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Comment by gpvos | Hacker News Reader

A thing that you can often see in the Netherlands is frontage roads. When a road with houses on it needs a speed upgrade, it gets split into a fast road and a parallel frontage/access/service road for access to the adjacent houses. Possibly even on both sides. This is something that was already being done way back early in the 20th century. (Edit: found a reference to the Dutch word, "ventweg" ("hawking/peddling road"), in 1923.)

It seems to me that in such cases the US tends to choose to expand into a stroad instead. Belgium also has quite a few stroad-like roads, but at least those tend to have usable sidewalks and fairly often even bicycle paths.

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We have a major one of those in NYC, queens boulevard, and it’s a disaster. It’s dangerous to cross, and wide enough that it’s inconvenient to get across, so it effectively divides neighborhoods in half.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110923155641/http://wiki.coe.n...

There's a picture of one here, and the main road is a single lane in both directions. Which is as far from Queens Boulevard as you can get.

The 2 lanes to be crossed makes crossing safer. Further, the side roads are differentiated to make it clear that they are primarily for biking/walking (they are a different color, and are tiled).

Also:

> Service roads are purposely constructed to be discontinuous sections of road, meaning that through traffic cannot use it to get from one main street to another. Since the only traffic on it will be cars accessing the houses or shops along the service road, traffic is substantially lower that on the main roads, and speeds are kept down due to the short segments of roadway

Queens boulevard is a highway masquerading as a road.

There's a few of these around the suburb-y metro Detroit area. They're nice to bike on, and they haven't seemed awful to drive, but they do still do "divide neighborhoods" quite well, which is unfortunate

The Dutch versions of these have elaborate systems to separate pedestrian and bike traffic that minimize the "divide neighborhoods" effect.

The first time I went to the Netherlands I walked from Schiphol airport to the center of Amsterdam and it was an easy but amazing experience. Walking from JFK to Manhattan is a completely possible walk in terms of distance (I usually do better than a 20 minute pace on the flats so it takes only half a day) but when I think of the battle with the infrastructure you'd have to do it's like an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

It's a half marathon's distance as the bird flies from JFK to midtown. That's almost four and a half hours at a twenty minute pace. Not walkable for anyone but an athlete.

I've never run a marathon and probably never will but I've walked 20 miles several times at a slow pace and never thought it was that hard.

Barring something like serious obesity or disability it’s impossible for me to imagine an adult who couldn’t walk for for and a half hours, especially on flat terrain. That’s basically an easy hike.

Google the word "modal filter"

I think I've come across references that those "ventwegen" existed even back in the 19th century.

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