9 ms·

> My assumption that it's always been this way, was wrong. On the other side, it's interesting to note that beautiful walkable bikeable Amsterdam was a traffic

by aqme28 4y ago

> My assumption that it's always been this way, was wrong. On the other side, it's interesting to note that beautiful walkable bikeable Amsterdam was a traffic and cars hellhole up until the 70s. Nothing has to be permanent.

rzwitserloot 4y ago
And to add to this: I can imagine an urban engineer walking through Amsterdam (or any other dutch city, really) to just despair. The sheer amount of infra Amsterdam has built to be this bike friendly is of an epic scale: The dutch have been doing their infra projects with 'bikes and walking comes first' in mind for about 50 years now; no wonder it seems undoable to reproduce that kind of thing in less than a decade. For those who haven't been there: Entire, completely separated two-way wide bike paths with their own bridges and tunnels, nowhere near car roads. Huge swaths of the city that are _solely_ for bikes and walking, with only a few roads dedicated for cars. (i.e. to travel between 2 places in inner Amsterdam by car, generally you drive _away_ from your destination towards the ring, hop on a ring road, drive _past_ your target, and then drive back into the inner city. And yet this is faster than the US style because it avoids incessant waiting in queues and traffic lights, and there's far less traffic as bike/walk is a workable alternative). The bikes, where they even have to cross a car road, get preferential traffic lights and all the bike paths have double detector loops - your bike traffic light tends to switch to green just as you approach the intersection, and if you're the last in a peloton of bicycles you might notice the light switching to orange juuust as you pass the light. That's not a coincidence. Yeah, you can build that up. But it takes quite a while, and requires a financial outlay that seems daunting unless you smear it out over 50 years. However, perhaps, go to Copenhagen. It's often listed as just as bike friendly, if not _more_ bike friendly than cities in The Netherlands. This is hogwash (SOURCE: I've been in, and biked in, both places, recently). Copenhagen is great, Amsterdam is far better. However, Copenhagen looks much more doable. Where Amsterdam has completely separated bike infra and no major car roads running through the center, Copenhagen has giant 3-lane-each car highways right through the busy city center, and almost no separated bike infra. What Copenhagen does have, is one entire lane of car traffic dedicated to bikes, with not a painted line, but an actual physical divider (just a curb thing. You can drive over them but if you do it at speed that might cause some damage, that's all. Cheap as heck, but an order of magnitude better than just a painted line of course). They are wider than 'the minimum necessary for the width of one bike' that you often see elsewhere. A select few tricky intersections have dedicated bike infra. Maybe one bridge is bike-dedicated. And that is all. That should fill you with hope: __That is enough__ to get the kind of bike-friendly name that Copenhagen enjoys. You can get that done in any major city on an acceptable budget within the span of a decade, assuming non-deadlocked political chaos (unfortunately, US and UK, you may have to return to that feeling of despair). From _there_, by all means, look at The Netherlands as bike walhalla. Here's a simple formula to 'fix' the stroads of the USA. They tend to be 4 to 5 lanes each side, so there's plenty of room for this: 1. Turn the stroad into a road - few exits (no way to turn right onto a store's parking lot). But only 2 lanes. Reducing 5 lanes to 2 sounds like a disaster but it won't be: Road congestion primarily depends on the exit: If a popular destination cannot deal with the number of cars that want to exit off of it, even if you have 100 lanes, you _will_ end up with a traffic jam eventually. 2 lanes still allows dynamic traffic (faster traffic capable of passing slower traffic). That's 90% of the win right there, any further lanes barely make a dent. 2. Make strips of 'access road' - these are small, 1-lane roads with a low maximum speed, where every few meters an 'exit' to a store's car park or a home driveway. Between the access road and the main car road there's a real divider: A ditch, a small creek, or an actual metal divider if you have to (Especially in the US with all the trucks, I fear folks will just drive across the dirt or grass otherwise). If you wanna throw money at it and really work on making the place look nice: Line of trees does wonders. Only way to switch from the main road to the access road is to exit onto one from the major intersections which are now miles apart. Between 2 intersections there __are no exits at all__ on the main car road. To go to a store you drive to the intersection that precedes it, exit onto the access road, and drive to it from there. 3. We have 1 lane left (2 lanes to the car road, 1 for the divider, 1 for the access road). The remaining road can now be used to become a bike path. It should optimally be between the access road and the main car road, _between_ the trees : You don't want the bikes to have to deal with the exit/entries onto driveways and car park every few meters. You have plenty of space: in this setup, assuming you started with a 5-lane stroad, it's 2 lanes worth of space you get to play with. It's not exactly cheap but the US is spending literally multiple billions on widening literally 26-lane-wide highways (Katy Highway for example) with some more lanes to 'fight traffic', which seems idiotic and indeed does not work - if you want to fight traffic, reduce traffic. One way to do that: Entice some car traffic to turn itself into bike traffic by making that a viable option. You won't, and can't, replace all the traffic. But if you can eliminate even 5% of the cars, traffic jams are reduced by 50%+. Building these bike strips and turning massive stroads into roads+streets is an order of magnitude cheaper. Note that the primary problem is that the popular target exits lead into city blocks that simply cannot handle the traffic, hence, 'widen the highway' is a net negative, even: It makes people _think_ the car is now a better option (induced demand), but it didn't do anything at all to address the problem. So you really just need to add some bike infra to these overly busy destination city blocks to replace 5% of the traffic within them with bikes - just the 'local traffic' will easily do that. So, this WILL work. And yet, it isn't done. What the fuck, USA?
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Other cities have done it quite a bit quicker, Amsterdam had a head start to begin with because the old city always was hostile to vehicles simply by the way it was laid out.
- msrenee 4y ago
  If you funnel all the traffic that needs to turn in the next 2 miles into a one-lane access road, you're just going to have them backed up past the exit on the main road. The reason no one has implemented this system is that it wouldn't work.
- ska 4y ago
  >Yeah, you can build that up. But it takes quite a while, "The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, the second best time in today" Things could move a lot faster than Amsterdam did, honestly. If a decision was made to stop centering cars in city & infrastructure planning, you would see changes quickly. This isn't the same as being anti-car, it's just prioritizing differently. The real kicker is that there is basically no way to do this without making car use less convenient, because for many decades the majority of planning and builds have been dedicated to making car use more convenient (or at least, not less) and externalizing most of the costs of it.
matthewfcarlson 4y ago
I love this optimism. I’ve long held that I would move to a bike only city if it was in my current country (USA). Starting a bike friendly city seems complicated and expensive but renovating a city seems significantly less expensive but much more political. I’m not sure which is harder of the two.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  I think the political hurdles would be far worse than any expense, especially here in America where the car-centric attitude is so deeply embedded.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    I think it's more that any threat to auto sales would cause marketing and lobbying spend to go up accordingly. Those two things determine what information Americans get exposed to, and what gets subsidized and what gets regulated. The US car-centric attitude is about half t-shirt slogans, half the necessity to have a car in a place built for cars with hourlong commutes, so why not love them? Regulations on marketing, campaign finance, and quid-pro-quo would go a long way in demolishing political hurdles between us and a lot of better things.
- bluejekyll 4y ago
  Start local. Your local city counselors are generally receptive to feedback from their community (in my experience). Compared to national politics, they tend not to get as much feedback about local issues that people care about. Write a letter, even email, and you’ll be surprised. Then talk to your neighbors, and get them to do the same. You then can live in a bike friendly city.
  - jcpst 4y ago
    I second this. And here’s proof it’s possible. It took a while, but we now have a part of the city that is designed around pedestrians: https://www.lenexa.com/government/departments___divisions/community_development/neighborhoods/lenexa_city_center https://www.lenexa.com/government/departments___divisions/co...
abirch 4y ago
I'm hoping self-driving cars will take people from the burbs to the cities, but then people can use public transportation and bikes in the cities.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  Self driving cars should at most drive people to the train stations that take them to the city.
  - trothamel 4y ago
    Why? Public transit takes about twice as long as driving a car. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61077-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61077-0 https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-transit-driving-times.html https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-transit-driving-times....
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      Because it fills the street with cars that are trying to go twice as fast as public transportation. That's the point of the entire thread, I think.
    - abirch 4y ago
      With more self driving cars there should be fewer accidents which translates to even faster driving times.
    - jeremyjacob 4y ago
      That's the problem, and why people choose cars over public transportation. It's a solvable problem however, and countries like Japan and Switzerland have done just that.
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      In São Paulo, Stockholm, Sydney and Amsterdam. None of which are top tier cities when it comes to public transport. Why not talk about Singapore, London, Hong Kong, Paris and Tokyo? The paper also ignores the last part of a car trip: finding a parking spot. In cities that takes often as long as the trip.
spamizbad 4y ago
Just out of curiosity, do the elderly there pine for the more automobile-centric days of the 1970s?
- wiseowise 4y ago
  Given how many elderly I see on bikes - not really.
xg15 4y ago
True in principle. But I think in this case, it's more interesting to observe which forces managed to change laws and culture in the US so radically that we got from the pedestrian-friendly state to today's situation. Know your enemy and know what they are capable of, in a sense.
nerdponx 4y ago
On the other hand, cyclists in the Netherlands are totally disrespectful of pedestrians, making it almost less walkable than New York City, where for the most part you don't have to worry about getting hit by a bike at every corner.
- woile 4y ago
  Amsterdam is perfectly walkable. I'm still more worried by every combustion powered vehicle, specially those who think they are above the rules. Motorbikes are becoming a problem, while a bike is not gonna kill you.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    It's possible that the cyclists are only hazardous in the touristy and busy old city. I had no trouble walking in the less-dense areas.
- mancerayder 4y ago
  I disagree - see my other comment here. It might be part of a bigger Zeitgeist in NY, but pedestrians are bullied and disrespected at every level by cyclists. Danger increases further when bringing e bikes into the picture.
- wiseowise 4y ago
  Where do you get your data from?
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Anecdotal but firsthand.
- ska 4y ago
  I've walked a fair bit in both cities, and that just doesn't match my experience at all. Additionally, when people talk about how walkabout NYC is, I suspect they only really mean a relatively small part of the metro area.
throwawaycuriou 4y ago
Anything we can read or watch on the transformation Amsterdam made?
- erwincoumans 4y ago
  Here is one link:https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in-the-1970s-what-changed/ https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in... There are other cities in the Netherlands, such as Utrecht as well: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-05/how-the-dutch-made-utrecht-a-bicycle-first-city https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-05/how-the-d...
- roeles 4y ago
  Not Amsterdam, but Utrecht.. But still. I think Utrecht might be more bike friendly than Amsterdam, with a clear network of central bike ways and free secure bike parking throughout the city. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fePpwYCs_JM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fePpwYCs_JM

by aqme28 4y ago

rzwitserloot 4y ago

And to add to this: I can imagine an urban engineer walking through Amsterdam (or any other dutch city, really) to just despair. The sheer amount of infra Amsterdam has built to be this bike friendly is of an epic scale: The dutch have been doing their infra projects with 'bikes and walking comes first' in mind for about 50 years now; no wonder it seems undoable to reproduce that kind of thing in less than a decade. For those who haven't been there: Entire, completely separated two-way wide bike paths with their own bridges and tunnels, nowhere near car roads. Huge swaths of the city that are _solely_ for bikes and walking, with only a few roads dedicated for cars. (i.e. to travel between 2 places in inner Amsterdam by car, generally you drive _away_ from your destination towards the ring, hop on a ring road, drive _past_ your target, and then drive back into the inner city. And yet this is faster than the US style because it avoids incessant waiting in queues and traffic lights, and there's far less traffic as bike/walk is a workable alternative). The bikes, where they even have to cross a car road, get preferential traffic lights and all the bike paths have double detector loops - your bike traffic light tends to switch to green just as you approach the intersection, and if you're the last in a peloton of bicycles you might notice the light switching to orange juuust as you pass the light. That's not a coincidence. Yeah, you can build that up. But it takes quite a while, and requires a financial outlay that seems daunting unless you smear it out over 50 years. However, perhaps, go to Copenhagen. It's often listed as just as bike friendly, if not _more_ bike friendly than cities in The Netherlands. This is hogwash (SOURCE: I've been in, and biked in, both places, recently). Copenhagen is great, Amsterdam is far better. However, Copenhagen looks much more doable. Where Amsterdam has completely separated bike infra and no major car roads running through the center, Copenhagen has giant 3-lane-each car highways right through the busy city center, and almost no separated bike infra. What Copenhagen does have, is one entire lane of car traffic dedicated to bikes, with not a painted line, but an actual physical divider (just a curb thing. You can drive over them but if you do it at speed that might cause some damage, that's all. Cheap as heck, but an order of magnitude better than just a painted line of course). They are wider than 'the minimum necessary for the width of one bike' that you often see elsewhere. A select few tricky intersections have dedicated bike infra. Maybe one bridge is bike-dedicated. And that is all. That should fill you with hope: __That is enough__ to get the kind of bike-friendly name that Copenhagen enjoys. You can get that done in any major city on an acceptable budget within the span of a decade, assuming non-deadlocked political chaos (unfortunately, US and UK, you may have to return to that feeling of despair). From _there_, by all means, look at The Netherlands as bike walhalla. Here's a simple formula to 'fix' the stroads of the USA. They tend to be 4 to 5 lanes each side, so there's plenty of room for this: 1. Turn the stroad into a road - few exits (no way to turn right onto a store's parking lot). But only 2 lanes. Reducing 5 lanes to 2 sounds like a disaster but it won't be: Road congestion primarily depends on the exit: If a popular destination cannot deal with the number of cars that want to exit off of it, even if you have 100 lanes, you _will_ end up with a traffic jam eventually. 2 lanes still allows dynamic traffic (faster traffic capable of passing slower traffic). That's 90% of the win right there, any further lanes barely make a dent. 2. Make strips of 'access road' - these are small, 1-lane roads with a low maximum speed, where every few meters an 'exit' to a store's car park or a home driveway. Between the access road and the main car road there's a real divider: A ditch, a small creek, or an actual metal divider if you have to (Especially in the US with all the trucks, I fear folks will just drive across the dirt or grass otherwise). If you wanna throw money at it and really work on making the place look nice: Line of trees does wonders. Only way to switch from the main road to the access road is to exit onto one from the major intersections which are now miles apart. Between 2 intersections there __are no exits at all__ on the main car road. To go to a store you drive to the intersection that precedes it, exit onto the access road, and drive to it from there. 3. We have 1 lane left (2 lanes to the car road, 1 for the divider, 1 for the access road). The remaining road can now be used to become a bike path. It should optimally be between the access road and the main car road, _between_ the trees : You don't want the bikes to have to deal with the exit/entries onto driveways and car park every few meters. You have plenty of space: in this setup, assuming you started with a 5-lane stroad, it's 2 lanes worth of space you get to play with. It's not exactly cheap but the US is spending literally multiple billions on widening literally 26-lane-wide highways (Katy Highway for example) with some more lanes to 'fight traffic', which seems idiotic and indeed does not work - if you want to fight traffic, reduce traffic. One way to do that: Entice some car traffic to turn itself into bike traffic by making that a viable option. You won't, and can't, replace all the traffic. But if you can eliminate even 5% of the cars, traffic jams are reduced by 50%+. Building these bike strips and turning massive stroads into roads+streets is an order of magnitude cheaper. Note that the primary problem is that the popular target exits lead into city blocks that simply cannot handle the traffic, hence, 'widen the highway' is a net negative, even: It makes people _think_ the car is now a better option (induced demand), but it didn't do anything at all to address the problem. So you really just need to add some bike infra to these overly busy destination city blocks to replace 5% of the traffic within them with bikes - just the 'local traffic' will easily do that. So, this WILL work. And yet, it isn't done. What the fuck, USA?

jacquesm 4y ago
Other cities have done it quite a bit quicker, Amsterdam had a head start to begin with because the old city always was hostile to vehicles simply by the way it was laid out.
msrenee 4y ago
If you funnel all the traffic that needs to turn in the next 2 miles into a one-lane access road, you're just going to have them backed up past the exit on the main road. The reason no one has implemented this system is that it wouldn't work.
ska 4y ago
>Yeah, you can build that up. But it takes quite a while, "The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, the second best time in today" Things could move a lot faster than Amsterdam did, honestly. If a decision was made to stop centering cars in city & infrastructure planning, you would see changes quickly. This isn't the same as being anti-car, it's just prioritizing differently. The real kicker is that there is basically no way to do this without making car use less convenient, because for many decades the majority of planning and builds have been dedicated to making car use more convenient (or at least, not less) and externalizing most of the costs of it.

matthewfcarlson 4y ago

I love this optimism. I’ve long held that I would move to a bike only city if it was in my current country (USA). Starting a bike friendly city seems complicated and expensive but renovating a city seems significantly less expensive but much more political. I’m not sure which is harder of the two.

danielvaughn 4y ago
I think the political hurdles would be far worse than any expense, especially here in America where the car-centric attitude is so deeply embedded.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  I think it's more that any threat to auto sales would cause marketing and lobbying spend to go up accordingly. Those two things determine what information Americans get exposed to, and what gets subsidized and what gets regulated. The US car-centric attitude is about half t-shirt slogans, half the necessity to have a car in a place built for cars with hourlong commutes, so why not love them? Regulations on marketing, campaign finance, and quid-pro-quo would go a long way in demolishing political hurdles between us and a lot of better things.
bluejekyll 4y ago
Start local. Your local city counselors are generally receptive to feedback from their community (in my experience). Compared to national politics, they tend not to get as much feedback about local issues that people care about. Write a letter, even email, and you’ll be surprised. Then talk to your neighbors, and get them to do the same. You then can live in a bike friendly city.
- jcpst 4y ago
  I second this. And here’s proof it’s possible. It took a while, but we now have a part of the city that is designed around pedestrians: https://www.lenexa.com/government/departments___divisions/community_development/neighborhoods/lenexa_city_center https://www.lenexa.com/government/departments___divisions/co...

abirch 4y ago

I'm hoping self-driving cars will take people from the burbs to the cities, but then people can use public transportation and bikes in the cities.

thrown_22 4y ago
Self driving cars should at most drive people to the train stations that take them to the city.
- trothamel 4y ago
  Why? Public transit takes about twice as long as driving a car. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61077-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61077-0 https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-transit-driving-times.html https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-transit-driving-times....
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Because it fills the street with cars that are trying to go twice as fast as public transportation. That's the point of the entire thread, I think.
  - abirch 4y ago
    With more self driving cars there should be fewer accidents which translates to even faster driving times.
  - jeremyjacob 4y ago
    That's the problem, and why people choose cars over public transportation. It's a solvable problem however, and countries like Japan and Switzerland have done just that.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    In São Paulo, Stockholm, Sydney and Amsterdam. None of which are top tier cities when it comes to public transport. Why not talk about Singapore, London, Hong Kong, Paris and Tokyo? The paper also ignores the last part of a car trip: finding a parking spot. In cities that takes often as long as the trip.

spamizbad 4y ago

Just out of curiosity, do the elderly there pine for the more automobile-centric days of the 1970s?

wiseowise 4y ago
Given how many elderly I see on bikes - not really.

xg15 4y ago

True in principle. But I think in this case, it's more interesting to observe which forces managed to change laws and culture in the US so radically that we got from the pedestrian-friendly state to today's situation. Know your enemy and know what they are capable of, in a sense.

nerdponx 4y ago

On the other hand, cyclists in the Netherlands are totally disrespectful of pedestrians, making it almost less walkable than New York City, where for the most part you don't have to worry about getting hit by a bike at every corner.

woile 4y ago
Amsterdam is perfectly walkable. I'm still more worried by every combustion powered vehicle, specially those who think they are above the rules. Motorbikes are becoming a problem, while a bike is not gonna kill you.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  It's possible that the cyclists are only hazardous in the touristy and busy old city. I had no trouble walking in the less-dense areas.
mancerayder 4y ago
I disagree - see my other comment here. It might be part of a bigger Zeitgeist in NY, but pedestrians are bullied and disrespected at every level by cyclists. Danger increases further when bringing e bikes into the picture.
wiseowise 4y ago
Where do you get your data from?
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Anecdotal but firsthand.
ska 4y ago
I've walked a fair bit in both cities, and that just doesn't match my experience at all. Additionally, when people talk about how walkabout NYC is, I suspect they only really mean a relatively small part of the metro area.

throwawaycuriou 4y ago

Anything we can read or watch on the transformation Amsterdam made?

erwincoumans 4y ago
Here is one link:https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in-the-1970s-what-changed/ https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in... There are other cities in the Netherlands, such as Utrecht as well: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-05/how-the-dutch-made-utrecht-a-bicycle-first-city https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-05/how-the-d...
roeles 4y ago
Not Amsterdam, but Utrecht.. But still. I think Utrecht might be more bike friendly than Amsterdam, with a clear network of central bike ways and free secure bike parking throughout the city. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fePpwYCs_JM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fePpwYCs_JM