferred this version because it's simpler and decentralised. Anyone could make something with the logo on it, so no purchase or registration needed.
I love the idea of doing it with kids, but honestly some of the reactions we got from car and van drivers with the Critical Mass rides, even when we were going at a decent pace, were incredibly dangerous, and I'd worry about that with kids unless the police were involved, as they were in this Bicibús. We had to have outriders looking out for car drivers who'd try to drive into the middle of the mass. There's something about cyclists taking over the road that really provokes some drivers.
Every critical mass ride I've ever seen blatantly ignores traffic laws, particularly running red lights. I say this as an avid cyclist and bike commuter: drivers are right to be pissed at them (but not to do something dangerous).
Critical Mass is a bit like Reclaim The Streets - it's partly trying to make the point that cycling infrastructure in cities is generally complete rubbish, and one of the few ways people actually feel safe when cycling is to take over the whole road. People driving cars have this luxury every single day, and if they can't take a small inconvenience like waiting for a mass to pass, which often just means something like missing one set of lights, then quite frankly I'm happy to piss a few people off in the name of making a point.
I know it alientates some drivers, but to be honest I very much doubt those people would be persuaded by any rational arguments anyway, and I do know that a decent number of people who watch the mass go past are inspired by it.
That old Goofy cartoon about drivers losing their minds as soon as they get behind the wheel is completely accurate for the great majority of American drivers. We simply should not allow cars in our cities. I fear that American and its cities are going to be left far behind as global cities rapidly realize this and we're still bulldozing neighborhoods for new freeways. Many cities abroad are already way nicer than all American cities, and they are accelerating away from us. It's sad.
Here's the wiki: http://youcantalktome.net
And here's some pictures of stickers we printed out and handed out: http://youcantalktome.net/pmwiki.php?n=Main.Vorlagen
It got so big that at one point the city decided to close some of the main roads every Sunday, making them exclusive to pedestrians, bicycles, scooters, or whatever-thing-that-is-not-a-car.
Eventually it got quite large, i.e. thousands of people on each gathering, and it became some sort of peaceful rally that happened every week. In the end, the govt. had no choice but to concede them certain things like ciclovías, cycling roads, legislation, etc.
I lived in the city for a while and let me tell you, it is AMAZING to have all that much space just for walking around, talking, having coffee, whatever, even if it's only for one day a week.
I want to emphasize on the scale and impact of said project, it is ~30 km of roads that are completely closed for cars for the whole day. The roads that close are (check this out!) the most important ones, running through the middle of the city. At the beginning, people were worried that this would have some negative effect as, you know, the main roads would be completely closed; but today, a decade later, there have been zero negative consequences for that. Most people that live nearby just run their errands walking because they know they can't use their car anyway. Cars are not as important as people seem to believe and I would argue that they're more harmful as a whole than if they weren't there at all.
I am super thrilled about projects like -> https://culdesac.com/, hopefully I can retire to a place like that.
Otherwise the story is just "kids go to school on bike".
On the way home though, if we optimise for connectedness by being willing to stop and pick up litter on the way, the whole city will be clean!
This idea didn't actually came from me. It was UncleBob - Expecting Professionalism that our wonderful manager Michael chose at work on 2021-08-09. I bike to and from work every day, so decided to apply the "clean as you go" philosophy to every area of life, to love my neighbours the trees, birds, eels, snails. And it's brought a lot of "thank you"s, which multiplied happiness :)
A possible suggestion is to change our metric for success from financial gain to connectedness.
For city planning, like everything else, that could be achieved using a Sierpiński triangle: lots of space in the middle (with walking & bike paths) and high-density on 3 sides. Are there any SimCity players here who could simulate this for us?
Whether the city is willing to re-zone accordingly is the bigger question. I pray that San Francisco's leaders will re-zone before the earthquake does it for us.
I can say from experience in NYC: Central Park is nice, but one giant park for a large chunk of manhattan is not ideal. Works fine for UES/UWS, who have other park options on the island coast. But the section down near Midtown is miserable. And “parks” in the rest of the borough often don’t even have accessible grass (it’s fenced off, as if it was a garden or something).
There are problems in my current city, Denver, as well. But parks are very pleasantly pockmarked around the city to give residents options. Now if only they’d close off the biggest park to car traffic…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOifuHs6eY
We need parks, not car parks! Rather getting zapped on power lines or pooping on cars, the birds can have branches to sit in and flower beds to fertilise.
6000cars/km² in Barcelona.
San Francisco/Oakland metropolitan area has 4000/sq mi... 1540/km²
Guttenberg, NJ has the highest in the US with 20,600/sq mi (8000/km²)
Source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.planetizen.com/node/45622%3...
Population density is correlated with car density up to a certain point.
Where are you getting that number? Wikipedia has 7,194/km².
As explained the followup tweets: By extending the route to cover multiple schools, with fixed arrival times at each destination, people can join and leave the "bike bus" as it passes through. Even regular business commuters are joining the bike bus.
I love it.
Having children do it does decrease the chance of being broken up for obstructing cars.
The intent of the infrastructure is to move people, cars and other motorized vehicles hijacked it and excluded other users.
And to claim that cyclists are violent towards drivers is the pinnacle of absurdity. Drivers using their 2 tonne heavy machinery as a weapon, driving towards people, and then you blame the victims for tapping on the bonnet of the aggressors weapon.
If roads were built for those cars, one can't claim they hijack it when that's what it's for.
We can argue it shouldn't have been built that way, but given that it was (in the US anyway), there's no hijacking involved in using it as designed.
Critical Mass cyclist attacks car with U-lock in San Francisco https://www.kron4.com/news/critical-mass-cyclist-attacks-car...
Minivan's rude introduction to Critical Smash https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Minivan-s...
A Toyota mini van sits in a repair shop in Mountain View with a broken back window and numerous scratches to the body. The van was attacked by critical mass riders last friday. At the time of the attack a woman and five kids were in the car.
And one from 2015 where the driver endangered the cyclists "then a driver of a Zipcar moves toward the cyclists."
In Vancouver, we were having a great ride through the city. We may have been delaying traffic a bit, but that's fine. Then they decided to ride up the Lions Gate Bridge (the main artery in and out of the city) and stop all traffic going in both directions for about 10-15 minutes.
The friends I was with all agreed we wouldn't participate again because of those actions.
Edit: I was not disappointed.
They don't care about my health? I don't care about them being late to work.
It doesn't matter that they personally are good/bad/green/egoist/selfish/selfless/saints. The problem is that they are short sighted, and don't even try to move the set-point of the traffic situation.
When I drive I hate everything and everyone, it's miserable. Nowhere to park, no one can drive, everyone is slow, everyone is in a rush...
But of course some people doesn't have such a strong emotional response to the situation, or they have a very strong response to mass transit...
I wish I lived in a more bike friendly area. Here that would result in people being honked at and cars impatiently passing them at high speeds.
Edit: that’s still a thing! https://pedibus.ch/
Cities should serve people, not cars.
> Secondly, raised lanes are horrendously expensive, ugly, and reduce street level light.
Having bikes in roads is expensive too. It costs everyone time, which is money. Ugly is subjective. And as for street level light - maybe. That depends on the exact parameters like road width. On a wider arterial road a raised greenway on pillars wouldn’t cast a shadow on the street level sidewalks. Chicago has an elevated rail system for example, and it doesn’t cause streets to feel dark.
> Cities should serve people, not cars.
Respectfully, this is an empty slogan. You could just as well say “cities should serve people, not bikes”. Cities serve people better by accommodating cars. People are who chose to raise taxes and spend money on roads for cars.
This seems like nonsense. Surely public transport has more capacity than cars, or at least it is not guaranteed that cars have more.
If faster travel times means shorter commute time, surely public transport with more capacity improves the average time for the average person going to the average places.
> They are a significantly better option in terms of travel time than even the best public transit in the world, simply because you are going directly from point to point, at relatively high speed, with no stops, no wait times
I believe the problem with this reasoning is that cars take space, and roads too. Lots of roads and parking will make a place less dense, and will increase distances.
The best public transit in the world covers the areas where on average most people go (thus serving the most people), has better energy efficiency (a single bus consumes less per passenger than a car), and removes the need for lots of parking infrastructure. Everything else being equal, public transport is the most efficient, and provides faster travel times on average for the average person (I concede, not for everyone).
In a place not built for cars (like Barcelona), rush hour is a nightmare where cars hardly move (take the tram in Diagonal in the morning and you will move faster than the cars next to you). Most people there take the metro/bus/ride a bike + walk for less than 30 minutes. As an example, a 30min ride on the L1 red line metro (without changing lines) will bring you from Hospitalet de Llobregat (metropolitan area of Barcelona) to the city center.
I might be biased in favor of cities made to walk, instead of made for cars. What I do not concede is that cars provide faster travel times than the best public transport. I would be happy to get some data that supports your assertion.
That said, I agree with your other usages (cargo, transport people, go to places far away, independence).
It is also true that while traveling on public transport you can read, and by walking/riding a bike you improve your health compared to sitting in a car. A city with less cars is also more walkable. More "walkability" might be better for shops, maybe even improve safety. These advantages need to be weighted against cars too :)
It doesn't make sense to create biking / walking lanes raised up on pillars because a) that introduces artificial hills and b) it increases effort to get places - you'll only be able to get on or off the raised system at a ramp, which might be inconvenient.
In London the average car speed is 11-12 mph, and then you'll have to walk to / from a car park. Cars aren't always fast and point to point
Because everybody wants to get from point to point fastest and safest way possible and doing it by car is not the answer which scales.
I consider the level of pollution to be minimal. It’s not even noticeable in many US cities. Plus this is also always improving, particularly with increasing popularity of hybrids and electric cars.
> extremely dangerous to other road user
First off, “extremely dangerous” is hyperbole. The number of fatalities on roads is very low, and it will keep getting lower as safety features like blind spot monitoring become standards. Roads are already incredibly safe - in the US the fatality rate is something like 1 per 100 million vehicle miles.
But safety is also why roads should be reserved for motorized vehicles. Your assertion also seems very one sided. Safety is a two way thing - a substantial portion of bikers put themselves in danger by riding where they really shouldn’t.
> take a lot of space on the road
They also provide a lot of utility, which is why taxpayers funded roads and parking spaces to begin with. I, and I suspect most people, don’t mind using space for things that are high value, like cars.
Transport is one of the highest contributors to greenhouse gases in the US with light vehicles being the largest contributor to that sector https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P10127TU.pdf
>The number of fatalities on roads is very low,
Road traffic crashes are a leading cause of death in the United States for people aged 1–54 https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...
> and it will keep getting lower as safety features like blind spot monitoring become standards.
The rate has been pretty stagnant for the last 10 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
> the US the fatality rate is something like 1 per 100 million vehicle miles.
This is true, but this number needs context. Average US driver covers 13k a year * by a lifetime of driving your over 1/2 a million miles per person, so the number you should be presenting is 1 in 200 chance to die. And thats just fatalities, when you consdier serious injury as well, the number isn't great.
> I suspect most people, don’t mind using space for things that are high value, like cars.
Was with you until "like cars". Cars waste a lot of space. They take up space in city centres, parked, while you're working/shopping, when you're actually in them they're still using a lot of space for typically one person. I think we'll see a lot more of this in the coming decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_removal
That's the point, cars deliver a lot of personal space & comfort that really make it attractive vis a vis public transport.
But I greatly prefer to choose routes that avoid fast, congested car traffic. This also appears to be the approach of my city when developing new or improved roadways.
But truth be told, the major thing slowing cars down is other cars. Trying to increase traffic flow through a given area will eventually cause it to slow down to a crawl, bikes or no bikes.
Certainly not when you bury them under pillars for cars. Or is there any example where the area beneath the raised highway isn't the worst part of town? What you'd need to do is bury the cars. Side effect: less car traffic, because people tend to not really enjoy driving in tunnels. Unfortunately, it's very expensive and much of the underground space in cities is already spoken for.
Is it possible? Yes. Please come to the Netherlands and see for yourself.
Or watch the video's on this channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes
i imagine the phones on the bike bus advertising who they are, what their schedule is, who can join, how to join, and letting folks about know what the route is, what disruption to expect, how to plan around this happening.
hoping on the bandwagon is enough to make this happen in some places but i think the core kernel idea could use some shareability & amplifiability in other places. a more reductionist expression is simply that the real world lacks virality potential. projects like Google's Eddystone[1]/Project Lighthouse (2015) are few & far between, underfunded & in Eddystone's case seemingly abandoned, but embuing reality with more of the neat connective capabilities of the computerized info-verse remains- i think- a key enabler.
Not exactly the same thing, but quite similar.
for the record, I cycle, drive a hybrid and am looking to buy an electric car. I'm not singling out cyclists as a hate target. I'm genuinely curious how this is going to work.
The move to electric vehicles and bicycles does create a revenue shortfall, but that’s all it is - not any kind of structural issue that needs clever new thinking. Implement a per/km tax on cars or just whack up GST, it doesn’t matter.
I dont think there is a way we can do this, or allow offgrid without a socialist leaning tax hike to everybody.
Positive news that are heartwarming and nice but will be irrelevant for the grand scheme of things. Call me cynical if you want, but this is not a real change, is just another PR stunt stuff.
Just wait patiently and drive at the speed of traffic.