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Talking infrastructure with people in the US (and maybe elsewhere) is frustrating. People seem to forget that we can build whatever system we want. Which is why

Talking infrastructure with people in the US (and maybe elsewhere) is frustrating. People seem to forget that we can build whatever system we want. Which is why it warmed my cockles to see this: "Road building traditions go back a long way and they are influenced by many factors. But the way Dutch streets and roads are built today is largely the result of deliberate political decisions in the 1970s to turn away from the car centric policies of the prosperous post war era. Changed ideas about mobility, safer and more livable cities and about the environment led to a new type of streets in the Netherlands." Here in the US, most people I talk to seem to think the car-based, suburban, strip malls, business parks, and commercial city center approach is the only way to do things. You can see this approach disastrously over-applied here in Hawaii, especially on O'ahu and around Honolulu. It's refreshing to see this well thought out reminder that humans are clever creatures and really can optimize systems for other outcomes.

wpietri 11y ago
San Francisco has been moving in this direction and I couldn't be happier. Some of it is directly inspired by Dutch innovations; a few years back the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition's director took a sabbatical in Amsterdam and came back all fired up: http://www.spur.org/events/2011-01-13/going-dutch-creating-bicycle-dependent-city http://www.spur.org/events/2011-01-13/going-dutch-creating-b... But yes, when I tell people outside of SF that I haven't owned a car in years they often look at me as if I had two heads. As the great Vizzini would say, it's just inconceivable.
- aexaey 11y ago
  BTW, photo in the linked article was made from the top of this 2500-place 3-story-high bicycle parking structure at the Amsterdam Central train station: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fietsflat https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fietsflat edit: grammar
IkmoIkmo 11y ago
Absolutely, although it does depend. The Netherlands had and still has today very small cities where residential, commercial, office and other (local school, sports centre, park) areas are close together and easily reachable by foot, bicycle or short distance public transportation (tram, bus, subway). Building cycling infrastructure immediately pays off because you're building transportation lanes that have 10 miles per hour speeds, in cities where citizens mostly make many 1-4 mile trips. And this is a pretty common European feature really, virtually all our cities are built in the age of transport by foot or horse and are structured much differently, coupled with higher rates of population density in the Europe (vs say the US, or worse, Australia). That wouldn't work as much in say Australian cities, some of which are known for their terrible urban sprawl. The notion of building transportation lanes that average 10 miles per hour when typical citizens work, shop or go to school say 10 miles or more away from home, doesn't make as much sense. Australia after all has seen the majority of its cities founded in the past 150 years and saw 2/3rd of its population growth in the past 50 years or so in the era of ubiquitous cars. Now of course existing Dutch cities today are expanded with minimizing any urban sprawl in mind, and cycling is both an instrument to solve issues as well as drive city design to prevent issues. And new cities are entirely built with this in mind. But in terms of reinventing existing cities, it was much easier to do in the Netherlands than it'd be in say the US. So while I'm Dutch and yes, 40 years ago we were heavily motorised, and had lots of traffic deaths, and had poor cycling infrastructure, and were able to reinvent ourselves, and while yes this can apply to all cities worldwide to a large extent, it's also fair to point out that some cities would really need radical changes to decrease travel distance and create more density. e.g. by creating many small city centres where residents can do everything (most of their shopping, work, entertainment and education within miles of their home). Such radical changes require very significant leadership and an effort that dwarfs what the Dutch had to do to get where they are today. That having been said I've also visited lots of American cities where cycling infrastructure would seem like a perfect fit. You mentioned Honolulu, I totally agree, it's a no-brainer to build cycling infrastructure there, requiring nothing more than what the Dutch did. Lastly another difference isn't technical, economical or social or relating to geography or anything like that, but purely political. The Netherlands has always had an automotive industry but it's always been relatively small. Virtually all cars are imported. Of the top 10 brands, 3 are German, 3 are French, 1 American/Swedish/Korean/Japanese. It's pretty well known that the car industry helped dismantle public transportation in the US, such forces haven't been as big a factor in the Netherlands (despite the fact Dutch Royal Shell's oil industry was the largest company by revenue of any company worldwide in 2013, 2nd in 2014 and 3rd in 2015, revenues equivalent to about 85% of the country's GDP (!), but it's pretty much entirely focused outside of the Dutch market anyway). Although I do recall very recently Shell funding helmets for kids which I thought was pretty funny. In 2010 only 2 kids died in traffic in the Netherlands, and it's pretty well known that cycling is reduced when cyclists are forced to wear helmets here and that cycling's popularity has done a lot for safety. You could take that as a clever anti-cycling measure wrapped in 'safe the kids' rhetoric from Shell, but perhaps that's paranoid. Fun fact, Dutch support for Israel in the 70s may have helped the cycling culture get a tiny boost. OPEC boycotted oil sales to the Netherlands for its arms sales to Israel who was embroiled in the 73 war with various OPEC members. Dutch PM responded with car-free sundays due to oil scarcity. Of course soon after OPEC expanded the list of countries beyond the Netherlands, we started getting oil from South America and Africa instead and it didn't last very long either (ironically there was even a bit of an oil glut in Dutch harbours because one of the biggest refineries in the world was in Rotterdam so whenever it supplied e.g. France or Germany it could circumvent the boycott), and driving less on sunday led to driving more on saturday, so it wasn't extremely significant but I thought it probably helped a tiny bit :)
- jacquesm 11y ago
  I remember roller skating on N200 during one of those car-less Sundays.
- justincormack 11y ago
  High property prices might help rebuild places like Australia to higher density.
- manachar 11y ago
  The interesting part is cities where traffic is bad like Honolulu and Boston are doing massive changes to their infrastructure. It's just the changes are primarily to try to squeeze more cars in. Boston's Big Dig was a non-minor, twenty year, 22 billion dollar project. Essentially, many places are spending massive amounts of money and looking to do big changes already. It's just these projects almost universally are focused on being an continuation of the existing car-based infrastructure – just with more lanes to fit more cars. Urban sprawl with existing infrastructure can be a tough one to solve. I hope to see more communities make more innovative choices in the future.
- brc 11y ago
  I'm really coming around to the idea of car-free Sundays. Even from something like 5-11 am I think a lot of places would really benefit from that. This Sunday I participated in marathon/half marathon and it was great to see the streets empty except for runners, occasional cyclists taking advantage of the closed streets and lots of pedestrians watching the crowd but also filling the cafes everywhere. You specifically mentioned Australia - while Melbourne is flat and cool, both Sydney and Brisbane are hilly and hot for half the year. The country also has insane helmet laws, so that even the bike-sharing programs are essentially unused simply because you have to wear a helmet or face a fine. So the bikes sit in the sun and rain and virtually never get used. Removing the helmet laws for adults would go a long way to higher adoption in the dutch model. But 'safety' laws are hard to ratchet back, given all the effort that went into telling people they couldn't be trusted with their own judgement in the first place.
- Khaine 11y ago
  Try telling your logic to all the idiots who want cycling infrastructure here in Australia. You need the right population density for it to be effective
jacobolus 11y ago
Hawaii in particular seems like an insane place to build a car-centric society. It’s not like anyone is going to go on a long road trip, or needs to commute from point to point over a huge geographic area (as one comparison, the island of Oahu has <1/10 the area of the SF Bay Area). I’m guessing the typical Honolulu commute is only a few miles. Some combination of boats, mass transit, bikes, walking, so-called neighborhood electric vehicles, and the occasional jeep seems like it would be much more practical. The money and space spent on parking, wide streets, and car ownership would go quite a long way if diverted to transit.
- masklinn 11y ago
  > as one comparison, the island of Oahu has <1/10 the area of the SF Bay Area And a good part of it is Koʻolau and Waianae which most people probably don't cross daily.
- sirmarksalot 11y ago
  Downtown real estate in Hawaii is about as expensive as in San Francisco. Most working-class people live in bedroom suburbs like Hawaii Kai, Mililani, or Makakilo, 12-20 miles away. People who live closer to town are largely on the mountain ridges, making it geographically close, but logistically impossible to bike. And a huge number of people also cross the mountains from Kaneohe, Kailua or Waimanalo, using either Likelike or Pali Hwy, both of which have a staggering amount of elevation change.
pinaceae 11y ago
also helps when cities/towns are older than the US as a whole. much denser, built for different times. also helps when your country is dead flat. old people can cycle on flat roads. SF style hills ... not so much.
- _ph_ 11y ago
  This is why electrically assisted bikes are a huge thing. For the weak, they give the ability to ride at a decent speed and also they help with going uphill. Which is also important, if you use the bike as vehicle rather than a sports device, like biking in business clothing.
  - awjr 11y ago
    My wife has an arthritic knee and we bought a e-bike with a throttle. So she can go for a ride with me and then when her knee starts twingeing she can just stop peddling and carry on. We did consider a mobility scooter, but that in no way looks cool in anyway possible.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      Have a look at these: http://www.trikkelev.com/ http://www.trikkelev.com/
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Never been in SF, but lived in Switzerland. Everyone cycles there, even in the Alps centric cities.
  - usrusr 11y ago
    Cycling in Switzerland (not as a commuter, but as part of the yearly lycra invasion riding to the alpine roads), I was very impressed with the cleverness of their mix of separate lanes, on-road lanes, mixed traffic and the occasional dedicated cyclepath. The Swiss cycle infrastructure is clearly driven by compromise in terms of money and space, but it always respects the cyclist and is very good at avoiding safety pitfalls like dedicated cycle infrastructure at roundabouts. In Germany, otoh, cycle infrastructure is everywhere (even in placed where law doesn't actually allow it) but suffers a lot from a tradition of building cycle infrastructure for the benefit of cars, dating back to you-know-whom. Instead of picking the type of infrastructure by how well it matches the specific needs of the place where it is built, this decision is mostly driven by one size fits all best practice ideas that change like fashion. The result is a dangerous, inconsistent mess that makes some cyclists envy American "cyclists share the road" signs. Unfortunately, Swiss cities don't have the modal split numbers required to be internationally recognized as a template to copy (even Basel! Maybe statistical methods are to blame?). I think a full copy of Swiss infrastructure would be much more useful than an incomplete imitation of the Netherlands or Copenhagen in places that lack the dedication necessary to do the latter.
greggman 11y ago
Don't forget the influence of the auto industry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-I8GDklsN4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-I8GDklsN4
walshemj 11y ago
You have to compare geography and the pre existing built environment though
- ska 11y ago
  True, to a point. Geography should affect planning, but we haven't done a particularly good job of that in many cases. There is also a real danger of a sunk cost fallacy being applied to the later (existing infrastructure), for example.
Scarblac 11y ago
It seems that the US likes to do everything in a more decentralized way though. After the flooding near New York a few years back Dutch consultants were brought in to see what could be improved, one of the hard things was that in the US they had to work with small local governments everywhere whereas in the Netherlands flood prevention is mostly a national issue solved by national infrastructure projects.

wpietri 11y ago

San Francisco has been moving in this direction and I couldn't be happier. Some of it is directly inspired by Dutch innovations; a few years back the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition's director took a sabbatical in Amsterdam and came back all fired up: http://www.spur.org/events/2011-01-13/going-dutch-creating-bicycle-dependent-city http://www.spur.org/events/2011-01-13/going-dutch-creating-b... But yes, when I tell people outside of SF that I haven't owned a car in years they often look at me as if I had two heads. As the great Vizzini would say, it's just inconceivable.

aexaey 11y ago
BTW, photo in the linked article was made from the top of this 2500-place 3-story-high bicycle parking structure at the Amsterdam Central train station: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fietsflat https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fietsflat edit: grammar

IkmoIkmo 11y ago

Absolutely, although it does depend. The Netherlands had and still has today very small cities where residential, commercial, office and other (local school, sports centre, park) areas are close together and easily reachable by foot, bicycle or short distance public transportation (tram, bus, subway). Building cycling infrastructure immediately pays off because you're building transportation lanes that have 10 miles per hour speeds, in cities where citizens mostly make many 1-4 mile trips. And this is a pretty common European feature really, virtually all our cities are built in the age of transport by foot or horse and are structured much differently, coupled with higher rates of population density in the Europe (vs say the US, or worse, Australia). That wouldn't work as much in say Australian cities, some of which are known for their terrible urban sprawl. The notion of building transportation lanes that average 10 miles per hour when typical citizens work, shop or go to school say 10 miles or more away from home, doesn't make as much sense. Australia after all has seen the majority of its cities founded in the past 150 years and saw 2/3rd of its population growth in the past 50 years or so in the era of ubiquitous cars. Now of course existing Dutch cities today are expanded with minimizing any urban sprawl in mind, and cycling is both an instrument to solve issues as well as drive city design to prevent issues. And new cities are entirely built with this in mind. But in terms of reinventing existing cities, it was much easier to do in the Netherlands than it'd be in say the US. So while I'm Dutch and yes, 40 years ago we were heavily motorised, and had lots of traffic deaths, and had poor cycling infrastructure, and were able to reinvent ourselves, and while yes this can apply to all cities worldwide to a large extent, it's also fair to point out that some cities would really need radical changes to decrease travel distance and create more density. e.g. by creating many small city centres where residents can do everything (most of their shopping, work, entertainment and education within miles of their home). Such radical changes require very significant leadership and an effort that dwarfs what the Dutch had to do to get where they are today. That having been said I've also visited lots of American cities where cycling infrastructure would seem like a perfect fit. You mentioned Honolulu, I totally agree, it's a no-brainer to build cycling infrastructure there, requiring nothing more than what the Dutch did. Lastly another difference isn't technical, economical or social or relating to geography or anything like that, but purely political. The Netherlands has always had an automotive industry but it's always been relatively small. Virtually all cars are imported. Of the top 10 brands, 3 are German, 3 are French, 1 American/Swedish/Korean/Japanese. It's pretty well known that the car industry helped dismantle public transportation in the US, such forces haven't been as big a factor in the Netherlands (despite the fact Dutch Royal Shell's oil industry was the largest company by revenue of any company worldwide in 2013, 2nd in 2014 and 3rd in 2015, revenues equivalent to about 85% of the country's GDP (!), but it's pretty much entirely focused outside of the Dutch market anyway). Although I do recall very recently Shell funding helmets for kids which I thought was pretty funny. In 2010 only 2 kids died in traffic in the Netherlands, and it's pretty well known that cycling is reduced when cyclists are forced to wear helmets here and that cycling's popularity has done a lot for safety. You could take that as a clever anti-cycling measure wrapped in 'safe the kids' rhetoric from Shell, but perhaps that's paranoid. Fun fact, Dutch support for Israel in the 70s may have helped the cycling culture get a tiny boost. OPEC boycotted oil sales to the Netherlands for its arms sales to Israel who was embroiled in the 73 war with various OPEC members. Dutch PM responded with car-free sundays due to oil scarcity. Of course soon after OPEC expanded the list of countries beyond the Netherlands, we started getting oil from South America and Africa instead and it didn't last very long either (ironically there was even a bit of an oil glut in Dutch harbours because one of the biggest refineries in the world was in Rotterdam so whenever it supplied e.g. France or Germany it could circumvent the boycott), and driving less on sunday led to driving more on saturday, so it wasn't extremely significant but I thought it probably helped a tiny bit :)

jacquesm 11y ago
I remember roller skating on N200 during one of those car-less Sundays.
justincormack 11y ago
High property prices might help rebuild places like Australia to higher density.
manachar 11y ago
The interesting part is cities where traffic is bad like Honolulu and Boston are doing massive changes to their infrastructure. It's just the changes are primarily to try to squeeze more cars in. Boston's Big Dig was a non-minor, twenty year, 22 billion dollar project. Essentially, many places are spending massive amounts of money and looking to do big changes already. It's just these projects almost universally are focused on being an continuation of the existing car-based infrastructure – just with more lanes to fit more cars. Urban sprawl with existing infrastructure can be a tough one to solve. I hope to see more communities make more innovative choices in the future.
brc 11y ago
I'm really coming around to the idea of car-free Sundays. Even from something like 5-11 am I think a lot of places would really benefit from that. This Sunday I participated in marathon/half marathon and it was great to see the streets empty except for runners, occasional cyclists taking advantage of the closed streets and lots of pedestrians watching the crowd but also filling the cafes everywhere. You specifically mentioned Australia - while Melbourne is flat and cool, both Sydney and Brisbane are hilly and hot for half the year. The country also has insane helmet laws, so that even the bike-sharing programs are essentially unused simply because you have to wear a helmet or face a fine. So the bikes sit in the sun and rain and virtually never get used. Removing the helmet laws for adults would go a long way to higher adoption in the dutch model. But 'safety' laws are hard to ratchet back, given all the effort that went into telling people they couldn't be trusted with their own judgement in the first place.
Khaine 11y ago
Try telling your logic to all the idiots who want cycling infrastructure here in Australia. You need the right population density for it to be effective

jacobolus 11y ago

Hawaii in particular seems like an insane place to build a car-centric society. It’s not like anyone is going to go on a long road trip, or needs to commute from point to point over a huge geographic area (as one comparison, the island of Oahu has <1/10 the area of the SF Bay Area). I’m guessing the typical Honolulu commute is only a few miles. Some combination of boats, mass transit, bikes, walking, so-called neighborhood electric vehicles, and the occasional jeep seems like it would be much more practical. The money and space spent on parking, wide streets, and car ownership would go quite a long way if diverted to transit.

masklinn 11y ago
> as one comparison, the island of Oahu has <1/10 the area of the SF Bay Area And a good part of it is Koʻolau and Waianae which most people probably don't cross daily.
sirmarksalot 11y ago
Downtown real estate in Hawaii is about as expensive as in San Francisco. Most working-class people live in bedroom suburbs like Hawaii Kai, Mililani, or Makakilo, 12-20 miles away. People who live closer to town are largely on the mountain ridges, making it geographically close, but logistically impossible to bike. And a huge number of people also cross the mountains from Kaneohe, Kailua or Waimanalo, using either Likelike or Pali Hwy, both of which have a staggering amount of elevation change.

pinaceae 11y ago

also helps when cities/towns are older than the US as a whole. much denser, built for different times. also helps when your country is dead flat. old people can cycle on flat roads. SF style hills ... not so much.

_ph_ 11y ago
This is why electrically assisted bikes are a huge thing. For the weak, they give the ability to ride at a decent speed and also they help with going uphill. Which is also important, if you use the bike as vehicle rather than a sports device, like biking in business clothing.
- awjr 11y ago
  My wife has an arthritic knee and we bought a e-bike with a throttle. So she can go for a ride with me and then when her knee starts twingeing she can just stop peddling and carry on. We did consider a mobility scooter, but that in no way looks cool in anyway possible.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Have a look at these: http://www.trikkelev.com/ http://www.trikkelev.com/
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
pjmlp 11y ago
Never been in SF, but lived in Switzerland. Everyone cycles there, even in the Alps centric cities.
- usrusr 11y ago
  Cycling in Switzerland (not as a commuter, but as part of the yearly lycra invasion riding to the alpine roads), I was very impressed with the cleverness of their mix of separate lanes, on-road lanes, mixed traffic and the occasional dedicated cyclepath. The Swiss cycle infrastructure is clearly driven by compromise in terms of money and space, but it always respects the cyclist and is very good at avoiding safety pitfalls like dedicated cycle infrastructure at roundabouts. In Germany, otoh, cycle infrastructure is everywhere (even in placed where law doesn't actually allow it) but suffers a lot from a tradition of building cycle infrastructure for the benefit of cars, dating back to you-know-whom. Instead of picking the type of infrastructure by how well it matches the specific needs of the place where it is built, this decision is mostly driven by one size fits all best practice ideas that change like fashion. The result is a dangerous, inconsistent mess that makes some cyclists envy American "cyclists share the road" signs. Unfortunately, Swiss cities don't have the modal split numbers required to be internationally recognized as a template to copy (even Basel! Maybe statistical methods are to blame?). I think a full copy of Swiss infrastructure would be much more useful than an incomplete imitation of the Netherlands or Copenhagen in places that lack the dedication necessary to do the latter.

greggman 11y ago

Don't forget the influence of the auto industry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-I8GDklsN4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-I8GDklsN4

walshemj 11y ago

You have to compare geography and the pre existing built environment though

ska 11y ago
True, to a point. Geography should affect planning, but we haven't done a particularly good job of that in many cases. There is also a real danger of a sunk cost fallacy being applied to the later (existing infrastructure), for example.

Scarblac 11y ago

It seems that the US likes to do everything in a more decentralized way though. After the flooding near New York a few years back Dutch consultants were brought in to see what could be improved, one of the hard things was that in the US they had to work with small local governments everywhere whereas in the Netherlands flood prevention is mostly a national issue solved by national infrastructure projects.