Comment by wonder_er | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wonder_er | Hacker News Reader

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cities are already hell for cars.

This is a piece I don't know how to explain coherently - cities function _as poorly_ for passenger vehicles as they do for bicyclists.

Tons of queueing time, low reliability, noise, hassle, expense, lack of perception of progress.

I think a good city engineer would:

1. start gathering benchmarks for travel time by mode across the city, at various times of day. 2. Start counting intersection vehicle through-put 3. Start counting intersection "vehicle dwell time" (an intersection that has 15 cars stopped waiting for a light to change is wasting an incredible amount of time)

And then with this data, start modifying how the intersections are laid out, run experiments. There's 50 things someone could experiment with, some of which would be worth retaining and expanding.

American traffic 'planning' is so boring and so openly ineffective. It's a traumatizing institution to be a part of, if you have a sense of awareness and responsibility and agency.

Yet another video from NJB on this topic.

https://youtu.be/d8RRE2rDw4k?t=402

Chuck Marohn measured his average speed at rush hour, and found it was about 16km/h ... So despite the roads having a speed limit of 50 km/h or more, his average speed was less than 16, because of all the traffic lights. And this was in a tiny town of only 14,000 people. Incidentally, 16 km/h is the average speed of a cyclist in Amsterdam

> So despite the roads having a speed limit of 50 km/h or more, his average speed was less than 16, because of all the traffic lights.

> Incidentally, 16 km/h is the average speed of a cyclist in Amsterdam

Unfortunately this only says that removing traffic lights would drive cars' average speed up and many bikers aren't actually stopping at traffic lights.

Maybe average speed is not that important as a metric and we should not optimize for it.

I would prefer a 15km/h average speed for cars, but to avoid any intersections with other users and flow interruptions: people should not cross streets, they should pass over them on bridges.

Crossroads should not exist, only roundabouts.

Etc.

Anyway, in most of Amsterdam the average speed of cars is between 15 and 30km/h [1], while bikes on average go at 14.9km/h.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-average-traffic-s...

> removing traffic lights would drive cars' average speed up

My gut feeling is that the "coordination cost" of big heavy cars needs to be paid one way or another.

You can reduce the coordination needed, sure, but the car-centric design of North America cities requires a lot of it.

> many bikers aren't actually stopping at traffic lights

I jump the light as much as I jaywalk - only when I have looked both ways and am sure of the safety.

It probably come out wrong.

what I meant whit this

> removing traffic lights would drive cars' average speed up

is that knowing that cars are slow because there are a lot of traffic lights to stop at, it's not very helpful.

The only thing that we can logically conclude with that information is that traffic lights take down average speed.

On the other hand, being bikes' top speeds much lower than cars and being subject at the same traffic lights, the only thing that we can conclude is that they don't stop at traffic lights as much or they pass cars stuck in traffic, even if it's probably forbidden.

Which is okay, everybody does that, but, again, not very helpful.

It only says that bikes don't respect every traffic laws in the book.

Not a big deal, but we can't use that information to optimize traffic.

The video is actually comparing cars on a main road in London (Ontario) with bicycles in Amsterdam (North Holland). NJB is humorously pointing out that the traffic design in London is so inefficient, that Amsterdam bikers actually have comparable performance to London cars (qua average speed).

> and many bikers aren't actually stopping at traffic lights.

It is not because of this, but because Amsterdam created entirely separate bicycle routes that have grease separated intersections with main roads for cars. So they simply don't have as many traffic lights for bikes because of that. Also, even if the are traffic lights they're much smarter at adapting to traffic and have much faster phases than in America.

> avoid any intersections with other users and flow interruptions: people should not cross streets, they should pass over them on bridges.

No, the cars should be the ones going over bridges or through tunnels. Doing it the other way around is prioritizing cars and dehumanizing pedestrians and cyclists.

I average 20-25km/h on an electric-assist bike in San Francisco (because my commute happens to have dedicated bike lanes the whole way along the bay). Would be much slower if I had to dodge vehicles.

I understand there are a lot of documents and papers on this in the Netherlands, since they have been measuring and experimenting for over half a century now. They don't just count vehicles, but also persons. If you're in government, maybe also see if you can contact the dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management (Rijkswaterstaat). https://www.rijkswaterstaat.nl/en

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