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A thing that you can often see in the Netherlands is frontage roads. When a road with houses on it needs a speed upgrade, it gets split into a fast road and a p
by gpvos 5y ago
A thing that you can often see in the Netherlands is frontage roads. When a road with houses on it needs a speed upgrade, it gets split into a fast road and a parallel frontage/access/service road for access to the adjacent houses. Possibly even on both sides. This is something that was already being done way back early in the 20th century. (Edit: found a reference to the Dutch word, "ventweg" ("hawking/peddling road"), in 1923.)
It seems to me that in such cases the US tends to choose to expand into a stroad instead. Belgium also has quite a few stroad-like roads, but at least those tend to have usable sidewalks and fairly often even bicycle paths.
- mattzito 5y agoWe have a major one of those in NYC, queens boulevard, and it’s a disaster. It’s dangerous to cross, and wide enough that it’s inconvenient to get across, so it effectively divides neighborhoods in half.
- addicted 5y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20110923155641/http://wiki.coe.neu.edu/groups/nl2011transpo/wiki/22911/7_Service_Roads.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110923155641/http://wiki.coe.n... There's a picture of one here, and the main road is a single lane in both directions. Which is as far from Queens Boulevard as you can get. The 2 lanes to be crossed makes crossing safer. Further, the side roads are differentiated to make it clear that they are primarily for biking/walking (they are a different color, and are tiled). Also: > Service roads are purposely constructed to be discontinuous sections of road, meaning that through traffic cannot use it to get from one main street to another. Since the only traffic on it will be cars accessing the houses or shops along the service road, traffic is substantially lower that on the main roads, and speeds are kept down due to the short segments of roadway Queens boulevard is a highway masquerading as a road.
- mcv 5y agoI think I've come across references that those "ventwegen" existed even back in the 19th century.
- cobertos 5y agoThere's a few of these around the suburb-y metro Detroit area. They're nice to bike on, and they haven't seemed awful to drive, but they do still do "divide neighborhoods" quite well, which is unfortunate
- PaulHoule 5y agoThe Dutch versions of these have elaborate systems to separate pedestrian and bike traffic that minimize the "divide neighborhoods" effect. The first time I went to the Netherlands I walked from Schiphol airport to the center of Amsterdam and it was an easy but amazing experience. Walking from JFK to Manhattan is a completely possible walk in terms of distance (I usually do better than a 20 minute pace on the flats so it takes only half a day) but when I think of the battle with the infrastructure you'd have to do it's like an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
- eyabs 5y agoIt's a half marathon's distance as the bird flies from JFK to midtown. That's almost four and a half hours at a twenty minute pace. Not walkable for anyone but an athlete.
- PaulHoule 5y agoI've never run a marathon and probably never will but I've walked 20 miles several times at a slow pace and never thought it was that hard.
- airza 5y agoBarring something like serious obesity or disability it’s impossible for me to imagine an adult who couldn’t walk for for and a half hours, especially on flat terrain. That’s basically an easy hike.
- xputer 5y agoGoogle the word "modal filter"