Message from cycling heaven: it’s not that fantastic here
bikecity.amsterdam.nl
bikecity.amsterdam.nl
Now, look at the amount of empty space on the sidewalk. Notice anything?
In cities, cars take up an inordinate amount of physical space—far more than their fair share. And then drivers still complain they don't have enough room and are stuck in traffic, because of course they are, cars are huge!
Screw cars in cities. In busy areas like lower Manhattan, you shouldn't be able to drive at all unless you have a documented need (commercial vehicle, physical disability, etc). Make sure the people who truly have to drive can actually get around without waiting in traffic, and then leave the rest of the space for pedestrians, cyclists, and others who can use the resource efficiently.
https://www.detroittransit.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/sp...
When I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, the family vehicle of choice for most of my friends and I was the "generic midsized family sedan" - Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, etc. Plus the Accords and Camrys of the late 80s and 90s was closer in size to a 2021 Civic than a 2021 Accord. I think we managed just fine, including taking extended multiday family road trips.
I don't have kids, but talking to my friends who do, it sounds like nowadays the minimum acceptable size to shuttle around a single child is a Honda Pilot or Toyota Highlander (or the current fad - Kia Telluride). I'm only half-joking.
Part of the upsize, at least for families, is child car seats. They're enormous now, and children seem to stay in them longer (boosters and things). A co-worker had a mid-2000s Passat and you couldn't fit a baby seat in the back without forcing the passenger into an awkward upright seatback. I'm not sure what you do about that.
I'm in a relatively dense suburb outside DC and I just wish they'd spend a little more time/money on mixed transit options. We're like 80% there, but corners get cut and so bike lanes that dead-end, or sidewalks but not crosswalks, stuff like that.
Other laws keep ATVs, side-by-sides, and other smaller vehicles off streets, and crash requirements push up vehicle frame sizes and weights. It's a slow-motion arms race towards consumer-targeted armored personnel carriers.
Every block gets a loading/unloading space, and the rest can be used for open restaurants and other people oriented uses.
In addition it will greatly reduce a lot of unnecessary driving.
And a congestion charge needs to be implemented ASAP to eliminate a lot of the driving across Manhattan which basically treats some of the worlds most expensive real estate as a glorified thoroughfare.
I'm all for congestion pricing and I wouldn't be against a proposal to eliminate on-street parking—but I think a lot of drivers would just use parking garages.
A lot of cities are investing heavily in specialized bus lanes and the like; not a bad idea as such but it always seemed like a bewilderingly complex and expensive solution.
Then again, practically speaking, you will have people foaming at the mouth and rioting in the streets if the "human right" of being able to drive a car anywhere is taken away. You already have people ranting to no end about bus and cycle lanes. Twice someone nearly ran over me on the cycle lane and then proceeded to rant at me that cycle lanes were all bullshit and that I should fuck off with my bike (it's the type of incident that really makes you doubt if physical violence is truly never acceptable...)
The reality would be that people with such responsibilities would be driven from the city along with those that don't have their own parking spaces. Individual traffic is not going away again, so this is no feasible solution. You could build more parking garages to get unused vehicles from the street perhaps.
I’m still not sure why cars are the only objects that cities are expected to provide storage for.
Do you expect the city to provide refrigerated storage for essential groceries since you don’t have a fridge? Do you expect the city to provide storage for a rack of your most essential clothing? Then why are we expecting the city to provide public storage for the ton of metal you decide to move around?
In the situation where you’re trying to drive people for emergency needs, in a situation where roads are not crammed with private cars, calling an Uber that drops you off will be cheaper and significantly faster (because you don’t have those private cars clogging up the roads anymore
It's hard to have your cake and it eat too.
Unfortunately, this attitude is one of the contributing factors to the impossibility of sensible discussion on this topic.
I live in Lower Manhattan, and I own a car. I garage park, which costs a small fortune but means I don't take up space on a sidewalk; not that there's really a meaningful amount of street parking in Lower Manhattan anyway - which is why parking garages cost $70 per day.
I contribute next-to-nothing in terms of street crowding based on the times when the car is in use and the places where I travel.
And yet still this isn't good enough for the car abolitionists.
I could see an argument for allowing cars during certain hours late at night—but I don't think that would satisfy most drivers, and I think it would be tricky to enforce—if there's a mishap and you can't reach your destination on time, do you get ticketed? And, if we close only the most crowded streets, whichever streets in the area remain open will become crowded quite quickly!
Would it really be much of a problem to take a bus to the garage where your car is parked? And even if it is then maybe that's better than the situation we have today?
Well, you see that's fascinating because if you look at crashes and pedestrian safety - as I understand it - Manhattan has fewer crashes and fewer pedestrian/cyclist injuries/deaths than does Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx.
Do you know how many traffic fatalities there were in the NYPD 1st, 5th and 7th precincts so far this year (that's the whole of Lower Manhattan below Houston)? Three.
If you want to focus on the areas with the largest safety problems, your focus should not be in Manhattan. If you want to focus on the leading causes of collisions, it's distracted driving; not excess density.
It's also not about air quality, because it's being made quite clear that electric cars are just as much of a problem as fossil-fueled powered ones.
>Would it really be much of a problem to take a bus to the garage where your car is parked?
Yes, in my case that would be a big problem - but actually the onus is on those who want changes to sell them in a sensible way to everyone, including the households in Manhattan (supposedly ~22%; although that was before the surge in purchases last year) that own cars despite the tremendous cost to do so.
What we mainly hear is the prescription "ban private car operation in Manhattan", as if that is the outcome itself rather than a means to some actual goal. This despite the fact that nowhere else in the world has anything similar been achieved.
And that's only the people who died, not all the people who were permanently handicapped.
Edit: https://vzv.nyc/ is cool. It looks like we are in fact better at keeping people alive than I realized, but cars still lead to an awful lot of serious injuries.
The reporting unit that you're looking at is the Manhattan South "Patrol Borough"; this includes up to 59th St so it's a much larger chunk of the city.
That's coincidentally the zone that is covered by the proposed congestion pricing.
And I haven't even begun to model all the positive externalities of vehicles -- everything from letting trucks filled with goods stock your "local" coffeeshop, and workers to drive to that coffeeshop. And when the plumbing gets backed up or the ice-machine needs repair, someone will drive to that coffee shop -- right by your house -- and fix it, all so you can have a walkable neighborhood in which you can sip coffee and complain about cars. And there are other positive externalities including more price competition and thus cheaper goods, reduction in geographic monopolies, increases in homeownership rates, etc.
I say this as someone who doesn't even own a car, but I recognize that I am extremely privileged to be able to work from anywhere and live in an expensive urban center where everyone spends long hours in their cars driving to me and catering to my needs, from delivering my groceries and packages to driving from the burbs to my neighborhood to cook me dinner. I am at the top of a huge pyramid reliant on vehicles -- and I know it. I'm not going to say "Let them eat cake".
A good life-tip is that if you ever come up with some model of society that makes everyone look like they are doing something irrational, then odds are that your model is wrong, not that society is wrong. It can happen that you really are smarter than the system and that you've predicted all the important long term consequences of your proposals and correctly weighed them -- but it almost never does. And not for something as obvious as sidewalks being able to hold more people than cars per square foot.
We need far fewer would-be social optimizers, and far more humility in these discussions, as our world is flooded with bad models and bad ideas.
Well, but it could also be a case of "tragedy of the commons". Everyone is acting rationally on an individual level, but a collective change would be to everyone's benefit.
I know people who drive big SUVs even though gas is more expensive not because they like big SUVs, but because they're worried if they don't drive a big SUV, they're more likely to die in a crash with someone who does. The result is, of course, even more SUVs.
In the specific case of SUVs, almost all SUVs sold are actually lifted sedans. They don't have much worse mileage or weigh more than the corresponding sedans. Nor are they better in crashes. It's more of a culture war item where some people really hate those who drive the SUVs -- soccer moms, etc. Here the issue is that a lower center of gravity (and a stiffer ride) creates better handling, but an SUV is more comfortable and is easier to get in and out of. And it usually features a soft suspension. So there are a lot of car enthusiasts that hate SUVs because it's a rejection of their values, and a lot of Europeans that prefer wagons to SUVs are offended by someone wanting to sit higher up.
Now yes, there is a situation in which higher cars make it more valuable to sit higher up, but that difference of being 1 foot higher doesn't really destroy visibility, it's psychological. The most popular SUV -- RAV4 has a height of 5.6 feet -- whereas the most popular sedan of 2020 (Camry) has a height of 4.77 feet. That 1 foot difference is not going to destroy visibility and does not represent some out of control thing. The difference in weight is about 100 pounds (3500 for Rav4 and 3400 for Camry). RAV4 gets 30mpg combined -- same as the Camry. These are not huge differences to justify the rage many have at SUVs. Just give the SUV in front of you a bit more room and your visibility will be fine, nor does the RAV4 force other people to get a RAV4 due to collisions.
While this is right at a surface level, I think it’s more accurate to say that people don’t walk everywhere because in most cases, they cannot. In every North American city, if you step just a bit out of the urban core, or even across the urban core, it will be very difficult to walk to where you need to go. This means that nearly every North American is dependent on a car by default. There is an ingrained car culture that makes change difficult. I would say that car dependency is a result of our city design, rather than the result of cars being good.
It doesn’t have to be this way, it didn’t used to be this way, and it isn’t this way in many parts of the world. Just because cars are a very convenient mode of transportation doesn’t mean that the changes required to support have been positive. There are some very extreme negative externalities:
- Extreme land use requirements. Not only do you need huge roads, but you need huge parking lots everywhere. Nearly half of all land in an American city is dedicated to the car. A lot of that land cannot generate economic value very efficiently. For example, a massive mall will have an even bigger parking lot. But if that area was a walkable neighborhood, it could support many more local businesses and generate more tax income and economic activity.
- Destruction of neighborhoods. Thousands of neighborhoods destroyed and people displaced to build highways right through downtown.
- Acceptance of bad air quality. Cars make air quality pretty bad in cities. Air would be fresher in cities without cars.
- Acceptance of terrible noise pollution. Cars (or any motor vehicle) are very loud, especially at scale. Cities would feel much quieter without cars. And constant exposure to this noise makes people less happy.
And look, I don’t believe cars are the root of evil. My point is that we are dependent on cars because we designed our cities around cars. Yes, of course our economy is stronger because we have an excellent interstate highway system. But that highway didn’t need to cut a city in half and bring noise and pollution right downtown. And yes, trucks and fright and deliveries make lives better. But we didn’t need to abandon local, walkable businesses to get that.
If cities were designed to optimize people’s happiness, we should absolutely see far fewer cars in cities. Because it’s possible to design a city such that you don’t <em>need</em> to drive a car everywhere. And when that happens, people don’t gravitate towards the car nearly as often as they do today. Because driving a car in a city is really not that nice. In fact, it is usually very stressful and involves a lot of waiting.
That is why alternatives work when they are well-supported. And that’s really the point here: people want there to be a reasonable choice <em>besides>/em> cars in cities. There should be options! Cars are just the only viable option for way too many trips because cities are designed only for cars. Providing options is very difficult to accomplish when you dedicate almost half of a cities land and 95% of the public right of way to cars.
The same way as airports for general aviation, but for cars?
Carports?
The city center in Amsterdam is not the Netherlands, and it's not even the rest of Amsterdam. When you talk about how difficult it is for pedestrians in Amsterdam, that's a clear sign you're not a local and that you don't know what you're talking about.
Amsterdam's city center is historic, largely unchanged from almost half a millennium ago in terms of structure, with millions of tourists coming every year to visit. Take a 20 minute walk outside the touristic spots and you might be extremely surprised.
Edit - I see the other comment now. Lol. Not my experience at all.
I love biking now - but I'm just wondering at what age a normal biker gets too old to bike everywhere daily.
The question is a little ridiculous to me to begin with: you are too old once you can’t get the pedals round. If you can move a bike forwards you can participate in Dutch cycling traffic. There is no distinction between the two.
EDIT - But just to clarify: many people cycle well into retirement. We’re talking 60-70+ stopping ages over here, easily.
EDIT 2 - Here, have some governmental data: https://www.government.nl/binaries/government/documents/repo.... It doesn’t say anything on bicycle use in older age, but it does show you that average speed goes down by age. Average trip length does not however. In general it’s just an interesting read though.
Elderly cyclists are a point of concern because three quarters of the cyclists dying in traffic accidents are over 60 years old, a quarter over 80 (https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2020/11/elderly-cyclists-more-...)
That partly is because of the huge success in making cycling safer for kids and partly because of population aging, but also is seen as not catering enough for this group. Many of bicycle accidents involving the elderly are one-sided.
As an anecdote, my father has trouble walking nowadays - I think getting him to walk one km is ambitious. He does still use an electric bicycle though.
Her point is that the hogging of public space by bicyclists is a problem, and that the cause is bicyclists ignoring rules and not thinking about others. That is a universal problem. Here in Seattle, bicyclists think they're beyond reproach. You can't run red lights and hit pedestrians without backlash.
That is not my takeaway at all. And I feel like the only way you could think that were if you were already predisposed against bicyclists.
The problem the author is talking about is that there is mostly no problem at all, and therefore many people don’t think about how they can share space (because they generally don’t have to).
> All these conversations abroad made people reinterpret the street for what it truly is: the remaining space between houses, with all sorts of uses and purposes worthy of discussion. Public space does not necessarily exist to facilitate fast traffic.
The author is basically saying that drivers get angry because bikes are slower than cars, and that separating bike and car infrastructure 90% of the time makes drivers see bikes as an intrusion in the shared 10% of the infrastructure, because they're used to their particular speed profile being catered to.
I'd think the reason is simple - car runs red light, you risk getting a ticket and fine and increases to your insurance premium. Hit someone while you're doing it? Now you're guilty of manslaughter.
Bike runs a red light? No one (including cops) cares enough to do anything aside from people swearing at you or giving you the finger. A car hits you while you're running the red light? Odds are it's still more likely to be considered the car driver's fault, and many cyclists seem to think they are invincible until they actually get injured so they don't think twice about the risk.
I will admit I am guilty of intentionally running red lights on a bicycle. But I've never intentionally run a red light while driving - again, because of the aforementioned disincentives.
But I live in "Cycling Hell"; Long Island, NY. It's hard to feel sorry for Amsterdam.
We have twisty, windy roads, with few shoulders, and what shoulder there is, is filled with rubble, trash, and dead critters.
Cyclists here need to basically stay in the road, or wipe out. Staying in the road has its own drawbacks. Namely, Long Island drivers.
A few years ago, a local politician made a comment to the effect that "No one should ride a bicycle on Long Island." It drew fire from cyclists all over the country.
Unfortunately, he actually had a point, because we have some of the least-suited cycling roads in the world. New York City is even crazier, but traffic can't go fast, there, so it's less likely that cyclists will be killed. There are frequent cycling accidents in the city.
I moved up here from the DC suburbs, where they had cycling support similar to Amsterdam.
Fortunately (or not), I am not a cyclist. I walk two miles, every morning, and I've learned to do that as early as possible. If I wait until after 6AM, I have to deal with the same knucklehead drivers as the cyclists. I've taken to wearing what I call my "clown suit"; a bright, dayglo shirt or jacket, with reflective stripes, and obnoxious sneakers. Even so, I still need to be very cautious. People drive like crap in the morning. Traffic lanes, crosswalks and stop signs are just "suggestions."
A downside of everyone cycling there is that bike theft is absolutely rife.
That has largely stopped as the cars have become more secure.
Heck, I know a homeless guy I talked to a couple of times and helped out with food and stuff, I know him by name. A couple months later I met him drugged of his ass on the Main Street, offering me a bike I'm like "nahh dude come on"
My pretty expensive bike got stolen at some point too :(
> That there are complaints from car drivers about the number of people bringing their children to school by bicycle. Whether the cyclists are willing to adapt.
I can sympathize with this, or at least what I understand of it given it seems to be translated from Dutch. In the neighboring big city there are bike lanes (though sharing the same surface as the autos) for most of the major thoroughfares. Bicycling has become more and more popular over the past couple of decades, and I’m totally fine with that. I gladly yield to those paths and the cyclists using the where I can, and generally follow all the rules of the road. I’ve not had a traffic citation since 2004.
However I’ve noticed over the past decade or so that that cyclists are becoming increasingly aggressive - disregarding the rules they must follow: cutting through traffic, ignoring lights and not yielding to pedestrians at pedestrian crossings. It’s gotten so bad that some of the optimal paths I could take to the office I don’t. More than once has a cyclist confronted me, one even smacked my vehicle with his backpack, because I blew the horn when they jumped off the curb and directly into traffic. I want to support more bike friendly initiatives because I like the health and environmental benefits, I just don’t want to be associated with the assholes come with the territory.
This was the case at both elementary schools I attended. In high school it was a non-issue since pretty much everyone cycled or walked anyway.
With this context in mind, cars complaining about cycles is rather ... odd.
> one even smacked my vehicle with his backpack, because I blew the horn when they jumped off the curb and directly into traffic.
Cars horns are really loud, come across as very aggressive, and immediately send adrenaline levels up. It's a horrible communication method, especially to people who aren't in cars, that usually only provokes the wrong kind of responses in people.
You might just be seeing more of them. The research says cyclists tend to obey the rules of the road more than car drivers:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2019/05/10/cyclists...
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/01/03/study-cyclists-dont-b...
>More than once has a cyclist confronted me, one even smacked my vehicle with his backpack, because I blew the horn when they jumped off the curb and directly into traffic.
Yeah, I had someone give me some grief because I didn't put my hand out when stopping last week. He told me that next time he will run me over and it will be my fault.
The real magic is not the bike lanes - it's that people don't need to lock up bikes! I can't say enough about how much of a game changer that is. In the US, the logistics of securing a bike makes the affair so much of a hassle. I basically gave up bike riding after the third time my bike was stolen.
In every city in the Netherlands I'm aware of, bikes get stolen aallll the time. Only in villages and other rural areas can you trust the environment to not steal your bikes. That's because everybody knows each other, there's no chance you're going to get away with stealing a bike, there's a lot of trust.
But in a city? Was it in the outskirts?
https://bikeshed.johnhoogstrate.nl/bicycle/security/axa_defe...
I love cycling, been cycling for 25+ years, including commuting to my office via (beautiful) cycling path at Birmingham canals.
But when I visited Amsterdam, of course I don't have my bike there, so I went anywhere using Uber, and walking around - and that's when I noticed that:
It's really scary to be a pedestrian in Amsterdam.
In a lot of places, the cyclist path is on the same surface with the pedestrian path. Of course it's separated with lanes (read: paint job on the surface) - but we are on the same surface, next to another.
Several times I was almost hit by the cyclists, I'm pretty sure I was on my / pedestrian's path, but I almost got hit anyway. A lot of the cyclists are cycling in a very high speed.
That was a new feeling & experience for me, and I didn't like it.
I hope the situation will become better for the pedestrians.
There is no sane or remotely cohesive design to layouts and few curbs and so on
This sounds like someone complaining about being razed by cars while strolling in the middle of the street.
Compared to what? Los Angeles? Cairo?
Less sarcastically: I get your point, but it's a tradeoff. It's a beautifully car-free (and just plain beautiful and eminently livable) city otherwise. Yes, you do have to be careful about the bikes (as one must with cars, buses, and trucks, motorbikes and scooters just about anywhere else) -- but wherever you go, you pick your battles.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/disconcerting-rise-road-rage-shoot...
> So far this year, as of June 7, a person has been killed or injured in a suspected road rage shooting on average every 18 hours in the United States
The first-class citizens might as well take pity on them, after all.
Being new to the place, we tend to notice things that other people already took for granted.
Unless someone explains it to you, though, I’m not really sure how anyone could be expected to know?
My British girlfriend once unplugged my alarm clock because she thought there was no way to use the power plug above that otherwise, my alarm plug was "blocking" that one. I just reversed the socket and put it back in. She felt stupid, but since British plugs can be put in one way only I can understand simply not thinking of that.
And bike lanes are already segregated with at least paint so that's already a signal. People just need to get used to it, which is hard initially when all you know is cars and walking.
SF for example is full of solid white lines. The law says solid white lines are supposed to be treated the same as concrete barriers. No crossing period. Yet people cross them all the time with impunity. If they were actually curbs people would only rarely cross them accidentally
As a cyclist, it's easy and essential to stay on the right side. Accidentally not noticing the curb will result in a crash or near one.
Research shows sloped or even leveled kerbs don’t seem to lead to problems (https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/ejtir/article/view/3254)
(well, I was once hit by a car, but I was on a bike so....)
Thank you.
NYC - cars, bikes and pedestrians all feel like they are the most important.
Paris - there are no rules, and someone will steal your bike anyway.
Amsterdam - bikes are on top and know it, cars and pedestrians can fight for the scraps.
Germany - cars are king. Some pedestrian crossings you even have to wait two lights to make it all the way across the road.
I'm still amazed about the roundabout around Arc de Triomphe.
It will not. In the NYC metro area (including Northern NJ), pedestrians are constantly in danger of being hit by both cyclists and people on powered bicycles (which are motorcycles for all practical purposes).
I have seen these people hit people and on one occasion one of them kicked a stroller. If anyone says anything, they face further harassment: In one instance, one rider lifted her bicycle and hit me and left.
Delivery drivers tend to be better than others on the sidewalk, but then you watch them go the wrong way at 30 MPH with the giant battery pack and you feel for the driver who might have a close encounter or worse.
Sidewalks are for pedestrians.
PS: I notice that this thread seems to be full of people who claim standing on the sidewalk watching cars whizz by is scary. It isn't. Cars don't routinely jump the curb, cars don't routinely drive on sidewalks, most drivers are quick to yield to pedestrians. On the other hand, even if you are crossing at the walk sign, there will be at least four bike riders trying to run the red light through a hundred pedestrians at 42nd & 8th.
The only reason you’re more afraid of bikes than cars is because you’re socialized to accept cars.
Bike lanes usually adjoin sidewalks, as opposed to car lanes, which usually have some buffer.
But also because if you were hit by a car the likelihood of you being around to write a comment about it would be extremely low.
The failure here is on the part of city planners, not the cyclists. And enforcing traffic laws against an even moderately skilled cyclist is difficult: I remember easily outrunning the bike cops when I was younger because I was simply in much better shape than them and could handle a bike a lot better in an urban environment.
Yeah, no, when there is a perfectly fine one way road with enough space plus a speed limit of 25 mph, having to constantly be aware of people on bicycles come at you from behind or around corners at full speed is the fault of the person who chooses to do that.
The fact that this happens every day, multiple times is because 1) the targets (e.g., moms with a stroller) are powerless in a one-on-one confrontation with these bullies; 2) the police will never enforce existing laws.
In Denmark and the Netherlands, at least when I got to bike in those places, the police would routinely ticket bicyclists. I know, I got tickets and paid fines.
In countries with decent infrastructure you don’t need to look out for bicyclists “coming from behind”.
I also find it interesting that the guy protected by a ton of steel is afraid of 200 pounds of mostly flesh coming from behind on a one way road and is unable to imagine how that 180 pounds of flesh on 20 pounds of metal might feel about the ton of steel coming from behind them on that “perfectly fine” 25 mph one way road.
This is either an example of a perfect propagandist misdirection or the best illustration of the blind spot people on bicycles and powered-bicycles have when it comes to pedestrians.
I was referring to pedestrians having to constantly have 360 degrees situational awareness because of faster traveling bicycles presenting a danger to them, to their babies or toddlers etc. The person who's riding full speed on sidewalks is already signaling the fact that they are a bully. All a parent pushing a stroller or walking their toddler can do is to try to avoid being slammed into at full speed.
As for the person driving a car, the fact is bicyclists rarely consider the momentum of those vehicles when they decide to run a red light and ram through a bunch of pedestrians crossing the street and zip through cross-traffic in through daredevil fashion. 99/100 that works out not because the bicyclist is not a complete nitwit but because everyone else is constantly looking out for them.
Rather, pedestrians pretend to be ok with cars because they’re socialized to believe car lanes belong to cars so if they get run over to death by them (which they do all the time) they blame it on the pedestrian, whereas if they receive even the slightest scratch from a bike while stepping onto the bike lane, they blame it on the biker.
And that’s before considering the fact that bike lanes in MUC are right along the sidewalks, whereas car lanes have several buffers between them and the sidewalks.
There are no trillion dollar bike companies telling pedestrians that they are at fault for any accident and that they are responsible for not walking near bikes. There are no bike companies that invented a new crime out of whole cloth (jaywalking) that tells people that if they enter 80% of the public street space and get killed by a bike, they are legally responsible (jaywalking).
How many tickets do you think have been given for “jaywalking” on a bike lane.
The reality is your entire complaint confuses the actual solution for pedestrians, which is more bike lanes (bike lanes save pedestrian lives since they create a buffer between sidewalks and car lanes through the bike lane, and I don’t think there’s been a bike lane death of a pedestrian in the US in the last decade at least), with your socialization which basically says cars own the road and any injury caused by a car is the pedestrians responsibility, whereas bicyclists are interlopers and any injuries by them, no matter how minor, is far worse than a car killing a pedestrian.
All the cities I lived in had comparatively decent cycling infrastructure, far from what it's like in NL, but still decent enough.
Now, I've never been to NYC but the problem there was that some people seem to hate cyclists no matter what you do. You can behave 100% correct and with care but you will still get people who feel you ought not to be on the road at all and will still try and drive you off the road no matter what you do, or they will pass you as close as possible just to annoy you, or where there's really no space at all. I've had people stop their cars just to hurl abuse at me, God know why. Things like that.
99.9% of drivers can be perfectly fine and just 0.1% are these kind of people, then you're going to run in to one of them every few days or weeks depending on how much you cycle, simple because you'll easily encounter over a hundred cars in a journey (And in reality, it seems to be far more than 0.1% unfortunately).
It's this kind of aggression, harassment, and violent assault that makes cyclists cycle on pavements. No matter what you do you're going to get shit, and at least on the pavement it's not dangerous.
Hell, on multiple occasions I've received shit for cycling on the cycle path.
You need to be an exceptionally cheerful and positive person to not become somewhat jaded by all of this.
Or let me put it in this way: if a large group of normal people are doing something wrong while performing in just one activity, then there's probably something wrong with the system surrounding that activity and not all of those people.
Of course they are. If you cycle on them in the Netherlands, you'll get yelled at very fast. I don't think anyone anywhere claims that people should cycle on sidewalks. Still, in many bicycle-hostile areas, cyclists choose to do that over, you know, dying - but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's dangerous to cycle on sidewalks.
Why didn't they stepped unknowingly into car's lane - but did so into bike's lane?
It's all in the design.
This is also the main thing other countries don’t realize. Bikes here are slow. They’re not meant to be performant. They’re meant to bring you slowly (but steadily) from A to B.
Also I much prefer a busy road full of cyclist with little sidewalk, than a busy road full of cars with dedicate sidewalk. All the noise and smog makes the walking plain terrible and borderline unhealthy.
That being said in order to maintain the beautiful traditional architecture and layout of the city centre sacrifices must be made, and as a cyclist I also feel the pain of being blocked by pedestrians. Everyone suffers a little bit, which from what I've heard seems to be a dominant Dutch political philosophy reflected in its coalition governments.
NL has about 2.6 pedestrian deaths per million compared to the US’s 19 or so (which must have only gone up since the pandemic).
And this is not even adjusting for the significantly greater walking that’s done in the NL.
You learn to look left and right before stepping into a path or road.
Have you tried it? They're truly a wonderful place for cyclists.
(well at least back in 2001, no idea how is it now)
The difference between cars is that cyclists - as a general rule - totally ignore any rules. Pedestrian crossing? Pah! Rules are for others! Instead scream obscenities at the pedestrian as you weave past and around them (at <10cm distance) for having the temerity of slowing you down when they are legitimately crossing the cycle path. A cyclist was recently prosecuted in London for killing a pedestrian when they drove into them at high speed after shouting at them to get out of the way failed to work... There must be loads of other non-fatal collisions that don't make the news
TL;Dr - During in rush hour it can be hard to cross the cycle lanes, but roads are fine. Cars generally do not try to "go around you" at very close distance when you are a pedestrian, but cyclists do.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2019/05/10/cyclists...
https://whyy.org/articles/cyclists-violate-traffic-law-no-mo...
After a few days there I finally started to get the system. Because some areas have sidewalks and bike lanes at the same level, I noticed cyclists will often use the sidewalks to pass slower bikes. I realized then that just like in any other big city, you have to stand up for yourself and when a cyclist is on a pedestrian right-of-way and decides to get up in your face, you're completely within your rights to push back and kindly show them the edges of the bike lane they've left. It reminded me a bit of figuring out how to get around NYC.
Outside of the cramped shared spaces in Amsterdam the aggression levels are understandably much lower and the separation between bikes and pedestrians is more manageable, and I never once had an issue elsewhere in the Netherlands.
I feel like getting hit by cyclists a few times does not mean you're more attuned to getting out of their way, but rather attuned to either walking in bike-lanes or just totally not paying attention. Or unlucky. Normally I'd say just unlucky, but....
I don't think the attitude of "you're completely within your rights to push back and kindly show them the edges of the bike lane" shows a winning strategy for "getting out of their way".
The reality is that we're all travelers within the cities we live in and visit, we all have places we want to get, and most of us do not want to interfere with each other negatively. "pushing back" is not the way you cultivate that, and not what most pedestrians or cyclists expect.
Yup, THIS. Right. there.
As a cyclist just trying to get from point A to B at my default speed of 20km/h it’s immensely annoying when one of them suddenly turns onto the street forcing me to brake like a madman (and then build up all that speed again).
One thing that is / will speed it up is remote working. Once we divorce the location of the city from the location of the people, the cities stop competing in attracting the company and need to attract the employees. Which will me a better facilities for humans not companies.
It's the one big benefit I see from remote working and amazingly I expect to see it within the same metro-area.
Don't have mega-cities and mega-mayors. Have lots of small neighbourhoods that experiment with each other.
A lot of these comments misses the point of this article. This isn't a pro or anti cycling article. The point is that a lot of are not following laws and common courtesy. Being on a bicycle does not exempt you.
That old trope is continually brought up yet the research is clear that cyclists stop at read lights more often than car drivers.
This is true even near a primary school where kids bike to: https://goo.gl/maps/e4thCUV1WV5p1JLE9
The segregated paths are usually alongside roads or wide streets.
Conveyance is a utility like sewer or electricity, and like sewer and electricity, it shouldn’t be flowing at ground level.
Minneapolis has some interesting solutions. The skyway (in both Minneapolis and St. Paul) connects all the buildings in the downtown via elevated (or subterranean) pedestrian pathways, important in the 0 degrees F (-18C) winter. But ideally, you’d flip the situation with the cars and trucks on the non-ground-level with the streets purely for people or low speed and low mass vehicles like bikes.
Minneapolis also has the Greenway, superhighway for bikes that is grade-separated from much of the rest of the city (sitting below, in like a greenery-surrounded canyon, with bridges above), an old railroad route. Pretty fantastic.
Or go to a SE Asia country with few car. Motorbikes dominate and they try and avoid you but it’s nerve wracking. Plenty of bikers get crushed by trucks.
That's what I got here.
> author was trying to express the need for balanced considered approach to change rather than just a blind push to implement what the Dutch have.
On the plus side, there are US-based traffic planning innovations that have demonstrated some success in certain metro areas such as "Complete Streets". There's more of these now than ever before.