I find it quite distasteful and lacking perspective when hearing Dutch people say "cycling really isn't that great!" (although I know that's not really the point of this article). But still, don't ignore the horrific reality of really a lot of the world at this point: suburban america is just one isolated example. I know there's always some level of "the grass is always greener" but the Dutch emphasis on making cycling out to be not so really a big deal actually is a bit ridiculous frankly.
I got none of that from this article. I felt the author was trying to express the need for balanced considered approach to change rather than just a blind push to implement what the Dutch have. There's weakness inherent in the Dutch model, and while it might be the perceived pinnacle we've achieved as humanity, perhaps there's a better model if we consider it further.
Yup. Given, too, that it was presented at the Dutch Cycling Embassy, I (as a Dutchman) read this as the author trying to raise the bar/challenging the Dutch discussion on transit (or Movement, as her book is called) not to get complacent.
> author was trying to express the need for balanced considered approach to change rather than just a blind push to implement what the Dutch have.
I think that's a thoughtful concern, but really, the least of our problems in the USA is traffic planners blindly copying Amsterdam and going overboard with bike infrastructure. That just isn't going to happen. Ever.
On the plus side, there are US-based traffic planning innovations that have demonstrated some success in certain metro areas such as "Complete Streets". There's more of these now than ever before.
Another thing I only noticed when I visited Amsterdam - it's scary for pedestrians.
I love cycling, been cycling for 25+ years, including commuting to my office via (beautiful) cycling path at Birmingham canals.
But when I visited Amsterdam, of course I don't have my bike there, so I went anywhere using Uber, and walking around - and that's when I noticed that:
It's really scary to be a pedestrian in Amsterdam.
In a lot of places, the cyclist path is on the same surface with the pedestrian path.
Of course it's separated with lanes (read: paint job on the surface) - but we are on the same surface, next to another.
Several times I was almost hit by the cyclists, I'm pretty sure I was on my / pedestrian's path, but I almost got hit anyway. A lot of the cyclists are cycling in a very high speed.
That was a new feeling & experience for me, and I didn't like it.
I hope the situation will become better for the pedestrians.
Walking in Amsterdam isn't my favorite; as you have alluded to the cyclists there have long since grown tired of stoned tourists wandering into the bike lane and don't yield in the same way as in other cities. But compared to the US, where every street crossing requires dashing across 4-8 lanes of traffic in the 20 seconds allotted to me by the Car Gods... there is no comparison in terms of subjective or objective danger.
100%. As a pedestrian Amsterdam is genuinely awful. I've been many times and nearly been taken out by cyclists and trams. Ebikes are causing a big rise in incidents too.
There is no sane or remotely cohesive design to layouts and few curbs and so on
If you are being taking out by trams of all things you are not paying attention to the road layout and markings. Probably similar with bike lanes. People in Amsterdam have very little tolerance for tourists walking in bike lanes because it happens so much.
This sounds like someone complaining about being razed by cars while strolling in the middle of the street.
Another thing I only noticed when I visited Amsterdam - it's scary for pedestrians.
Compared to what? Los Angeles? Cairo?
Less sarcastically: I get your point, but it's a tradeoff. It's a beautifully car-free (and just plain beautiful and eminently livable) city otherwise. Yes, you do have to be careful about the bikes (as one must with cars, buses, and trucks, motorbikes and scooters just about anywhere else) -- but wherever you go, you pick your battles.
Ha, well pick your battle with an angry car driver and he'll probably shout, gesticulate and then drive away. Do the same with an angry cyclist and the outcome can be somewhat more severe.
I find traffic in LA is extremely chilled. For example, on the smaller roads turning cars yield to pedestrians always (at least in the more affluent areas). This is pretty unique. I've lived in big cities in four different countries and LA traffic is the most relaxed i've found anywhere.
Given that the carless are second-class citizens in LA -- and that this is one of the most obvious and ever-present facts of life in basically every city that made the ill-fated decision to follow the Los Angeles development "model" --
The first-class citizens might as well take pity on them, after all.
I've lived in Amsterdam for 20 years now and I don't know a single street outside of the canals where the pedestrian path is on the same level as the bike lane. Apart from the color distinction, the pedestrian path is also raised from the street level practically everywhere except for the canals where the border is marked by white lines and bollards every couple meters.
Isn't it likely your parent has seen a lot more than you? Were you along a canal? Or perhaps those places you noticed were exceptional in the extreme. Presumably you wouldn't really know after such a short stay.
My first time in Amsterdam I was terribly confused by the bike lanes. We’d never seen an entirely separate and dedicated bike lane like that so we walked in it. It was a Sunday morning so fortunately there wasn’t much traffic but eventually an exasperated local on his bike stopped us and explained that we were basically waltzing around in the middle of the road and could we please stop. He was perfectly polite and his information was quite helpful but I got the sense he had given the same lecture many times before.
Unless someone explains it to you, though, I’m not really sure how anyone could be expected to know?
If the concept is completely unknown to you, then I can imagine just not realizing it.
My British girlfriend once unplugged my alarm clock because she thought there was no way to use the power plug above that otherwise, my alarm plug was "blocking" that one. I just reversed the socket and put it back in. She felt stupid, but since British plugs can be put in one way only I can understand simply not thinking of that.
Well there weren’t many bikes whizzing by and the sidewalks were quite “full” from cafe seating and postcard displays and the like. It wasn’t really a conscious “decision” to walk in the bike path it just sort of seemed natural?
I've been there and don't remember that. But I did hear this complaint about other cities and it always struck me as odd. People have no issues standing on the sidewalk as cars whiz around them and they feel safe. A bike going very fast in its own lane next to you is most of the time slower than a car and about 100 times lighter. And thus at least so much less dangerous. People have a right to feel whatever they want, but the numbers show it's a lot safer to be a pedestrian in a bike friendly city than a car friendly city.
In perception, maybe. A curb doesn't slow a car down enough to not end your life, and it's much easier to do even for a driver trying to stay in their lane.
I disagree. Tactile barriers like curbs and even rumble strips provide real security because they are such effective signals to both sides. Pedestrians would be much more afraid if cars only had to stay in painted lines and people had to walk right beside them.
At this point it's no longer particularly newsworthy to write a car lost control and leveled three people on a bus stop. It happens all the time, it even happened on the bus stop I frequently used 20 years ago.
And bike lanes are already segregated with at least paint so that's already a signal. People just need to get used to it, which is hard initially when all you know is cars and walking.
Drivers intentionally cross plainted lines they are not supposed to cross all the time. Drivers rarely cross curbs intensionally.
SF for example is full of solid white lines. The law says solid white lines are supposed to be treated the same as concrete barriers. No crossing period. Yet people cross them all the time with impunity. If they were actually curbs people would only rarely cross them accidentally
I think it's more that we grew up with cars and accepted the danger. The same way we are no longer scrubbing our hands as we did early in the pandemic.
Sadly it seems like a sizable amount of the population plans to keep up the "temporary" measures forever. I can only assume it's tribally motivated at this point where it's simply not rational anymore for vaccinated people who account for <1% of deaths to go around in space suits staying six feet away from everyone and continuing to go overboard with sanitization. I predict they'll still be doing this in five years and still try to shame the rest of us who moved on.
Note that the "cycling heaven" the title refers to is the Netherlands in general. The Amsterdam city centre is probably one of the worst cycling experiences in the Netherlands due to the sheer number of people needing to share the limited space. Still vastly preferable over having all those people use cars though, and I'm sure outside of the centre it's much better.
I remember watching tourists try to cross it with their children, not realizing that they are meant to cross underground (in fairness, the signage was very hard to find even for those of us who knew there was an underground crossing).
> I hope the situation will become better for the pedestrians.
It will not. In the NYC metro area (including Northern NJ), pedestrians are constantly in danger of being hit by both cyclists and people on powered bicycles (which are motorcycles for all practical purposes).
I have seen these people hit people and on one occasion one of them kicked a stroller. If anyone says anything, they face further harassment: In one instance, one rider lifted her bicycle and hit me and left.
Delivery drivers tend to be better than others on the sidewalk, but then you watch them go the wrong way at 30 MPH with the giant battery pack and you feel for the driver who might have a close encounter or worse.
Sidewalks are for pedestrians.
PS: I notice that this thread seems to be full of people who claim standing on the sidewalk watching cars whizz by is scary. It isn't. Cars don't routinely jump the curb, cars don't routinely drive on sidewalks, most drivers are quick to yield to pedestrians. On the other hand, even if you are crossing at the walk sign, there will be at least four bike riders trying to run the red light through a hundred pedestrians at 42nd & 8th.
The problem isn’t the cyclists or the pedestrians, it’s that they are both combined to less than 2m of space on the side of the road, the rest being reserved for the almighty automobile.
When cities don’t prioritize dedicated bike infrastructure, the sidewalk is the de-facto bike lane. Sure, cyclists are supposed to ride in traffic but that’s also super dangerous in a city like NYC.
The failure here is on the part of city planners, not the cyclists. And enforcing traffic laws against an even moderately skilled cyclist is difficult: I remember easily outrunning the bike cops when I was younger because I was simply in much better shape than them and could handle a bike a lot better in an urban environment.
> The failure here is on the part of city planners
Yeah, no, when there is a perfectly fine one way road with enough space plus a speed limit of 25 mph, having to constantly be aware of people on bicycles come at you from behind or around corners at full speed is the fault of the person who chooses to do that.
The fact that this happens every day, multiple times is because 1) the targets (e.g., moms with a stroller) are powerless in a one-on-one confrontation with these bullies; 2) the police will never enforce existing laws.
In Denmark and the Netherlands, at least when I got to bike in those places, the police would routinely ticket bicyclists. I know, I got tickets and paid fines.
You’re seriously mistaken if you think a one way road with a 25mph speed limit is “perfectly fine”.
In countries with decent infrastructure you don’t need to look out for bicyclists “coming from behind”.
I also find it interesting that the guy protected by a ton of steel is afraid of 200 pounds of mostly flesh coming from behind on a one way road and is unable to imagine how that 180 pounds of flesh on 20 pounds of metal might feel about the ton of steel coming from behind them on that “perfectly fine” 25 mph one way road.
This is either an example of a perfect propagandist misdirection or the best illustration of the blind spot people on bicycles and powered-bicycles have when it comes to pedestrians.
I was referring to pedestrians having to constantly have 360 degrees situational awareness because of faster traveling bicycles presenting a danger to them, to their babies or toddlers etc. The person who's riding full speed on sidewalks is already signaling the fact that they are a bully. All a parent pushing a stroller or walking their toddler can do is to try to avoid being slammed into at full speed.
As for the person driving a car, the fact is bicyclists rarely consider the momentum of those vehicles when they decide to run a red light and ram through a bunch of pedestrians crossing the street and zip through cross-traffic in through daredevil fashion. 99/100 that works out not because the bicyclist is not a complete nitwit but because everyone else is constantly looking out for them.
Lol what lies. Pedestrians don’t need to have 360 degree awareness of bikes relative to cars because they are afraid of what bikes might do to them. There has been 1 pedestrian killed by a bike in NYC over the past decade. Whereas cars kill a pedestrian nearly every other day in NYC.
Rather, pedestrians pretend to be ok with cars because they’re socialized to believe car lanes belong to cars so if they get run over to death by them (which they do all the time) they blame it on the pedestrian, whereas if they receive even the slightest scratch from a bike while stepping onto the bike lane, they blame it on the biker.
And that’s before considering the fact that bike lanes in MUC are right along the sidewalks, whereas car lanes have several buffers between them and the sidewalks.
There are no trillion dollar bike companies telling pedestrians that they are at fault for any accident and that they are responsible for not walking near bikes. There are no bike companies that invented a new crime out of whole cloth (jaywalking) that tells people that if they enter 80% of the public street space and get killed by a bike, they are legally responsible (jaywalking).
How many tickets do you think have been given for “jaywalking” on a bike lane.
The reality is your entire complaint confuses the actual solution for pedestrians, which is more bike lanes (bike lanes save pedestrian lives since they create a buffer between sidewalks and car lanes through the bike lane, and I don’t think there’s been a bike lane death of a pedestrian in the US in the last decade at least), with your socialization which basically says cars own the road and any injury caused by a car is the pedestrians responsibility, whereas bicyclists are interlopers and any injuries by them, no matter how minor, is far worse than a car killing a pedestrian.
I'm from the Netherlands originally, but also lived and cycled in England, Ireland, and New Zealand.
All the cities I lived in had comparatively decent cycling infrastructure, far from what it's like in NL, but still decent enough.
Now, I've never been to NYC but the problem there was that some people seem to hate cyclists no matter what you do. You can behave 100% correct and with care but you will still get people who feel you ought not to be on the road at all and will still try and drive you off the road no matter what you do, or they will pass you as close as possible just to annoy you, or where there's really no space at all. I've had people stop their cars just to hurl abuse at me, God know why. Things like that.
99.9% of drivers can be perfectly fine and just 0.1% are these kind of people, then you're going to run in to one of them every few days or weeks depending on how much you cycle, simple because you'll easily encounter over a hundred cars in a journey (And in reality, it seems to be far more than 0.1% unfortunately).
It's this kind of aggression, harassment, and violent assault that makes cyclists cycle on pavements. No matter what you do you're going to get shit, and at least on the pavement it's not dangerous.
Hell, on multiple occasions I've received shit for cycling on the cycle path.
You need to be an exceptionally cheerful and positive person to not become somewhat jaded by all of this.
Or let me put it in this way: if a large group of normal people are doing something wrong while performing in just one activity, then there's probably something wrong with the system surrounding that activity and not all of those people.
Of course they are. If you cycle on them in the Netherlands, you'll get yelled at very fast. I don't think anyone anywhere claims that people should cycle on sidewalks. Still, in many bicycle-hostile areas, cyclists choose to do that over, you know, dying - but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's dangerous to cycle on sidewalks.
I lived in Amsterdam for 5 years. I'm not entirely sure what your talking about with the pedestrian path being beside the cycle lane. They are normally on two different levels, there is a curb. I also never found it that dangerous to be a pedestrian. I have seen many many tourists walk in the cycle lanes though, or step into them without looking, and almost get hit. Honestly to me it kinda sounds like you were walking in the bike lane. I think there is some learning curve in getting used to all of the bikes around, but it really isn't dangerous. Also I can confirm that in the 5 years I lived there I was never hit by a cyclist. however when a family member came to visit, they walked right out into a bike lane without looking and almost did get hit.
I live in Amsterdam coming from Italy and have lived also in states. I have the opposite experience. Roads in the center are busy but everybody rides at slow speeds even cars and small motorcycles. They all share the canal roads with pedestrians and everyone is careful about each other.
This is also the main thing other countries don’t realize. Bikes here are slow. They’re not meant to be performant. They’re meant to bring you slowly (but steadily) from A to B.
Also I much prefer a busy road full of cyclist with little sidewalk, than a busy road full of cars with dedicate sidewalk. All the noise and smog makes the walking plain terrible and borderline unhealthy.
I've lived in Amsterdam for 2 years now, and whilst the "fear" of the cyclists has long worn off, there is still considerable inconvenience as a pedestrian. Many busy areas have a pavement only wide enough for 1 or 2 people at a time, meaning you constantly have to walk in the road and compete with the cars and bikes. It can be really quite unpleasant.
That being said in order to maintain the beautiful traditional architecture and layout of the city centre sacrifices must be made, and as a cyclist I also feel the pain of being blocked by pedestrians. Everyone suffers a little bit, which from what I've heard seems to be a dominant Dutch political philosophy reflected in its coalition governments.
Have you tried walking in Birmingham? Some of the "cycle lanes" here are just a pavement with a sign. There is no separation from pedestrians. And the majority of cyclists (especially Just Eat delivery riders) seem to think it is legal to ride on every pavement. Amsterdam is way better.
It is the same in London. The dedicated bike lanes contain legions of fast moving cyclists.
The difference between cars is that cyclists - as a general rule - totally ignore any rules. Pedestrian crossing? Pah! Rules are for others! Instead scream obscenities at the pedestrian as you weave past and around them (at <10cm distance) for having the temerity of slowing you down when they are legitimately crossing the cycle path. A cyclist was recently prosecuted in London for killing a pedestrian when they drove into them at high speed after shouting at them to get out of the way failed to work... There must be loads of other non-fatal collisions that don't make the news
TL;Dr - During in rush hour it can be hard to cross the cycle lanes, but roads are fine. Cars generally do not try to "go around you" at very close distance when you are a pedestrian, but cyclists do.
Your anecdote goes against pretty much every study that shows motorists break the rules far more commonly than cyclists - in addition to the fact they kill multiple people every day.
Which studies?
You say "the rules" - I suspect it varies a lot by rule.
Speeding? Yep, drivers are going to slip above the limit unless they're very careful, whereas you have to be a very capable athlete to do that as a cyclist.
Running a red light or going on the pavement? I'm pretty sure cyclists break these far more often.
I don't understand your point, of course different road users break different rules, they have different rules. You can't speed on a bicycle as there's no requirement for a speedometer. Motorists are less likely to be fined for driving without lights are they're always present and largely automatic, you can't illegally park your bicycle on the pavement in London as it doesn't apply.
Thanks for the links. My point was that studies wouldn't invalidate mattlondon's observation that cyclists more often break laws that affect pedestrians. The studies you referenced do seem refute his claim "cyclists - as a general rule - totally ignore any rules" - presumably the non-aggressive majority aren't catching his attention.
As somebody who's been hit a few times by cyclists, one time suffering long-term injury to my elbow, I feel like I've grown pretty attuned to getting out of their way. Yet in Amsterdam I kept getting belled, yelled at, or pushed. The busier parts of Amsterdam along people's commute are really quite scary as a pedestrian, there's often not enough room for 2 people to comfortable stand side-by-side without getting a bell or a curse from overpacked bikes on similarly narrow bike lanes bleeding out from their designated lanes. In some of the narrower streets there often isn't even place for pedestrians to walk separated from cars and bikes, but bikes will act as if the entire area is theres.
After a few days there I finally started to get the system. Because some areas have sidewalks and bike lanes at the same level, I noticed cyclists will often use the sidewalks to pass slower bikes. I realized then that just like in any other big city, you have to stand up for yourself and when a cyclist is on a pedestrian right-of-way and decides to get up in your face, you're completely within your rights to push back and kindly show them the edges of the bike lane they've left. It reminded me a bit of figuring out how to get around NYC.
Outside of the cramped shared spaces in Amsterdam the aggression levels are understandably much lower and the separation between bikes and pedestrians is more manageable, and I never once had an issue elsewhere in the Netherlands.
> As somebody who's been hit a few times by cyclists, one time suffering long-term injury to my elbow, I feel like I've grown pretty attuned to getting out of their way
I feel like getting hit by cyclists a few times does not mean you're more attuned to getting out of their way, but rather attuned to either walking in bike-lanes or just totally not paying attention. Or unlucky. Normally I'd say just unlucky, but....
I don't think the attitude of "you're completely within your rights to push back and kindly show them the edges of the bike lane" shows a winning strategy for "getting out of their way".
The reality is that we're all travelers within the cities we live in and visit, we all have places we want to get, and most of us do not want to interfere with each other negatively. "pushing back" is not the way you cultivate that, and not what most pedestrians or cyclists expect.
That wasn’t at all my experience when I visited. Yes, some paths in the tourist area were crowded, but at no time did I feel unsafe. Add in the street car/trolley and easy ability to cycle out of the tourist district and it was pretty awesome, IMO.
Pedestrians in Amsterdam (especially the tourists) feel like they own the street and can just step every which way without looking first.
As a cyclist just trying to get from point A to B at my default speed of 20km/h it’s immensely annoying when one of them suddenly turns onto the street forcing me to brake like a madman (and then build up all that speed again).
As with all things, there are trade-offs, nothing will ever be perfect and we should solutions if it improves tings. How many people die per 1000 km traveled? Accidents? Injuries?
I live in NL a few years back, and when I asked a colleage about buying a bike he said: 'just go to central Amsterdam and wait for one of the [slang word for tracksuited petty thief I can't remember] to speak to you. They'll ask you what you want, even what colour, and bring something back within 15 minutes for €50 (or whatever)'.
A downside of everyone cycling there is that bike theft is absolutely rife.
Well tbh I would never leave a bike locked up in any kind of busy public place in the UK and expect it to be there when I got back either. But otoh I don't think bike theft has been turned into quite such a readily available service here!
I saw someone stealing a bike in Oxford once. There were two policemen just 50 yards away. They did eventually come over to find out why I was shouting at the guy to stop stealing the bike.
I've never lived somewhere where cars weren't the most common method of transportation and I've only heard about bikes being stolen. Probably because it's just so much harder to steal a car whereas you can feasibly just carry a bicycle on your back.
Yeah it's very common to hear "wanna buy this bike? It's yours for 10 our".. at a night out, in basically every city.
Heck, I know a homeless guy I talked to a couple of times and helped out with food and stuff, I know him by name. A couple months later I met him drugged of his ass on the Main Street, offering me a bike I'm like "nahh dude come on"
My pretty expensive bike got stolen at some point too :(
That title doesn't match the content at all. Yes, it's cycling heaven here, and yes, it's fantastic and I wouldn't trade it for any other infrastructure in the world — but of course there are some trade-offs, and this article lists a number of minor downsides.
It's a bit of a weird title because it implies the article is going to be a rebuttal against how great the cycling is, but at the same time the phrase "it's not that fantastic" implies the cycling is still a little fantastic as well.
Sure, some people get too frail, but in general being in physical shape is NOT a requirement to cycling as a means of transport (as opposed to a sport) in the Netherlands. Especially e-bikes are helping out a lot in that regard.
The question is a little ridiculous to me to begin with: you are too old once you can’t get the pedals round. If you can move a bike forwards you can participate in Dutch cycling traffic. There is no distinction between the two.
EDIT - But just to clarify: many people cycle well into retirement. We’re talking 60-70+ stopping ages over here, easily.
EDIT 2 - Here, have some governmental data: https://www.government.nl/binaries/government/documents/repo....
It doesn’t say anything on bicycle use in older age, but it does show you that average speed goes down by age. Average trip length does not however. In general it’s just an interesting read though.
I'll answer for Switzerland which also has a strong bicycling culture. People cycle while they're physically able. I have a neighbour couple who are around 70 and cycle everywhere in the city limits.
Just some anecdotes from an expat: My landlord is 80+ and cycles everywhere. My parents in law are 75+ and are about to get rid of their car altogether since they either cycle or take public transport. My aunt in law is close to 80 and changed from manual to electric bike a few years ago after a stroke.
yea. plenty of places in the world where people don't have cars in general and afaik old people get by just fine. Japan does not have good bike infra like the netherlands but the majority of people don't use a car much either
That partly is because of the huge success in making cycling safer for kids and partly because of population aging, but also is seen as not catering enough for this group. Many of bicycle accidents involving the elderly are one-sided.
IIRC part of the reason was also the emergence of the electric bicycle, allowing elderly people to cycle for longer and at higher speeds. And I think they expected this to go down some more now that both their riders and the other participants in traffic get used to that.
My grandfather had 4 hip replacements. Only after the last one (at 85 maybe?) did he become unable to ride a bike. My grandmother at the same age still does. They’ve never even owned a car or license.
Italy: can't believe how many 'old' people are still cycling.
Do it until you can't!
I got overtaken going up a particularly famous and very steep mountain climb - the cyclist said he was 86. Oh, and he loves his electric bike.
Generally around when you're too frail to safely stop unexpectedly. Or probably a little after that, just like how people keep driving their cars a bit too long.
As an anecdote, my father has trouble walking nowadays - I think getting him to walk one km is ambitious. He does still use an electric bicycle though.
I think the author's point is lost because she's trying to convey some points that requires a lot of nuance and subtlety, but English is not her first language.
Her point is that the hogging of public space by bicyclists is a problem, and that the cause is bicyclists ignoring rules and not thinking about others. That is a universal problem. Here in Seattle, bicyclists think they're beyond reproach. You can't run red lights and hit pedestrians without backlash.
> Her point is that the hogging of public space by bicyclists is a problem, and that the cause is bicyclists ignoring rules and not thinking about others.
That is not my takeaway at all. And I feel like the only way you could think that were if you were already predisposed against bicyclists.
The problem the author is talking about is that there is mostly no problem at all, and therefore many people don’t think about how they can share space (because they generally don’t have to).
I had the same reading as you. I think this paragraph makes it clearer:
> All these conversations abroad made people reinterpret the street for what it truly is: the remaining space between houses, with all sorts of uses and purposes worthy of discussion. Public space does not necessarily exist to facilitate fast traffic.
The author is basically saying that drivers get angry because bikes are slower than cars, and that separating bike and car infrastructure 90% of the time makes drivers see bikes as an intrusion in the shared 10% of the infrastructure, because they're used to their particular speed profile being catered to.
I for one see cars run red lights as often as bicycles in seatte, ad trying to cross the road on foot feels like the cars are actively trying to hit you
I see this claim whenever "Cars vs Bicycle" discussions happen, but have rarely seen this happen in any city I've visited or lived in.
I'd think the reason is simple - car runs red light, you risk getting a ticket and fine and increases to your insurance premium. Hit someone while you're doing it? Now you're guilty of manslaughter.
Bike runs a red light? No one (including cops) cares enough to do anything aside from people swearing at you or giving you the finger. A car hits you while you're running the red light? Odds are it's still more likely to be considered the car driver's fault, and many cyclists seem to think they are invincible until they actually get injured so they don't think twice about the risk.
I will admit I am guilty of intentionally running red lights on a bicycle. But I've never intentionally run a red light while driving - again, because of the aforementioned disincentives.
I would love to have the feedback of a few Chinese people that were living in China before the car transition on that subject. I remember Beijing in the 90s with thousands of bicycles and it was a big jungle! After that experience, I started to think that only mass transit is going to be a real solution for dense cities.
Go to Singapore. Car ownership is at 11%. Very good mass transit. Plenty of fatalities since: 1) people still use taxis to get around, 2) you still need to transport cargo.
Or go to a SE Asia country with few car. Motorbikes dominate and they try and avoid you but it’s nerve wracking. Plenty of bikers get crushed by trucks.
I went to grad school in the early 90s. One of my friends from China told me a story, that he had gotten permission to buy a gas scooter. He said that he kept it for a few weeks, then got rid of it: The scooter could go no faster than a bike due to all of the bike traffic.
Enormous bicycle traffic was a reality in Shanghai in the 2010s. (I'm not Chinese, but I lived there.) Has the car transition happened yet? Will it ever? It's extremely difficult -- and expensive -- to get a city license plate.
It is amazing just how many people draw conclusions from having visited Amsterdam for coffeeshops and the Red Light District, without having cycled or gone outside of Amsterdam's city center.
The city center in Amsterdam is not the Netherlands, and it's not even the rest of Amsterdam. When you talk about how difficult it is for pedestrians in Amsterdam, that's a clear sign you're not a local and that you don't know what you're talking about.
Amsterdam's city center is historic, largely unchanged from almost half a millennium ago in terms of structure, with millions of tourists coming every year to visit. Take a 20 minute walk outside the touristic spots and you might be extremely surprised.
Yup. Also would still take Amsterdam city centre walking (full of bikes & with little pedestrian lanes), instead of most other city centers that have sidewalks but are entirely polluted with noisy and smoggy cars.
Who said it was bad for pedestrians? I’ve visited as a tourist and didn’t find downtown to be problematic as a pedestrian. The street cars are handy. And renting a bike and leaving downtown was easy and enjoyable. All around excellent approach to transit, from what I saw.
Edit - I see the other comment now. Lol. Not my experience at all.
I think ground level in city centers should be for pedestrians and less-than-15mph bikes (and other slow vehicles 120kg or less). Everything else is either elevated or subterranean, including bike lanes and most definitely cars and trucks.
Conveyance is a utility like sewer or electricity, and like sewer and electricity, it shouldn’t be flowing at ground level.
Minneapolis has some interesting solutions. The skyway (in both Minneapolis and St. Paul) connects all the buildings in the downtown via elevated (or subterranean) pedestrian pathways, important in the 0 degrees F (-18C) winter. But ideally, you’d flip the situation with the cars and trucks on the non-ground-level with the streets purely for people or low speed and low mass vehicles like bikes.
Minneapolis also has the Greenway, superhighway for bikes that is grade-separated from much of the rest of the city (sitting below, in like a greenery-surrounded canyon, with bridges above), an old railroad route. Pretty fantastic.
But I live in "Cycling Hell"; Long Island, NY. It's hard to feel sorry for Amsterdam.
We have twisty, windy roads, with few shoulders, and what shoulder there is, is filled with rubble, trash, and dead critters.
Cyclists here need to basically stay in the road, or wipe out. Staying in the road has its own drawbacks. Namely, Long Island drivers.
A few years ago, a local politician made a comment to the effect that "No one should ride a bicycle on Long Island." It drew fire from cyclists all over the country.
Unfortunately, he actually had a point, because we have some of the least-suited cycling roads in the world. New York City is even crazier, but traffic can't go fast, there, so it's less likely that cyclists will be killed. There are frequent cycling accidents in the city.
I moved up here from the DC suburbs, where they had cycling support similar to Amsterdam.
Fortunately (or not), I am not a cyclist. I walk two miles, every morning, and I've learned to do that as early as possible. If I wait until after 6AM, I have to deal with the same knucklehead drivers as the cyclists. I've taken to wearing what I call my "clown suit"; a bright, dayglo shirt or jacket, with reflective stripes, and obnoxious sneakers. Even so, I still need to be very cautious. People drive like crap in the morning. Traffic lanes, crosswalks and stop signs are just "suggestions."
Maybe. But they’ve also invested massively in infrastructure and transformed their roads. So it’s not clear to me which is the most important factor, but conversely American cities have terrible cycling infrastructure and car-serving cities everywhere and everyone drives, hilly or no.
Ugly American here, bound to a vehicle because I live in the suburbs.
> That there are complaints from car drivers about the number of people bringing their children to school by bicycle. Whether the cyclists are willing to adapt.
I can sympathize with this, or at least what I understand of it given it seems to be translated from Dutch. In the neighboring big city there are bike lanes (though sharing the same surface as the autos) for most of the major thoroughfares. Bicycling has become more and more popular over the past couple of decades, and I’m totally fine with that. I gladly yield to those paths and the cyclists using the where I can, and generally follow all the rules of the road. I’ve not had a traffic citation since 2004.
However I’ve noticed over the past decade or so that that cyclists are becoming increasingly aggressive - disregarding the rules they must follow: cutting through traffic, ignoring lights and not yielding to pedestrians at pedestrian crossings. It’s gotten so bad that some of the optimal paths I could take to the office I don’t. More than once has a cyclist confronted me, one even smacked my vehicle with his backpack, because I blew the horn when they jumped off the curb and directly into traffic. I want to support more bike friendly initiatives because I like the health and environmental benefits, I just don’t want to be associated with the assholes come with the territory.
The context here is that when I was at school, you were simple not allowed to bring your child to school in a car unless there was a specific reason. Actually, you weren't even allowed to cycle unless you lived more than ~1km away (due to lack of cycle racks). They were flexible about this of course (e.g. being picked up every once in a while was fine), but being dropped off/picked up every day was very rare.
This was the case at both elementary schools I attended. In high school it was a non-issue since pretty much everyone cycled or walked anyway.
With this context in mind, cars complaining about cycles is rather ... odd.
> one even smacked my vehicle with his backpack, because I blew the horn when they jumped off the curb and directly into traffic.
Cars horns are really loud, come across as very aggressive, and immediately send adrenaline levels up. It's a horrible communication method, especially to people who aren't in cars, that usually only provokes the wrong kind of responses in people.
I recently bought an e-bike from China. The only thing I dislike is its horn which is scarily loud. I will buy one of the single ping bells that everyone here in Japan uses.
>However I’ve noticed over the past decade or so that that cyclists are becoming increasingly aggressive - disregarding the rules they must follow: cutting through traffic, ignoring lights and not yielding to pedestrians at pedestrian crossings.
You might just be seeing more of them. The research says cyclists tend to obey the rules of the road more than car drivers:
>More than once has a cyclist confronted me, one even smacked my vehicle with his backpack, because I blew the horn when they jumped off the curb and directly into traffic.
Yeah, I had someone give me some grief because I didn't put my hand out when stopping last week. He told me that next time he will run me over and it will be my fault.
I spent a week once in The Hague- it may have been my favorite place I have ever been.
The real magic is not the bike lanes - it's that people don't need to lock up bikes! I can't say enough about how much of a game changer that is. In the US, the logistics of securing a bike makes the affair so much of a hassle. I basically gave up bike riding after the third time my bike was stolen.
Huh? You didn't need to lock up your bike in The Hague?
In every city in the Netherlands I'm aware of, bikes get stolen aallll the time. Only in villages and other rural areas can you trust the environment to not steal your bikes. That's because everybody knows each other, there's no chance you're going to get away with stealing a bike, there's a lot of trust.
It's a context-sensitive metric. I would estimate that in Shanghai it took one to two months for my unlocked bike to get stolen. (I lost three bikes this way.) That doesn't sound great, but in San Francisco it'd be a matter of days.
When I was in The Hague there were always a dozen bikes parked outside of every restaurant, shop, etc. Maybe they got locked up for longer term parking, but here in the states I have had a bike stolen while I was still within 15 feet of it.
I lived in Utrecht for a year and a half and I've been to The Hague a few times. I'm a little confused. I don't remember seeing things any different there than Utrecht and in Utrecht we definitely locked up our bikes. Or do you just not count the wheel locks that every typical Dutch bike has built in? Even those, you really just use if you're running in somewhere real quick. If you're going to leave your bike out somewhere for more than 15 minutes or so, you'd still chain it up. The big difference vs somewhere like NYC (where I lived previously), is that you don't necessarily need the biggest and toughest locks (unless you have a really nice bike, which will definitely still be at risk of being stolen) and that bike racks and secure places to lock your bike are much more frequent. Dutch bikes are also generally heavy and chunky and have all their components (lights, seat, etc) pretty securely attached. In NYC even if you locked your bike up, if you had a halfway decent seat, that would get stolen if you didn't take it with you.
Bikes get stolen all the time in Amsterdam. Just earlier this year I forgot to lock my bike and it was promptly stolen. Bike theft is so common that the police can't even dedicate resources to the problem. I can't imagine a city like The Hague being any different from here.
What a load of horse shit. Half the people I know have had their bikes or mopeds stolen. Especially in the big cities, probably the most common crime happening. Its why people buy shit bikes, so it doesn't matter much when they are stolen.
A thought experiment I often perform in Manhattan: Look at the road, and imagine that every car is two pedestrians. Consider how much empty space would be left on the road.
Now, look at the amount of empty space on the sidewalk. Notice anything?
In cities, cars take up an inordinate amount of physical space—far more than their fair share. And then drivers still complain they don't have enough room and are stuck in traffic, because of course they are, cars are huge!
Screw cars in cities. In busy areas like lower Manhattan, you shouldn't be able to drive at all unless you have a documented need (commercial vehicle, physical disability, etc). Make sure the people who truly have to drive can actually get around without waiting in traffic, and then leave the rest of the space for pedestrians, cyclists, and others who can use the resource efficiently.
Yes. Similar images have been published over the years, all attempting to show how space inefficient cars are compared to other transit options. This particular one takes it a step further by calling out EVs as no better than ICEVs with regard to space consumption.
The solution is for most people to drive Miatas or Smart4Twos. I'm only half joking.
When I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, the family vehicle of choice for most of my friends and I was the "generic midsized family sedan" - Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, etc. Plus the Accords and Camrys of the late 80s and 90s was closer in size to a 2021 Civic than a 2021 Accord. I think we managed just fine, including taking extended multiday family road trips.
I don't have kids, but talking to my friends who do, it sounds like nowadays the minimum acceptable size to shuttle around a single child is a Honda Pilot or Toyota Highlander (or the current fad - Kia Telluride). I'm only half-joking.
Part of the upsize, at least for families, is child car seats. They're enormous now, and children seem to stay in them longer (boosters and things). A co-worker had a mid-2000s Passat and you couldn't fit a baby seat in the back without forcing the passenger into an awkward upright seatback. I'm not sure what you do about that.
I'm in a relatively dense suburb outside DC and I just wish they'd spend a little more time/money on mixed transit options. We're like 80% there, but corners get cut and so bike lanes that dead-end, or sidewalks but not crosswalks, stuff like that.
I wish we had ultracompact city cars in the US. Something barely big enough to hold one person and a smidge of cargo. Would take up about as much floor area as a person and a lug-behind piece of luggage. Basically the scooters you see all over Asia, but with a roof.
Think you want the Toyota i-Road [1]. They tried to bring them to the US a couple times and no one wanted them. It's a demand problem, not a supply one.
These would almost certainly be required to be LSVs in the US, limiting them to <25 mph and forbidding them from many areas and routes. Those limitations suppress demand - it's a chicken-and-egg problem.
Other laws keep ATVs, side-by-sides, and other smaller vehicles off streets, and crash requirements push up vehicle frame sizes and weights. It's a slow-motion arms race towards consumer-targeted armored personnel carriers.
Kei cars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kei_car) and even kei trucks are really popular in Japan, but that's because they have low prices and tax incentives.
I’ve also thought the same as you and wondered what the best way to achieve such a result would be. I think the best thing the city could do is eliminate on street parking. Not just free on street parking but on street parking entirely.
Every block gets a loading/unloading space, and the rest can be used for open restaurants and other people oriented uses.
In addition it will greatly reduce a lot of unnecessary driving.
And a congestion charge needs to be implemented ASAP to eliminate a lot of the driving across Manhattan which basically treats some of the worlds most expensive real estate as a glorified thoroughfare.
London has this - congestion charge, it probably isn't high enough because London traffic is still terrible, but at £15/$20 it does discourage frequent casual trips.
NYC will hopefully have it sooner rather than later. However, it depends on the state legislature, many of whom live an 8+ hour drive away from the city and haven't visited it in years but are convinced they know the best for those of us who live here.
I think we should literally just close most roads to cars, and restrict the remainder to trucks, taxis, busses, and anyone who would be allowed in a traditional handicapped parking spot.
I'm all for congestion pricing and I wouldn't be against a proposal to eliminate on-street parking—but I think a lot of drivers would just use parking garages.
And once you close off roads to cars bus services will instantly improve on account of not being stuck in traffic any more.
A lot of cities are investing heavily in specialized bus lanes and the like; not a bad idea as such but it always seemed like a bewilderingly complex and expensive solution.
Then again, practically speaking, you will have people foaming at the mouth and rioting in the streets if the "human right" of being able to drive a car anywhere is taken away. You already have people ranting to no end about bus and cycle lanes. Twice someone nearly ran over me on the cycle lane and then proceeded to rant at me that cycle lanes were all bullshit and that I should fuck off with my bike (it's the type of incident that really makes you doubt if physical violence is truly never acceptable...)
Family strutures today mean that you might suddenly need to care for others not in your vicinity. You need to bring them to doctors, nursing or any social activity. Good luck doing that with public traffic. That only works for pure city dwellers.
The reality would be that people with such responsibilities would be driven from the city along with those that don't have their own parking spaces. Individual traffic is not going away again, so this is no feasible solution. You could build more parking garages to get unused vehicles from the street perhaps.
I’m still not sure why cars are the only objects that cities are expected to provide storage for.
Do you expect the city to provide refrigerated storage for essential groceries since you don’t have a fridge? Do you expect the city to provide storage for a rack of your most essential clothing? Then why are we expecting the city to provide public storage for the ton of metal you decide to move around?
In the situation where you’re trying to drive people for emergency needs, in a situation where roads are not crammed with private cars, calling an Uber that drops you off will be cheaper and significantly faster (because you don’t have those private cars clogging up the roads anymore
A simple metric like # of people times meter lanes of road divided by square meter of sidewalk would be useful in characterizing areas. I recently vacationed in a neighborhood where the local grocery store was within walking distance but there was no sidewalk or walking path to get there. Any sidewalks that are put in are cut into personal property instead of the roadway, so there isn't much support for them among voters.
Another solution could be to make cars half as wide and twice as tall as they are now. That way they would take up less space, you could effectively double capacity on roadways and foster a lot of technological innovation relative to maintaining balance and safety.
Historically, major cities haven't just existed to serve the needs of their residents, but have served as cultural and economic centers for outlying rural and suburban areas. Part of that responsibility included being actually accessible to these people.
Americans cities should stop bending over backwards for suburbanites. Especially so because suburbs split off into their own counties so they don’t have to contribute by paying taxes to pay for the city streets and services they use. They just want to take but not give in any way
>Screw cars in cities. In busy areas like lower Manhattan, you shouldn't be able to drive at all unless you have a documented need (commercial vehicle, physical disability, etc).
Unfortunately, this attitude is one of the contributing factors to the impossibility of sensible discussion on this topic.
I live in Lower Manhattan, and I own a car. I garage park, which costs a small fortune but means I don't take up space on a sidewalk; not that there's really a meaningful amount of street parking in Lower Manhattan anyway - which is why parking garages cost $70 per day.
I contribute next-to-nothing in terms of street crowding based on the times when the car is in use and the places where I travel.
And yet still this isn't good enough for the car abolitionists.
I don't fault you or anyone who has decided it makes sense to own a car on an individual level, but I still think the city at large would be better off without them. You could, for example, ditch your expensive parking garage for an electric bicycle, which you'd be able to ride safely if most streets were free (or mostly free) of cars.
I could see an argument for allowing cars during certain hours late at night—but I don't think that would satisfy most drivers, and I think it would be tricky to enforce—if there's a mishap and you can't reach your destination on time, do you get ticketed? And, if we close only the most crowded streets, whichever streets in the area remain open will become crowded quite quickly!
Do we just disagree that the current situation with respect to car usage/traffic/crashes/pedestrian safety in cities needs to be seriously changed or do you have some better proposal?
Would it really be much of a problem to take a bus to the garage where your car is parked? And even if it is then maybe that's better than the situation we have today?
>with respect to car usage/traffic/crashes/pedestrian safety
Well, you see that's fascinating because if you look at crashes and pedestrian safety - as I understand it - Manhattan has fewer crashes and fewer pedestrian/cyclist injuries/deaths than does Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx.
Do you know how many traffic fatalities there were in the NYPD 1st, 5th and 7th precincts so far this year (that's the whole of Lower Manhattan below Houston)? Three.
If you want to focus on the areas with the largest safety problems, your focus should not be in Manhattan. If you want to focus on the leading causes of collisions, it's distracted driving; not excess density.
It's also not about air quality, because it's being made quite clear that electric cars are just as much of a problem as fossil-fueled powered ones.
>Would it really be much of a problem to take a bus to the garage where your car is parked?
Yes, in my case that would be a big problem - but actually the onus is on those who want changes to sell them in a sensible way to everyone, including the households in Manhattan (supposedly ~22%; although that was before the surge in purchases last year) that own cars despite the tremendous cost to do so.
What we mainly hear is the prescription "ban private car operation in Manhattan", as if that is the outcome itself rather than a means to some actual goal. This despite the fact that nowhere else in the world has anything similar been achieved.
And that's only the people who died, not all the people who were permanently handicapped.
Edit: https://vzv.nyc/ is cool. It looks like we are in fact better at keeping people alive than I realized, but cars still lead to an awful lot of serious injuries.
>I'm reading that there were 16 fatalities in southern Manhattan so far this year? That's admittedly much lower than I expected, but more than three. Am I reading the data incorrectly?
The reporting unit that you're looking at is the Manhattan South "Patrol Borough"; this includes up to 59th St so it's a much larger chunk of the city.
That's coincidentally the zone that is covered by the proposed congestion pricing.
Two people traveling 30 mph in a 10 by 50 foot rectangle have a throughput of 116 people per minute. If that same 10 by 50 rectangle holds 100 pedestrians walking at 3 mph, it will have a throughout of 528 people per minute which is 5 times better, But because they are only going at 3 miles per hour, it will take them 2 hours to walk 6 miles instead of 12 minutes, which is a factor of 10 loss of efficiency. Thus the loss in terms of throughput is more than offset by the gain in terms of time saved. Then when you add other factors such as protection from weather and ability to carry heavy things, you understand why streets have vehicles in them instead of just relying on pedestrians. Only in those situations where time has no value or distances are very short is the pedestrian option more efficient than the vehicle option.
Look you are arguing about the parameters, so I guess you acknowledge there is a trade off. Maybe in one city it's 2 miles you are willing to walk. Maybe in another, only 1 mile, or 4 miles. Point being, there is a reason people don't walk everywhere, which is that there is a space/time trade off. Once you understand this trade off, you'll also understand why we give more room to cars than to pedestrians, and why people walk short distances but not long distances.
And I haven't even begun to model all the positive externalities of vehicles -- everything from letting trucks filled with goods stock your "local" coffeeshop, and workers to drive to that coffeeshop. And when the plumbing gets backed up or the ice-machine needs repair, someone will drive to that coffee shop -- right by your house -- and fix it, all so you can have a walkable neighborhood in which you can sip coffee and complain about cars. And there are other positive externalities including more price competition and thus cheaper goods, reduction in geographic monopolies, increases in homeownership rates, etc.
I say this as someone who doesn't even own a car, but I recognize that I am extremely privileged to be able to work from anywhere and live in an expensive urban center where everyone spends long hours in their cars driving to me and catering to my needs, from delivering my groceries and packages to driving from the burbs to my neighborhood to cook me dinner. I am at the top of a huge pyramid reliant on vehicles -- and I know it. I'm not going to say "Let them eat cake".
A good life-tip is that if you ever come up with some model of society that makes everyone look like they are doing something irrational, then odds are that your model is wrong, not that society is wrong. It can happen that you really are smarter than the system and that you've predicted all the important long term consequences of your proposals and correctly weighed them -- but it almost never does. And not for something as obvious as sidewalks being able to hold more people than cars per square foot.
We need far fewer would-be social optimizers, and far more humility in these discussions, as our world is flooded with bad models and bad ideas.
> A good tip is that if you ever come up with some model of society that makes everyone look like they are doing something irrational, then odds are that your model is wrong, not that society is wrong.
Well, but it could also be a case of "tragedy of the commons". Everyone is acting rationally on an individual level, but a collective change would be to everyone's benefit.
I know people who drive big SUVs even though gas is more expensive not because they like big SUVs, but because they're worried if they don't drive a big SUV, they're more likely to die in a crash with someone who does. The result is, of course, even more SUVs.
Yes, there can be some tragedy of the commons issues, but a lot of the time, that's really an issue of a stable versus unstable equilibrium. You would be surprised by how many people insist on an unstable equilibrium and ask government to try to stabilize it, which often ends up being quite expensive. But it does happen. However most tragedy of the commons issues are not new and there are already established ways of dealing with them.
In the specific case of SUVs, almost all SUVs sold are actually lifted sedans. They don't have much worse mileage or weigh more than the corresponding sedans. Nor are they better in crashes. It's more of a culture war item where some people really hate those who drive the SUVs -- soccer moms, etc. Here the issue is that a lower center of gravity (and a stiffer ride) creates better handling, but an SUV is more comfortable and is easier to get in and out of. And it usually features a soft suspension. So there are a lot of car enthusiasts that hate SUVs because it's a rejection of their values, and a lot of Europeans that prefer wagons to SUVs are offended by someone wanting to sit higher up.
Now yes, there is a situation in which higher cars make it more valuable to sit higher up, but that difference of being 1 foot higher doesn't really destroy visibility, it's psychological. The most popular SUV -- RAV4 has a height of 5.6 feet -- whereas the most popular sedan of 2020 (Camry) has a height of 4.77 feet. That 1 foot difference is not going to destroy visibility and does not represent some out of control thing. The difference in weight is about 100 pounds (3500 for Rav4 and 3400 for Camry). RAV4 gets 30mpg combined -- same as the Camry. These are not huge differences to justify the rage many have at SUVs. Just give the SUV in front of you a bit more room and your visibility will be fine, nor does the RAV4 force other people to get a RAV4 due to collisions.
I think I and most people around here have a different definition of an SUV than you. I'd call a RAV4 a crossover. Kind of an SUV but kind of not. You say that most SUVs are lifted sedans, but I'd argue that SUVs, at least originally, and the ones I would consider a problem, are built on a light truck chassis. I'm pretty sure most people don't have half as much of a problem with RAV4s as they do with Sequoias. Add in the F150 and it's pretty sketchy driving a civic in some places I've lived.
No clue. Maybe someday I'll figure out why my inlaws took their son to the Honda dealership at 20 and talked him into signing a lease on a base model Civic. He loves the thing though. I hate it and it hates me. I will say it rolled over 100k the other day and we've yet to do any major repairs. Just the battery that I can think of. Twice so far. Both times I was driving it and a long way from home.
> Point being, there is a reason people don't walk everywhere, which is that there is a space/time trade off.
While this is right at a surface level, I think it’s more accurate to say that people don’t walk everywhere because in most cases, they cannot. In every North American city, if you step just a bit out of the urban core, or even across the urban core, it will be very difficult to walk to where you need to go. This means that nearly every North American is dependent on a car by default. There is an ingrained car culture that makes change difficult. I would say that car dependency is a result of our city design, rather than the result of cars being good.
It doesn’t have to be this way, it didn’t used to be this way, and it isn’t this way in many parts of the world. Just because cars are a very convenient mode of transportation doesn’t mean that the changes required to support have been positive. There are some very extreme negative externalities:
- Extreme land use requirements. Not only do you need huge roads, but you need huge parking lots everywhere. Nearly half of all land in an American city is dedicated to the car. A lot of that land cannot generate economic value very efficiently. For example, a massive mall will have an even bigger parking lot. But if that area was a walkable neighborhood, it could support many more local businesses and generate more tax income and economic activity.
- Destruction of neighborhoods. Thousands of neighborhoods destroyed and people displaced to build highways right through downtown.
- Acceptance of bad air quality. Cars make air quality pretty bad in cities. Air would be fresher in cities without cars.
- Acceptance of terrible noise pollution. Cars (or any motor vehicle) are very loud, especially at scale. Cities would feel much quieter without cars. And constant exposure to this noise makes people less happy.
And look, I don’t believe cars are the root of evil. My point is that we are dependent on cars because we designed our cities around cars. Yes, of course our economy is stronger because we have an excellent interstate highway system. But that highway didn’t need to cut a city in half and bring noise and pollution right downtown. And yes, trucks and fright and deliveries make lives better. But we didn’t need to abandon local, walkable businesses to get that.
If cities were designed to optimize people’s happiness, we should absolutely see far fewer cars in cities. Because it’s possible to design a city such that you don’t <em>need</em> to drive a car everywhere. And when that happens, people don’t gravitate towards the car nearly as often as they do today. Because driving a car in a city is really not that nice. In fact, it is usually very stressful and involves a lot of waiting.
That is why alternatives work when they are well-supported. And that’s really the point here: people want there to be a reasonable choice <em>besides>/em> cars in cities. There should be options! Cars are just the only viable option for way too many trips because cities are designed only for cars. Providing options is very difficult to accomplish when you dedicate almost half of a cities land and 95% of the public right of way to cars.
its super nice to finally see someone share my feelings. it is hard to express these views sometimes because they are often faced with hard backlash by a lot of bike activists who see biking as the only answer to climate change and strict bike lanes with super defensive construction against cars and all other modes of transportation as the only way to achieve this. there are much more flexible and nice ways than the dutch model.berlin is moving hard in the dutch direction and it feels like a short sighted and suffocating development. we need a public space that is open and adapts to small developments, we will have e scooters e motorbikes small electric cars self driving microcars, super fast electric wheelchairs with ai emergency prevention for elderly or disabled, relatively slow moving parcel and grocery delivery robots.and all of this has to take into account that walkability is still the number one factor for quality of life feeling in neighbourhoods.
Bicycling has had this "we are beyond reproach" attitude for years due to its health and environmental benefits. At least in my city, it's led to a sense of entitlement and militantism. Red lights and stop signs are routinely ignored by bicyclists. I've witnessed plenty of near misses against pedestrians, and myself have been hit by a bicyclist while I was on the pedestrian side of the path.
A lot of these comments misses the point of this article. This isn't a pro or anti cycling article. The point is that a lot of are not following laws and common courtesy. Being on a bicycle does not exempt you.
To the extent that this meandering article makes a point, it doesn't match my experience in the Netherlands at all. In residential streets there are usually no bikelanes and there is street parking, kids playing football and so on, that is, the street is by no means dedicated to cycling. Take for instance a street where I used to live: https://goo.gl/maps/1T8PzJfPjxpT1JdN9
ReThinking cities is wildly expensive. And it will take a long time
One thing that is / will speed it up is remote working. Once we divorce the location of the city from the location of the people, the cities stop competing in attracting the company and need to attract the employees. Which will me a better facilities for humans not companies.
It's the one big benefit I see from remote working and amazingly I expect to see it within the same metro-area.
Don't have mega-cities and mega-mayors. Have lots of small neighbourhoods that experiment with each other.
There is an advantage to enjoying unpopular things. When I seek out used books on matters of interest to me, the prices are low. When I go riding on bike paths in Los Angeles, there aren't gobs of other cyclists that I have to deal with. Yes, you can have too much of a good thing.
206 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] threadThat's what I got here.
On the plus side, there are US-based traffic planning innovations that have demonstrated some success in certain metro areas such as "Complete Streets". There's more of these now than ever before.
I love cycling, been cycling for 25+ years, including commuting to my office via (beautiful) cycling path at Birmingham canals.
But when I visited Amsterdam, of course I don't have my bike there, so I went anywhere using Uber, and walking around - and that's when I noticed that:
It's really scary to be a pedestrian in Amsterdam.
In a lot of places, the cyclist path is on the same surface with the pedestrian path. Of course it's separated with lanes (read: paint job on the surface) - but we are on the same surface, next to another.
Several times I was almost hit by the cyclists, I'm pretty sure I was on my / pedestrian's path, but I almost got hit anyway. A lot of the cyclists are cycling in a very high speed.
That was a new feeling & experience for me, and I didn't like it.
I hope the situation will become better for the pedestrians.
There is no sane or remotely cohesive design to layouts and few curbs and so on
This sounds like someone complaining about being razed by cars while strolling in the middle of the street.
Compared to what? Los Angeles? Cairo?
Less sarcastically: I get your point, but it's a tradeoff. It's a beautifully car-free (and just plain beautiful and eminently livable) city otherwise. Yes, you do have to be careful about the bikes (as one must with cars, buses, and trucks, motorbikes and scooters just about anywhere else) -- but wherever you go, you pick your battles.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/disconcerting-rise-road-rage-shoot...
> So far this year, as of June 7, a person has been killed or injured in a suspected road rage shooting on average every 18 hours in the United States
The first-class citizens might as well take pity on them, after all.
Being new to the place, we tend to notice things that other people already took for granted.
Unless someone explains it to you, though, I’m not really sure how anyone could be expected to know?
My British girlfriend once unplugged my alarm clock because she thought there was no way to use the power plug above that otherwise, my alarm plug was "blocking" that one. I just reversed the socket and put it back in. She felt stupid, but since British plugs can be put in one way only I can understand simply not thinking of that.
And bike lanes are already segregated with at least paint so that's already a signal. People just need to get used to it, which is hard initially when all you know is cars and walking.
SF for example is full of solid white lines. The law says solid white lines are supposed to be treated the same as concrete barriers. No crossing period. Yet people cross them all the time with impunity. If they were actually curbs people would only rarely cross them accidentally
As a cyclist, it's easy and essential to stay on the right side. Accidentally not noticing the curb will result in a crash or near one.
Research shows sloped or even leveled kerbs don’t seem to lead to problems (https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/ejtir/article/view/3254)
(well, I was once hit by a car, but I was on a bike so....)
Thank you.
NYC - cars, bikes and pedestrians all feel like they are the most important.
Paris - there are no rules, and someone will steal your bike anyway.
Amsterdam - bikes are on top and know it, cars and pedestrians can fight for the scraps.
Germany - cars are king. Some pedestrian crossings you even have to wait two lights to make it all the way across the road.
I'm still amazed about the roundabout around Arc de Triomphe.
It will not. In the NYC metro area (including Northern NJ), pedestrians are constantly in danger of being hit by both cyclists and people on powered bicycles (which are motorcycles for all practical purposes).
I have seen these people hit people and on one occasion one of them kicked a stroller. If anyone says anything, they face further harassment: In one instance, one rider lifted her bicycle and hit me and left.
Delivery drivers tend to be better than others on the sidewalk, but then you watch them go the wrong way at 30 MPH with the giant battery pack and you feel for the driver who might have a close encounter or worse.
Sidewalks are for pedestrians.
PS: I notice that this thread seems to be full of people who claim standing on the sidewalk watching cars whizz by is scary. It isn't. Cars don't routinely jump the curb, cars don't routinely drive on sidewalks, most drivers are quick to yield to pedestrians. On the other hand, even if you are crossing at the walk sign, there will be at least four bike riders trying to run the red light through a hundred pedestrians at 42nd & 8th.
The only reason you’re more afraid of bikes than cars is because you’re socialized to accept cars.
Bike lanes usually adjoin sidewalks, as opposed to car lanes, which usually have some buffer.
But also because if you were hit by a car the likelihood of you being around to write a comment about it would be extremely low.
The failure here is on the part of city planners, not the cyclists. And enforcing traffic laws against an even moderately skilled cyclist is difficult: I remember easily outrunning the bike cops when I was younger because I was simply in much better shape than them and could handle a bike a lot better in an urban environment.
Yeah, no, when there is a perfectly fine one way road with enough space plus a speed limit of 25 mph, having to constantly be aware of people on bicycles come at you from behind or around corners at full speed is the fault of the person who chooses to do that.
The fact that this happens every day, multiple times is because 1) the targets (e.g., moms with a stroller) are powerless in a one-on-one confrontation with these bullies; 2) the police will never enforce existing laws.
In Denmark and the Netherlands, at least when I got to bike in those places, the police would routinely ticket bicyclists. I know, I got tickets and paid fines.
In countries with decent infrastructure you don’t need to look out for bicyclists “coming from behind”.
I also find it interesting that the guy protected by a ton of steel is afraid of 200 pounds of mostly flesh coming from behind on a one way road and is unable to imagine how that 180 pounds of flesh on 20 pounds of metal might feel about the ton of steel coming from behind them on that “perfectly fine” 25 mph one way road.
This is either an example of a perfect propagandist misdirection or the best illustration of the blind spot people on bicycles and powered-bicycles have when it comes to pedestrians.
I was referring to pedestrians having to constantly have 360 degrees situational awareness because of faster traveling bicycles presenting a danger to them, to their babies or toddlers etc. The person who's riding full speed on sidewalks is already signaling the fact that they are a bully. All a parent pushing a stroller or walking their toddler can do is to try to avoid being slammed into at full speed.
As for the person driving a car, the fact is bicyclists rarely consider the momentum of those vehicles when they decide to run a red light and ram through a bunch of pedestrians crossing the street and zip through cross-traffic in through daredevil fashion. 99/100 that works out not because the bicyclist is not a complete nitwit but because everyone else is constantly looking out for them.
Rather, pedestrians pretend to be ok with cars because they’re socialized to believe car lanes belong to cars so if they get run over to death by them (which they do all the time) they blame it on the pedestrian, whereas if they receive even the slightest scratch from a bike while stepping onto the bike lane, they blame it on the biker.
And that’s before considering the fact that bike lanes in MUC are right along the sidewalks, whereas car lanes have several buffers between them and the sidewalks.
There are no trillion dollar bike companies telling pedestrians that they are at fault for any accident and that they are responsible for not walking near bikes. There are no bike companies that invented a new crime out of whole cloth (jaywalking) that tells people that if they enter 80% of the public street space and get killed by a bike, they are legally responsible (jaywalking).
How many tickets do you think have been given for “jaywalking” on a bike lane.
The reality is your entire complaint confuses the actual solution for pedestrians, which is more bike lanes (bike lanes save pedestrian lives since they create a buffer between sidewalks and car lanes through the bike lane, and I don’t think there’s been a bike lane death of a pedestrian in the US in the last decade at least), with your socialization which basically says cars own the road and any injury caused by a car is the pedestrians responsibility, whereas bicyclists are interlopers and any injuries by them, no matter how minor, is far worse than a car killing a pedestrian.
All the cities I lived in had comparatively decent cycling infrastructure, far from what it's like in NL, but still decent enough.
Now, I've never been to NYC but the problem there was that some people seem to hate cyclists no matter what you do. You can behave 100% correct and with care but you will still get people who feel you ought not to be on the road at all and will still try and drive you off the road no matter what you do, or they will pass you as close as possible just to annoy you, or where there's really no space at all. I've had people stop their cars just to hurl abuse at me, God know why. Things like that.
99.9% of drivers can be perfectly fine and just 0.1% are these kind of people, then you're going to run in to one of them every few days or weeks depending on how much you cycle, simple because you'll easily encounter over a hundred cars in a journey (And in reality, it seems to be far more than 0.1% unfortunately).
It's this kind of aggression, harassment, and violent assault that makes cyclists cycle on pavements. No matter what you do you're going to get shit, and at least on the pavement it's not dangerous.
Hell, on multiple occasions I've received shit for cycling on the cycle path.
You need to be an exceptionally cheerful and positive person to not become somewhat jaded by all of this.
Or let me put it in this way: if a large group of normal people are doing something wrong while performing in just one activity, then there's probably something wrong with the system surrounding that activity and not all of those people.
Of course they are. If you cycle on them in the Netherlands, you'll get yelled at very fast. I don't think anyone anywhere claims that people should cycle on sidewalks. Still, in many bicycle-hostile areas, cyclists choose to do that over, you know, dying - but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's dangerous to cycle on sidewalks.
Why didn't they stepped unknowingly into car's lane - but did so into bike's lane?
It's all in the design.
This is also the main thing other countries don’t realize. Bikes here are slow. They’re not meant to be performant. They’re meant to bring you slowly (but steadily) from A to B.
Also I much prefer a busy road full of cyclist with little sidewalk, than a busy road full of cars with dedicate sidewalk. All the noise and smog makes the walking plain terrible and borderline unhealthy.
That being said in order to maintain the beautiful traditional architecture and layout of the city centre sacrifices must be made, and as a cyclist I also feel the pain of being blocked by pedestrians. Everyone suffers a little bit, which from what I've heard seems to be a dominant Dutch political philosophy reflected in its coalition governments.
NL has about 2.6 pedestrian deaths per million compared to the US’s 19 or so (which must have only gone up since the pandemic).
And this is not even adjusting for the significantly greater walking that’s done in the NL.
You learn to look left and right before stepping into a path or road.
Have you tried it? They're truly a wonderful place for cyclists.
(well at least back in 2001, no idea how is it now)
The difference between cars is that cyclists - as a general rule - totally ignore any rules. Pedestrian crossing? Pah! Rules are for others! Instead scream obscenities at the pedestrian as you weave past and around them (at <10cm distance) for having the temerity of slowing you down when they are legitimately crossing the cycle path. A cyclist was recently prosecuted in London for killing a pedestrian when they drove into them at high speed after shouting at them to get out of the way failed to work... There must be loads of other non-fatal collisions that don't make the news
TL;Dr - During in rush hour it can be hard to cross the cycle lanes, but roads are fine. Cars generally do not try to "go around you" at very close distance when you are a pedestrian, but cyclists do.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2019/05/10/cyclists...
https://whyy.org/articles/cyclists-violate-traffic-law-no-mo...
After a few days there I finally started to get the system. Because some areas have sidewalks and bike lanes at the same level, I noticed cyclists will often use the sidewalks to pass slower bikes. I realized then that just like in any other big city, you have to stand up for yourself and when a cyclist is on a pedestrian right-of-way and decides to get up in your face, you're completely within your rights to push back and kindly show them the edges of the bike lane they've left. It reminded me a bit of figuring out how to get around NYC.
Outside of the cramped shared spaces in Amsterdam the aggression levels are understandably much lower and the separation between bikes and pedestrians is more manageable, and I never once had an issue elsewhere in the Netherlands.
I feel like getting hit by cyclists a few times does not mean you're more attuned to getting out of their way, but rather attuned to either walking in bike-lanes or just totally not paying attention. Or unlucky. Normally I'd say just unlucky, but....
I don't think the attitude of "you're completely within your rights to push back and kindly show them the edges of the bike lane" shows a winning strategy for "getting out of their way".
The reality is that we're all travelers within the cities we live in and visit, we all have places we want to get, and most of us do not want to interfere with each other negatively. "pushing back" is not the way you cultivate that, and not what most pedestrians or cyclists expect.
Yup, THIS. Right. there.
As a cyclist just trying to get from point A to B at my default speed of 20km/h it’s immensely annoying when one of them suddenly turns onto the street forcing me to brake like a madman (and then build up all that speed again).
A downside of everyone cycling there is that bike theft is absolutely rife.
That has largely stopped as the cars have become more secure.
Heck, I know a homeless guy I talked to a couple of times and helped out with food and stuff, I know him by name. A couple months later I met him drugged of his ass on the Main Street, offering me a bike I'm like "nahh dude come on"
My pretty expensive bike got stolen at some point too :(
I love biking now - but I'm just wondering at what age a normal biker gets too old to bike everywhere daily.
The question is a little ridiculous to me to begin with: you are too old once you can’t get the pedals round. If you can move a bike forwards you can participate in Dutch cycling traffic. There is no distinction between the two.
EDIT - But just to clarify: many people cycle well into retirement. We’re talking 60-70+ stopping ages over here, easily.
EDIT 2 - Here, have some governmental data: https://www.government.nl/binaries/government/documents/repo.... It doesn’t say anything on bicycle use in older age, but it does show you that average speed goes down by age. Average trip length does not however. In general it’s just an interesting read though.
Elderly cyclists are a point of concern because three quarters of the cyclists dying in traffic accidents are over 60 years old, a quarter over 80 (https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2020/11/elderly-cyclists-more-...)
That partly is because of the huge success in making cycling safer for kids and partly because of population aging, but also is seen as not catering enough for this group. Many of bicycle accidents involving the elderly are one-sided.
As an anecdote, my father has trouble walking nowadays - I think getting him to walk one km is ambitious. He does still use an electric bicycle though.
Her point is that the hogging of public space by bicyclists is a problem, and that the cause is bicyclists ignoring rules and not thinking about others. That is a universal problem. Here in Seattle, bicyclists think they're beyond reproach. You can't run red lights and hit pedestrians without backlash.
That is not my takeaway at all. And I feel like the only way you could think that were if you were already predisposed against bicyclists.
The problem the author is talking about is that there is mostly no problem at all, and therefore many people don’t think about how they can share space (because they generally don’t have to).
> All these conversations abroad made people reinterpret the street for what it truly is: the remaining space between houses, with all sorts of uses and purposes worthy of discussion. Public space does not necessarily exist to facilitate fast traffic.
The author is basically saying that drivers get angry because bikes are slower than cars, and that separating bike and car infrastructure 90% of the time makes drivers see bikes as an intrusion in the shared 10% of the infrastructure, because they're used to their particular speed profile being catered to.
I'd think the reason is simple - car runs red light, you risk getting a ticket and fine and increases to your insurance premium. Hit someone while you're doing it? Now you're guilty of manslaughter.
Bike runs a red light? No one (including cops) cares enough to do anything aside from people swearing at you or giving you the finger. A car hits you while you're running the red light? Odds are it's still more likely to be considered the car driver's fault, and many cyclists seem to think they are invincible until they actually get injured so they don't think twice about the risk.
I will admit I am guilty of intentionally running red lights on a bicycle. But I've never intentionally run a red light while driving - again, because of the aforementioned disincentives.
Or go to a SE Asia country with few car. Motorbikes dominate and they try and avoid you but it’s nerve wracking. Plenty of bikers get crushed by trucks.
The city center in Amsterdam is not the Netherlands, and it's not even the rest of Amsterdam. When you talk about how difficult it is for pedestrians in Amsterdam, that's a clear sign you're not a local and that you don't know what you're talking about.
Amsterdam's city center is historic, largely unchanged from almost half a millennium ago in terms of structure, with millions of tourists coming every year to visit. Take a 20 minute walk outside the touristic spots and you might be extremely surprised.
Edit - I see the other comment now. Lol. Not my experience at all.
Conveyance is a utility like sewer or electricity, and like sewer and electricity, it shouldn’t be flowing at ground level.
Minneapolis has some interesting solutions. The skyway (in both Minneapolis and St. Paul) connects all the buildings in the downtown via elevated (or subterranean) pedestrian pathways, important in the 0 degrees F (-18C) winter. But ideally, you’d flip the situation with the cars and trucks on the non-ground-level with the streets purely for people or low speed and low mass vehicles like bikes.
Minneapolis also has the Greenway, superhighway for bikes that is grade-separated from much of the rest of the city (sitting below, in like a greenery-surrounded canyon, with bridges above), an old railroad route. Pretty fantastic.
But I live in "Cycling Hell"; Long Island, NY. It's hard to feel sorry for Amsterdam.
We have twisty, windy roads, with few shoulders, and what shoulder there is, is filled with rubble, trash, and dead critters.
Cyclists here need to basically stay in the road, or wipe out. Staying in the road has its own drawbacks. Namely, Long Island drivers.
A few years ago, a local politician made a comment to the effect that "No one should ride a bicycle on Long Island." It drew fire from cyclists all over the country.
Unfortunately, he actually had a point, because we have some of the least-suited cycling roads in the world. New York City is even crazier, but traffic can't go fast, there, so it's less likely that cyclists will be killed. There are frequent cycling accidents in the city.
I moved up here from the DC suburbs, where they had cycling support similar to Amsterdam.
Fortunately (or not), I am not a cyclist. I walk two miles, every morning, and I've learned to do that as early as possible. If I wait until after 6AM, I have to deal with the same knucklehead drivers as the cyclists. I've taken to wearing what I call my "clown suit"; a bright, dayglo shirt or jacket, with reflective stripes, and obnoxious sneakers. Even so, I still need to be very cautious. People drive like crap in the morning. Traffic lanes, crosswalks and stop signs are just "suggestions."
> That there are complaints from car drivers about the number of people bringing their children to school by bicycle. Whether the cyclists are willing to adapt.
I can sympathize with this, or at least what I understand of it given it seems to be translated from Dutch. In the neighboring big city there are bike lanes (though sharing the same surface as the autos) for most of the major thoroughfares. Bicycling has become more and more popular over the past couple of decades, and I’m totally fine with that. I gladly yield to those paths and the cyclists using the where I can, and generally follow all the rules of the road. I’ve not had a traffic citation since 2004.
However I’ve noticed over the past decade or so that that cyclists are becoming increasingly aggressive - disregarding the rules they must follow: cutting through traffic, ignoring lights and not yielding to pedestrians at pedestrian crossings. It’s gotten so bad that some of the optimal paths I could take to the office I don’t. More than once has a cyclist confronted me, one even smacked my vehicle with his backpack, because I blew the horn when they jumped off the curb and directly into traffic. I want to support more bike friendly initiatives because I like the health and environmental benefits, I just don’t want to be associated with the assholes come with the territory.
This was the case at both elementary schools I attended. In high school it was a non-issue since pretty much everyone cycled or walked anyway.
With this context in mind, cars complaining about cycles is rather ... odd.
> one even smacked my vehicle with his backpack, because I blew the horn when they jumped off the curb and directly into traffic.
Cars horns are really loud, come across as very aggressive, and immediately send adrenaline levels up. It's a horrible communication method, especially to people who aren't in cars, that usually only provokes the wrong kind of responses in people.
You might just be seeing more of them. The research says cyclists tend to obey the rules of the road more than car drivers:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2019/05/10/cyclists...
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/01/03/study-cyclists-dont-b...
>More than once has a cyclist confronted me, one even smacked my vehicle with his backpack, because I blew the horn when they jumped off the curb and directly into traffic.
Yeah, I had someone give me some grief because I didn't put my hand out when stopping last week. He told me that next time he will run me over and it will be my fault.
The real magic is not the bike lanes - it's that people don't need to lock up bikes! I can't say enough about how much of a game changer that is. In the US, the logistics of securing a bike makes the affair so much of a hassle. I basically gave up bike riding after the third time my bike was stolen.
In every city in the Netherlands I'm aware of, bikes get stolen aallll the time. Only in villages and other rural areas can you trust the environment to not steal your bikes. That's because everybody knows each other, there's no chance you're going to get away with stealing a bike, there's a lot of trust.
But in a city? Was it in the outskirts?
https://bikeshed.johnhoogstrate.nl/bicycle/security/axa_defe...
Now, look at the amount of empty space on the sidewalk. Notice anything?
In cities, cars take up an inordinate amount of physical space—far more than their fair share. And then drivers still complain they don't have enough room and are stuck in traffic, because of course they are, cars are huge!
Screw cars in cities. In busy areas like lower Manhattan, you shouldn't be able to drive at all unless you have a documented need (commercial vehicle, physical disability, etc). Make sure the people who truly have to drive can actually get around without waiting in traffic, and then leave the rest of the space for pedestrians, cyclists, and others who can use the resource efficiently.
https://www.detroittransit.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/sp...
When I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, the family vehicle of choice for most of my friends and I was the "generic midsized family sedan" - Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, etc. Plus the Accords and Camrys of the late 80s and 90s was closer in size to a 2021 Civic than a 2021 Accord. I think we managed just fine, including taking extended multiday family road trips.
I don't have kids, but talking to my friends who do, it sounds like nowadays the minimum acceptable size to shuttle around a single child is a Honda Pilot or Toyota Highlander (or the current fad - Kia Telluride). I'm only half-joking.
Part of the upsize, at least for families, is child car seats. They're enormous now, and children seem to stay in them longer (boosters and things). A co-worker had a mid-2000s Passat and you couldn't fit a baby seat in the back without forcing the passenger into an awkward upright seatback. I'm not sure what you do about that.
I'm in a relatively dense suburb outside DC and I just wish they'd spend a little more time/money on mixed transit options. We're like 80% there, but corners get cut and so bike lanes that dead-end, or sidewalks but not crosswalks, stuff like that.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByQ1hkv1rj4
Other laws keep ATVs, side-by-sides, and other smaller vehicles off streets, and crash requirements push up vehicle frame sizes and weights. It's a slow-motion arms race towards consumer-targeted armored personnel carriers.
Every block gets a loading/unloading space, and the rest can be used for open restaurants and other people oriented uses.
In addition it will greatly reduce a lot of unnecessary driving.
And a congestion charge needs to be implemented ASAP to eliminate a lot of the driving across Manhattan which basically treats some of the worlds most expensive real estate as a glorified thoroughfare.
https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-charge
I'm all for congestion pricing and I wouldn't be against a proposal to eliminate on-street parking—but I think a lot of drivers would just use parking garages.
A lot of cities are investing heavily in specialized bus lanes and the like; not a bad idea as such but it always seemed like a bewilderingly complex and expensive solution.
Then again, practically speaking, you will have people foaming at the mouth and rioting in the streets if the "human right" of being able to drive a car anywhere is taken away. You already have people ranting to no end about bus and cycle lanes. Twice someone nearly ran over me on the cycle lane and then proceeded to rant at me that cycle lanes were all bullshit and that I should fuck off with my bike (it's the type of incident that really makes you doubt if physical violence is truly never acceptable...)
The reality would be that people with such responsibilities would be driven from the city along with those that don't have their own parking spaces. Individual traffic is not going away again, so this is no feasible solution. You could build more parking garages to get unused vehicles from the street perhaps.
I’m still not sure why cars are the only objects that cities are expected to provide storage for.
Do you expect the city to provide refrigerated storage for essential groceries since you don’t have a fridge? Do you expect the city to provide storage for a rack of your most essential clothing? Then why are we expecting the city to provide public storage for the ton of metal you decide to move around?
In the situation where you’re trying to drive people for emergency needs, in a situation where roads are not crammed with private cars, calling an Uber that drops you off will be cheaper and significantly faster (because you don’t have those private cars clogging up the roads anymore
It's hard to have your cake and it eat too.
Unfortunately, this attitude is one of the contributing factors to the impossibility of sensible discussion on this topic.
I live in Lower Manhattan, and I own a car. I garage park, which costs a small fortune but means I don't take up space on a sidewalk; not that there's really a meaningful amount of street parking in Lower Manhattan anyway - which is why parking garages cost $70 per day.
I contribute next-to-nothing in terms of street crowding based on the times when the car is in use and the places where I travel.
And yet still this isn't good enough for the car abolitionists.
I could see an argument for allowing cars during certain hours late at night—but I don't think that would satisfy most drivers, and I think it would be tricky to enforce—if there's a mishap and you can't reach your destination on time, do you get ticketed? And, if we close only the most crowded streets, whichever streets in the area remain open will become crowded quite quickly!
Would it really be much of a problem to take a bus to the garage where your car is parked? And even if it is then maybe that's better than the situation we have today?
Well, you see that's fascinating because if you look at crashes and pedestrian safety - as I understand it - Manhattan has fewer crashes and fewer pedestrian/cyclist injuries/deaths than does Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx.
Do you know how many traffic fatalities there were in the NYPD 1st, 5th and 7th precincts so far this year (that's the whole of Lower Manhattan below Houston)? Three.
If you want to focus on the areas with the largest safety problems, your focus should not be in Manhattan. If you want to focus on the leading causes of collisions, it's distracted driving; not excess density.
It's also not about air quality, because it's being made quite clear that electric cars are just as much of a problem as fossil-fueled powered ones.
>Would it really be much of a problem to take a bus to the garage where your car is parked?
Yes, in my case that would be a big problem - but actually the onus is on those who want changes to sell them in a sensible way to everyone, including the households in Manhattan (supposedly ~22%; although that was before the surge in purchases last year) that own cars despite the tremendous cost to do so.
What we mainly hear is the prescription "ban private car operation in Manhattan", as if that is the outcome itself rather than a means to some actual goal. This despite the fact that nowhere else in the world has anything similar been achieved.
And that's only the people who died, not all the people who were permanently handicapped.
Edit: https://vzv.nyc/ is cool. It looks like we are in fact better at keeping people alive than I realized, but cars still lead to an awful lot of serious injuries.
The reporting unit that you're looking at is the Manhattan South "Patrol Borough"; this includes up to 59th St so it's a much larger chunk of the city.
That's coincidentally the zone that is covered by the proposed congestion pricing.
And I haven't even begun to model all the positive externalities of vehicles -- everything from letting trucks filled with goods stock your "local" coffeeshop, and workers to drive to that coffeeshop. And when the plumbing gets backed up or the ice-machine needs repair, someone will drive to that coffee shop -- right by your house -- and fix it, all so you can have a walkable neighborhood in which you can sip coffee and complain about cars. And there are other positive externalities including more price competition and thus cheaper goods, reduction in geographic monopolies, increases in homeownership rates, etc.
I say this as someone who doesn't even own a car, but I recognize that I am extremely privileged to be able to work from anywhere and live in an expensive urban center where everyone spends long hours in their cars driving to me and catering to my needs, from delivering my groceries and packages to driving from the burbs to my neighborhood to cook me dinner. I am at the top of a huge pyramid reliant on vehicles -- and I know it. I'm not going to say "Let them eat cake".
A good life-tip is that if you ever come up with some model of society that makes everyone look like they are doing something irrational, then odds are that your model is wrong, not that society is wrong. It can happen that you really are smarter than the system and that you've predicted all the important long term consequences of your proposals and correctly weighed them -- but it almost never does. And not for something as obvious as sidewalks being able to hold more people than cars per square foot.
We need far fewer would-be social optimizers, and far more humility in these discussions, as our world is flooded with bad models and bad ideas.
Well, but it could also be a case of "tragedy of the commons". Everyone is acting rationally on an individual level, but a collective change would be to everyone's benefit.
I know people who drive big SUVs even though gas is more expensive not because they like big SUVs, but because they're worried if they don't drive a big SUV, they're more likely to die in a crash with someone who does. The result is, of course, even more SUVs.
In the specific case of SUVs, almost all SUVs sold are actually lifted sedans. They don't have much worse mileage or weigh more than the corresponding sedans. Nor are they better in crashes. It's more of a culture war item where some people really hate those who drive the SUVs -- soccer moms, etc. Here the issue is that a lower center of gravity (and a stiffer ride) creates better handling, but an SUV is more comfortable and is easier to get in and out of. And it usually features a soft suspension. So there are a lot of car enthusiasts that hate SUVs because it's a rejection of their values, and a lot of Europeans that prefer wagons to SUVs are offended by someone wanting to sit higher up.
Now yes, there is a situation in which higher cars make it more valuable to sit higher up, but that difference of being 1 foot higher doesn't really destroy visibility, it's psychological. The most popular SUV -- RAV4 has a height of 5.6 feet -- whereas the most popular sedan of 2020 (Camry) has a height of 4.77 feet. That 1 foot difference is not going to destroy visibility and does not represent some out of control thing. The difference in weight is about 100 pounds (3500 for Rav4 and 3400 for Camry). RAV4 gets 30mpg combined -- same as the Camry. These are not huge differences to justify the rage many have at SUVs. Just give the SUV in front of you a bit more room and your visibility will be fine, nor does the RAV4 force other people to get a RAV4 due to collisions.
While this is right at a surface level, I think it’s more accurate to say that people don’t walk everywhere because in most cases, they cannot. In every North American city, if you step just a bit out of the urban core, or even across the urban core, it will be very difficult to walk to where you need to go. This means that nearly every North American is dependent on a car by default. There is an ingrained car culture that makes change difficult. I would say that car dependency is a result of our city design, rather than the result of cars being good.
It doesn’t have to be this way, it didn’t used to be this way, and it isn’t this way in many parts of the world. Just because cars are a very convenient mode of transportation doesn’t mean that the changes required to support have been positive. There are some very extreme negative externalities:
- Extreme land use requirements. Not only do you need huge roads, but you need huge parking lots everywhere. Nearly half of all land in an American city is dedicated to the car. A lot of that land cannot generate economic value very efficiently. For example, a massive mall will have an even bigger parking lot. But if that area was a walkable neighborhood, it could support many more local businesses and generate more tax income and economic activity.
- Destruction of neighborhoods. Thousands of neighborhoods destroyed and people displaced to build highways right through downtown.
- Acceptance of bad air quality. Cars make air quality pretty bad in cities. Air would be fresher in cities without cars.
- Acceptance of terrible noise pollution. Cars (or any motor vehicle) are very loud, especially at scale. Cities would feel much quieter without cars. And constant exposure to this noise makes people less happy.
And look, I don’t believe cars are the root of evil. My point is that we are dependent on cars because we designed our cities around cars. Yes, of course our economy is stronger because we have an excellent interstate highway system. But that highway didn’t need to cut a city in half and bring noise and pollution right downtown. And yes, trucks and fright and deliveries make lives better. But we didn’t need to abandon local, walkable businesses to get that.
If cities were designed to optimize people’s happiness, we should absolutely see far fewer cars in cities. Because it’s possible to design a city such that you don’t <em>need</em> to drive a car everywhere. And when that happens, people don’t gravitate towards the car nearly as often as they do today. Because driving a car in a city is really not that nice. In fact, it is usually very stressful and involves a lot of waiting.
That is why alternatives work when they are well-supported. And that’s really the point here: people want there to be a reasonable choice <em>besides>/em> cars in cities. There should be options! Cars are just the only viable option for way too many trips because cities are designed only for cars. Providing options is very difficult to accomplish when you dedicate almost half of a cities land and 95% of the public right of way to cars.
The same way as airports for general aviation, but for cars?
Carports?
A lot of these comments misses the point of this article. This isn't a pro or anti cycling article. The point is that a lot of are not following laws and common courtesy. Being on a bicycle does not exempt you.
That old trope is continually brought up yet the research is clear that cyclists stop at read lights more often than car drivers.
This is true even near a primary school where kids bike to: https://goo.gl/maps/e4thCUV1WV5p1JLE9
The segregated paths are usually alongside roads or wide streets.
One thing that is / will speed it up is remote working. Once we divorce the location of the city from the location of the people, the cities stop competing in attracting the company and need to attract the employees. Which will me a better facilities for humans not companies.
It's the one big benefit I see from remote working and amazingly I expect to see it within the same metro-area.
Don't have mega-cities and mega-mayors. Have lots of small neighbourhoods that experiment with each other.