Seems a bit extreme. If the incidence of pedestrian accidents is relatively low, it's perfectly reasonable to prioritize aesthetics and cost considerations.
Or to put it in another way: https://i.redd.it/auq600rozlsc1.png – pretty sure that road has very low cyclists and very low cycle accidents.
Of course not every road should have cycle lanes and bollards, but in general there's a huge lack of attention to the safety of anything that's a non-car.
A common retort is that bridges aren't built where most people swim across the river. It's a chicken and egg problem, and you are absolutely correct in what you address.
To use a popular HN quote: build it and they will come.
It might be true, but it might not be.
Many places in UK have put a lot of effort into providing cycle lanes, prioritising cyclists over cars and pedestrians to do so. It has not worked. They built it and no one came. Its pretty clear that the solution here is more and cheaper public transport. I think fixed price tickets giving you unlimited usage, better bus services to rail stations, etc. are the right approach.
I hate driving, but there are some places that it is impractical to go to without a car, and times when public transport is not available. These should be minimised.
London alone is an extreme counterexample:
- "Cycling levels continued to increase where we invested in new infrastructure, such as Cycleways."
- "13% increase in cycling between 2019 and 2022, or 155 per cent since 2000"
- "[In the 20 years before the pandemic] Among sustainable modes, cycling grew the fastest, with 126 per cent more daily cycling journeys, compared to a 68 per cent increase in public transport and a 15 per cent decrease in car journeys."
(https://content.tfl.gov.uk/cycling-action-plan.pdf)
And the kicker:
"Concerns over road danger and fear of collisions is the most common barrier to cycling, with 82 per cent of non-cyclists citing it as a deterrent. This is despite cycling becoming significantly safer in the last two decades. These concerns are common across all demographic groups, regardless of gender, age, ethnicity, or disability. However, women, children and older Londoners are more likely to be put off cycling by road danger and have a stronger preference for protection from motor traffic."
"[...] the number of collisions resulting in death or serious injuries for people cycling is higher for cars than any other vehicle types. Between 2017 and 2021, cars, private hire vehicles and taxis were involved in collisions resulting in 2,770 serious injuries and 12 fatalities, 65 per cent of all people killed or seriously injured while cycling. This reflects the fact that cars make up most of London’s motorised traffic."
I don’t have data on hand, but just a casual glance on an average day suggests that fewer than 1% of road users in my neighborhood are on bicycles—and that’s in Downtown Culver City, a mixed-use/pedestrian-friendly urbanist oasis. I’m sad to say that Culver City recently decided to dismantle its dedicated bike lanes, despite reported figures of >50% increases in bicycle traffic.[0]
I want more bicycle infrastructure, but I do not feel well-equipped to argue my case when even with the bike lanes in place, I’ve never seen two bicycles waiting at the same red light—all while car traffic is piled up as far as the eye can see.
[0]: https://ktla.com/news/local-news/culver-city-bike-lane-proje...
First off, the starting point matters. As you show with your example, trying these ideas in US cities is... hard to say the least. There is way too much cultural momentum behind car infrastructure.
As for the low bike lane usage you noticed, a lot of factors are involved.
1. You say "bike lane", is that a lane on the road, in effect shared with cars? Forget about high usage. The key is to get as much physical separation from traffic as possible. An easy rule of thumb is: would you let your 12-yo kid travel on said lanes on their own? If not, there's your answer. The paths must feel safe to people other than 20-40 y/o able-bodied males.
2. Once your paths are nice and separated, consider that the number of paths, how connected they are, and where they lead to all matter. A single path from nowhere to nowhere will not be used. 200 miles of paths can mean a strong network or 200 1 mile long disjoint paths.
3. You need the law to prioritize cyclists (and pedestrians for that matter). See another user's post on how the law is in the Netherlands: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29878551. The bare minimum would be giving cyclists on cycling paths the right of way at intersections.
4. The rest of infrastructure, especially intersections, must be built with cyclists in mind. The Netherlands is again king at this, e.g. https://youtu.be/g0F_hTGYa0Y?t=712. The difference between the thought Dutch traffic engineers put into designing for cyclists and the US engineers should be evident. At the very least, the bike path asphalt should be colored differently at intersections.
5. It takes time, especially somewhere as car-centric as the US. You can't expect people to switch to biking overnight.
6. Car-centric design stretches cities out, lowering density. Cycling and walking have limited range, so the average US city is going to inherently get lower cycling uptake.
But if that lane is only a small stretch of someone's commute, they won't suddenly start cycling because one of many stretches got a cycle lane. Or change which road they use if they already cycle.
But that lane is a start. When the next street and the next street and the next street all get lanes, you suddenly have not only lanes but a connected network. Only then do you get new cyclists or change of behavior.
What it costs you to do the job isn’t the reality of it, sadly.
There aren't sidewalks everywhere.
In farm country, not really.
Places in between are debatable - and as an inveterate pedestrian who's never learned to drive, I'd tend to be in favour of many of the places in between having sidewalks.
But still, a blanket "you can't afford roads" is a bit much.
Bollards like in the article are usually a few feet tall. Like, 30-40" tall, like 800+mm tall.
Note these are literally just the hemispheres, not any of the related mounting equipment. For these to actually be useful at stopping cars, you'll then want additional mounting equipment. So its not really $20 anyways for these things which as mentioned aren't even going to be very useful at stopping any cars.
Finally, shipping from Russia to the US is probably pretty expensive and difficult these days.
2) F-150 being considered a reasonable car is a whole another problem
3) They aren't there to protect against speeding cars, but to delineate parking lots and other similar places where a car might suddenly hit you
4) For the same reason they aren't usually fixed to the ground, they function as 100kg paperweights absorbing the car's momentum
5) Finally, I don't suggest importing them, but I don't have American concrete plant websites handy and I don't expect the economy of casting concrete hemispheres to be that different across countries.
2) Ok, but we shouldn't design our safety infrastructure based on some hypothetical, we should base it off the actual realities of the spaces the equipment will be operating in.
3) So essentially just those little parking stop blocks, not actual bollards.
4) 100kg isn't going to do much to stop a 1,300kg vehicle going even 20km/h. You think two people are going to stop a car going that fast? The car will just keep moving after hitting one of these, assuming it doesn't just go right over it.
5) You really don't think there's a difference in export/import valuations internationally or that manufacturing costs differ between countries? A chunk of concrete made in Russia has vastly different economics from a chunk of concrete made in Germany from a chunk of concrete made in the US.
For example, a small parking stop block in the US costs like $60+, before delivery costs.
https://www.nitterhousemasonry.com/our-products/concrete-par...
Here's an example of an actual concrete bollard sold in the US. Starting at $835/ea. Note these have a hollow core; they're kind of intended to be put on to a metal post embedded in the actual concrete because in an actual collision with a moving car the car would just push these out of the way. So really this is $835, after spending almost a thousand dollars on the metal post solidly integrated into the concrete slab below.
https://www.belson.com/Round-Concrete-Security-Bollards
An example of the kind of post these would slip over: (only $2,800USD if you buy 50-99!)
https://www.reliance-foundry.com/shop/bollard/crash-rated/r-...
These (or the cheaper ~$1,000 ones) are the kinds of bollards 7/11 would be installing in front of their stores to protect customers. Which, comparing $2,800USD to $20USD, you can see why I had skepticism.
There's ~9,400 7/11 locations in the US. Lets say they install 6 bollards per location, and they go with the about $1,000 option. That's ~$56 million in just the costs of the bollards, without factoring in delivery to 9,400 sites. Also without factoring in any of the labor to install them, or the other material costs like the new concrete for the pad they're embedding into or the concrete filling the post. And the material cost for these bollards are cheap compared to paying the people to actually plan them, source them, install them, paint them, and inspect them. So realistically I'd imagine it would cost 7/11 probably at least a couple hundred million dollars to just install six new bollards at every one of their US locations.
I think it's reasonable for a non-US person to discuss safety infrastructure based on the actual realities of non-US spaces - I agree that things need scaling up to work equivalently on your side of the pond but europe is not actually a hypothetical :)
Remember that a combination of stupidly written emissions regulations and the ... uniqueness ... of the USian psyche lead between them to your vehicles being comically huge to the rest of the world.
The first thought that comes to mind for a european when we see an F-150 is to feel sorry for the owner's girlfriend.
> Bollard posts typically measure between 90 and 130 centimetres in height.
https://www.bollardsdirect.co.uk/blogs/news/guide-to-bollard...
90cm ~= 35", so roughly the height I was talking about before. Most other countries I've visited had bollards at ~90cm as well. Do you really see a lot of 20cm bollards around that are to actually stop a car and not just deter people from driving over something?
If you drive a car, you increase the risk of cyclists and pedestrians to get hurt or killed. Hurting or killing pedestrians also harms the society in several ways. Tax the car sales appropriately to the risk imposed on individuals and the society and you have enough money for bollards.
[0] https://fortune.com/2024/02/28/how-expensive-new-used-cars-o...
i explicitly said bollards should be up to the jurisdiction. it's reasonable to prioritize other things. that's fine. all i'm saying is that decision should be intentional.
if you're going to make a decision to prioritize aesthetics or cost, it should actually be a decision that gets made somewhere along the line. the status quo is that "should we install bollards here" is not even a question that gets asked for most applications, whether the answer to that question is yes or no.
[1] Keep in mind that a single new housing unit that reduces the owner's commute by 40 miles/day is good for eliminating more than half a million vehicle miles, in addition to all of its other benefits.
If a local government can get together a million bucks to install some bollards at one or two dangerous intersections, that's a win. That million dollars could never have been spent on a national emission reduction effort.
Whereas if you're asking whether they should remove other waste from the transportation budget, or any other budget, which is money spent with low value (e.g. overpaying to use a politically connected contractor), and use that money for cancer research, the answer is yes.
So why don't they do that?
And once you're already paying the cost to build and maintain the roads, you might as well use them for general purposes.
That's simply not true. If people combined the money they spent on car payments, insurance, the opportunity cost from lower average lifespan due to car emissions and children being run over by pick-up trucks, and used it on taxes for busses, we could very easily have a high availability public transit system, even in suburban hell.
Though of course to achieve maximum efficiency the government must create tax incentives for dense housing and tax disincentives for suburbs.
Your points about busses don't make sense - a bus takes up 2 or at most 3 car lengths on the road. One nearly empty bus with three people in it is thus more efficient from every angle, including time because those people aren't traffic.
Your idea that point to point travel is faster with cars is false: come to Houston and I'll show you why (traffic). You can get around cities and even suburbs with public transit much faster for all rides. A great example is the train from the airport to an Airbnb in NYC. Only a fool would attempt that in a cab to save time.
In other countries, soccer clubs hire busses and vans for meets and the like, or individual children simply take public transit to events. This was true in America in the 70s as well according to my grandpa.
Building a road for emergency vehicles and commercial deliveries is one thing. Just needs one or two lanes. But for every person and their car: Houston. 8 lane nightmares.
This is simply false. There is an unavoidable problem in suburbia: During parts of the day the number of vehicles that drive down certain roads is one vehicle with one occupant. Replacing a single-occupant car with a single-occupant bus is not more efficient. But running the bus only once every four to eight hours is unreasonable latency and objectively worse than the status quo where you can leave whenever you want.
> One nearly empty bus with three people in it is thus more efficient
You're assuming the bus will have more than one person on it. That's the unavoidable trade off. If there is one traveler every 90 minutes then getting a bus with three people on it would only be possible if there is only one bus every 4.5 hours.
> Your idea that point to point travel is faster with cars is false: come to Houston and I'll show you why (traffic).
Traffic is caused by bad design. Ironically it's the density separation that does this. You put all the density downtown but people live in the suburbs. Then there is no traffic in the suburbs but, because you need a car to leave the suburbs, unreasonable traffic downtown where everybody takes their cars, and on the main road that leads to downtown.
If people lived downtown then they wouldn't need to drive. But if every place was medium density instead of separation of high and low, you also wouldn't have a problem because some people could walk and the remaining traffic wouldn't all be concentrated in one place.
The problem is entirely caused by zoning rules and I'm not at all convinced we wouldn't be better off to utterly abolish all density restrictions whatsoever.
Politicians obviously and frequently don't get the math right (or even do the comparison), but that doesn't affect what they should do if they were making better policy choices, or what voters should ask for if they're doing the numbers.
1. taxes - I pay hefty taxes on fuel (in the UK) and tax on owning a car 2. insurance - I have to have an insurance policy that will pay for any damage to third parties. The payment for those externalities is pooled, but paid.
Not perfect, and not entirely, but a lot of it is paid.
- deliberately mix pedestrians, bicycles and vehicles
- remove all traffic signs, traffic lights and markings at intersections
https://bigthink.com/the-present/want-less-car-accidents-get...
Most of (new) Dutch road design is designed to give pedestrians and cyclists multiple safe options, while cars have to take the long way round. You can in theory still get basically anywhere with a car if you need, but often (especially in cities) it easier to walk/cycle/take the train/tram/metro. The result is that things can be closer to each other (no parking moat everywhere) so in the end the trip is shorter and safer for everyone, including people choosing to take the car.
They've chosen to lower the speed limit rather than add bollards.
> I think that it's in fact quite immature to act like we must always optimize for lives saved, no matter the cost and no matter how small the gain.
This is plainly incorrect, as Sweden and the Netherlands demonstrate.
That statement is both too generic and too specific. It's mainly driven by narrow sentiment, perhaps understandably since we're all pedestrians, especially the "choosing" part.
"Endangering" is very generic. Does a functionality in your software that could be beneficial to or facilitate endangering people but you chose not to disable it fit the assessment? Is E2EE helping criminals endanger people, or protecting honest people?
"Pedestrian" is too specific, there's nothing exceptional about pedestrians compared to any other mode of transportation so the statement above would need to be extended to "any decisions that did not protect people". And then it becomes very generic again.