19 ms·

I feel a lot of commenters are simply focusing on what signs can do or what sort of junction to build, rather than focus on the fact that on high speed primary

• TomMarius 9y ago
  The drivers shouldn't be punished for bad design of the road. A separate bike road should be constructed.
  • Svip 9y ago
    Indeed. The main type of accident involving cyclists in Denmark are so called 'right turn accidents', where a lorry turning right at a junction hits a cyclists because they are in their blind spot. This obviously happens exclusively in cities. The media has made a big deal about how tragic it is for the cyclists - which it is, but much less about how tragic it is for the driver. Remember, it's not like drivers want to hit cyclists or other soft traffic participants. That's why I propose a separate bike road, even if it is quite an expensive undertaking. But it will make all the road users feel safe. Or -- at least -- safer.
    • SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago
      > The main type of accident involving cyclists in Denmark are so called 'right turn accidents' It's the same in London, a city with notoriously poor cycling infrastructure and narrow streets due to long history. Ok, it's the "left turn" mirror image version due to driving on the left not right side of the road, but otherwise the same.
      • gaius 9y ago
        It’s not helped by cyclists habit of going straight on from a left turn lane.
        • YawningAngel 9y ago
          That is both legal and necessary to do
          • gambiting 9y ago
            I absolutely disagree. If I, as a driver, see someone in a left-only lane, it should ba absolutely safe for me to assume that they are indeed turning left - so I can safely pull out at the junction. Obviously it leads to accidents if the person then goes straight and runs into me. Being in a left-only lane is the same as indicating a turn.
            • SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago
              > If I, as a driver, see someone in a left-only lane, it should be absolutely safe for me to assume that they are indeed turning left The highway code is a bit more nuanced than you on this topic: http://www.highwaycodeuk.co.uk/road-junctions.html http://www.highwaycodeuk.co.uk/road-junctions.html it is safer for the vehicle driver to not make that assumption, it is safer for the cyclist not to be in that position as you point out; and primarily, it is safer if the road layout does not put these different vehicles in the same space.
            • 9y ago
  • kingosticks 9y ago
    What's the punishment exactly? Being forced to slow down at a junction where you don't have right of way to ensure you give right of way to the road traffic you failed to see?
    • TomMarius 9y ago
      The road was obviously not designed with cyclists in mind, it was designed to enable cars to merge into the road quickly. The punishment is exactly what you describe: "we failed to anticipate bycicle traffic and so we'll make it impossible to go fast because we made a bad design."
  • zimpenfish 9y ago
    > The drivers shouldn't be punished for bad design of the road. No excuse of "bad design" can work for blowing across a crossroaded "Give Way" at 37mph. That's reckless in any situation.
    • TomMarius 9y ago
      No it isn't, I do it daily in Prague together with police cars that are coming from a nearby police station. The difference is that I can be sure no bicycles are on the road. If I stopped or slowed down it would be very unsafe but this way I just merge into the traffic seamlessly.
      • squiggleblaz 9y ago
        I think you're referring to a different situation. It sounds like you're talking about a merge into a freeway or something similar. Your parent referred quite specifically to a cross road. The goal is not to merge, it's to get across. I agree with your parent; the action was necessarily dangerous. A person approaching a cross road must slow down, more so if there's a give way sign.
        • TomMarius 9y ago
          Nope I don't mean a merging lane, I literally mean a side road where you have to give way to a main road but the safest thing to do is to speed up to 60-70kmph and merge into like if it was a highway. It's completely legal and most safe. In Europe the "give way" sign doesn't say anything about your speed, just that you can't cause others to speed down. Btw the same sign is used on freeway merging lanes, having to slow down as you imply would be extremely dangerous; the correct way is to use the merging lane to match speed with the lane you're merging into. I'm talking about this place: https://goo.gl/maps/2JwZGyzLPGG2 https://goo.gl/maps/2JwZGyzLPGG2
  • lmm 9y ago
    Cyclists shouldn't be punished either. All too often these bike roads are built to be less safe than the main road.
• 7952 9y ago
  Most roads in the UK are perfectly well designed to handle bike traffic. But they are not designed for the massive quantity of vehicle traffic travelling at relatively high speed on roads originally designed for a different age. Danger to cyclists are a symptom of this wider problem which we have no real solution for. Also, this particular junction is terribly designed for cars and will result in collisions.
  • Boltgolt 9y ago
    I mean, you say that, but every time I see cyclists on an A road or pedestrian crossings on a 2-2 lane highway I die a little inside
    • frabbit 9y ago
      You can live again! Get out of the car.
    • jnty 9y ago
      Assuming you see them when you're driving, it's probably the sedentary living that's killing you rather than other road users.
  • sharpercoder 9y ago
    I disagree vehemently. While my experience on UK roads isn't that big, I have not seen any well designed bicycle road. Even the roads in the residential areas I've seen are quite bad; small, many cars parked on them (bad for visibility) and of considerable lacking quality. The bicycle roads in London are just lines painted on top of whatever surface the route encounters: curbs, manholes, poles in the middle of the road, pedestrian areas... Sudden and unmarked bicycle road stops where cyclists can't make out where to go. See also: https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11985/city-cycling-in-london-is-a-joke https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11985/city-cycling-in-... No, if anything, UK roads are specifically not designed to handle bicycle traffic. I wonder what makes you think so?
    • 7952 9y ago
• pmontra 9y ago
  Can you do 30-40 km/h on those bicycle roads or is there slow traffic such as 10-20 km/h bicycles and runners? In the latter case fast bicycles will stay on the main road no matter what. In my experience I also have much better visibility at junctions on the main road instead of on bicycle lanes that are closer to walls and hedges and have 3 or 4 meters less of buffer between me and incoming cars from the right. I'm also less visible to them. It means to slow down at every side junction and over 100 km it would make a huge difference in time and wear. As a matter of fact I tend to stay on the road all the time. A consequence is that in the last years I started going over dirt roads along channels and rivers. It's very quiet and more relaxing than being close to the noise of cars.
  • kqr 9y ago
    > I also have much better visibility at junctions on the main road instead of on bicycle lanes that are closer to walls and hedges and have 3 or 4 meters less of buffer between me and incoming cars from the right. I'm also less visible to them. More anecdata: I take the bike when I can, and I have had motorists run into me a few times. Every single time has been on dedicated bike roads. Don't get me wrong -- I have had many, many more near misses on regular roads, but regular roads are built in ways which make it easy to convert impending collisions into near misses. Bike roads tend to not have those margins. Before dedicated bike roads can be considered a solution, they must be built in ways which make me feel safer when I choose them.
    • Scarblac 9y ago
      How did motorists end up on dedicated bike roads?
      • lmm 9y ago
        Often these "dedicated bike roads" become not-so-dedicated at junctions. Also motorists frequently ignore painted lines marking bicycle lanes. (You can argue for physically segregated bike lanes instead of painted lines, but as a cyclist I won't use physically segregated bike lanes unless I know how they end, because all too often you get a "bike lane to nowhere" with no way to get off it).
• kingosticks 9y ago
  I don't think that's a fact. We are not even talking about particularly high speed roads here. The same thing happens regardless of speed so that's really nothing to do with it. The cost of separate cycle lanes (everywhere?) is huge compared to simple junction alterations as in this particular case. Traffic lights are even worse! These are vastly over-engineered solutions compared to that proposed in the article. Sure it may not work everywhere but remember the majority of roads and junctions are accident free where the road is shared by all users without issue. It's the easily avoidable accidents we should target. The lack of driver training/awareness is also explicitly called out in the article. It's an interesting read.
  • falsedan 9y ago
    > simple junction alterations as in this particular case I'd propose an even-simpler alteration, which would require zero engineering & road closures: block some of the right sight lines from Dibden to Beaulieu when approaching with a sightscreen, trees, or billboards. Drivers approaching would notice the impaired visibility and switch to a more defensive technique or be more aware of a potential collision.
    • kingosticks 9y ago
      In theory, yes I agree, some evergreen bushes would be sufficient. But it technically still leaves it possible for a driver to shoot straight over whereas the road change is fool-proof. Plus you don't actually have to close any roads to implement the junction alteration (in this case). Of course it is more expensive and time consuming to implement, I grant you that.
      • falsedan 9y ago
        Shooting straight through is safe if Beaulieu is empty, so why prevent it? Even a low wall or hedge would be enough to prompt a driver to check for traffic more carefully than a superficial scan.
        • 9y ago
• keir-rex 9y ago
  There’s a subset of drivers in the UK who have a resentment to sharing the road with cyclists. Their primary arguments follow; “car drivers pay road tax...” or “cyclists should be forced to sit a driving/road test...” blah blah. There are certainly cyclists who do nothing to help the reputation for the rest but car drivers fail to realise how vulnerable cyclists and motorcyclists are.
  • papermule 9y ago
    Why shouldn’t cyclists need a license to ride on the road? Others road users must have one. ---- It's a shame I'm getting downvoted, but the current state of affairs is that in cities like London bicycles, cars and trucks will be sharing the road for the near-mid future. I'd rather not have trucks or cars in the city, and ideally cyclists would have their own road separate from cars and pedestrians, but I think that's a pipe dream. Until then what else can do we? At least if we require tests for cyclists, like we do for cars, buses and trucks, it might help reduce the number of cyclists doing risky things that perhaps they aren't even aware of? Sure there are still reckless drivers, but at least they have a license that can be revoked and points that can be fined. How do we ban reckless cyclists from the road?
    • zimpenfish 9y ago
      > All other road users must have one. Not true. Horse drawn vehicles and horse riders don't. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/rules-about-animals-47-to-58 https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/rules-about-ani... Invalid carriages also need no license. https://www.gov.uk/mobility-scooters-and-powered-wheelchairs-rules https://www.gov.uk/mobility-scooters-and-powered-wheelchairs... I'm sure other examples can be found.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      • NoGravitas 9y ago
        In most of the US (it varies by state), moped riders (where mopeds are generally defined as motorcycles below a certain engine capacity and top speed, often 30 or 40 mph) do not need a license.
• usrusr 9y ago
  Separation is not the issue here, the separated lanes have to cross just as well. They are only less likely to have cars run over cyclists, because now the guy with the perfectly unobstructed view is forced to always yield to the guy who is driving around huge, dangerous blind spots. On-demand lights are even worse, now the guy who isn't a danger to others is legally obliged to preventive defer to those who are even if nobody is there, that's like saluting the portrait of the dictator.
• rhn_mk1 9y ago
  I'm not sure having bicycle paths is always feasible. The first reason is that building a bicycle path could take years and the problem can be solved much earlier and simpler in the way described. Second, low-traffic roads may normally be safe enough for cyclists (traffic amount was never stated). The same issue can apply to remote roads of all sizes. Granted, it would be nice to have a bike road next to every high speed road, but for traffic in the range of 20cars/h I've seen that exactly once in my lifetime.
• drsim 9y ago
  > In Denmark, a lot of high speed roads (excluding motorways, of course) out in the country have separate dual-way bicycle lanes near it but not attached to it. (Example: https://i.imgur.com/dS6jqXS.jpg https://i.imgur.com/dS6jqXS.jpg) Yes, there are many many of these in southern Jutland. However I can count on one hand how many cyclists I've seen using them. And I've spent months down there. I cycle every day and am pro-bike, but they seem wasteful of both the countryside and money. I would be opposed to building similar in the UK since more strips of asphalt throughout the countryside is the last thing we need. My experiences cycling on fast country roads have been hairy at times, but we also need to recognise that there are problem spots and tackle these rather than copy/paste concepts blindly.
• mannykannot 9y ago
  > I feel a lot of commenters are simply focusing on what signs can do or what sort of junction to build, rather than focus on the fact that on high speed primary country roads, bicycles shouldn't be sharing the road with the cars. Yes, they are focusing on feasible mitigation, not abstract theorizing (to be fair, about half of this comment does discuss the same sort of feasible mitigations as are dismissed in the first paragraph.)
• brw12 9y ago
  Strong disagree with Svip. Training doesn't make good drivers. Who is going to ensure the trainers are good? Who is going to test that the training is being effective? More restrictive licensing, with more consistent requirements, might make a difference, but is politically nearly impossible. As long as many people will be inattentive and unreflective humans, there will be bad drivers. Unless you're going to support a policy of refusing to allow a large percentage of the population to drive (like, say, how we restrict most people from performing surgery), you'll have bad drivers. Bez's proposed solutions have the benefit of being politically palatable, and aligning actual driver behavior with public safety.
  • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Uhm, training actually does make good drivers in Germany, tests are hard, enforcement is very consistent. That is one reason they don't need a speed limit on the autobahn.