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> It is really frustrating how highway engineers, as a profession, are unwilling to consistently learn lessons from the Netherlands in designing cycle infrastru
by maxwell86 5y ago
> It is really frustrating how highway engineers, as a profession, are unwilling to consistently learn lessons from the Netherlands in designing cycle infrastructure.
These decisions aren't made by highway engineers, they are made by politicians.
The highway engineer puts a proper bikelane, makes the highway wider, and tells the politician that its going to cost 100 million dollars to do a couple of kms.
The politician says that there is no money for that, at most 10 million, and that they "promised it", and suggests whether one can't paint a line or something for cheap instead. Otherwise, the engineer is fired.
So the cousin of the politician ends up being paid 10 million $ for painting a shitty 1000$ line that serves no purpose.
There is a systemic difference between the UK and the Netherlands.
Suggesting that the UK doesn't have good bike lanes cause Netherlands has better highway engineers is as accurate as suggesting that the UK did Brexit cause their highway engineers are bad.
- Doctor_Fegg 5y agoI wish that were true but, having sat in lots of meetings with them (including an hour with the leader of the County Council last month), that's not my experience. The highway engineers were generally trained in the 80s or thereabouts to value vehicle throughput and continuous speed as their principal outputs. So they continue to build junctions with massive corner radiuses, shared-use pedestrian/cycle paths to maximise the space available for cars, priority for turning cars at side-road crossings, and so on. Here in Oxfordshire you could describe the situation as "officer capture" - the officers continue to design dreck, and the elected politicians aren't (yet) strong enough to reject it.
- wolverine876 5y ago> These decisions aren't made by highway engineers, they are made by politicians. They are made by the public. We need to persaude other citizens, not rely on (and blame) some higher power.
- trgn 5y ago> The highway engineer puts a proper bikelane, makes the highway wider, and tells the politician that its going to cost 100 million dollars to do a couple of kms. Yikes! That's criminal. You can get an excellent bikelane with a few bollards and a paint can. I would say that's a failure of the engineering profession.
- maxwell86 5y agoIf the road is designed for 2 car lanes, without much tolerance, something has to give. Either you make it wider, or you change it to one car lane, or you remove parking spaces, etc. If you leave the 2 car lanes, and make them smaller to fit to one bike lane per car lane, such that cars barely fit, and such that cars can't leave a proper distance when overtaking bikes, you end up with the crappy unsafe solution that the OP is complaining about. You annoy car drivers, and you give bike riders the impression that cycling is unsafe, so this is actually counter productive.