This design highlights a major failing with UK cycle "infrastructure". Here, we often have shared use pavements with sometimes a bit of white paint to designate the pedestrian and cycle lanes, but they cede priority at every single side road. The problem is that it makes cycling using them really awkward as it takes significant energy for cyclists to slow down and then speed up multiple times. The irony is that if you just use the main road instead, then you have priority over all the side roads, so the bike "lane" is pretty much useless.
Of course, we also suffer from just having fragments of cycle infrastructure that don't join up and most of the time, the infrastructure consists of "magic" paint that is somehow going to prevent motorists from parking and blocking the lane (it doesn't and they do).
Edit: Thought I'd share the sheer incompetence that we're faced with. Here's a "cycle lane" in the centre of Bristol that doesn't even use a different colour, so pedestrians aren't particularly aware of it which just leads to unnecessary confrontation - peds and cyclists fighting over the scraps left over from designing for motorists.
Italy has exactly the same problem. Not only we have a horrible infrastructure (the quality of our asphalt is abysmal), but cycle paths are pretty much always shared with pedestrians, and they're filled with obstacles (manholes, poles, chicanes...).
Moreover, bike paths are usually built on only one side of the road as a two-way path. It's dangerous for everybody involved, especially when a car has to stop and give way to both sides (spoiler: cars don't do it).
Everything makes biking on a bike path a slower and horrible experience, so nobody uses bike paths and then a vicious circle ensues.
In Ireland, Dublin City Council has mostly gone with lanes which are either on the side of the road (with or without bollards), or entirely separate, whereas South Dublin County Council prefers shared use pavements. The two local authorities are contiguous, so it's all a bit jarring when you go between them.
Its interesting how my brain immediately sees the ambiguous bike lane mixed in with pedestrians spaces, and thinks 'That's dangerous', but i am not conditioned to think the same way about bicycles being forced to mix with car traffic, or pedestrians forced onto very narrow sidewalks in the clearzone of roads.
I was pleasantly surprised to find one of the major London cycle lanes that goes from Tower Bridge to Greenwich gives priority to cyclists crossing side roads https://maps.app.goo.gl/b3SweRqzvNehTcE38
First we have to understand that, all things being equal, cars "win" by default on the roads. They are bigger, heavier, faster and more powerful (thanks to burning fossil fuels), and the operators are more reckless and inconsiderate due to being shielded from the outside world. That means their presence on the roads automatically makes it more dangerous and unpleasant for everyone else.
Second notice that primary routes are always designed for cars first. Every two places has a primary route connecting it. Depending on the importance of the route that route will have some level of protection against things like flooding, subsidence etc. and also be generally higher quality. That primary route is always for cars. Due to the above, that generally makes it undesirable or often practically unavailable for non-motorised traffic. See, for example, dual carriageways. Technically everyone has a right to use them by any means (they have paid for it, after all), but you'd be crazy to walk/cycle down one.
Third notice that cars are basically untouchable. It's considered a perfectly acceptable and normal part of driving to put people's lives in danger by driving too close and too fast etc. But nobody dares touch a car. They have the capability of killing or seriously injuring people, but people don't have the capability of killing them (the cars). The police will laugh at you if you report a car driving too closely. But scratching a car or something? Police will be on your case. Basically, we value metal boxes on wheels more than people's bodies.
Fourth notice that every part of the road network is designed to make it easier for cars at the detriment of pedestrians and cyclists. Why does a pedestrian need to press a button to cross the road? Why, upon pressing the button, must the pedestrian wait to cross? Why doesn't the light cycle start immediately? There is absolutely no sense at all in making the pedestrian wait. But everyone is used to it and doesn't question it; it's just the way it is. But what it does is makes being a pedestrian a third class status. It's these little things, like having to sit at the back of the bus, that chip away at people's ability to feel like an equal member of society. If you walk or cycle you are under no illusion that you come second to cars. It's little wonder people choose the car if they can.
Yeah it really strikes me when reading the OP article that this is what a country that's "got it's shit together" looks like...
OTOH I did wonder how feasible it is to transfer such a well-designed system to UK towns and cities where it seems like available space would be too cramped to recreate all those nice features though
It's the urban planning, but I'll point out that it's the requirements and responibilities put on the drivers as well.
Driving lessons for me consisted for 80% of learning how to ALWAYS ALWAYS track all the cyclists and pedestrians in urban environments, how to approach an intersection and have complete visual on whatever the weaker parties might be doing. A very defensive "assume weird shit can happen any time, and don't assume you can just take your right of way" attitude, and I think our cities are better for it.
In America, it seems that a pedestrian is a second rate cititzen. Conversely, here if you hit the "weaker" party as a driver and it's almost always on you in terms of liability.
It also helps that "the car driver is to blame until proven otherwise" is the actual law in the Netherlands, which is motivated precisely because of that power dynamic. Essentially, the responsibility defaults the more dangerous vehicle.
(for some reason this always is controversial with a lot of Americans whenever it is brought up in on-line discussions)
As a Dutch person living in the US, a big difference is also that almost every driver in the Netherlands is also a cyclist themselves. In the US there is this almost cultural divide between drivers and cyclists where it becomes part of people's identity. In the Netherlands most people will just choose their mode of transportation depending on the specifics of the trip.
In practice this means drivers tend to do a much better job anticipating cyclists, e.g. by checking for cyclists before making a turn.
In the greater united states, the first people to get cars were also those who had various forms of power. Those people (moneyed european americans who believed in the myth of industrialization, supremacists) used power to shape the legal regime of cities to claim more space for themselves.
"Jaywalking" is a pejorative slur popularized by some people in the USA to justify their road supremacy.
I've lost friendships with my american friends (and a canadian, living in america) because of how evident their dangerous driving is, with regard to non-drivers is.
I can stomach approximately one mean thing to be said about someone walking on a street before I am unable to be in friendship with the person who says that mean thing.
Pedestrians in america are not "second rate citizens", they are seen as _not having dignity or humanity_. the kinds of people in america likely to be walking around certain roads have generally been of the groups of people some Americans have pointed ethnic cleansing energies at, which obviously requires lots of dehumanization already.
I have such beef with the various powers and authorities that influence american mobility networks.
American traffic planners are functional flat-earthers. not great.
Driver's ed in the US in any state with much urbanization to speak of is like that too (there's 50 states with 50 different curriculums with differing levels of specificity so generalizing is ill advised unless you're looking to intentionally mislead) unless perhaps one took it long ago or in somewhere so rural that other traffic wasn't relevant.
Driving lessons in NL also teach you to open your door with your _right_ hand (left is right side drive), that way you turn your shoulder a bit and get in perfect position for controlling blind spot and mirror for eventual bike incoming (or whatever vehicle you missed).
These are absolutely wonderful on busy roads with tons of (car) traffic. Before they had the count down one would just stand there waiting for what seems forever. It can go green any moment, you have to pay attention. The entire state of mind is different. You can just zone out. I even pull out my phone knowing I have time to answer a message or look up at what time a store closes.
I just learn I've only seen the highly predictable ones, apparently in other locations they also have heat sensors to detect how many cyclists are standing there. It may speed up if there are enough. If 1% of the cyclists know what is really going on it would be a lot. Until now I was just happy it turns green when I'm the only traffic for as far as the eye can see.
Yeah these ‘predictors’ only make sense if they can give a countdown at a constant rate.
The idea is nice but often they countdown at say 1dot/sonly to have the last 5 dots disappear in the last second so they miss their purpose.
on the other hand, a consequence on predictable ones is that people will start cycling on the last 2 dots or so instead of waiting for the green light.
I wish urban designers in Poland learned from this. Our bike lanes are terribly designed, cars turn right into them with very poor visibility. The "solution" is that lawmakers introduce additional restrictions for bikers, which are unclear to everyone, so right now nobody really knows if bikes have priority on bike lane crossings or not.
It’s good to realise the Dutch cycling infrastructure did not came out of nowhere. There were huge protests in the 70’s about traffic safety. At that time cars ruled the roads and there a lot of accidents, also involving children. From those protests an culture shift started, towards better cycling infrastructure.
In defense of urban planners, we get good design and want to see more of it, but are usually beholden to the elected officials in the municipality who we require to vote in and ratify new design standards, or funding for projects.
Isn't it funny how part of the solution is a bit like introducing a one-car buffer into the queue, reducing back pressure? Makes me wonder how much traffic planning and distributed systems could learn from each other (or perhaps already have, I'm not an expert in either).
As someone living in the netherlands, primary use is for decoupling risk. Look at the pedestrian side, they only cross a single lane where they have to look in a single direction. This makes pedestrian behaviour so obvious that its hard to miss someone looking straight at you while you're crossing. Same with car behaviour, no matter where the car is, the nose is pointing straight at you before crossing the conflict zone. The line of communication you have before a potential accident is insanely useful. It does not matter wether a stop sign or right of way was there if you're dead.
The "buffer" reduces decision complexity even more because people treat them like train blocks. The only annoyance I have is when people actually break-and-check at these points even though its better to roll the car slowly trough to save the people right behind from brake checking entire queues.
The article doesn't deal with what happens when the queue gets bigger than one. It looks like a second car would queue on the main road, blocking traffic.
To eliminate this you could turn the buffer into a whole extra lane with room for say 5 cars to queue, but this would compromise on the nice feature where the partially turned car gets to completely turn and have great vision of the cycle lanes in both directions.
It's an interesting article, but from a systems design perspective I'd be much more interested in how they handle a change in requirements like "there are now five times more cars turning left here than the intersection was designed for".
> Makes me wonder how much traffic planning and distributed systems could learn from each other
I don't know any concrete example, but since road engineers have been using queueing theory, originally invented for telecommunication networks, for more than 70 years, I would be surprised if models and tools designed for one use case had not been reused for the other.
The article points out very nicely that it is expensive (in space terms) to have cars integrate safely with the pedestrian and bicycle traffic of dense urban areas. The mismatch in size and speed requires buffer zones that must be dedicated to this function only.
Roughly the same size as if the street had 2 car lanes on each side. In fact this is what I've seen living here in Amsterdam for a few years, every once in a while they remove a lane or two from some street and beef up these security features as well as add more pedestrian space.
It's cheaper to maintain extra fat sidewalks and stuff than 2 more lanes of asfalct also.
As a Dutch citizen, I love the expanse in terms of space. Lately, they have been allocating a lot more green areas as well, making the whole experience very enjoyable.
On the other hand, the reduction in cars due to people switching to cycling makes the infrastructure incredibly cheap.
Look at the video in [0]: how much space would you need if every single cyclist was driving a large SUV? Look how smooth the traffic flows through the intersection, how many flyovers would you need to achieve this with cars?
Yes, cycle infrastructure does indeed take up a nonzero amount of space. But it easily pays for itself by reducing the need for far more space-consuming car infrastructure.
A bidirectional bike lane takes about as much space as one lane of on-street car parking, which american cities have plenty of. Swap half the parking to bike lanes and that gets you most of the way there.
I wish more urban areas were as good as The Netherlands. Where I live, there are occasionally some footpaths on the sides of the roads that are half a cycle lane. People constantly walk in the cycle lanes and cycle on the footpaths. Other than that, its just normal urban roads
As a semi regular tourist to the Netherlands from North America it took a bit to adjust to all the modes of traffic at once but now I can easily navigate and stay safe around bikes, mopeds, trams, skinny cars etc. But I’m also a seasoned traveller in the region.
So, there would be an adjustment period for the population of your country, and it might take a while, and depending on culture might not be easy.
Driving in towns and cities in the Netherlands is frightening as a foreigner not used to it as you're constantly afraid about hitting a cyclist. I drive like a grandma there.
And that's how it should be.
I always regret not taking the very advice I gave yesterday about European cities and parking on the outskirts!
My hometown of Malmö is very bike friendly but let me be frank, no it does not flow smoothly. Cars are required to stop for cyclists and pedestrians on most crosswalks.
And no they do not like it, we have consciously prioritized pedestrians and cyclists at the expense of car drivers patience, fuel, and even congestion when the cars behind them all have to stop for a cyclist to cross.
Drivers get mad, regularly complain, cyclists abuse their privilege by rolling into intersections without even turning their heads towards traffic.
And you know what? I wouldn't have it any other way. I think a healthy society should prioritize healthy alternatives to cars.
The question is: is the flow worse for people in general, or only the ones in cars. If those cyclists and pedestrians would've been in cars (i.e. if there wasn't good bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure), would the flow for the average person be better? Would it even be better just looking at people in cars?
Only daft tourists and provincials use a car in a city like Amsterdam. You are right, car traffic doesn't flow, but that is kinda the point. Bikes and pedestrians first, cars second.
Very interesting article. After 12 years of almost daily cycling in the Netherlands, I recently started driving a car as well. I always appreciated the Dutch civil infrastructure, and this new experience only adds to my admiration.
Compared to other European countries, driving in NL definitely requires extra attention. There are many small & vulnerable participants sharing the space, moving in different directions with much less inertia than cars. On the other hand there are plenty of buffer zones, the lanes are cleverly organised and clearly marked, and there's 30 kmh (18 mph) limit in most streets in the city. A smaller car with great visibility is really useful here.
I moved from the U.S. to the Netherlands nine years ago, and I can attest that the bike infrastructure is amazing and has an outsized impact on your quality of life and general happiness.
Being able to bike everywhere — safely, quickly, without any cultural baggage of "being one of those bicycle people" — is a total game-changer.
It's one of those things that sounds kooky to people who haven't actually experienced it. When American friends and family ask me what I love most about living here and I say "the bike infrastructure," reactions range from a polite smile to eye-rolling.
On paper it doesn't sound particularly sexy, but in reality the impact on your day-to-day life is immense. Your health, your connection to the immediate environment, your cost savings, your time/stress savings, your sense of freedom of movement.
1000% agree. We moved 7 years ago and now have 4 kids. It is so valuable that my preteens can bike to tennis, friends, etc safely, even at night. Or that you can pop a toddler to childcare without a car seat and parking. Last year we finally got a car. I hardly ever use it.
And remember, the bike infrastructure was only built in the past 30-40 years. Before that, the Netherlands had a super car-focused infrastructure. It was only after the “stop murdering our children” political campaigns that the car focus shifted.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollan...
What really amazes me is motorists' dislike of cyclists (common here in Ireland, also). If that cyclist you see wasn't cycling, they'd be in a car in front of you, and your traffic queue would be worse. Every cyclist is doing every motorist a favour.
The underground (plus partly underwater) bicycle parking garage at Amsterdam Centraal is also pretty amazing to experience. So much nicer than the old outdoor one.
I live in Amsterdam. The freedom to do all your errants and entertainment by bike or walking is amazing. I can literally walk to the zoo, walk to the market, and walk to endless bars and restaurant.
The things is this is not some liberal, 15 min city conspiracy. This is how life has always been…
> When American friends and family ask me what I love most about living here and I say "the bike infrastructure," reactions range from a polite smile to eye-rolling.
I get the same eye rolling when people ask me what I like most living in the centre of a major urban metropolis (Toronto) and I respond with "not having to own a car". Having everything (work, my daughter's school, groceries, cultural amenities, etc) within a 15 minute walk is fantastic and there's ample car-sharing for occasions where a car is required. People think I'm this eccentric hippie or something when I just don't want to spend time in a car on a daily basis.
I love the Netherlands, and not just for their livable street design, I just wish they food weren't so bland. They make even German cuisine look adventurous in comparison.
As a Dutch person... this is sadly not just 100% accurate, it's almost part of our culture by now, hahaha. For example, in Gerard Reve's "De Avonden" ("The Evenings", a literary classic in the Netherlands from 1947) the daily bland dinners are described like a recurring cynical joke.
Apparently World War 2 is to blame for the shift in food culture. Somehow we never recovered from that.
I think we just internalized that Dutch cuisine sucks and focus on getting good food from other cultures (don't complain about our pannenkoeken or stroopwafels though, unless you're looking for a fight).
I really wish this tired cliché would disappear, and I say this as someone who has emigrated from a country renowned for its cuisine.
Dutch supermarkets offer an impressive variety of products, and there’s no shortage of specialty or “ethnic” shops where you can find virtually any ingredient for any type of cooking. Major cities are brimming with restaurants serving world cuisines, and people with diverse dietary restrictions are well catered to, with a plethora of options available. Plus, Indonesian and Surinamese food can be considered "local" by this point (if you ignore the historical complexity of the topic) and are simply delicious.
While it’s true that the availability of cheap street food might not be as prominent, to say the food here is “bland” couldn’t be further from the truth.
This is true. I can recommend the Indonesian and Surinam restaurants, both are former colonies so many people from there moved to NL. Their food is much better, the Dutch like it so much that you could almost call them part of Dutch culture.
A lot around this is culture. The Dutch have been living with cyclists for years so they work with them.
In London motorcyclists drive to the front by the traffic lights. The motorists accept this. I found London quite safe in this respect for motorcyclists.
In the other hand, riding a motorcycle in the Netherlands doesn’t feel nearly as safe. If you ride to the front by the traffic lights the motorists will get angry and more likely to lead to road rage and increased risk.
Having said that of course the Netherlands is full of cycles lanes.
But in terms of intersections I’m not impressed. On long roads where every other country would give right of way to the long road because it works together with the natural psychology of driving on a long continuous road, in the Netherlands they will give right of way to small side streets. It’s like they have a policy of throwing vehicles into the path of free flow traffic. It’s absurd. And did people coming from other countries results in a few heart stopping moments.
Very cool, but to me it kind of illustrates a common pattern of thought on here which is that there's theoretically some sort of "optimum" city design which works for everyone which is a fallacy.
There are costs and benefits to everything. In London you can walk ten minutes, jump on the train, get where you want, have a walkable (ish) town centre, go home drunk, and it's accessible to the poor (if we assume away rents which are theoretically solvable).
But then in various American cities you can drive 20 minutes in your own bubble from your suburban house to a parking lot around the corner from the bar/restaurant/whatever. You're shielded from weather and don't have to socialise with undesirables.
Neither of those systems feel inherently "wrong" or "right" to me, they feel like different opinions. I've enjoyed both at different stages of my life for different reasons.
If anything I feel that the "worst case" is when you try to mix both because then you either have hilarious congestion (because cars are too big to fit on medieval streets) or huge walking distances / public transport dead spots (because trains can't cover large areas with low population density).
Despite the cycling infrastructure being second to none, I hated my time cycling in Amsterdam earlier this year. The drivers (taxis in particular) are just terrible, very violent, at least in the city center. Having a lot of cycling paths that don't intersect or run along motorways (the ones through parks are especially nice) improves the situation and I did enjoy that part, but I can't shake the first impression of crazy aggressive drivers.
Ljubljana, Slovenia, where I live, has decent cycling infra (cycling paths in almost every street, not as good as Amsterdam), but the drivers are way more considerate, so it's overall much nicer to cycle around, at least to me.
That's probably an Amsterdam thing, smaller Dutch cities are lovely and awesome to cycle in. Rotterdam was also not enjoyable to cycle due to aggressive drivers when I visited.
The problem in the Netherlands nowadays is not the interaction between motorists verus cyclists, but ebikes versus normal bikes. Lot of accidents happen on the bycicle roads
By far the largest amount of cyclist deaths and injury are still caused by cars. The ebikes just get more news coverage because they're novel. But cars are heavier and go faster so will almost always be more dangerous to other cyclists and pedestrians.
When I rode an ebike in the Netherlands I still frequently got overtaken by people on omafietsen. It was the mopeds using the bike paths that were causing problems.
Bikes are small and fast, and only a small fraction of cars will need to turn here as this is a street going in to a neighborhood. The chances of multiple cars wanting to take this turn and there being a long stream of bikes that holds them up is small. So 'never' is not the right word here, but the times this happens is negligible.
This specific turn is onto a street that the article describes as "traffic volume here is low, since only residents will use this street." They probably expect the 1-car buffer to be enough for this intersection. You can see in the video that the 1-car buffer is empty most of the time.
For intersections where they expect more turning traffic (where the one car buffer wouldn't be enough), they add turning lanes that can accomodate more than one car. You can see an example of this a few hundred meters northeast when Graafseweg intersects the Van Grobbendocklaan: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZmURqawr3oeBX5Sq9
Bike lanes are everywhere in most big cities in France too... But they're bad, very bad.
We desperately need this principle of elevated bike lanes that cars should be worried to cross.
I have code an open-source framework to assess the cyclability of territories : https://villes.plus
It only takes into account quality bike lanes, based on OSM data, run every trimestre.
For instance, painted bike lanes or shared bus lanes are excluded.
Amsterdam's score is around 90 %.
The best French city, Strasbourg, has around 45 %. There is some inherent variability as each run takes random points among a data set to build the segments to be tested.
Is this intentional bait for the somewhat notorious "Copenhagen is Great ... but it's not Amsterdam" video by the Not Just Bikes channel? ;)
(as a Dutchie living in Malmö: I love Copenhagen, and I'm already happy that it's a million times better than 99% of the rest of the world. Still, it's also true that the Netherlands has a head-start of a few decades on everyone else and that it does show if you look closely)
Bike lanes yes. But where are all the safety features you can see here? Bike lanes are often separated, but not always. On many streets they are just painted on. They are rarely color marked, which is fine when you know where the bike lane but in new places you sometimes miss that there is a bike lane because it is not obvious at the crossing.
Even proper, separated bike lanes often terminate in right turn lanes for cars (even in places where there is a lot of bikes and in places where there would be a lot of space), leading to weird situations where a car is trapped in a wall of cyclists from every side.
In practice it mostly works but I'm not surprised car ownership in the city is on the rise, because the city still prioritizes cars way too much. Copenhagen is mostly a regular city with consistent bike lanes.
The one thing lacking is marking for pedestrian crossings on the bike lanes. It feels fine in this low-traffic intersection, but in my area (not netherlands), it has become a bit hard to cross bike lanes with high trafic from both pedestrians and cyclists.
This is 1950's Swedish solution, imho. Modern fad is that there shall be no separate bicycle crossings in intersection areas. Bicycles are equal to other vehicles so it makes sense to concentrate the intersecting traffic to one flow, so it is easier to observe.
> Bicycles are equal to other vehicles so it makes sense to concentrate the intersecting traffic to one flow, so it is easier to observe
Swedish bike lanes are the absolute worst I've cycled on - and I've cycled in England, Denmark, Spain and (briefly) the Netherlands.
Disregarding the pitiful maintenance of a lot of the bike lanes in Stockholm (which is another discussion), the current model where a bike-lane has been carved from the pedestrian pavement, but which then throws the cyclist out to the road immediately before a junction is a deadly design which I've found to be nerve-wracking both when I'm cycling or driving.
The cyclist is hidden behind parked cars, and is in the blindspot of turning trucks, until the very last seconds before suddenly emerging into the flow of traffic when crossing the side-street. I see near-misses almost every day.
It amazes me that anyone ever thought this was a good idea - but even more egregious to me is that Swedes seem to think their own invention is somehow so good they want to export it.
Although this was in the '80s I remember that I (Dutch) walked to school at the age of 5, in a town (technically a city (Enkhuizen)), mostly through a pedestrian area but I had to cross one busy street.
My parents told me later that they secretly followed me the first few times (I never noticed).
Just try to image that you live in a country that is so safe you can let small kids walk to school. Try to imagine what a society could look like if it's designed for people first, not traffic.
> My parents told me later that they secretly followed me the first few times (I never noticed).
Ha, not in the Netherlands, but we started doing exactly the same with our 5-year old recently. She wanted to walk to a friend's house alone a few weeks ago and my wife followed her in spy-like fashion to make sure she arrived safely. We also started dropping her off a few blocks before kindergarten so that she can walk the remaining distance "alone" (again secretly followed).
My kids walked to school from about age 7 or so. Same as when I was young. When I do drop them off (because we are late or there is a blizzard or whatever) I'm a bit ashamed and hope no one sees me driving. Now we have 2 pedestrian crossings on the way to school. one really busy, but luckily it has lights. The one without lights is designed so the road shrinks to single file so cars can't meet at the crossing, but have to take turns passing.
it was the 80s, I used to walk to school at 6, passing through an hospital, in a town, quite a big one, named Rome.
It's just that parents nowadays forgot that kids are functioning humans, can learn stuff and can do stuff on their own.
edit: for the downvoters, look at what Japan does or how women in Denmark do with their kids, instead of thinking "this man must be crazy, how in the hell I can leave my kids alone in this world full of dangers, they will surely die" and react like i tried to kidnap your kids to boil them and then eat them.
The image is not very common, most of the time they have elevated the space before and after the bikepath, forcing cars to slow down before going on it.
However one of the downsides is that often the front space is a too bit small in cities, so not always easy to fully go on it without blocking the bike path. And in busy bike paths at times cars will get impatient.
The notch for the cycle path is actually really interesting to me in that it allows a single car to wait without blocking the flow of the road they are departing. I imagine a lot of RL taillights get clipped but that’s fine at the end of the day.
That pretty much never happens. The vast majority of cars just aren't big enough to stick out, and people generally have enough self-preservation to not drive at full speed into a full-sized box truck.
Interesting that very few (any?) people in the pictures are wearing helmets. In the US, I think it's a lot more common for cyclers to wear helmets. Maybe that comes with a fear of getting clobbered by a car.
From what I can remember, the overseeing bodies (whatever they are) are not convinced that requiring helmets would reduce serious incident rates, and in fact convinced that this would decrease overall bike ridership.
I'd speculate that the metric of "injuries per kilometer cycled" wouldn't budge because of a helmets requirement.
Can't find a good summary of this now, but some bits of this are googleable.
I'm not sure how common this type of intersection is. I live and bike daily in Amsterdam and it took me about a minute to fully understand what's going on here. The picture seems to show a special case where the intersecting road is bike only, and instead of the normal painted arrows that show where bikes should queue up when making a left, there's an open area off to the left where one would wait behind the "shark teeth".
FYI if you are ever biking here in NL, the thing to remember is that if the "haaientanden" point at you, watch out!, as that means you do not have the right of way.
Edit: The side roads are for cars as well, which means you have a strange turning lane in the middle of the intersection where traffic might back up. A simple roundabout seems like a much better solution here unless the goal is to keep cars moving quickly and the turn lane is rarely used.
Can someone explain this, the italicized part below, in more detail?
>> When you approach from the side street, as a driver, the order of dealing with other traffic is different, but the priority is similar. First you will notice a speed bump. The complete intersection is on a raised table. Pedestrians would not have priority if the street was level, but now that it isn’t the “exit construction” rule could apply and in that case a crossing pedestrian would have priority. But for that rule to apply the footway should be continuous, and that is not the case here.
I haven't read the entire article, but this is a very common situation: main road with two cycle paths crosses a minor road (or has two side roads at the same place). All roads are also for cars. I'm not sure why the article makes such a difference between the two side roads: they seem quite similar apart from the one-car waiting space before the cycle path.
These types of interactions are pretty much everywhere outside of historical city centers and the like where you don't have space for it. You might not find them in the old town of Ams, but as soon as you head out a bit, you see them everywhere. Same in Delft and pretty much anywhere else with historic architecture.
Yeah there is not really space for these eleborate intersections in central Amsterdam. Most are signal controlled or pure spaghetti with trams coming from four directions with almost absolute priority, like this one https://www.google.com/maps/place/52%C2%B021'49.1%22N+4%C2%B...
In general, separate bike lines are nothing special in the Netherlands, even in Amsterdam. However, it's an old, compact city with narrow streets, so you're unlikely to see these types of intersections in those streets. Same is true for other old city centers with compact layouts.
You're more likely to see this if you go to places with more space, such as suburbs built in the last century (which basically means going to another town or city that Amsterdam grew into, because in the Netherlands city distribution is also compact). As you can see from the picture this street is in such a neighborhood.
Also, the general concept of having a distance of one car between crossing and bike lane is universal whenever there is space. I can give you a personal anecdote (at the cost of doxxing myself). I grew up in Oldeberkoop, a tiny village with around 1500 people in it that somehow has its own wikipedia page[0].
Just outside of the village is a crossing with an N-road, which is Dutch for "provincial national road but not quite highway". In the early nineties it was still a simple crossing, no separate bike lanes, and I recall traffic accidents happening once or twice every year. For context, nowadays the speed limit on provincial roads is 100 km/h[2], although in the early nineties it was still 80 km/h. That didn't matter though: everyone was speeding as if they were on a highway and going 120 to 140 km/h.
In mid nineties the crossing was changed to a roundabout, solving the speeding problem, and separate bike lanes were added (this also reduced traffic noise a lot). In the early 2000s the roundabout was changed to the safer design described in the article: more space between corner and bike lane, and a bigger island in the middle of the road for pedestrians[3]. I haven't heard of any incidents in the years since.
Recall: this is a village of 1500 people. When the article says:
> I would like to emphasise that this intersection is not special in any way. You can find many similar examples all over the country. That is because the design features stem from the design manuals which are used throughout the country.
... it is not exaggerating. This is the norm with any new intersection that is being built, or any existing one that is due for its two-decade maintenance.
I appreciate and approve of this detail applied to many interesting design features of an otherwise banal collection of junctions.
I live in Denver, and daily appreciate how much self-harming behavior is built into American road network design standards. It's truly stunning.
Consider reading the book "Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System"[0]
I wish he'd titled it as "the transportation system of the Greater United States". I emphatically disagree with the use of "our".
Anyway, american road networks were designed, funded, built by people who wanted to accomplish ethnic cleansing, and I think it's plainly obvious that this is the case, so it feels strange to even talk about it sometimes.
to my knowledge, no one in the netherlands road design system has been recently thing to accomplish ethnic cleansing, so their road networks can develop towards/with mutuality.
in the USA, at minimum the founders/originators of these systems were openly supremacist and spoke openly about what and how they were doing. I.E:
> If we [road funding authorities, municipal authorities, and their political supporters] could build a highway through their neighborhood, we could get rid of some of them, and make it harder for the rest of them to exist, and we'd see less of them either way.
the "they" was always an ethnic group. The playbook of these supremacists was to squish all people within that group into a tiny compression of humanity, then attack it directly, using the normal tools of colonial empires.
There are lots of dedicated cycle lanes in London now which is good. I feel much safer cycling in those.
But as a pedestrian and as a car driver too, there are still a hard-core of dangerous cyclists who refuse to use them and will instead be willfully breaking the law (going through red lights, wrong way/wrong side of the street etc). And just to add insult to injury, they literally add insults! Aggressive shouting, gesticulating etc if your dare to e.g. use a pedestrian crossing or drive on a green light but you are in their way.
Tl;Dr you can build all this stuff but it seems like the aggressive pricks won't use it and will just carry on with no accountability or consequences and we all suffer from it.
It is completely beyond me why other EU countries simply don’t copy the dutch. It’s clearly way better designed, it’s a pleasure for cyclists, drivers and pedestrians and way safer.
you need space to do that, not many cities in Europe have the luxury of being built from scratch and having so much space to dedicate to a single intersection.
edit: anyway the simplest solution is to turn every intersection into a roundabout, no traffic lights needed, clear right of way, cars can't go fast and in the end it also makes it easier for pedestrians to cross the street.
Such old urban places would just be car-free in the Netherlands (sometimes with limited access for delivery and emergency vehicles), a trend fortunately becoming popular in other European cities now.
The “urban” in the title is a bit misleading, this intersection is definitely more suburban, or on the boundary of an urban center. (Or rather, the author has a different definition of urban - in my definition cities like den Bosch are really just a small medieval urban core surrounded by continuous medium-density suburban neighborhoods.)
A street like your picture would make it incredibly difficult for a car to obtain a dangerous speed, so would by itself largely eliminate the need for dedicated cycling space.
Here in the Netherlands also in small streets and areas bike lanes are common. They are literally drawn on the street and a car is basically not allowed to ride on them when a bike is passing.
I find bikelanes that are integrated with sidewalks incredibly dangerous and give a false sense of safety. Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars. Taipei uses the sidewalk model and I recommend never using them
I find the Chinese model of bike/scooter lanes w/ barriers integrated into the main road a superior model. The other critical point is integrating bus stops into "islands" in the road so the bike lanes go behind the bus stops is critical. (a stopped bus with passengers going on/off essentially closes off the shoulder for an extended amount of time). Granted the main roads in Chinese cities are generally much wider so I'm not sure if it can be miniaturized the same way. The "turning area" is very useful concept for unblocking traffic and helping with visibility, though it does take up a lot of space. However the one in the example only accommodates one turning car at a time
1199 cyclists killed in 4 years, 658 of these being from collisions with various motor vehicles. 262 pedestrians killed in 4 years, 11 of these being from collisions with bicycles. Before any "oh but there's few deaths but more accidents it's still unsafe": no, it is not.
I know your username sets high expectations, but stop bullshitting and look at facts.
I broadly agree that I'd like standalone separated bike lanes, but I think this is dubious:
> Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars
As far as I'm aware, more or less everywhere, both the frequency & severity of bicycle vs pedestrian crashes is much lower than bicycle vs car crashes. Do you have any statistics that say otherwise?
> I find bikelanes that are integrated with sidewalks incredibly dangerous and give a false sense of safety.
As a cyclist, I also hate them. In my experience, what is even more dangerous than small children is dogs. Even if they are on a leash, there is nothing stopping them from just suddenly jumping a meter to the left, right in front of your bike.
Not sure if you mean the Dutch style cycle lanes: in that case, it's just tourists that risk impact with bikes, simply because they're conditioned to ignore them (i.e. the brain is trained to consider dangerous only what's beyond the curb).
After a few weeks people just learn to be mindful of bicycles and bicycle lanes as they are normally mindful of roads. In particular, one learns to never change direction suddenly (crossing a bike lane, but also on a shared road) but to stop first and check behind their back for potential cyclists.
I think if you tried them out you'll find these bike paths are not unsafe (and I bet the accident numbers back that up), because it's a whole system. Design like this will have features to force drivers to take slow turns when crossing the bike paths, and they are raised so that it's clear to drivers they don't have right of way.
NL always goes for the transit stops that poke out like you mention as well when possible.
When we visited Amsterdam as pedestrians, we absolutely hated these bike lane / sidewalk combinations. The problem are the often narrow, obstructed sidewalks forcing you to step into the bike lane. I wouldn't call that "incredibly dangerous" though, after all, we didn't witness any accident, but certainly annoying, especially considering that the most common obstruction is parked bikes.
I guess it takes some getting used to, or maybe the Dutch simply avoid walking and take the bike instead.
> Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars.
That's blatantly not true. Have you seen any KSI statistics?
Pedestrians are more likely to be killed by a driver mounting the pavement and hitting them than they are by a cyclist. The facts suggest that in a cyclist/pedestrian collision, it's often the cyclist that gets more injured.
> Bikes hitting pedestrians is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars.
Do you have any empirical evidence for this? Because every single study I have seen suggest that speed and weight of the participants matters most. And a bike and a person are simply, much less likely to cause serious harm.
A car can kill a biker easy, for a bike to kill anybody, you need to really be incredibly unlucky.
The Dutch are doing a lot of empirical work, and they have not adopted anything like you describe.
"Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars."
what? there are many orders of magnitude more injuries and deaths from bikes being hit by cars than there are from pedestrians being hit by bikes. Even when a pedestrian is hit (which is rare- both are highly nimble), it is very rare that it is problematic because a bike carries so little momentum
This design highlights a major failing with UK cycle "infrastructure". Here, we often have shared use pavements with sometimes a bit of white paint to designate the pedestrian and cycle lanes, but they cede priority at every single side road. The problem is that it makes cycling using them really awkward as it takes significant energy for cyclists to slow down and then speed up multiple times. The irony is that if you just use the main road instead, then you have priority over all the side roads, so the bike "lane" is pretty much useless.
Of course, we also suffer from just having fragments of cycle infrastructure that don't join up and most of the time, the infrastructure consists of "magic" paint that is somehow going to prevent motorists from parking and blocking the lane (it doesn't and they do).
Edit: Thought I'd share the sheer incompetence that we're faced with. Here's a "cycle lane" in the centre of Bristol that doesn't even use a different colour, so pedestrians aren't particularly aware of it which just leads to unnecessary confrontation - peds and cyclists fighting over the scraps left over from designing for motorists.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/JjfG1YJBwaqyov5H8
Italy has exactly the same problem. Not only we have a horrible infrastructure (the quality of our asphalt is abysmal), but cycle paths are pretty much always shared with pedestrians, and they're filled with obstacles (manholes, poles, chicanes...).
Moreover, bike paths are usually built on only one side of the road as a two-way path. It's dangerous for everybody involved, especially when a car has to stop and give way to both sides (spoiler: cars don't do it).
Everything makes biking on a bike path a slower and horrible experience, so nobody uses bike paths and then a vicious circle ensues.
We should all learn from the Ducth and the Danes.
In Ireland, Dublin City Council has mostly gone with lanes which are either on the side of the road (with or without bollards), or entirely separate, whereas South Dublin County Council prefers shared use pavements. The two local authorities are contiguous, so it's all a bit jarring when you go between them.
Separately, a national project, Busconnects, is putting in its own bike lanes. Some of these are... interesting: https://irishcycle.com/2023/03/23/busconnects-approach-to-cy...
Here is a related article from a UK perspective:
https://www.cycling-embassy.org.uk/blog/2013/07/03/how-does-...
It's even worse in my UK village. they don't even paint white lines, just the white outline of a bike every few hundred meters on the road.
Its interesting how my brain immediately sees the ambiguous bike lane mixed in with pedestrians spaces, and thinks 'That's dangerous', but i am not conditioned to think the same way about bicycles being forced to mix with car traffic, or pedestrians forced onto very narrow sidewalks in the clearzone of roads.
It is so adorable when Europeans complain about bike/transit infrastructure. Here’s my bike lane. It’s that white strip of paint on the right there:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/HHcHi3u5xbAM4jxY7?g_st=ic
I was pleasantly surprised to find one of the major London cycle lanes that goes from Tower Bridge to Greenwich gives priority to cyclists crossing side roads https://maps.app.goo.gl/b3SweRqzvNehTcE38
These are death trap bike lanes. Not actually suitable for cycling by an adult operating their vehicle beyond a walking pace.
The problem in the UK is a deep cultural one.
First we have to understand that, all things being equal, cars "win" by default on the roads. They are bigger, heavier, faster and more powerful (thanks to burning fossil fuels), and the operators are more reckless and inconsiderate due to being shielded from the outside world. That means their presence on the roads automatically makes it more dangerous and unpleasant for everyone else.
Second notice that primary routes are always designed for cars first. Every two places has a primary route connecting it. Depending on the importance of the route that route will have some level of protection against things like flooding, subsidence etc. and also be generally higher quality. That primary route is always for cars. Due to the above, that generally makes it undesirable or often practically unavailable for non-motorised traffic. See, for example, dual carriageways. Technically everyone has a right to use them by any means (they have paid for it, after all), but you'd be crazy to walk/cycle down one.
Third notice that cars are basically untouchable. It's considered a perfectly acceptable and normal part of driving to put people's lives in danger by driving too close and too fast etc. But nobody dares touch a car. They have the capability of killing or seriously injuring people, but people don't have the capability of killing them (the cars). The police will laugh at you if you report a car driving too closely. But scratching a car or something? Police will be on your case. Basically, we value metal boxes on wheels more than people's bodies.
Fourth notice that every part of the road network is designed to make it easier for cars at the detriment of pedestrians and cyclists. Why does a pedestrian need to press a button to cross the road? Why, upon pressing the button, must the pedestrian wait to cross? Why doesn't the light cycle start immediately? There is absolutely no sense at all in making the pedestrian wait. But everyone is used to it and doesn't question it; it's just the way it is. But what it does is makes being a pedestrian a third class status. It's these little things, like having to sit at the back of the bus, that chip away at people's ability to feel like an equal member of society. If you walk or cycle you are under no illusion that you come second to cars. It's little wonder people choose the car if they can.
Yeah it really strikes me when reading the OP article that this is what a country that's "got it's shit together" looks like...
OTOH I did wonder how feasible it is to transfer such a well-designed system to UK towns and cities where it seems like available space would be too cramped to recreate all those nice features though
It's the urban planning, but I'll point out that it's the requirements and responibilities put on the drivers as well.
Driving lessons for me consisted for 80% of learning how to ALWAYS ALWAYS track all the cyclists and pedestrians in urban environments, how to approach an intersection and have complete visual on whatever the weaker parties might be doing. A very defensive "assume weird shit can happen any time, and don't assume you can just take your right of way" attitude, and I think our cities are better for it.
In America, it seems that a pedestrian is a second rate cititzen. Conversely, here if you hit the "weaker" party as a driver and it's almost always on you in terms of liability.
It also helps that "the car driver is to blame until proven otherwise" is the actual law in the Netherlands, which is motivated precisely because of that power dynamic. Essentially, the responsibility defaults the more dangerous vehicle.
(for some reason this always is controversial with a lot of Americans whenever it is brought up in on-line discussions)
As a Dutch person living in the US, a big difference is also that almost every driver in the Netherlands is also a cyclist themselves. In the US there is this almost cultural divide between drivers and cyclists where it becomes part of people's identity. In the Netherlands most people will just choose their mode of transportation depending on the specifics of the trip.
In practice this means drivers tend to do a much better job anticipating cyclists, e.g. by checking for cyclists before making a turn.
In the greater united states, the first people to get cars were also those who had various forms of power. Those people (moneyed european americans who believed in the myth of industrialization, supremacists) used power to shape the legal regime of cities to claim more space for themselves.
"Jaywalking" is a pejorative slur popularized by some people in the USA to justify their road supremacy.
I've lost friendships with my american friends (and a canadian, living in america) because of how evident their dangerous driving is, with regard to non-drivers is.
I can stomach approximately one mean thing to be said about someone walking on a street before I am unable to be in friendship with the person who says that mean thing.
Pedestrians in america are not "second rate citizens", they are seen as _not having dignity or humanity_. the kinds of people in america likely to be walking around certain roads have generally been of the groups of people some Americans have pointed ethnic cleansing energies at, which obviously requires lots of dehumanization already.
I have such beef with the various powers and authorities that influence american mobility networks.
American traffic planners are functional flat-earthers. not great.
Driver's ed in the US in any state with much urbanization to speak of is like that too (there's 50 states with 50 different curriculums with differing levels of specificity so generalizing is ill advised unless you're looking to intentionally mislead) unless perhaps one took it long ago or in somewhere so rural that other traffic wasn't relevant.
Driving lessons in NL also teach you to open your door with your _right_ hand (left is right side drive), that way you turn your shoulder a bit and get in perfect position for controlling blind spot and mirror for eventual bike incoming (or whatever vehicle you missed).
I live in NL close to a border. Guess where tourists tend to stop their car, when coming in from the left in situation of the fine article?
People have little situational awareness anyway, but perhaps a bit moreso when they are Dutch.
We have lots of smooth infrastructure that I never noticed until various foreign experts on the internet expressed how wonderful it is.
There is an actual traffic light design I really like. It has a circle of small white leds that switch off one by one as a count down to green
https://www.maxvandaag.nl/sessies/themas/reizen-verkeer/hoe-...
These are absolutely wonderful on busy roads with tons of (car) traffic. Before they had the count down one would just stand there waiting for what seems forever. It can go green any moment, you have to pay attention. The entire state of mind is different. You can just zone out. I even pull out my phone knowing I have time to answer a message or look up at what time a store closes.
I just learn I've only seen the highly predictable ones, apparently in other locations they also have heat sensors to detect how many cyclists are standing there. It may speed up if there are enough. If 1% of the cyclists know what is really going on it would be a lot. Until now I was just happy it turns green when I'm the only traffic for as far as the eye can see.
Oh wow, I never even consciously realised the zoning-out benefit - I already just appreciated them for being able to take off more quickly.
Yeah these ‘predictors’ only make sense if they can give a countdown at a constant rate. The idea is nice but often they countdown at say 1dot/sonly to have the last 5 dots disappear in the last second so they miss their purpose. on the other hand, a consequence on predictable ones is that people will start cycling on the last 2 dots or so instead of waiting for the green light.
I wish urban designers in Poland learned from this. Our bike lanes are terribly designed, cars turn right into them with very poor visibility. The "solution" is that lawmakers introduce additional restrictions for bikers, which are unclear to everyone, so right now nobody really knows if bikes have priority on bike lane crossings or not.
It’s good to realise the Dutch cycling infrastructure did not came out of nowhere. There were huge protests in the 70’s about traffic safety. At that time cars ruled the roads and there a lot of accidents, also involving children. From those protests an culture shift started, towards better cycling infrastructure.
In defense of urban planners, we get good design and want to see more of it, but are usually beholden to the elected officials in the municipality who we require to vote in and ratify new design standards, or funding for projects.
Isn't it funny how part of the solution is a bit like introducing a one-car buffer into the queue, reducing back pressure? Makes me wonder how much traffic planning and distributed systems could learn from each other (or perhaps already have, I'm not an expert in either).
As someone living in the netherlands, primary use is for decoupling risk. Look at the pedestrian side, they only cross a single lane where they have to look in a single direction. This makes pedestrian behaviour so obvious that its hard to miss someone looking straight at you while you're crossing. Same with car behaviour, no matter where the car is, the nose is pointing straight at you before crossing the conflict zone. The line of communication you have before a potential accident is insanely useful. It does not matter wether a stop sign or right of way was there if you're dead.
The "buffer" reduces decision complexity even more because people treat them like train blocks. The only annoyance I have is when people actually break-and-check at these points even though its better to roll the car slowly trough to save the people right behind from brake checking entire queues.
The article doesn't deal with what happens when the queue gets bigger than one. It looks like a second car would queue on the main road, blocking traffic.
To eliminate this you could turn the buffer into a whole extra lane with room for say 5 cars to queue, but this would compromise on the nice feature where the partially turned car gets to completely turn and have great vision of the cycle lanes in both directions.
It's an interesting article, but from a systems design perspective I'd be much more interested in how they handle a change in requirements like "there are now five times more cars turning left here than the intersection was designed for".
> Makes me wonder how much traffic planning and distributed systems could learn from each other
I don't know any concrete example, but since road engineers have been using queueing theory, originally invented for telecommunication networks, for more than 70 years, I would be surprised if models and tools designed for one use case had not been reused for the other.
The article points out very nicely that it is expensive (in space terms) to have cars integrate safely with the pedestrian and bicycle traffic of dense urban areas. The mismatch in size and speed requires buffer zones that must be dedicated to this function only.
Roughly the same size as if the street had 2 car lanes on each side. In fact this is what I've seen living here in Amsterdam for a few years, every once in a while they remove a lane or two from some street and beef up these security features as well as add more pedestrian space.
It's cheaper to maintain extra fat sidewalks and stuff than 2 more lanes of asfalct also.
As a Dutch citizen, I love the expanse in terms of space. Lately, they have been allocating a lot more green areas as well, making the whole experience very enjoyable.
Example: https://zuidas.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/groenstrook-bee...
On the other hand, the reduction in cars due to people switching to cycling makes the infrastructure incredibly cheap.
Look at the video in [0]: how much space would you need if every single cyclist was driving a large SUV? Look how smooth the traffic flows through the intersection, how many flyovers would you need to achieve this with cars?
Yes, cycle infrastructure does indeed take up a nonzero amount of space. But it easily pays for itself by reducing the need for far more space-consuming car infrastructure.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RQrKP9a0XE
A bidirectional bike lane takes about as much space as one lane of on-street car parking, which american cities have plenty of. Swap half the parking to bike lanes and that gets you most of the way there.
I wish more urban areas were as good as The Netherlands. Where I live, there are occasionally some footpaths on the sides of the roads that are half a cycle lane. People constantly walk in the cycle lanes and cycle on the footpaths. Other than that, its just normal urban roads
As a semi regular tourist to the Netherlands from North America it took a bit to adjust to all the modes of traffic at once but now I can easily navigate and stay safe around bikes, mopeds, trams, skinny cars etc. But I’m also a seasoned traveller in the region.
So, there would be an adjustment period for the population of your country, and it might take a while, and depending on culture might not be easy.
Where I live there will be pedestrians on left side of asphalt roads and street food stalls on footpaths if the footpaths exist at all.
Driving in towns and cities in the Netherlands is frightening as a foreigner not used to it as you're constantly afraid about hitting a cyclist. I drive like a grandma there.
And that's how it should be.
I always regret not taking the very advice I gave yesterday about European cities and parking on the outskirts!
It's much easier if you also cycle or just walk. People in cars in a city is pretty weird, we just got way too much used to it.
My hometown of Malmö is very bike friendly but let me be frank, no it does not flow smoothly. Cars are required to stop for cyclists and pedestrians on most crosswalks.
And no they do not like it, we have consciously prioritized pedestrians and cyclists at the expense of car drivers patience, fuel, and even congestion when the cars behind them all have to stop for a cyclist to cross.
Drivers get mad, regularly complain, cyclists abuse their privilege by rolling into intersections without even turning their heads towards traffic.
And you know what? I wouldn't have it any other way. I think a healthy society should prioritize healthy alternatives to cars.
The question is: is the flow worse for people in general, or only the ones in cars. If those cyclists and pedestrians would've been in cars (i.e. if there wasn't good bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure), would the flow for the average person be better? Would it even be better just looking at people in cars?
Only daft tourists and provincials use a car in a city like Amsterdam. You are right, car traffic doesn't flow, but that is kinda the point. Bikes and pedestrians first, cars second.
Very interesting article. After 12 years of almost daily cycling in the Netherlands, I recently started driving a car as well. I always appreciated the Dutch civil infrastructure, and this new experience only adds to my admiration.
Compared to other European countries, driving in NL definitely requires extra attention. There are many small & vulnerable participants sharing the space, moving in different directions with much less inertia than cars. On the other hand there are plenty of buffer zones, the lanes are cleverly organised and clearly marked, and there's 30 kmh (18 mph) limit in most streets in the city. A smaller car with great visibility is really useful here.
I moved from the U.S. to the Netherlands nine years ago, and I can attest that the bike infrastructure is amazing and has an outsized impact on your quality of life and general happiness.
Being able to bike everywhere — safely, quickly, without any cultural baggage of "being one of those bicycle people" — is a total game-changer.
It's one of those things that sounds kooky to people who haven't actually experienced it. When American friends and family ask me what I love most about living here and I say "the bike infrastructure," reactions range from a polite smile to eye-rolling.
On paper it doesn't sound particularly sexy, but in reality the impact on your day-to-day life is immense. Your health, your connection to the immediate environment, your cost savings, your time/stress savings, your sense of freedom of movement.
1000% agree. We moved 7 years ago and now have 4 kids. It is so valuable that my preteens can bike to tennis, friends, etc safely, even at night. Or that you can pop a toddler to childcare without a car seat and parking. Last year we finally got a car. I hardly ever use it.
And remember, the bike infrastructure was only built in the past 30-40 years. Before that, the Netherlands had a super car-focused infrastructure. It was only after the “stop murdering our children” political campaigns that the car focus shifted. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollan...
> "being one of those bicycle people"
What really amazes me is motorists' dislike of cyclists (common here in Ireland, also). If that cyclist you see wasn't cycling, they'd be in a car in front of you, and your traffic queue would be worse. Every cyclist is doing every motorist a favour.
The underground (plus partly underwater) bicycle parking garage at Amsterdam Centraal is also pretty amazing to experience. So much nicer than the old outdoor one.
I live in Amsterdam. The freedom to do all your errants and entertainment by bike or walking is amazing. I can literally walk to the zoo, walk to the market, and walk to endless bars and restaurant.
The things is this is not some liberal, 15 min city conspiracy. This is how life has always been…
> without any cultural baggage of "being one of those bicycle people"
Arguably you technically do have that cultural baggage, it's just that it's a core part of the Dutch national identity so it doesn't stand out ;)
> When American friends and family ask me what I love most about living here and I say "the bike infrastructure," reactions range from a polite smile to eye-rolling.
I get the same eye rolling when people ask me what I like most living in the centre of a major urban metropolis (Toronto) and I respond with "not having to own a car". Having everything (work, my daughter's school, groceries, cultural amenities, etc) within a 15 minute walk is fantastic and there's ample car-sharing for occasions where a car is required. People think I'm this eccentric hippie or something when I just don't want to spend time in a car on a daily basis.
I love the Netherlands, and not just for their livable street design, I just wish they food weren't so bland. They make even German cuisine look adventurous in comparison.
As a Dutch person... this is sadly not just 100% accurate, it's almost part of our culture by now, hahaha. For example, in Gerard Reve's "De Avonden" ("The Evenings", a literary classic in the Netherlands from 1947) the daily bland dinners are described like a recurring cynical joke.
Apparently World War 2 is to blame for the shift in food culture. Somehow we never recovered from that.
I think we just internalized that Dutch cuisine sucks and focus on getting good food from other cultures (don't complain about our pannenkoeken or stroopwafels though, unless you're looking for a fight).
Their savory dishes aren't great (looking at you stamppot) but they do sweets well! Poffertjes, oliebollen, stroopwafels, etc.
Surinamese is what you are looking for.
I really wish this tired cliché would disappear, and I say this as someone who has emigrated from a country renowned for its cuisine.
Dutch supermarkets offer an impressive variety of products, and there’s no shortage of specialty or “ethnic” shops where you can find virtually any ingredient for any type of cooking. Major cities are brimming with restaurants serving world cuisines, and people with diverse dietary restrictions are well catered to, with a plethora of options available. Plus, Indonesian and Surinamese food can be considered "local" by this point (if you ignore the historical complexity of the topic) and are simply delicious.
While it’s true that the availability of cheap street food might not be as prominent, to say the food here is “bland” couldn’t be further from the truth.
This is true. I can recommend the Indonesian and Surinam restaurants, both are former colonies so many people from there moved to NL. Their food is much better, the Dutch like it so much that you could almost call them part of Dutch culture.
I admire it to an extent in that it is a part of their healthy culture. I think they take it a bit far though
But being more like the Italians or French in terms of food would mean being more like the Italians or French...
They should also improve the landscape. It's too flat. What happened to the proposal to build a mountain in the North Sea?
I had some decent ramen in Utrecht recently!
A lot around this is culture. The Dutch have been living with cyclists for years so they work with them.
In London motorcyclists drive to the front by the traffic lights. The motorists accept this. I found London quite safe in this respect for motorcyclists.
In the other hand, riding a motorcycle in the Netherlands doesn’t feel nearly as safe. If you ride to the front by the traffic lights the motorists will get angry and more likely to lead to road rage and increased risk.
Having said that of course the Netherlands is full of cycles lanes.
But in terms of intersections I’m not impressed. On long roads where every other country would give right of way to the long road because it works together with the natural psychology of driving on a long continuous road, in the Netherlands they will give right of way to small side streets. It’s like they have a policy of throwing vehicles into the path of free flow traffic. It’s absurd. And did people coming from other countries results in a few heart stopping moments.
Very cool, but to me it kind of illustrates a common pattern of thought on here which is that there's theoretically some sort of "optimum" city design which works for everyone which is a fallacy.
There are costs and benefits to everything. In London you can walk ten minutes, jump on the train, get where you want, have a walkable (ish) town centre, go home drunk, and it's accessible to the poor (if we assume away rents which are theoretically solvable).
But then in various American cities you can drive 20 minutes in your own bubble from your suburban house to a parking lot around the corner from the bar/restaurant/whatever. You're shielded from weather and don't have to socialise with undesirables.
Neither of those systems feel inherently "wrong" or "right" to me, they feel like different opinions. I've enjoyed both at different stages of my life for different reasons.
If anything I feel that the "worst case" is when you try to mix both because then you either have hilarious congestion (because cars are too big to fit on medieval streets) or huge walking distances / public transport dead spots (because trains can't cover large areas with low population density).
> Neither of those systems feel inherently "wrong" or "right" to me, they feel like different opinions.
One of those options is clearly much, much worse for the planet. That's not just my opinion.
Despite the cycling infrastructure being second to none, I hated my time cycling in Amsterdam earlier this year. The drivers (taxis in particular) are just terrible, very violent, at least in the city center. Having a lot of cycling paths that don't intersect or run along motorways (the ones through parks are especially nice) improves the situation and I did enjoy that part, but I can't shake the first impression of crazy aggressive drivers.
Ljubljana, Slovenia, where I live, has decent cycling infra (cycling paths in almost every street, not as good as Amsterdam), but the drivers are way more considerate, so it's overall much nicer to cycle around, at least to me.
That's probably an Amsterdam thing, smaller Dutch cities are lovely and awesome to cycle in. Rotterdam was also not enjoyable to cycle due to aggressive drivers when I visited.
Cool to see my hometown ('s-Hertogenbosch) appear on the front page of HN. I use this intersection almost every week: AMA ;)
How far is it from the intersection to the nearest place you can get a Bosche Bol? :)
How funny it is to hear foreigners try to pronounce it?
The problem in the Netherlands nowadays is not the interaction between motorists verus cyclists, but ebikes versus normal bikes. Lot of accidents happen on the bycicle roads
By far the largest amount of cyclist deaths and injury are still caused by cars. The ebikes just get more news coverage because they're novel. But cars are heavier and go faster so will almost always be more dangerous to other cyclists and pedestrians.
When I rode an ebike in the Netherlands I still frequently got overtaken by people on omafietsen. It was the mopeds using the bike paths that were causing problems.
> Here you can see that a car drivers waiting for people cycling are never in the way of other people in cars.
Am I blind or does it only work for just one or maybe two cars?
Bikes are small and fast, and only a small fraction of cars will need to turn here as this is a street going in to a neighborhood. The chances of multiple cars wanting to take this turn and there being a long stream of bikes that holds them up is small. So 'never' is not the right word here, but the times this happens is negligible.
Correct, only one.
This specific turn is onto a street that the article describes as "traffic volume here is low, since only residents will use this street." They probably expect the 1-car buffer to be enough for this intersection. You can see in the video that the 1-car buffer is empty most of the time.
For intersections where they expect more turning traffic (where the one car buffer wouldn't be enough), they add turning lanes that can accomodate more than one car. You can see an example of this a few hundred meters northeast when Graafseweg intersects the Van Grobbendocklaan: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZmURqawr3oeBX5Sq9
Correct. That is enough 95% of the time. (I made that number up, but it's not far from the truth.)
It's not that much different from Copenhagen where I live. Bike lanes are everywhere.
Bike lanes are everywhere in most big cities in France too... But they're bad, very bad.
We desperately need this principle of elevated bike lanes that cars should be worried to cross.
I have code an open-source framework to assess the cyclability of territories : https://villes.plus
It only takes into account quality bike lanes, based on OSM data, run every trimestre.
For instance, painted bike lanes or shared bus lanes are excluded.
Amsterdam's score is around 90 %.
The best French city, Strasbourg, has around 45 %. There is some inherent variability as each run takes random points among a data set to build the segments to be tested.
Is this intentional bait for the somewhat notorious "Copenhagen is Great ... but it's not Amsterdam" video by the Not Just Bikes channel? ;)
(as a Dutchie living in Malmö: I love Copenhagen, and I'm already happy that it's a million times better than 99% of the rest of the world. Still, it's also true that the Netherlands has a head-start of a few decades on everyone else and that it does show if you look closely)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjzzV2Akyds
Bike lanes yes. But where are all the safety features you can see here? Bike lanes are often separated, but not always. On many streets they are just painted on. They are rarely color marked, which is fine when you know where the bike lane but in new places you sometimes miss that there is a bike lane because it is not obvious at the crossing.
Even proper, separated bike lanes often terminate in right turn lanes for cars (even in places where there is a lot of bikes and in places where there would be a lot of space), leading to weird situations where a car is trapped in a wall of cyclists from every side.
In practice it mostly works but I'm not surprised car ownership in the city is on the rise, because the city still prioritizes cars way too much. Copenhagen is mostly a regular city with consistent bike lanes.
Berlin is full of bike lanes, but they're built ass-backwards and inconvenient for everyone - motorists, pedestrians and cyclists alike.
The one thing lacking is marking for pedestrian crossings on the bike lanes. It feels fine in this low-traffic intersection, but in my area (not netherlands), it has become a bit hard to cross bike lanes with high trafic from both pedestrians and cyclists.
This is 1950's Swedish solution, imho. Modern fad is that there shall be no separate bicycle crossings in intersection areas. Bicycles are equal to other vehicles so it makes sense to concentrate the intersecting traffic to one flow, so it is easier to observe.
> Bicycles are equal to other vehicles so it makes sense to concentrate the intersecting traffic to one flow, so it is easier to observe
Swedish bike lanes are the absolute worst I've cycled on - and I've cycled in England, Denmark, Spain and (briefly) the Netherlands.
Disregarding the pitiful maintenance of a lot of the bike lanes in Stockholm (which is another discussion), the current model where a bike-lane has been carved from the pedestrian pavement, but which then throws the cyclist out to the road immediately before a junction is a deadly design which I've found to be nerve-wracking both when I'm cycling or driving. The cyclist is hidden behind parked cars, and is in the blindspot of turning trucks, until the very last seconds before suddenly emerging into the flow of traffic when crossing the side-street. I see near-misses almost every day.
It amazes me that anyone ever thought this was a good idea - but even more egregious to me is that Swedes seem to think their own invention is somehow so good they want to export it.
Although this was in the '80s I remember that I (Dutch) walked to school at the age of 5, in a town (technically a city (Enkhuizen)), mostly through a pedestrian area but I had to cross one busy street.
My parents told me later that they secretly followed me the first few times (I never noticed).
Just try to image that you live in a country that is so safe you can let small kids walk to school. Try to imagine what a society could look like if it's designed for people first, not traffic.
> My parents told me later that they secretly followed me the first few times (I never noticed).
Ha, not in the Netherlands, but we started doing exactly the same with our 5-year old recently. She wanted to walk to a friend's house alone a few weeks ago and my wife followed her in spy-like fashion to make sure she arrived safely. We also started dropping her off a few blocks before kindergarten so that she can walk the remaining distance "alone" (again secretly followed).
My kids walked to school from about age 7 or so. Same as when I was young. When I do drop them off (because we are late or there is a blizzard or whatever) I'm a bit ashamed and hope no one sees me driving. Now we have 2 pedestrian crossings on the way to school. one really busy, but luckily it has lights. The one without lights is designed so the road shrinks to single file so cars can't meet at the crossing, but have to take turns passing.
I will say that my daughters are five and seven and I don’t let them bike or walk to school alone here in Hilversum, which is choking on SUV’s.
My daughter’s commute https://youtu.be/UWp7YiM3rzM?si=QoF4BgLEbnltcyg6
it was the 80s, I used to walk to school at 6, passing through an hospital, in a town, quite a big one, named Rome.
It's just that parents nowadays forgot that kids are functioning humans, can learn stuff and can do stuff on their own.
edit: for the downvoters, look at what Japan does or how women in Denmark do with their kids, instead of thinking "this man must be crazy, how in the hell I can leave my kids alone in this world full of dangers, they will surely die" and react like i tried to kidnap your kids to boil them and then eat them.
> Just try to imag[in]e that you live in a country that is so safe you can let small kids walk to school.
The USA is already that safe.
> Try to imagine what a society could look like if it's designed for people first, not traffic.
The normal approach is to build overpasses or underpasses so that pedestrians have no need to go into the road.
https://tylervigen.com/the-mystery-of-the-bloomfield-bridge
We could just copy the Dutch road design manual, flip it for the UK and be done with it. This is basically perfect.
These are the things you can do when you don’t give away both sides of every street to fully-subsidized car storage.
The image is not very common, most of the time they have elevated the space before and after the bikepath, forcing cars to slow down before going on it.
However one of the downsides is that often the front space is a too bit small in cities, so not always easy to fully go on it without blocking the bike path. And in busy bike paths at times cars will get impatient.
The notch for the cycle path is actually really interesting to me in that it allows a single car to wait without blocking the flow of the road they are departing. I imagine a lot of RL taillights get clipped but that’s fine at the end of the day.
That pretty much never happens. The vast majority of cars just aren't big enough to stick out, and people generally have enough self-preservation to not drive at full speed into a full-sized box truck.
Interesting that very few (any?) people in the pictures are wearing helmets. In the US, I think it's a lot more common for cyclers to wear helmets. Maybe that comes with a fear of getting clobbered by a car.
From what I can remember, the overseeing bodies (whatever they are) are not convinced that requiring helmets would reduce serious incident rates, and in fact convinced that this would decrease overall bike ridership.
I'd speculate that the metric of "injuries per kilometer cycled" wouldn't budge because of a helmets requirement.
Can't find a good summary of this now, but some bits of this are googleable.
I'm not sure how common this type of intersection is. I live and bike daily in Amsterdam and it took me about a minute to fully understand what's going on here. The picture seems to show a special case where the intersecting road is bike only, and instead of the normal painted arrows that show where bikes should queue up when making a left, there's an open area off to the left where one would wait behind the "shark teeth".
FYI if you are ever biking here in NL, the thing to remember is that if the "haaientanden" point at you, watch out!, as that means you do not have the right of way.
Edit: The side roads are for cars as well, which means you have a strange turning lane in the middle of the intersection where traffic might back up. A simple roundabout seems like a much better solution here unless the goal is to keep cars moving quickly and the turn lane is rarely used.
I never understood why people have a tough time understanding the lovely shark teeth signs.
It's literally a painted give way sign.
Fellow Amsterdam resident here, this kind of layout is very common all over the city (I live in the south of the city but I have seen these all over).
Can someone explain this, the italicized part below, in more detail?
>> When you approach from the side street, as a driver, the order of dealing with other traffic is different, but the priority is similar. First you will notice a speed bump. The complete intersection is on a raised table. Pedestrians would not have priority if the street was level, but now that it isn’t the “exit construction” rule could apply and in that case a crossing pedestrian would have priority. But for that rule to apply the footway should be continuous, and that is not the case here.
I haven't read the entire article, but this is a very common situation: main road with two cycle paths crosses a minor road (or has two side roads at the same place). All roads are also for cars. I'm not sure why the article makes such a difference between the two side roads: they seem quite similar apart from the one-car waiting space before the cycle path.
These types of interactions are pretty much everywhere outside of historical city centers and the like where you don't have space for it. You might not find them in the old town of Ams, but as soon as you head out a bit, you see them everywhere. Same in Delft and pretty much anywhere else with historic architecture.
Yeah there is not really space for these eleborate intersections in central Amsterdam. Most are signal controlled or pure spaghetti with trams coming from four directions with almost absolute priority, like this one https://www.google.com/maps/place/52%C2%B021'49.1%22N+4%C2%B...
In general, separate bike lines are nothing special in the Netherlands, even in Amsterdam. However, it's an old, compact city with narrow streets, so you're unlikely to see these types of intersections in those streets. Same is true for other old city centers with compact layouts.
You're more likely to see this if you go to places with more space, such as suburbs built in the last century (which basically means going to another town or city that Amsterdam grew into, because in the Netherlands city distribution is also compact). As you can see from the picture this street is in such a neighborhood.
Also, the general concept of having a distance of one car between crossing and bike lane is universal whenever there is space. I can give you a personal anecdote (at the cost of doxxing myself). I grew up in Oldeberkoop, a tiny village with around 1500 people in it that somehow has its own wikipedia page[0].
Just outside of the village is a crossing with an N-road, which is Dutch for "provincial national road but not quite highway". In the early nineties it was still a simple crossing, no separate bike lanes, and I recall traffic accidents happening once or twice every year. For context, nowadays the speed limit on provincial roads is 100 km/h[2], although in the early nineties it was still 80 km/h. That didn't matter though: everyone was speeding as if they were on a highway and going 120 to 140 km/h.
In mid nineties the crossing was changed to a roundabout, solving the speeding problem, and separate bike lanes were added (this also reduced traffic noise a lot). In the early 2000s the roundabout was changed to the safer design described in the article: more space between corner and bike lane, and a bigger island in the middle of the road for pedestrians[3]. I haven't heard of any incidents in the years since.
Recall: this is a village of 1500 people. When the article says:
> I would like to emphasise that this intersection is not special in any way. You can find many similar examples all over the country. That is because the design features stem from the design manuals which are used throughout the country.
... it is not exaggerating. This is the norm with any new intersection that is being built, or any existing one that is due for its two-decade maintenance.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldeberkoop
[1] https://www.wegenwiki.nl/Provinciale_weg
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_Netherland...
[3] https://www.google.com/maps/@52.9331081,6.1326563,3a,75y,49....
The problem nowadays is not the interaction between cyclists and motorists but more between ebikes and normal bikes (on the same pathway)
I appreciate and approve of this detail applied to many interesting design features of an otherwise banal collection of junctions.
I live in Denver, and daily appreciate how much self-harming behavior is built into American road network design standards. It's truly stunning.
Consider reading the book "Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System"[0]
I wish he'd titled it as "the transportation system of the Greater United States". I emphatically disagree with the use of "our".
Anyway, american road networks were designed, funded, built by people who wanted to accomplish ethnic cleansing, and I think it's plainly obvious that this is the case, so it feels strange to even talk about it sometimes.
to my knowledge, no one in the netherlands road design system has been recently thing to accomplish ethnic cleansing, so their road networks can develop towards/with mutuality.
in the USA, at minimum the founders/originators of these systems were openly supremacist and spoke openly about what and how they were doing. I.E:
> If we [road funding authorities, municipal authorities, and their political supporters] could build a highway through their neighborhood, we could get rid of some of them, and make it harder for the rest of them to exist, and we'd see less of them either way.
the "they" was always an ethnic group. The playbook of these supremacists was to squish all people within that group into a tiny compression of humanity, then attack it directly, using the normal tools of colonial empires.
There are lots of dedicated cycle lanes in London now which is good. I feel much safer cycling in those.
But as a pedestrian and as a car driver too, there are still a hard-core of dangerous cyclists who refuse to use them and will instead be willfully breaking the law (going through red lights, wrong way/wrong side of the street etc). And just to add insult to injury, they literally add insults! Aggressive shouting, gesticulating etc if your dare to e.g. use a pedestrian crossing or drive on a green light but you are in their way.
Tl;Dr you can build all this stuff but it seems like the aggressive pricks won't use it and will just carry on with no accountability or consequences and we all suffer from it.
Needs (2018) in the submission title.
I also recommend this article, on why in the US, innovation in this area isn't pushed:
America Has No Transportation Engineers
https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/america-has-no-transporta...
It is completely beyond me why other EU countries simply don’t copy the dutch. It’s clearly way better designed, it’s a pleasure for cyclists, drivers and pedestrians and way safer.
Yeah almost everybody copied our airport signage system. Why not the road system... NL is very flat though
It also includes a car driving on the cycleway and turning over the full white line at 1:35 and use of the phone while cycling at 1:44
Meanwhile, in France: https://tinyurl.com/yjvsm9x9
you need space to do that, not many cities in Europe have the luxury of being built from scratch and having so much space to dedicate to a single intersection.
Where i live (in Rome) the streets are like this
https://as1.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/04/93/42/24/1000_F_493422444_Hw...
edit: anyway the simplest solution is to turn every intersection into a roundabout, no traffic lights needed, clear right of way, cars can't go fast and in the end it also makes it easier for pedestrians to cross the street.
Such old urban places would just be car-free in the Netherlands (sometimes with limited access for delivery and emergency vehicles), a trend fortunately becoming popular in other European cities now.
The “urban” in the title is a bit misleading, this intersection is definitely more suburban, or on the boundary of an urban center. (Or rather, the author has a different definition of urban - in my definition cities like den Bosch are really just a small medieval urban core surrounded by continuous medium-density suburban neighborhoods.)
I know few cities beat Rome when it comes to their age, but Den Bosch has had city right since 1185 AD...so it is not exactly "built from scratch".
A street like your picture would make it incredibly difficult for a car to obtain a dangerous speed, so would by itself largely eliminate the need for dedicated cycling space.
Here in the Netherlands also in small streets and areas bike lanes are common. They are literally drawn on the street and a car is basically not allowed to ride on them when a bike is passing.
I find bikelanes that are integrated with sidewalks incredibly dangerous and give a false sense of safety. Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars. Taipei uses the sidewalk model and I recommend never using them
I find the Chinese model of bike/scooter lanes w/ barriers integrated into the main road a superior model. The other critical point is integrating bus stops into "islands" in the road so the bike lanes go behind the bus stops is critical. (a stopped bus with passengers going on/off essentially closes off the shoulder for an extended amount of time). Granted the main roads in Chinese cities are generally much wider so I'm not sure if it can be miniaturized the same way. The "turning area" is very useful concept for unblocking traffic and helping with visibility, though it does take up a lot of space. However the one in the example only accommodates one turning car at a time
>Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars.
Source ? Here's mine: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2024/15/684-road-traffic-death...
1199 cyclists killed in 4 years, 658 of these being from collisions with various motor vehicles. 262 pedestrians killed in 4 years, 11 of these being from collisions with bicycles. Before any "oh but there's few deaths but more accidents it's still unsafe": no, it is not.
I know your username sets high expectations, but stop bullshitting and look at facts.
I broadly agree that I'd like standalone separated bike lanes, but I think this is dubious:
> Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars
As far as I'm aware, more or less everywhere, both the frequency & severity of bicycle vs pedestrian crashes is much lower than bicycle vs car crashes. Do you have any statistics that say otherwise?
> I find bikelanes that are integrated with sidewalks incredibly dangerous and give a false sense of safety.
As a cyclist, I also hate them. In my experience, what is even more dangerous than small children is dogs. Even if they are on a leash, there is nothing stopping them from just suddenly jumping a meter to the left, right in front of your bike.
Not sure if you mean the Dutch style cycle lanes: in that case, it's just tourists that risk impact with bikes, simply because they're conditioned to ignore them (i.e. the brain is trained to consider dangerous only what's beyond the curb).
After a few weeks people just learn to be mindful of bicycles and bicycle lanes as they are normally mindful of roads. In particular, one learns to never change direction suddenly (crossing a bike lane, but also on a shared road) but to stop first and check behind their back for potential cyclists.
I think if you tried them out you'll find these bike paths are not unsafe (and I bet the accident numbers back that up), because it's a whole system. Design like this will have features to force drivers to take slow turns when crossing the bike paths, and they are raised so that it's clear to drivers they don't have right of way.
NL always goes for the transit stops that poke out like you mention as well when possible.
When we visited Amsterdam as pedestrians, we absolutely hated these bike lane / sidewalk combinations. The problem are the often narrow, obstructed sidewalks forcing you to step into the bike lane. I wouldn't call that "incredibly dangerous" though, after all, we didn't witness any accident, but certainly annoying, especially considering that the most common obstruction is parked bikes.
I guess it takes some getting used to, or maybe the Dutch simply avoid walking and take the bike instead.
> Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars.
That's blatantly not true. Have you seen any KSI statistics?
Pedestrians are more likely to be killed by a driver mounting the pavement and hitting them than they are by a cyclist. The facts suggest that in a cyclist/pedestrian collision, it's often the cyclist that gets more injured.
> Bikes hitting pedestrians is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars.
Do you have any empirical evidence for this? Because every single study I have seen suggest that speed and weight of the participants matters most. And a bike and a person are simply, much less likely to cause serious harm.
A car can kill a biker easy, for a bike to kill anybody, you need to really be incredibly unlucky.
The Dutch are doing a lot of empirical work, and they have not adopted anything like you describe.
"Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars."
what? there are many orders of magnitude more injuries and deaths from bikes being hit by cars than there are from pedestrians being hit by bikes. Even when a pedestrian is hit (which is rare- both are highly nimble), it is very rare that it is problematic because a bike carries so little momentum