4 ms·
The Netherlands does this very well. Car traffic is nicely separated from bicycle traffic, which is nicely separated from pedestrians. There's even an entire na
by Maultasche 10y ago
The Netherlands does this very well. Car traffic is nicely separated from bicycle traffic, which is nicely separated from pedestrians. There's even an entire nationwide network of bicycle paths.
I suggest using Google street view to look around. Usually, you can see a bike path off on the side of the road that's nicely separated from the cars. I don't think that Google has gotten around to taking street view pictures in all the bike-only paths in more rural areas, although I hear they've done that in some places.
The Netherlands has been committed to improving bicycle use and safety since the 1950s, so they've built up a lot of infrastructure with that in mind. In fact, I hear that in any accident in the Netherlands involving a car and bicycle, the car is always at fault unless they can prove that the bicycle was being reckless. It makes cars a lot more careful, and encourages riding a bike instead of driving.
From what I hear, the effect is from all this that automobile traffic in is pretty congested and slow. The Dutch government seems to be making a general policy of discouraging car driving and encouraging alternate forms of transportation, as a means to unclog the roads and reduce pollution. The Netherlands is very dense, so pollution would be very bad if all those people were driving everywhere.
I'm not Dutch, but sometimes I wish I were, because I would very much like to bike to work on a regular basis. My city in California has some bike lanes, but they aren't very wide and are right next to the cars. They've been starting to build bike paths that are completely separate from roads, but we don't yet have a city-wide bike path network yet. I suspect we'll eventually get one, but it will be decades away. I'll go biking with my children on quiet residential streets or the bike paths, but there's no way I'd take them on the bike lanes on the bigger roads.