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I have a unique perspective here, having lived in both Australia and a modern European country with AMAZING cycling infrastructure. Bikes should not share the s

I have a unique perspective here, having lived in both Australia and a modern European country with AMAZING cycling infrastructure. Bikes should not share the same spaces as pedestrians OR cars. Period. If they must share, bikes are much closer to pedestrians than cars, yet we ask them to share the road with cars. These modes of transport are VASTLY different, and of course lead to all kinds of animosity between these groups. Australia is notorious for underfunding and ignoring anything resembling cycling infrastructure. Cyclists believe they're "motor vehicles," and indeed, under many statues, they are legally classed as such. The problem is, when there is a 20 car queue stuck behind two cyclists riding next to each other, cruising along at 30kph in a 100kph zone (yes, this actually happens, often), this just not efficient use of the road. The answer is not "teach drivers to be okay with driving at 30kph everywhere." That's silly and I'm tired of this canard. The answer is of course better infrastructure. Hard barriers between cyclists and motorists, and preferably pedestrians too. The only reason this problem exists is apathy and greed. It's often the motorists most impacted by slow and dangerous cyclists who are least willing to increase their taxes to solve this problem.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
It takes a long time to build the right infrastructure, the Dutch have been doing it for forty years and they aren't finished yet.
- llampx 5y ago
  I could say the same about roads and highways, given that long stretches of the Autobahn are seemingly always in construction and/or certain stretches have been in construction for years. When you're "done" with infrastructure you tend to get spectacular collapses.
  - mlatu 5y ago
    Autobahn? I think you mean Gemany, the other person was talking about the Dutch (Netherlands)
    - jamil7 5y ago
      Autobahn just means Highway, regardless I think the person you're replying to was making a general observation that public infrastructure, much like software is never really "finished".
      - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
        I was making the point that we have a long way to go before the infrastructure is at an acceptable level, where there is no conflict between drivers and cyclists. Not that it never needs maintenance.
smackeyacky 5y ago
Because being 30 seconds slower to your destination requires a billion dollars of infrastructure to fix, rather than sharing a public road. Nice attitude. I'm one of those annoying cyclists that head to the middle of the road when its narrow or has poor visibility. Its not to deliberately annoy anybody, it's to discourage impatient drivers from squeezing me into the barriers, the curbs or ditches. I love it when somebody honks their horn and yells insults at the dire inconvenience of having to slow down for 100m, because it means I have been seen and said driver didn't kill me. Its nothing to do with apathy and greed and everything to do with the insufferable entitlement of people who take knobs like Jeremy Clarkson seriously.
- seer 5y ago
  The "Not Just Bikes" channel in YouTube makes the awesome observation that building infrastructure for cyclists actually improves driving times for a car drivers, and may be actually cheaper to implement, certainly much cheaper to maintain. The calculation for car-saturated cities is that each drive takes as long as fastest alternative mode, and no faster. Which kinda makes sense to me - as you build more infra people chose to not drive, making driving a lot more fun for the die-hards and the ones where that's not an option.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  It's a safety thing as well. And those bike roads last a very long time compared to car roads. It would likely cause less polarization too!
- CalRobert 5y ago
  a billion dollars can get you a LOT of bike infra. Or comparatively little road infra. And "infra" can be planter boxes and moving paint, for a start. This thread was a reminder that even in the Netherlands, when you design roads for higher speeds and try to change that by plopping down a sign, it doesn't work. https://www.reddit.com/r/Netherlands/comments/ss3t0u/whats_up_with_all_the_speeding_drivers_highway/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Netherlands/comments/ss3t0u/whats_u...
- charcircuit 5y ago
  If you can't go the speed limit, you should get off the road and let cars pass.
unglaublich 5y ago
Well, in the city centers, bikes are a LOT faster than both cars and pedestrians. Within cities, bikes should share the road with motorists. Outside of cities, they should share with pedestrians.
- hulitu 5y ago
  Until as a pedestrian, you are hit by a bike.
- twic 5y ago
  This aligns with my experience. I cycle a lot in inner London - zones 1 - 2 ish. There are a few cycle lanes, paths through parks, canal towpaths, etc, but mostly, i'm on the road. For me, that's fine; traffic is never very fast, and the next junction is never far away, so there's a mix of overtaking cars, being overtaken by cars, and each of us blocking the other for a little while where there's no room to overtake. Also, there are a lot of bus lanes, which are even better - fewer vehicles, and less likely to misbehave. I occasionally cycle in outer London, and there, i'm glad of the network of long-distance cycle paths, sparse though it is. Speeds are higher, and drivers are more impatient. I once cycled in Swindon, including across the White Hart roundabout. I won't be doing that again.
- petre 5y ago
  Hungary has a great approach. The "cycling" infra is shared with tractors and carts outside of cities. They're basically agricultural access roads.
  - wiredfool 5y ago
    I didn’t notice any cycling infra when I was there 2 years back, and as far as I could tell, some regional roads were barred to cyclists. (To the point of a randonneur ride around lake Balaton advertising that you needed specific permits for the main road) Not that the side roads were bad. Cars were better behaved than they are in Ireland anyway.
    - rexpress 5y ago
_the_inflator 5y ago
> If they must share, bikes are much closer to pedestrians than cars I disagree. Aggressive and fast driving cyclists are in no way less dangerous to pedestrians than a car. Keep the cyclists away, in their own area. This makes for easier rules based on consistent behavior of the participants. Sometimes I wonder, why cyclist complain about the dangers of cars, while on the other hand they are a thread to pedestrians. I think that every form of mobility has its own rules. Pedestrians walk fast at around 6km/h. Average is maybe around 4. A cyclist is way faster than that.
- maccard 5y ago
  > Aggressive and fast driving cyclists are in no way less dangerous to pedestrians than a car. That's just not true. A car weighs well over a tonne, and can comfortably travel at twice the speed any random bike can in a city (15mph on a bike in a city center is snappy, 30mph in a car is achieveable by the time you've cleared a junction). The impact of being hit by a car at 20mph and being hit by a cyclist at 20mph are also completely different for a pedestrian. You are far more likely to sustain serious injuries by being hit by a ton and a half of metal than 100kg of metal and squish.
  - justsomehnguy 5y ago
    And how many cars are in a car-free zones can hit you? Biggest problem with cyclist is not what they are fast driving and behave aggressively. It is what they do it where people don't expect them. And your whole comment reads like "You were made to an improvised bowling pin by a 100kg person a on a 25kg bike? Praise God it wasn't A CAR". "Well thanks. Maybe a car would have been better, because it just would had driven over me and killed me, instead I'm now have a broken base of the skull and disabled down the waist."
    - maccard 5y ago
      > And how many cars are in a car-free zones can hit you? That's not OP said, they claimed "Aggressive and fast driving cyclists are in no way less dangerous to pedestrians than a car".
jborean93 5y ago
> The problem is, when there is a 20 car queue stuck behind two cyclists riding next to each other, cruising along at 30kph in a 100kph zone (yes, this actually happens, often) At least in the part of Australia I live in the only roads that are 100km/h are highways and bikes aren’t allowed there. I’ve yet to see this particular scenario. I don’t want to say it doesn’t happen but I don’t think it’s as common as it’s made out to be here I do 100% agree on separated lanes with barriers or dedicated paths for bikes. Keeping it separate, even as a dedicated bike lane with a small barrier is so much better than trying to share the road with parked cars or crappy pot holes. Ultimate I also think people just need to learn empathy. Loosing a minute of your commute isn’t worth getting angry.
Reason077 5y ago
> "bikes are much closer to pedestrians than cars, yet we ask them to share the road with cars." Not in terms of infrastructure. A mistake that planners often seem to make is to build "cycle lanes" that resemble footpaths: lots of zig-zags, stops and starts, clutter, obstacles to manoeuvre around, and diversions at junctions that make cyclists take longer routes than cars and force them to give way to all other traffic. The best bike lanes resemble motor traffic lanes: straight and continuous with as few interruptions as possible. If you build bad cycle lanes, most cyclists just won't use them and you haven't really solved anything.
- thinkharderdev 5y ago
  The other insane anti-pattern I see in US cities is to have the bike lane directly next to on-street parking. So if someone parks and opens the driver's side door it opens directly into the path of any oncoming cyclists. Almost every regular bike commuter I know has a story of being "car doored" or at least having several close calls.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "clutter, obstacles to manoeuvre around" Of the clutter can be insane, there is a new, 3 meter wide path, and some donkeyballs-brained perdon has installed a lamppost, a large metal 'internet box', and some other metal box duagonally across the path, so you can't cycle through it any more, and get through on a wheelchair!
- WkndTriathlete 5y ago
  > The best bike lanes resemble motor traffic lanes: straight and continuous with as few interruptions as possible. This. 100% this. The county highways around where I live have a paved shoulder that is as wide as a full lane of traffic. I routinely cycle on that shoulder safely with cars zipping by me at 55-60 mph and no one gets angry about it. But I do run into the bottom 1% of drivers occasionally (usually at intersections) who either simply do not see me, despite the fact I'm wearing fire-engine red kit and have flashing headlamp and taillight in broad daylight, or choose to ignore that I'm there and intentionally put me in danger. There are a couple of longer-distance high-quality road cycling trails around here (one is ~50 miles long, the other is ~120 miles long) but they are an inconvenient distance away. The other park-style trails around here simply aren't meant for road cyclists, for reasons that you've noted already.
upofadown 5y ago
Bicycles go 4-5 times faster than pedestrians. In the city, bicycles are more than half the speed of cars. I can't seen any rational reason to class things with the larger speed difference together.
arrrg 5y ago
Vehicular cycling (bikes being treated as other vehicles) is dangerous if it‘s used to guide infrastructure (then the correct answer is complete separation and a few other tricks that boil down to avoiding contact between bikes, cars and pedestrians), vehicular cycling is, however, exactly the right approach of no biking infrastructure exists. So vehicular cycling is both wrong and right at the same time. Correct as in guiding laws and behaviors when no infrastructure exists, but at the same time wrong in guiding new infrastructure. It should strictly be seen as a stop-gap, a measure only in place until infrastructure is in place. Until then and in those places vehicular cycling is exactly the right thing to do. I think this discussion often suffers from people thinking they have to find one correct answer for all situations. That‘s not needed. We just have to know when in which context vehicular cycling is the correct answer.
ndsipa_pomu 5y ago
In terms of efficient use of the road, it's clear to me that single occupancy cars should be eliminated as much as possible from cities and busy areas. 100 people cycling will take up substantially less room than 100 cars with one person in each and more importantly, 100 cyclists won't suffer from congestion. As Cory Doctorow put it recently, geometry is against cars.
ecf 5y ago
> the only reason this problem exists Is because passing legislation designed to protect cyclists with dedicated lanes and clear up the roads for cars would require the votes of people who hate cyclists, and everything they think they represent.
lamontcg 5y ago
> The problem is, when there is a 20 car queue stuck behind two cyclists riding next to each other, cruising along at 30kph in a 100kph zone (yes, this actually happens, often) I used to bike commute and I never caused this. I also can't remember the last time I've seen this in real life as a driver. Sometimes I get stuck behind a bicyclist that I'd rather not pass because there's oncoming traffic but that never lasts much more than 1 or 2 blocks and is inconsequential to my travel time.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

It takes a long time to build the right infrastructure, the Dutch have been doing it for forty years and they aren't finished yet.

llampx 5y ago
I could say the same about roads and highways, given that long stretches of the Autobahn are seemingly always in construction and/or certain stretches have been in construction for years. When you're "done" with infrastructure you tend to get spectacular collapses.
- mlatu 5y ago
  Autobahn? I think you mean Gemany, the other person was talking about the Dutch (Netherlands)
  - jamil7 5y ago
    Autobahn just means Highway, regardless I think the person you're replying to was making a general observation that public infrastructure, much like software is never really "finished".
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      I was making the point that we have a long way to go before the infrastructure is at an acceptable level, where there is no conflict between drivers and cyclists. Not that it never needs maintenance.

smackeyacky 5y ago

Because being 30 seconds slower to your destination requires a billion dollars of infrastructure to fix, rather than sharing a public road. Nice attitude. I'm one of those annoying cyclists that head to the middle of the road when its narrow or has poor visibility. Its not to deliberately annoy anybody, it's to discourage impatient drivers from squeezing me into the barriers, the curbs or ditches. I love it when somebody honks their horn and yells insults at the dire inconvenience of having to slow down for 100m, because it means I have been seen and said driver didn't kill me. Its nothing to do with apathy and greed and everything to do with the insufferable entitlement of people who take knobs like Jeremy Clarkson seriously.

seer 5y ago
The "Not Just Bikes" channel in YouTube makes the awesome observation that building infrastructure for cyclists actually improves driving times for a car drivers, and may be actually cheaper to implement, certainly much cheaper to maintain. The calculation for car-saturated cities is that each drive takes as long as fastest alternative mode, and no faster. Which kinda makes sense to me - as you build more infra people chose to not drive, making driving a lot more fun for the die-hards and the ones where that's not an option.
cinntaile 5y ago
It's a safety thing as well. And those bike roads last a very long time compared to car roads. It would likely cause less polarization too!
CalRobert 5y ago
a billion dollars can get you a LOT of bike infra. Or comparatively little road infra. And "infra" can be planter boxes and moving paint, for a start. This thread was a reminder that even in the Netherlands, when you design roads for higher speeds and try to change that by plopping down a sign, it doesn't work. https://www.reddit.com/r/Netherlands/comments/ss3t0u/whats_up_with_all_the_speeding_drivers_highway/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Netherlands/comments/ss3t0u/whats_u...
charcircuit 5y ago
If you can't go the speed limit, you should get off the road and let cars pass.

unglaublich 5y ago

Well, in the city centers, bikes are a LOT faster than both cars and pedestrians. Within cities, bikes should share the road with motorists. Outside of cities, they should share with pedestrians.

hulitu 5y ago
Until as a pedestrian, you are hit by a bike.
twic 5y ago
This aligns with my experience. I cycle a lot in inner London - zones 1 - 2 ish. There are a few cycle lanes, paths through parks, canal towpaths, etc, but mostly, i'm on the road. For me, that's fine; traffic is never very fast, and the next junction is never far away, so there's a mix of overtaking cars, being overtaken by cars, and each of us blocking the other for a little while where there's no room to overtake. Also, there are a lot of bus lanes, which are even better - fewer vehicles, and less likely to misbehave. I occasionally cycle in outer London, and there, i'm glad of the network of long-distance cycle paths, sparse though it is. Speeds are higher, and drivers are more impatient. I once cycled in Swindon, including across the White Hart roundabout. I won't be doing that again.
petre 5y ago
Hungary has a great approach. The "cycling" infra is shared with tractors and carts outside of cities. They're basically agricultural access roads.
- wiredfool 5y ago
  I didn’t notice any cycling infra when I was there 2 years back, and as far as I could tell, some regional roads were barred to cyclists. (To the point of a randonneur ride around lake Balaton advertising that you needed specific permits for the main road) Not that the side roads were bad. Cars were better behaved than they are in Ireland anyway.
  - rexpress 5y ago

_the_inflator 5y ago

> If they must share, bikes are much closer to pedestrians than cars I disagree. Aggressive and fast driving cyclists are in no way less dangerous to pedestrians than a car. Keep the cyclists away, in their own area. This makes for easier rules based on consistent behavior of the participants. Sometimes I wonder, why cyclist complain about the dangers of cars, while on the other hand they are a thread to pedestrians. I think that every form of mobility has its own rules. Pedestrians walk fast at around 6km/h. Average is maybe around 4. A cyclist is way faster than that.

maccard 5y ago
> Aggressive and fast driving cyclists are in no way less dangerous to pedestrians than a car. That's just not true. A car weighs well over a tonne, and can comfortably travel at twice the speed any random bike can in a city (15mph on a bike in a city center is snappy, 30mph in a car is achieveable by the time you've cleared a junction). The impact of being hit by a car at 20mph and being hit by a cyclist at 20mph are also completely different for a pedestrian. You are far more likely to sustain serious injuries by being hit by a ton and a half of metal than 100kg of metal and squish.
- justsomehnguy 5y ago
  And how many cars are in a car-free zones can hit you? Biggest problem with cyclist is not what they are fast driving and behave aggressively. It is what they do it where people don't expect them. And your whole comment reads like "You were made to an improvised bowling pin by a 100kg person a on a 25kg bike? Praise God it wasn't A CAR". "Well thanks. Maybe a car would have been better, because it just would had driven over me and killed me, instead I'm now have a broken base of the skull and disabled down the waist."
  - maccard 5y ago
    > And how many cars are in a car-free zones can hit you? That's not OP said, they claimed "Aggressive and fast driving cyclists are in no way less dangerous to pedestrians than a car".

jborean93 5y ago

> The problem is, when there is a 20 car queue stuck behind two cyclists riding next to each other, cruising along at 30kph in a 100kph zone (yes, this actually happens, often) At least in the part of Australia I live in the only roads that are 100km/h are highways and bikes aren’t allowed there. I’ve yet to see this particular scenario. I don’t want to say it doesn’t happen but I don’t think it’s as common as it’s made out to be here I do 100% agree on separated lanes with barriers or dedicated paths for bikes. Keeping it separate, even as a dedicated bike lane with a small barrier is so much better than trying to share the road with parked cars or crappy pot holes. Ultimate I also think people just need to learn empathy. Loosing a minute of your commute isn’t worth getting angry.

Reason077 5y ago

> "bikes are much closer to pedestrians than cars, yet we ask them to share the road with cars." Not in terms of infrastructure. A mistake that planners often seem to make is to build "cycle lanes" that resemble footpaths: lots of zig-zags, stops and starts, clutter, obstacles to manoeuvre around, and diversions at junctions that make cyclists take longer routes than cars and force them to give way to all other traffic. The best bike lanes resemble motor traffic lanes: straight and continuous with as few interruptions as possible. If you build bad cycle lanes, most cyclists just won't use them and you haven't really solved anything.

thinkharderdev 5y ago
The other insane anti-pattern I see in US cities is to have the bike lane directly next to on-street parking. So if someone parks and opens the driver's side door it opens directly into the path of any oncoming cyclists. Almost every regular bike commuter I know has a story of being "car doored" or at least having several close calls.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"clutter, obstacles to manoeuvre around" Of the clutter can be insane, there is a new, 3 meter wide path, and some donkeyballs-brained perdon has installed a lamppost, a large metal 'internet box', and some other metal box duagonally across the path, so you can't cycle through it any more, and get through on a wheelchair!
WkndTriathlete 5y ago
> The best bike lanes resemble motor traffic lanes: straight and continuous with as few interruptions as possible. This. 100% this. The county highways around where I live have a paved shoulder that is as wide as a full lane of traffic. I routinely cycle on that shoulder safely with cars zipping by me at 55-60 mph and no one gets angry about it. But I do run into the bottom 1% of drivers occasionally (usually at intersections) who either simply do not see me, despite the fact I'm wearing fire-engine red kit and have flashing headlamp and taillight in broad daylight, or choose to ignore that I'm there and intentionally put me in danger. There are a couple of longer-distance high-quality road cycling trails around here (one is ~50 miles long, the other is ~120 miles long) but they are an inconvenient distance away. The other park-style trails around here simply aren't meant for road cyclists, for reasons that you've noted already.

upofadown 5y ago

Bicycles go 4-5 times faster than pedestrians. In the city, bicycles are more than half the speed of cars. I can't seen any rational reason to class things with the larger speed difference together.

arrrg 5y ago

Vehicular cycling (bikes being treated as other vehicles) is dangerous if it‘s used to guide infrastructure (then the correct answer is complete separation and a few other tricks that boil down to avoiding contact between bikes, cars and pedestrians), vehicular cycling is, however, exactly the right approach of no biking infrastructure exists. So vehicular cycling is both wrong and right at the same time. Correct as in guiding laws and behaviors when no infrastructure exists, but at the same time wrong in guiding new infrastructure. It should strictly be seen as a stop-gap, a measure only in place until infrastructure is in place. Until then and in those places vehicular cycling is exactly the right thing to do. I think this discussion often suffers from people thinking they have to find one correct answer for all situations. That‘s not needed. We just have to know when in which context vehicular cycling is the correct answer.

ndsipa_pomu 5y ago

In terms of efficient use of the road, it's clear to me that single occupancy cars should be eliminated as much as possible from cities and busy areas. 100 people cycling will take up substantially less room than 100 cars with one person in each and more importantly, 100 cyclists won't suffer from congestion. As Cory Doctorow put it recently, geometry is against cars.

ecf 5y ago

> the only reason this problem exists Is because passing legislation designed to protect cyclists with dedicated lanes and clear up the roads for cars would require the votes of people who hate cyclists, and everything they think they represent.

lamontcg 5y ago

> The problem is, when there is a 20 car queue stuck behind two cyclists riding next to each other, cruising along at 30kph in a 100kph zone (yes, this actually happens, often) I used to bike commute and I never caused this. I also can't remember the last time I've seen this in real life as a driver. Sometimes I get stuck behind a bicyclist that I'd rather not pass because there's oncoming traffic but that never lasts much more than 1 or 2 blocks and is inconsequential to my travel time.