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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

Even though mapping out safe routes can help, it's by far more a cultural and political problem that does not have technological solutions. You need separate bike lanes or completely separate bike paths, you need separate traffic lights for bikes. You need to change laws so that car drivers are always legally responsible for damage, even if a cyclist/pedestrian caused the accident (because it makes car drivers more careful/aware). You need to train car drivers to be more aware of cyclists, starting with simple things like knowing how to open a door carefully. You need a police force that conducts a deep investigation when a cyclist gets hit and a municipality that changes the layout of the roads to decrease the probability of it happening again. Etc.

I live in a country that is cycling walhalla, where there are more bikes than citizens, where a good chunk of the population go to work and do groceries by bike and we do all of the above.

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This is the correct answer. One big problem is that your "safe bicycle path" can be made unsafe by a motorist that forgot to check for bicycles at any second. That can be parked cars, cars that turn right or or motorists that narrowly overtake with a high speed or whatever.

And the best solution for this is to create a separate space for bicycles that can't be accidentally violated without running into some sort of barrier. The next best thing is probably to include certain things in the the education for the drivers license that give people the empathy and perspective of what it feels like if you are on a bicycle and some asshole overtakes you with 70 km/h and half an arm of distance.

The Dutch cycling embassy website provides some basic principles on this: https://dutchcycling.nl/expertises/cycling-behaviour/ and on infrastructure https://dutchcycling.nl/expertises/cycling-infrastructure/

In my opinion the biggest problem is people who design roads/infrastructure don't bike. When they bike they will know what to do and how to pay attention.

So right now there is this huge push in EU to make more bike infrastructure. But people making it ... don't bike. At least not everywhere. And where they don't they will inevitably make bad bike infrastructure. This could just be corners that are too tight. Bad incline on a corner for example will not be obvious to someone who never bikes, could be just a few degrees. But on a bike it's deadly! Maybe not on dry asphalt, but bring some rain, sand, whatever and people will fall.

And then we can start talking about culture.

> Maybe not on dry asphalt, but bring some rain, sand, whatever and people will fall.

Oh man, here in Paris there's been a huge push for people to take up biking since Covid. But many bike paths are unbelievably stupid. Sure, many are too narrow, switch sides all the time, etc. I understand they had to do those in a hurry, it costs money to make them wider, etc.

But the most baffling thing is that some are actually painted with some slippery paint for some reason. I'm not talking about signs or delimiting lines, I'm talking about the underlying asphalt being fully painted, so that you're riding on the paint.

Bonus points for some of these particular paths going through a pretty pedestrian-dense area, and on the sidewalk, between parked cars on the left and pedestrians on the right who have to cross the bike path in order to reach the waiting area to cross the road. So you're very likely to have to emergency brake. I usually ride using the local bike sharing scheme, and even though those bikes are in questionable state, you're guaranteed to have the wheels skid when braking somewhat hard.

There's a way to walhalla. Infrastructure, training, and liability laws prime the pump. When almost everyone is a cyclist, every driver knows that any cyclist could be a friend or family member. Or themselves.

Also... The Dutch reach. Open the driver's side door with the other hand to make sure you look for cyclists. In 12 years in Amsterdam I have never won the 'door prize'.

Honestly, the problem is, in most of the cities, people who drive almost never bike. If everyone biked, while driving, you would somewhat understand how the person on the bike reacts to their surroundings.

Tokyo is pretty sweet to bike around right now, despite the lack of dedicated bike lanes. It’s not as great as my times in Netherlands / Denmark, but it’s great nevertheless. It’s a bit weird, because almost everyone switches between roads and sidewalks, but you get used to it. For that, you need to make biking the superior mode of transportation for certain trips. With e-bikes, that is the case for a lot of activities within Tokyo.

Honestly, the problem is, in most of the cities, people who drive almost never bike.

That's true, but you have to bootstrap it. People will also not bike if it's not safe or attractive to do. In the city I live in, the city center was pretty unsafe for pedestrians and cyclists until the end of the 70s. Two persistent politicians decided to pretty much ban cars from the city center [1], which led to a lot of protests. They persisted and in 1977 the switch was flipped on a single day. Nowadays everyone here is in favor of this and other cities have made the same change, because people realize now that a city center without cars is much nicer: you can walk around much more carelessly, the air is cleaner, etc. Also, it made biking far more attractive, because you can get from the outskirts of the city to some shop much faster by bike than by car.

Since then, the cycling network has been continuously optimized to be able to travel between different points in the city as possible as quickly as possible and with as few interactions with cars as possible. And there are other amenities like traffic light that increase priority for cyclists when it is raining (to encourage people to cycle even when it is raining).

The same is true outside the cities, where there is a dense cycling network, largely separated from car roads. Both for fast work <-> home routing and for recreational cycling. The latter is the so-called fietsknooppunten network that prefers nice routes through nature, etc. over short routes [2].

[1] Article in Dutch: https://www.aanpakringzuid.nl/actueel/nieuws/verhalen/straks... , Google translation: https://www-aanpakringzuid-nl.translate.goog/actueel/nieuws/...

[2] Fietsknooppunten: https://www.fietsknoop.nl/planner

Here's an underappreciated problem with biking in cities: storage. Most people in cities live above ground[0], and buildings don't have dedicated bike storage. Bike theft is common, and is a unique crime in being simultaneously highly disrupting to the victim, trivial to pull off, and not big enough monetarily for the police to bother pursuing - so you can't really park on the street overnight like you'd do with a car; it's too risky. This means people end up storing bikes in their apartments. Bikes are heavy and unwieldy and full of pointy bits and hard edges; going up and down with them is super annoying, especially if you don't have a lift (or it isn't big enough to fit a bike).

Solve the storage problem, and a lot more people city dwellers owning a bike will start using it daily, and many of those who don't will buy one.

[0] - Follows obviously from assuming most buildings have at least one floor.

Foldable (brompton for example) bikes, and owning a shitty bike are common solutions to this problem.

Shitty bikes are just as heavy, if not more, than good bikes.

But they don’t get stolen as often, if at all.

All of this is just cultural cope. Bikes are stolen in Tokyo and Amsterdam as well. Tokyo space is incredibly limited. And etc.

The problem is, biking is just not efficient compared to other transport modes in super majority of the cities in NA. There is no political appetite either. People just love their cars, and can’t be bothered to restructure their lives like my friends in Paris did.

FWIW, I'm writing from perspective of someone who lives and lived most of their life in Kraków, Poland - a city and culture that never been bike-hostile, and is increasingly bike-friendly. Despite owning a bike, I haven't rode much in the city since my university years, precisely because of the hassle of storing it and bringing it up and down 2-4 floors without a lift. I don't drive, I use public transit, walk, or rent e-scooters - and the latter is inferior to your own bike in every way except it's there and you don't have to carry it up and down the stairs.

Automatic blaming of a driver is a horrific idea. Immediately unintended consequences spring to mind, cyclists purposely cycling into cars to get an insurance claim for one. This might sound far fetched but my friends in the UK police deal with pedestrians who throw themselves in front of slow moving vehicles in an attempt to get a damages claim.

I cycle to work, and I came here to ask if there's a crowd sourced city map that shows cyclist traffic accident black spots as part of my cycle route is genuinely frightening due to traffic.

This might sound far fetched but my friends in the UK police deal with pedestrians who throw themselves in front of slow moving vehicles in an attempt to get a damages claim.

Interesting. I haven't really heard of such issues here much. How it works here:

- The car is responsible: the car driver has to pay 100% of the damage.

- The cyclist or pedestrian is responsible: the car driver has to pay at least 50% of the damage.

- For kids up till 14, the car driver is always 100% responsible for the damage.

I guess this helps, because for the cyclist there is always a risk of being partially responsible if you intentionally cycle into a car. At the same time, since the car driver is always responsible for damages (50% or up, depending on the blame), they are more careful by default.

IANAL, but: https://www.brugmanletselschadeadvocaten.nl/fietsongeluk/#:~...

Plenty of before the war videos from Russia of people throwing themselves under cars to get insurance payouts. Not fake, real thing.

Automatic blame is naive thinking.

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