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A common urban intersection in the Netherlands (2018)

360 points by itronitron 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
voidUpdate 2y ago
I wish more urban areas were as good as The Netherlands. Where I live, there are occasionally some footpaths on the sides of the roads that are half a cycle lane. People constantly walk in the cycle lanes and cycle on the footpaths. Other than that, its just normal urban roads
- mikrl 2y ago
  As a semi regular tourist to the Netherlands from North America it took a bit to adjust to all the modes of traffic at once but now I can easily navigate and stay safe around bikes, mopeds, trams, skinny cars etc. But I’m also a seasoned traveller in the region. So, there would be an adjustment period for the population of your country, and it might take a while, and depending on culture might not be easy.
  - voidUpdate 2y ago
    I live in England, so there are already bike lanes and such, they're just not as widespread as I wish they were and its almost always part of a car lane or a pedestrian lane
    - Woeps 2y ago
      My mother cycled from NL -> -> BE -> FR -> UK Stone henge and back again. Never again she said. It's a lovely country but the cycling infrastructure was ... questionable to say the least (according to her). Which I found surprising, as their hiking trails are awesome and very well kept! For example I loved hiking on the Jurasic Coast and Cornwall. (Even signed up a for a National Trust memberships)
      - voidUpdate 2y ago
        Can confirm, I've done quite a lot of walking and properly marked trails are generally very well kept. I've walked quite a lot of the Cornwall coastline and there are active efforts to improve the walkability in certain areas in response to storms and such like. But yeah, you're very unlikely to find any kind of cycling infrastructure outside of cities, and even then its not amazing
      - ben_w 2y ago
        Surprising, sure. My memories of living in the UK is that there's a weird disconnect where "everyone walks" so walkers are treated as in-group and supported in their hobbies of walking, while "only lycra-clad fitness freaks cycle" so they're an out-group and demonised. This also extends to "how dare cyclists not need to pay road tax" when pedestrians also don't and also have essentially the same requirements for road surface quality, and lead to the same resurfacing requirements, as a bike. Also, the UK romanticises the countryside — not just because it has some nice bits, but as part of its own national identity — and the imagined ideal when I was a kid was some old guy with a flat cap and a walking stick wearing tweed as they walk through it, not a cyclist. Basically the imagery of 1974 J. R. R. Tolkien Calendar[0] (how did that ever happen?) crossed with Last of the Summer Wine[1]. [0] https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/1974-calendar/author/tolkien/publisher/unwin/ https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/1974-calendar/aut... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-65715855 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-65715855
        Earw0rm 2y ago
        Accurate. This romanticist nonsense also means that adequately lit and drained paths - for walking, cycling and wheeling at all hours - inevitably attract rural NIMBY ire. "Preserve the character of our rural village with its 5000 SUVs and its manor house built by plantation owners". Presumably someone's done a Tolkien fanfic where it turns out the hobbits have a bunch of plantations in Numenor or somewhere populated by enslaved Uruks, and the twee-ness is a front for general assholeness and moral hypocrisy?
        2y ago
  - scotty79 2y ago
    The first day in Netherlands I learned that when surface under my feet changes, when I'm crossing the line between two surfaces I need to look back over my shoulder because there might be someone coming in fast. I apply this rule since I learned it in every country I live and it works great.
    - Vinnl 2y ago
      I wish everyone who was born here also stuck to this rule.
  - em500 2y ago
    Probably any change in country takes some time to adjust to traffic. Coming from the Netherlands, I got quite confused when driving in San Francisco, by many wide roads without any clear road markings. Which parts are meant for overtaking, pre-sorting for turns, parking on the side of the road or just parallel driving lanes? On several roads that could fit 3-6 cars I couldn't tell the direction of traffic on the middle lane(s) or the lane separations.
    - danans 2y ago
      > Probably any change in country takes some time to adjust to traffic. Coming from the Netherlands, I got quite confused when driving in San Francisco, To be fair, driving in SF is a challenge even for many people coming from other parts of California, due to the high density plus the steep and narrow topography of the city. Whereas someone coming from Pittsburgh might not find it strange due to the similar topography. Until regenerative braking came around with hybrid and electric cars, SF cars needed very frequent brake pad changes.
  - hansc 2y ago
    I live in The Netherlands (actually in the same city as the photo's were taken): There is a very large difference in traffic density and complexity between the larger cities such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht and the rest of the country (including middle sized cities). When I visit one of those larger cities, I am also constantly looking for bikes everywhere not to be crashing into me.
  - gorbypark 2y ago
    My city (Valencia, Spain) generally has good biking infrastructure but recently they redid an intersection and came up with this monstrosity. Even for locals it's confusing / dangerous. In the direction I travel frequently, I have to stop in the middle of the bike lane which is sandwiched between two pedestrian crossing to wait for a light. Once the light turns I cross over three lanes of vehicle traffic and immediately am thrown into a bike lane crossing my path. The cars here give you no leeway so if you are slightly late in crossing (and there's only about 3 seconds between the "hurry up the lights gonna change soon" flashing light to the cars getting a green light) then you have no place to stop / slow and look if there's any bikes coming. After that you are directly in a pedestrian crossing zebra zone in the island, which then throws you into anther bike crossing, another pedestrian zone and then finally crossing the other three lanes of traffic. Of course on the other side you t-bone directly into another bike lane, and then the lane I'm on turns into a "mixed use" lane (just paint on the sidewalk). https://www.google.com/maps/@39.4670503,-0.3900646,95m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MTExOC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/@39.4670503,-0.3900646,95m/data=...
- never_inline 2y ago
  Where I live there will be pedestrians on left side of asphalt roads and street food stalls on footpaths if the footpaths exist at all.
  - sandeep1998 2y ago
    India?
    - never_inline 2y ago
      yep easy to guess
0xbs0d 2y ago
It's not that much different from Copenhagen where I live. Bike lanes are everywhere.
- maelito 2y ago
  Bike lanes are everywhere in most big cities in France too... But they're bad, very bad. We desperately need this principle of elevated bike lanes that cars should be worried to cross. I have code an open-source framework to assess the cyclability of territories : https://villes.plus https://villes.plus It only takes into account quality bike lanes, based on OSM data, run every trimestre. For instance, painted bike lanes or shared bus lanes are excluded. Amsterdam's score is around 90 %. The best French city, Strasbourg, has around 45 %. There is some inherent variability as each run takes random points among a data set to build the segments to be tested.
  - lqet 2y ago
    > Bike lanes are everywhere in most big cities in France too... But they're bad, very bad. We once cycled from Germany to Colmar in France. Cycling through Colmar is indeed a scary experience, especially if you have a trailer with a small child in it: https://maps.app.goo.gl/wJU4GLWrmqF9EDes8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/wJU4GLWrmqF9EDes8 Of course it isn't much better in Germany.
    - maelito 2y ago
      Remember that the east of France is considered the top place to cycle... Well except Paris and its recent revolution.
      - lqet 2y ago
        I agree, the bike infrastructure in Paris is now quite good. If only cyclists in Paris would start to stop at red lights, especially at pedestrian crossings (this is a problem everywhere, of course, but in Paris it seems to be particularly bad).
    - 2y ago
vanderZwan 2y ago
Isn't it funny how part of the solution is a bit like introducing a one-car buffer into the queue, reducing back pressure? Makes me wonder how much traffic planning and distributed systems could learn from each other (or perhaps already have, I'm not an expert in either).
- dmurray 2y ago
  The article doesn't deal with what happens when the queue gets bigger than one. It looks like a second car would queue on the main road, blocking traffic. To eliminate this you could turn the buffer into a whole extra lane with room for say 5 cars to queue, but this would compromise on the nice feature where the partially turned car gets to completely turn and have great vision of the cycle lanes in both directions. It's an interesting article, but from a systems design perspective I'd be much more interested in how they handle a change in requirements like "there are now five times more cars turning left here than the intersection was designed for".
  - lqet 2y ago
    At least where I live, such a type of intersection is used when a residential street branches off a large main road. You do not have a high volume of traffic going into this residential street, and "waiting for a crossing cyclist" does only take 1-2 seconds. So a buffer size of 1 is usually enough.
  - desas 2y ago
    Build more bike lanes. To an extent, it's a self-solving problem. If you have great non-car transport options and an increase in traffic makes car driving less appealing, then more people will use those non-car transport options rather than joining the queue.
    - vanderZwan 2y ago
      And an often forgotten point: this benefits people who have to drive cars too, since there are less cars on the car road!
    - 2y ago
louwrentius 2y ago
Although this was in the '80s I remember that I (Dutch) walked to school at the age of 5, in a town (technically a city (Enkhuizen)), mostly through a pedestrian area but I had to cross one busy street. My parents told me later that they secretly followed me the first few times (I never noticed). Just try to image that you live in a country that is so safe you can let small kids walk to school. Try to imagine what a society could look like if it's designed for people first, not traffic.
- lqet 2y ago
  > My parents told me later that they secretly followed me the first few times (I never noticed). Ha, not in the Netherlands, but we started doing exactly the same with our 5-year old recently. She wanted to walk to a friend's house alone a few weeks ago and my wife followed her in spy-like fashion to make sure she arrived safely. We also started dropping her off a few blocks before kindergarten so that she can walk the remaining distance "alone" (again secretly followed).
  - david-gpu 2y ago
    That is how it worked when I was a kid on the 80s in Spain. I took the bus to school alone as an 8yo -- and I was considered a wimpy kid; my sister walked to school alone at 6. Meanwhile here in Canada they attach colored ribbons on their backpacks so they won't be allowed off the bus unless an adult is there to escort them home. Watching a 10yo being escorted back and forth to the bus stop is so sad. Personally, I blame the speed and amount of car traffic in our streets. Drivers routinely break the speed limits and oftentimes by the time they come to a stop they are already blocking the crosswalk.
- alkonaut 2y ago
  My kids walked to school from about age 7 or so. Same as when I was young. When I do drop them off (because we are late or there is a blizzard or whatever) I'm a bit ashamed and hope no one sees me driving. Now we have 2 pedestrian crossings on the way to school. one really busy, but luckily it has lights. The one without lights is designed so the road shrinks to single file so cars can't meet at the crossing, but have to take turns passing.
Mattasher 2y ago
I'm not sure how common this type of intersection is. I live and bike daily in Amsterdam and it took me about a minute to fully understand what's going on here. The picture seems to show a special case where the intersecting road is bike only, and instead of the normal painted arrows that show where bikes should queue up when making a left, there's an open area off to the left where one would wait behind the "shark teeth". FYI if you are ever biking here in NL, the thing to remember is that if the "haaientanden" point at you, watch out!, as that means you do not have the right of way. Edit: The side roads are for cars as well, which means you have a strange turning lane in the middle of the intersection where traffic might back up. A simple roundabout seems like a much better solution here unless the goal is to keep cars moving quickly and the turn lane is rarely used.
- coolgoose 2y ago
  I never understood why people have a tough time understanding the lovely shark teeth signs. It's literally a painted give way sign.
- gpvos 2y ago
  I haven't read the entire article, but this is a very common situation: main road with two cycle paths crosses a minor road (or has two side roads at the same place). All roads are also for cars. I'm not sure why the article makes such a difference between the two side roads: they seem quite similar apart from the one-car waiting space before the cycle path.
- alexanderchr 2y ago
  Yeah there is not really space for these eleborate intersections in central Amsterdam. Most are signal controlled or pure spaghetti with trams coming from four directions with almost absolute priority, like this one https://www.google.com/maps/place/52%C2%B021'49.1%22N+4%C2%B055'08.0%22E/@52.3636688,4.9186942,106m https://www.google.com/maps/place/52%C2%B021'49.1%22N+4%C2%B...
- hellweaver666 2y ago
  Fellow Amsterdam resident here, this kind of layout is very common all over the city (I live in the south of the city but I have seen these all over).
openrisk 2y ago
The article points out very nicely that it is expensive (in space terms) to have cars integrate safely with the pedestrian and bicycle traffic of dense urban areas. The mismatch in size and speed requires buffer zones that must be dedicated to this function only.
- vasco 2y ago
  Roughly the same size as if the street had 2 car lanes on each side. In fact this is what I've seen living here in Amsterdam for a few years, every once in a while they remove a lane or two from some street and beef up these security features as well as add more pedestrian space. It's cheaper to maintain extra fat sidewalks and stuff than 2 more lanes of asfalct also.
  - okwhateverdude 2y ago
    Even better, the gemeente is actively converting streets into fietsstraat. It is amazing and I love it. It makes my commute through the city so much faster and less stressful. When they did the knip experiment on that big through-road near Waterlooplein and there was no car traffic, it was also fantastic. At that time, I was commuting that direction and it was wild how quiet that part of the city became. Cars really are a terrible nuisance and do not belong in the city.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    Also, very often it doesn't reduce flow even for cars. There are tons of times when you remove lanes and it improves are keeps flow constant. 4 lane roads are the worst, you can get the same effect with a 2 lane with a turn. It really depends on how many intersection you have, having a single lane that only branches to 2 in front of an intersection can be more efficient, then constantly 2 lanes. The US style of many lanes, many intersections, is horrible from safety and a flow perspective.
- eterps 2y ago
  As a Dutch citizen, I love the expanse in terms of space. Lately, they have been allocating a lot more green areas as well, making the whole experience very enjoyable. Example: https://zuidas.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/groenstrook-beeld-1800x970.jpg https://zuidas.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/groenstrook-bee...
adrianh 2y ago
I moved from the U.S. to the Netherlands nine years ago, and I can attest that the bike infrastructure is amazing and has an outsized impact on your quality of life and general happiness. Being able to bike everywhere — safely, quickly, without any cultural baggage of "being one of those bicycle people" — is a total game-changer. It's one of those things that sounds kooky to people who haven't actually experienced it. When American friends and family ask me what I love most about living here and I say "the bike infrastructure," reactions range from a polite smile to eye-rolling. On paper it doesn't sound particularly sexy, but in reality the impact on your day-to-day life is immense. Your health, your connection to the immediate environment, your cost savings, your time/stress savings, your sense of freedom of movement.
- sokoloff 2y ago
  The underground (plus partly underwater) bicycle parking garage at Amsterdam Centraal is also pretty amazing to experience. So much nicer than the old outdoor one.
- dr_dshiv 2y ago
  1000% agree. We moved 7 years ago and now have 4 kids. It is so valuable that my preteens can bike to tennis, friends, etc safely, even at night. Or that you can pop a toddler to childcare without a car seat and parking. Last year we finally got a car. I hardly ever use it. And remember, the bike infrastructure was only built in the past 30-40 years. Before that, the Netherlands had a super car-focused infrastructure. It was only after the “stop murdering our children” political campaigns that the car focus shifted. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollands-stop-murdering-children-street-safety-movement https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollan...
- enaaem 2y ago
  I live in Amsterdam. The freedom to do all your errants and entertainment by bike or walking is amazing. I can literally walk to the zoo, walk to the market, and walk to endless bars and restaurant. The things is this is not some liberal, 15 min city conspiracy. This is how life has always been…
benterix 2y ago
> Here you can see that a car drivers waiting for people cycling are never in the way of other people in cars. Am I blind or does it only work for just one or maybe two cars?
- gpvos 2y ago
  Correct. That is enough 95% of the time. (I made that number up, but it's not far from the truth.)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- lenlorijn 2y ago
  Bikes are small and fast, and only a small fraction of cars will need to turn here as this is a street going in to a neighborhood. The chances of multiple cars wanting to take this turn and there being a long stream of bikes that holds them up is small. So 'never' is not the right word here, but the times this happens is negligible.
- palotasb 2y ago
  Correct, only one. This specific turn is onto a street that the article describes as "traffic volume here is low, since only residents will use this street." They probably expect the 1-car buffer to be enough for this intersection. You can see in the video that the 1-car buffer is empty most of the time. For intersections where they expect more turning traffic (where the one car buffer wouldn't be enough), they add turning lanes that can accomodate more than one car. You can see an example of this a few hundred meters northeast when Graafseweg intersects the Van Grobbendocklaan: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZmURqawr3oeBX5Sq9 https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZmURqawr3oeBX5Sq9
peoplefromibiza 2y ago
you need space to do that, not many cities in Europe have the luxury of being built from scratch and having so much space to dedicate to a single intersection. Where i live (in Rome) the streets are like this https://as1.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/04/93/42/24/1000_F_493422444_HwKgamOfg5OACxvRKamIBDsckLHlOdsS.jpg https://as1.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/04/93/42/24/1000_F_493422444_Hw... edit: anyway the simplest solution is to turn every intersection into a roundabout, no traffic lights needed, clear right of way, cars can't go fast and in the end it also makes it easier for pedestrians to cross the street.
- deleted 2y ago
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- leokennis 2y ago
  I know few cities beat Rome when it comes to their age, but Den Bosch has had city right since 1185 AD...so it is not exactly "built from scratch".
  - peoplefromibiza 2y ago
    I'm not saying that Amsterdam was built from scratch, nor that Rome is somewhat so special that you can't apply solutions used elsewhere, but that urban space is an hard requirement and the more dedicated infrastructures you build, the more the value of the area goes up and so we end up with those beautiful walkable, green, neighborhoods in Milan where the "Vertical Forest" is that only the very rich can afford. And in those parts of the city where space is basically free, people live too far from where they need to go by bike anyway. It's a cat and mouse game, you need very dense, very small, almost flat cities, to get to the point where Amsterdam is, which is not that typical especially in Europe.
- xiaq 2y ago
  Such old urban places would just be car-free in the Netherlands (sometimes with limited access for delivery and emergency vehicles), a trend fortunately becoming popular in other European cities now. The “urban” in the title is a bit misleading, this intersection is definitely more suburban, or on the boundary of an urban center. (Or rather, the author has a different definition of urban - in my definition cities like den Bosch are really just a small medieval urban core surrounded by continuous medium-density suburban neighborhoods.)
jwr 2y ago
I wish urban designers in Poland learned from this. Our bike lanes are terribly designed, cars turn right into them with very poor visibility. The "solution" is that lawmakers introduce additional restrictions for bikers, which are unclear to everyone, so right now nobody really knows if bikes have priority on bike lane crossings or not.
- Jaxan 2y ago
  It’s good to realise the Dutch cycling infrastructure did not came out of nowhere. There were huge protests in the 70’s about traffic safety. At that time cars ruled the roads and there a lot of accidents, also involving children. From those protests an culture shift started, towards better cycling infrastructure.
  - Tade0 2y ago
    There are many reasons why this is unlikely to happen in Poland, but from the top of my head: -Traffic fatalities have been falling for years now anyway - the 2022 figure per capita is around 20% higher than in the Netherlands, but used to be much, much worse. -Polish cities are sparsely populated due to adminstrative changes and little of the old architecture surviving the war. Official numbers say that Warsaw has a density of 3.6k/km2, while the runner up is much smaller Białystok with ~2.9k/km2. Most hover in the region of 2.0-2.5k/km2. Real numbers might be different, but it's sparse compared with say Amsterdam's ~5k/km2.
    - panick21_ 2y ago
      There are plenty of places in the Netherlands with much lower density. They have great cycling and urban design even in tiny towns.
      - Tade0 2y ago
        Those are just two out of many points. I stand corrected on the second, but the first holds - road safety has been improving for 20 years now, why bother?
timonoko 2y ago
This is 1950's Swedish solution, imho. Modern fad is that there shall be no separate bicycle crossings in intersection areas. Bicycles are equal to other vehicles so it makes sense to concentrate the intersecting traffic to one flow, so it is easier to observe.
- deleted 2y ago
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- stringsandchars 2y ago
  > Bicycles are equal to other vehicles so it makes sense to concentrate the intersecting traffic to one flow, so it is easier to observe Swedish bike lanes are the absolute worst I've cycled on - and I've cycled in England, Denmark, Spain and (briefly) the Netherlands. Disregarding the pitiful maintenance of a lot of the bike lanes in Stockholm (which is another discussion), the current model where a bike-lane has been carved from the pedestrian pavement, but which then throws the cyclist out to the road immediately before a junction is a deadly design which I've found to be nerve-wracking both when I'm cycling or driving. The cyclist is hidden behind parked cars, and is in the blindspot of turning trucks, until the very last seconds before suddenly emerging into the flow of traffic when crossing the side-street. I see near-misses almost every day. It amazes me that anyone ever thought this was a good idea - but even more egregious to me is that Swedes seem to think their own invention is somehow so good they want to export it.
eru 2y ago
I love the Netherlands, and not just for their livable street design, I just wish they food weren't so bland. They make even German cuisine look adventurous in comparison.
- CalRobert 2y ago
  I had some decent ramen in Utrecht recently!
- telesilla 2y ago
  Surinamese is what you are looking for.
- vanderZwan 2y ago
  As a Dutch person... this is sadly not just 100% accurate, it's almost part of our culture by now, hahaha. For example, in Gerard Reve's "De Avonden" ("The Evenings", a literary classic in the Netherlands from 1947) the daily bland dinners are described like a recurring cynical joke. Apparently World War 2 is to blame for the shift in food culture. Somehow we never recovered from that. I think we just internalized that Dutch cuisine sucks and focus on getting good food from other cultures (don't complain about our pannenkoeken or stroopwafels though, unless you're looking for a fight).
  - nate321 2y ago
    I seriously moved out of the country because the food was making me depressed. The bread is just so bad I couldn’t take it. I loved the infrastructure though.
  - fernandotakai 2y ago
    when i moved here, people told me the greatest issue with the country was not the weather, it was the food. and i remember saying "there's no way it's that bad". after being here for 2y, holy shit it's true. one dutch coworker said "we just eat for fuel, not for taste". thankfully it's quite easy to buy amazing ingredients and just do really tasty home meals. > (don't complain about our pannenkoeken or stroopwafels though, unless you're looking for a fight). i would also say dutch bar/finger food is delicious. it's impossible not to have bitterballen while having a beer.
ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
This design highlights a major failing with UK cycle "infrastructure". Here, we often have shared use pavements with sometimes a bit of white paint to designate the pedestrian and cycle lanes, but they cede priority at every single side road. The problem is that it makes cycling using them really awkward as it takes significant energy for cyclists to slow down and then speed up multiple times. The irony is that if you just use the main road instead, then you have priority over all the side roads, so the bike "lane" is pretty much useless. Of course, we also suffer from just having fragments of cycle infrastructure that don't join up and most of the time, the infrastructure consists of "magic" paint that is somehow going to prevent motorists from parking and blocking the lane (it doesn't and they do). Edit: Thought I'd share the sheer incompetence that we're faced with. Here's a "cycle lane" in the centre of Bristol that doesn't even use a different colour, so pedestrians aren't particularly aware of it which just leads to unnecessary confrontation - peds and cyclists fighting over the scraps left over from designing for motorists. https://maps.app.goo.gl/JjfG1YJBwaqyov5H8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/JjfG1YJBwaqyov5H8
- zelos 2y ago
  It's even worse in my UK village. they don't even paint white lines, just the white outline of a bike every few hundred meters on the road.
  - ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
    Here's a premium shared use pavement in Bristol (allegedly a "cycling city") that shows what you're missing https://maps.app.goo.gl/Gw3SBWT9WdYLDTN3A https://maps.app.goo.gl/Gw3SBWT9WdYLDTN3A
    - reddalo 2y ago
      lol are you serious? A "bike path" with f*cking trees and lightposts right in the middle? It looks like one of those EU-funding scams.
      - ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
wouldbecouldbe 2y ago
The image is not very common, most of the time they have elevated the space before and after the bikepath, forcing cars to slow down before going on it. However one of the downsides is that often the front space is a too bit small in cities, so not always easy to fully go on it without blocking the bike path. And in busy bike paths at times cars will get impatient.
cue_the_strings 2y ago
Despite the cycling infrastructure being second to none, I hated my time cycling in Amsterdam earlier this year. The drivers (taxis in particular) are just terrible, very violent, at least in the city center. Having a lot of cycling paths that don't intersect or run along motorways (the ones through parks are especially nice) improves the situation and I did enjoy that part, but I can't shake the first impression of crazy aggressive drivers. Ljubljana, Slovenia, where I live, has decent cycling infra (cycling paths in almost every street, not as good as Amsterdam), but the drivers are way more considerate, so it's overall much nicer to cycle around, at least to me.
- jadyoyster 2y ago
  That's probably an Amsterdam thing, smaller Dutch cities are lovely and awesome to cycle in. Rotterdam was also not enjoyable to cycle due to aggressive drivers when I visited.
  - CalRobert 2y ago
    Hilversum is pretty bad
- emptyfile 2y ago
  [dead]
contrarian1234 2y ago
I find bikelanes that are integrated with sidewalks incredibly dangerous and give a false sense of safety. Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars. Taipei uses the sidewalk model and I recommend never using them I find the Chinese model of bike/scooter lanes w/ barriers integrated into the main road a superior model. The other critical point is integrating bus stops into "islands" in the road so the bike lanes go behind the bus stops is critical. (a stopped bus with passengers going on/off essentially closes off the shoulder for an extended amount of time). Granted the main roads in Chinese cities are generally much wider so I'm not sure if it can be miniaturized the same way. The "turning area" is very useful concept for unblocking traffic and helping with visibility, though it does take up a lot of space. However the one in the example only accommodates one turning car at a time
- throw310822 2y ago
  Not sure if you mean the Dutch style cycle lanes: in that case, it's just tourists that risk impact with bikes, simply because they're conditioned to ignore them (i.e. the brain is trained to consider dangerous only what's beyond the curb). After a few weeks people just learn to be mindful of bicycles and bicycle lanes as they are normally mindful of roads. In particular, one learns to never change direction suddenly (crossing a bike lane, but also on a shared road) but to stop first and check behind their back for potential cyclists.
  - contrarian1234 2y ago
    I guess this conditioning just doesn't happen in Taipei .. I guess then I don't really understand why the sidewalk and bikelane are on the same level at all. Why not have an actual barrier or curb and places to get on/off? it's effectively another road - with the same dangers as a car-road. But it's just some painted asphalt
    - throw310822 2y ago
      A curb is just a sign, at least for pedestrians. If a curb can help you not to cross into a bicycle lane, so can a clearly painted lane.
isoprophlex 2y ago
It's the urban planning, but I'll point out that it's the requirements and responibilities put on the drivers as well. Driving lessons for me consisted for 80% of learning how to ALWAYS ALWAYS track all the cyclists and pedestrians in urban environments, how to approach an intersection and have complete visual on whatever the weaker parties might be doing. A very defensive "assume weird shit can happen any time, and don't assume you can just take your right of way" attitude, and I think our cities are better for it. In America, it seems that a pedestrian is a second rate cititzen. Conversely, here if you hit the "weaker" party as a driver and it's almost always on you in terms of liability.
- vanderZwan 2y ago
  It also helps that "the car driver is to blame until proven otherwise" is the actual law in the Netherlands, which is motivated precisely because of that power dynamic. Essentially, the responsibility defaults the more dangerous vehicle. (for some reason this always is controversial with a lot of Americans whenever it is brought up in on-line discussions)
  - isoprophlex 2y ago
    Having recently read "Amerikanen Lopen Niet" (Americans Don't Walk), the power dynamic you describe seems to be entirely real. Because a car is essential for economic survival in the USA, it's probably difficult for some to accept alternate realities from the status quo.
    - snakeyjake 2y ago
      Americans will never walk. Where I live, today's high temperature is lower than the low temperature in Amsterdam. In August the average low temperature is higher than the average high temperature in Amsterdam. Nobody, not even the hardiest Dutchman is going to walk or cycle when it is 27C at midnight in the summer and 0C at the warmest in the winter with four months of "Amsterdam weather" sprinkled between summer and winter. Plus there's geography. My house is 21m above sea level, 3m higher than the highest point in Amsterdam, and I live 500m from the sea at the very beginning of the rollercoaster of hills and valleys the glaciers carved into the landscape here. To walk or cycle to a store would require several Col du Tourmalet-class hill climbs (that's only a slight exaggeration) along the route. Everywhere south of me is hotter, everywhere north of me is hillier. https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-8pl51/Amsterdam/ https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-8pl51/Amsterdam/ Compare Amsterdam to DC a well-known "swamp" in the US that most people would consider one of its flatter cities. https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-kfds8/Washington/ https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-kfds8/Washington/ Don't be thrown off by the scale: yellow in Amsterdam (of which there is none) is 25m and yellow in DC (of which there is much) is 78m.
panick21_ 2y ago
I also recommend this article, on why in the US, innovation in this area isn't pushed: America Has No Transportation Engineers https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/america-has-no-transportation-engineers https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/america-has-no-transporta...
switch007 2y ago
Driving in towns and cities in the Netherlands is frightening as a foreigner not used to it as you're constantly afraid about hitting a cyclist. I drive like a grandma there. And that's how it should be. I always regret not taking the very advice I gave yesterday about European cities and parking on the outskirts!
- nedt 2y ago
  It's much easier if you also cycle or just walk. People in cars in a city is pretty weird, we just got way too much used to it.
  - switch007 2y ago
    Absolutely. And I do most of the time in the Netherlands. But like many Dutch people, I occasionally drive too ;)
rroose 2y ago
Cool to see my hometown ('s-Hertogenbosch) appear on the front page of HN. I use this intersection almost every week: AMA ;)
- dddw 2y ago
  How far is it from the intersection to the nearest place you can get a Bosche Bol? :)
  - rroose 2y ago
    Most people get their Bossche Bol at Jan de Groot, which is like a 15 minute walk or 5 minutes by bike from the intersection. Beware that there always is a big queue at Jan de Groot because it's very popular. You can also go to a Jumbo supermarket in 's-Hertogenbosch or Rosmalen as they usually sell the exact same Bossche Bol from this bakery.
- miniBill 2y ago
  How funny it is to hear foreigners try to pronounce it?
  - rroose 2y ago
    Not as funny as you would think :) They usually pronounce it pretty well: shertokenboss
Mystery-Machine 2y ago
It also includes a car driving on the cycleway and turning over the full white line at 1:35 and use of the phone while cycling at 1:44
gryzzly 2y ago
It is completely beyond me why other EU countries simply don’t copy the dutch. It’s clearly way better designed, it’s a pleasure for cyclists, drivers and pedestrians and way safer.
- dddw 2y ago
  Yeah almost everybody copied our airport signage system. Why not the road system... NL is very flat though
brnt 2y ago
Meanwhile, in France: https://tinyurl.com/yjvsm9x9 https://tinyurl.com/yjvsm9x9
m4rc3lv 2y ago
The problem in the Netherlands nowadays is not the interaction between motorists verus cyclists, but ebikes versus normal bikes. Lot of accidents happen on the bycicle roads
- lenlorijn 2y ago
  By far the largest amount of cyclist deaths and injury are still caused by cars. The ebikes just get more news coverage because they're novel. But cars are heavier and go faster so will almost always be more dangerous to other cyclists and pedestrians.
- ben-schaaf 2y ago
  When I rode an ebike in the Netherlands I still frequently got overtaken by people on omafietsen. It was the mopeds using the bike paths that were causing problems.
AnonHP 2y ago
Needs (2018) in the submission title.
m4rc3lv 2y ago
The problem nowadays is not the interaction between cyclists and motorists but more between ebikes and normal bikes (on the same pathway)
mattlondon 2y ago
There are lots of dedicated cycle lanes in London now which is good. I feel much safer cycling in those. But as a pedestrian and as a car driver too, there are still a hard-core of dangerous cyclists who refuse to use them and will instead be willfully breaking the law (going through red lights, wrong way/wrong side of the street etc). And just to add insult to injury, they literally add insults! Aggressive shouting, gesticulating etc if your dare to e.g. use a pedestrian crossing or drive on a green light but you are in their way. Tl;Dr you can build all this stuff but it seems like the aggressive pricks won't use it and will just carry on with no accountability or consequences and we all suffer from it.
jrslv 2y ago
Very interesting article. After 12 years of almost daily cycling in the Netherlands, I recently started driving a car as well. I always appreciated the Dutch civil infrastructure, and this new experience only adds to my admiration. Compared to other European countries, driving in NL definitely requires extra attention. There are many small & vulnerable participants sharing the space, moving in different directions with much less inertia than cars. On the other hand there are plenty of buffer zones, the lanes are cleverly organised and clearly marked, and there's 30 kmh (18 mph) limit in most streets in the city. A smaller car with great visibility is really useful here.
pyrale 2y ago
The one thing lacking is marking for pedestrian crossings on the bike lanes. It feels fine in this low-traffic intersection, but in my area (not netherlands), it has become a bit hard to cross bike lanes with high trafic from both pedestrians and cyclists.
DiggyJohnson 2y ago
The notch for the cycle path is actually really interesting to me in that it allows a single car to wait without blocking the flow of the road they are departing. I imagine a lot of RL taillights get clipped but that’s fine at the end of the day.
- crote 2y ago
  That pretty much never happens. The vast majority of cars just aren't big enough to stick out, and people generally have enough self-preservation to not drive at full speed into a full-sized box truck.
raldi 2y ago
These are the things you can do when you don’t give away both sides of every street to fully-subsidized car storage.
ponderings 2y ago
We have lots of smooth infrastructure that I never noticed until various foreign experts on the internet expressed how wonderful it is. There is an actual traffic light design I really like. It has a circle of small white leds that switch off one by one as a count down to green https://www.maxvandaag.nl/sessies/themas/reizen-verkeer/hoe-zit-het-hoe-werkt-een-wachttijdindicator-bij-fietsstoplichten/ https://www.maxvandaag.nl/sessies/themas/reizen-verkeer/hoe-... These are absolutely wonderful on busy roads with tons of (car) traffic. Before they had the count down one would just stand there waiting for what seems forever. It can go green any moment, you have to pay attention. The entire state of mind is different. You can just zone out. I even pull out my phone knowing I have time to answer a message or look up at what time a store closes. I just learn I've only seen the highly predictable ones, apparently in other locations they also have heat sensors to detect how many cyclists are standing there. It may speed up if there are enough. If 1% of the cyclists know what is really going on it would be a lot. Until now I was just happy it turns green when I'm the only traffic for as far as the eye can see.
- AriedK 2y ago
  Yeah these ‘predictors’ only make sense if they can give a countdown at a constant rate. The idea is nice but often they countdown at say 1dot/sonly to have the last 5 dots disappear in the last second so they miss their purpose. on the other hand, a consequence on predictable ones is that people will start cycling on the last 2 dots or so instead of waiting for the green light.
- Vinnl 2y ago
  Oh wow, I never even consciously realised the zoning-out benefit - I already just appreciated them for being able to take off more quickly.
BoggleFiend 2y ago
Interesting that very few (any?) people in the pictures are wearing helmets. In the US, I think it's a lot more common for cyclers to wear helmets. Maybe that comes with a fear of getting clobbered by a car.
- forkerenok 2y ago
  From what I can remember, the overseeing bodies (whatever they are) are not convinced that requiring helmets would reduce serious incident rates, and in fact convinced that this would decrease overall bike ridership. I'd speculate that the metric of "injuries per kilometer cycled" wouldn't budge because of a helmets requirement. Can't find a good summary of this now, but some bits of this are googleable.
  - Mawr 2y ago
    Some sources: [1]: "Cycling UK wants to keep helmets an optional choice. Forcing - or strongly encouraging - people to wear helmets deters people from cycling and undermines the public health benefits of cycling. This campaign seeks to educate policy makers and block misguided attempts at legislation." [2]: "Even if helmets are 85% effective (and assuming q = 0.5 as above), the number of cyclists’ lives saved will still be outnumbered by deaths to non-cyclists if there is a reduction in cycle use of more than 2%" [3]: "Enforced helmet laws and helmet promotion have consistently caused substantial reductions in cycle use (30-40% in Perth, Western Australia). Although they have also increased the proportion of the remaining cyclists who wear helmets, the safety of these cyclists has not improved relative to other road user groups (for example, in New Zealand). The resulting loss of cycling’s health benefits alone (that is, before taking account of its environmental, economic and societal benefits) is very much greater than any possible injury prevention benefit." [...] "Evidence also suggests that even the voluntary promotion of helmet wearing may reduce cycle use." [...] "Even with very optimistic assumptions as to the efficacy of helmets, relatively minor reductions in cycling on account of a helmet law are sufficient to cancel out, in population average terms, all head injury health benefits." [4]: "With 290 cyclist fatalities in 2022, cyclists were the largest group of road casualties. Of these, most were killed by collision with a vehicle (206 bicycle deaths)." [5]: "Cycling levels in the Netherlands have substantial population-level health benefits: about 6500 deaths are prevented annually, and Dutch people have half-a-year-longer life expectancy. These large population-level health benefits translate into economic benefits of €19 billion per year, which represents more than 3% of the Dutch gross domestic product between 2010 and 2013.3. The 6500 deaths that are prevented annually as a result of cycling becomes even more impressive when compared with the population health effects of other preventive measures. In an overview, Mackenbach et al.11 showed that the 22 new preventive interventions that have been introduced in the Netherlands between 1970 and 2010 (e.g., tobacco control, population-based screening for cancer, and road safety measures) altogether prevent about 16 000 deaths per year. Still, our results are likely to be an underestimation of the true total health and economic benefits." [6]: "Riding a bicycle to work every day reduces the risk of premature death by 41% (risk of dying from heart disease: -52%; risk of dying from cancer: -40%)." [...] "Regular cycling boosts physical fitness and compares to 1 to 2 weekly gym sessions." [...] "Bicycle use not only improves physical health, but also has a positive impact on mental health and subjective well-being." [1]: https://www.cyclinguk.org/campaign/cycle-helmets-evidence https://www.cyclinguk.org/campaign/cycle-helmets-evidence [2]: https://www.cyclehelmets.org/1249.html https://www.cyclehelmets.org/1249.html [3]: https://www.cyclinguk.org/article/why-should-highway-codes-advice-cycle-helmets-and-hi-vis-be-revised https://www.cyclinguk.org/article/why-should-highway-codes-a... [4]: https://english.kimnet.nl/publications/publications/2023/11/30/summary-mobility-report-2023 https://english.kimnet.nl/publications/publications/2023/11/... [5]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4504332/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4504332/ [6]: https://www.government.nl/binaries/government/documenten/reports/2018/04/01/cycling-facts-2018/Cycling+facts+2018.pdf https://www.government.nl/binaries/government/documenten/rep...
INTPenis 2y ago
My hometown of Malmö is very bike friendly but let me be frank, no it does not flow smoothly. Cars are required to stop for cyclists and pedestrians on most crosswalks. And no they do not like it, we have consciously prioritized pedestrians and cyclists at the expense of car drivers patience, fuel, and even congestion when the cars behind them all have to stop for a cyclist to cross. Drivers get mad, regularly complain, cyclists abuse their privilege by rolling into intersections without even turning their heads towards traffic. And you know what? I wouldn't have it any other way. I think a healthy society should prioritize healthy alternatives to cars.
- brnt 2y ago
  Only daft tourists and provincials use a car in a city like Amsterdam. You are right, car traffic doesn't flow, but that is kinda the point. Bikes and pedestrians first, cars second.
- Vinnl 2y ago
  The question is: is the flow worse for people in general, or only the ones in cars. If those cyclists and pedestrians would've been in cars (i.e. if there wasn't good bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure), would the flow for the average person be better? Would it even be better just looking at people in cars?
wonder_er 2y ago
I appreciate and approve of this detail applied to many interesting design features of an otherwise banal collection of junctions. I live in Denver, and daily appreciate how much self-harming behavior is built into American road network design standards. It's truly stunning. Consider reading the book "Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System"[0] I wish he'd titled it as "the transportation system of the Greater United States". I emphatically disagree with the use of "our". Anyway, american road networks were designed, funded, built by people who wanted to accomplish ethnic cleansing, and I think it's plainly obvious that this is the case, so it feels strange to even talk about it sometimes. to my knowledge, no one in the netherlands road design system has been recently thing to accomplish ethnic cleansing, so their road networks can develop towards/with mutuality. in the USA, at minimum the founders/originators of these systems were openly supremacist and spoke openly about what and how they were doing. I.E: > If we [road funding authorities, municipal authorities, and their political supporters] could build a highway through their neighborhood, we could get rid of some of them, and make it harder for the rest of them to exist, and we'd see less of them either way. the "they" was always an ethnic group. The playbook of these supremacists was to squish all people within that group into a tiny compression of humanity, then attack it directly, using the normal tools of colonial empires.
naming_the_user 2y ago
Very cool, but to me it kind of illustrates a common pattern of thought on here which is that there's theoretically some sort of "optimum" city design which works for everyone which is a fallacy. There are costs and benefits to everything. In London you can walk ten minutes, jump on the train, get where you want, have a walkable (ish) town centre, go home drunk, and it's accessible to the poor (if we assume away rents which are theoretically solvable). But then in various American cities you can drive 20 minutes in your own bubble from your suburban house to a parking lot around the corner from the bar/restaurant/whatever. You're shielded from weather and don't have to socialise with undesirables. Neither of those systems feel inherently "wrong" or "right" to me, they feel like different opinions. I've enjoyed both at different stages of my life for different reasons. If anything I feel that the "worst case" is when you try to mix both because then you either have hilarious congestion (because cars are too big to fit on medieval streets) or huge walking distances / public transport dead spots (because trains can't cover large areas with low population density).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- tmnvix 2y ago
  > Neither of those systems feel inherently "wrong" or "right" to me, they feel like different opinions. One of those options is clearly much, much worse for the planet. That's not just my opinion.
  - naming_the_user 2y ago
    Sure. The world would be more biodiverse, have less CO2 in the atmosphere, be less "touched" in general if you or I moved into a mud hut, or furthermore pulled out the old KMS card. Realistically it doesn't matter what we do - we can't make the world "more untouched" than it would be if we didn't exist. People have differing opinions on the level of modification that's reasonable to support their own life, their goals, their happiness etc.
hcfman 2y ago
A lot around this is culture. The Dutch have been living with cyclists for years so they work with them. In London motorcyclists drive to the front by the traffic lights. The motorists accept this. I found London quite safe in this respect for motorcyclists. In the other hand, riding a motorcycle in the Netherlands doesn’t feel nearly as safe. If you ride to the front by the traffic lights the motorists will get angry and more likely to lead to road rage and increased risk. Having said that of course the Netherlands is full of cycles lanes. But in terms of intersections I’m not impressed. On long roads where every other country would give right of way to the long road because it works together with the natural psychology of driving on a long continuous road, in the Netherlands they will give right of way to small side streets. It’s like they have a policy of throwing vehicles into the path of free flow traffic. It’s absurd. And did people coming from other countries results in a few heart stopping moments.
- ColonelPhantom 2y ago
  > On long roads where every other country would give right of way to the long road because it works together with the natural psychology of driving on a long continuous road, in the Netherlands they will give right of way to small side streets. Where was this? In my experience, this only applies to 'access roads', smaller roads not intended for through traffic. Roads intended to move traffic over longer distances do generally prioritize through traffic by giving right of way.
danw1979 2y ago
We could just copy the Dutch road design manual, flip it for the UK and be done with it. This is basically perfect.

360 points by itronitron 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

I wish more urban areas were as good as The Netherlands. Where I live, there are occasionally some footpaths on the sides of the roads that are half a cycle lane. People constantly walk in the cycle lanes and cycle on the footpaths. Other than that, its just normal urban roads

mikrl 2y ago
As a semi regular tourist to the Netherlands from North America it took a bit to adjust to all the modes of traffic at once but now I can easily navigate and stay safe around bikes, mopeds, trams, skinny cars etc. But I’m also a seasoned traveller in the region. So, there would be an adjustment period for the population of your country, and it might take a while, and depending on culture might not be easy.
- voidUpdate 2y ago
  I live in England, so there are already bike lanes and such, they're just not as widespread as I wish they were and its almost always part of a car lane or a pedestrian lane
  - Woeps 2y ago
    My mother cycled from NL -> -> BE -> FR -> UK Stone henge and back again. Never again she said. It's a lovely country but the cycling infrastructure was ... questionable to say the least (according to her). Which I found surprising, as their hiking trails are awesome and very well kept! For example I loved hiking on the Jurasic Coast and Cornwall. (Even signed up a for a National Trust memberships)
    - voidUpdate 2y ago
      Can confirm, I've done quite a lot of walking and properly marked trails are generally very well kept. I've walked quite a lot of the Cornwall coastline and there are active efforts to improve the walkability in certain areas in response to storms and such like. But yeah, you're very unlikely to find any kind of cycling infrastructure outside of cities, and even then its not amazing
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Surprising, sure. My memories of living in the UK is that there's a weird disconnect where "everyone walks" so walkers are treated as in-group and supported in their hobbies of walking, while "only lycra-clad fitness freaks cycle" so they're an out-group and demonised. This also extends to "how dare cyclists not need to pay road tax" when pedestrians also don't and also have essentially the same requirements for road surface quality, and lead to the same resurfacing requirements, as a bike. Also, the UK romanticises the countryside — not just because it has some nice bits, but as part of its own national identity — and the imagined ideal when I was a kid was some old guy with a flat cap and a walking stick wearing tweed as they walk through it, not a cyclist. Basically the imagery of 1974 J. R. R. Tolkien Calendar[0] (how did that ever happen?) crossed with Last of the Summer Wine[1]. [0] https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/1974-calendar/author/tolkien/publisher/unwin/ https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/1974-calendar/aut... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-65715855 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-65715855
      - Earw0rm 2y ago
        Accurate. This romanticist nonsense also means that adequately lit and drained paths - for walking, cycling and wheeling at all hours - inevitably attract rural NIMBY ire. "Preserve the character of our rural village with its 5000 SUVs and its manor house built by plantation owners". Presumably someone's done a Tolkien fanfic where it turns out the hobbits have a bunch of plantations in Numenor or somewhere populated by enslaved Uruks, and the twee-ness is a front for general assholeness and moral hypocrisy?
        2y ago
- scotty79 2y ago
  The first day in Netherlands I learned that when surface under my feet changes, when I'm crossing the line between two surfaces I need to look back over my shoulder because there might be someone coming in fast. I apply this rule since I learned it in every country I live and it works great.
  - Vinnl 2y ago
    I wish everyone who was born here also stuck to this rule.
- em500 2y ago
  Probably any change in country takes some time to adjust to traffic. Coming from the Netherlands, I got quite confused when driving in San Francisco, by many wide roads without any clear road markings. Which parts are meant for overtaking, pre-sorting for turns, parking on the side of the road or just parallel driving lanes? On several roads that could fit 3-6 cars I couldn't tell the direction of traffic on the middle lane(s) or the lane separations.
  - danans 2y ago
    > Probably any change in country takes some time to adjust to traffic. Coming from the Netherlands, I got quite confused when driving in San Francisco, To be fair, driving in SF is a challenge even for many people coming from other parts of California, due to the high density plus the steep and narrow topography of the city. Whereas someone coming from Pittsburgh might not find it strange due to the similar topography. Until regenerative braking came around with hybrid and electric cars, SF cars needed very frequent brake pad changes.
- hansc 2y ago
  I live in The Netherlands (actually in the same city as the photo's were taken): There is a very large difference in traffic density and complexity between the larger cities such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht and the rest of the country (including middle sized cities). When I visit one of those larger cities, I am also constantly looking for bikes everywhere not to be crashing into me.
- gorbypark 2y ago
  My city (Valencia, Spain) generally has good biking infrastructure but recently they redid an intersection and came up with this monstrosity. Even for locals it's confusing / dangerous. In the direction I travel frequently, I have to stop in the middle of the bike lane which is sandwiched between two pedestrian crossing to wait for a light. Once the light turns I cross over three lanes of vehicle traffic and immediately am thrown into a bike lane crossing my path. The cars here give you no leeway so if you are slightly late in crossing (and there's only about 3 seconds between the "hurry up the lights gonna change soon" flashing light to the cars getting a green light) then you have no place to stop / slow and look if there's any bikes coming. After that you are directly in a pedestrian crossing zebra zone in the island, which then throws you into anther bike crossing, another pedestrian zone and then finally crossing the other three lanes of traffic. Of course on the other side you t-bone directly into another bike lane, and then the lane I'm on turns into a "mixed use" lane (just paint on the sidewalk). https://www.google.com/maps/@39.4670503,-0.3900646,95m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MTExOC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/@39.4670503,-0.3900646,95m/data=...
never_inline 2y ago
Where I live there will be pedestrians on left side of asphalt roads and street food stalls on footpaths if the footpaths exist at all.
- sandeep1998 2y ago
  India?
  - never_inline 2y ago
    yep easy to guess

0xbs0d 2y ago

It's not that much different from Copenhagen where I live. Bike lanes are everywhere.

maelito 2y ago
Bike lanes are everywhere in most big cities in France too... But they're bad, very bad. We desperately need this principle of elevated bike lanes that cars should be worried to cross. I have code an open-source framework to assess the cyclability of territories : https://villes.plus https://villes.plus It only takes into account quality bike lanes, based on OSM data, run every trimestre. For instance, painted bike lanes or shared bus lanes are excluded. Amsterdam's score is around 90 %. The best French city, Strasbourg, has around 45 %. There is some inherent variability as each run takes random points among a data set to build the segments to be tested.
- lqet 2y ago
  > Bike lanes are everywhere in most big cities in France too... But they're bad, very bad. We once cycled from Germany to Colmar in France. Cycling through Colmar is indeed a scary experience, especially if you have a trailer with a small child in it: https://maps.app.goo.gl/wJU4GLWrmqF9EDes8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/wJU4GLWrmqF9EDes8 Of course it isn't much better in Germany.
  - maelito 2y ago
    Remember that the east of France is considered the top place to cycle... Well except Paris and its recent revolution.
    - lqet 2y ago
      I agree, the bike infrastructure in Paris is now quite good. If only cyclists in Paris would start to stop at red lights, especially at pedestrian crossings (this is a problem everywhere, of course, but in Paris it seems to be particularly bad).
  - 2y ago

vanderZwan 2y ago

Isn't it funny how part of the solution is a bit like introducing a one-car buffer into the queue, reducing back pressure? Makes me wonder how much traffic planning and distributed systems could learn from each other (or perhaps already have, I'm not an expert in either).

dmurray 2y ago
The article doesn't deal with what happens when the queue gets bigger than one. It looks like a second car would queue on the main road, blocking traffic. To eliminate this you could turn the buffer into a whole extra lane with room for say 5 cars to queue, but this would compromise on the nice feature where the partially turned car gets to completely turn and have great vision of the cycle lanes in both directions. It's an interesting article, but from a systems design perspective I'd be much more interested in how they handle a change in requirements like "there are now five times more cars turning left here than the intersection was designed for".
- lqet 2y ago
  At least where I live, such a type of intersection is used when a residential street branches off a large main road. You do not have a high volume of traffic going into this residential street, and "waiting for a crossing cyclist" does only take 1-2 seconds. So a buffer size of 1 is usually enough.
- desas 2y ago
  Build more bike lanes. To an extent, it's a self-solving problem. If you have great non-car transport options and an increase in traffic makes car driving less appealing, then more people will use those non-car transport options rather than joining the queue.
  - vanderZwan 2y ago
    And an often forgotten point: this benefits people who have to drive cars too, since there are less cars on the car road!
  - 2y ago

louwrentius 2y ago

Although this was in the '80s I remember that I (Dutch) walked to school at the age of 5, in a town (technically a city (Enkhuizen)), mostly through a pedestrian area but I had to cross one busy street. My parents told me later that they secretly followed me the first few times (I never noticed). Just try to image that you live in a country that is so safe you can let small kids walk to school. Try to imagine what a society could look like if it's designed for people first, not traffic.

lqet 2y ago
> My parents told me later that they secretly followed me the first few times (I never noticed). Ha, not in the Netherlands, but we started doing exactly the same with our 5-year old recently. She wanted to walk to a friend's house alone a few weeks ago and my wife followed her in spy-like fashion to make sure she arrived safely. We also started dropping her off a few blocks before kindergarten so that she can walk the remaining distance "alone" (again secretly followed).
- david-gpu 2y ago
  That is how it worked when I was a kid on the 80s in Spain. I took the bus to school alone as an 8yo -- and I was considered a wimpy kid; my sister walked to school alone at 6. Meanwhile here in Canada they attach colored ribbons on their backpacks so they won't be allowed off the bus unless an adult is there to escort them home. Watching a 10yo being escorted back and forth to the bus stop is so sad. Personally, I blame the speed and amount of car traffic in our streets. Drivers routinely break the speed limits and oftentimes by the time they come to a stop they are already blocking the crosswalk.
alkonaut 2y ago
My kids walked to school from about age 7 or so. Same as when I was young. When I do drop them off (because we are late or there is a blizzard or whatever) I'm a bit ashamed and hope no one sees me driving. Now we have 2 pedestrian crossings on the way to school. one really busy, but luckily it has lights. The one without lights is designed so the road shrinks to single file so cars can't meet at the crossing, but have to take turns passing.

Mattasher 2y ago

I'm not sure how common this type of intersection is. I live and bike daily in Amsterdam and it took me about a minute to fully understand what's going on here. The picture seems to show a special case where the intersecting road is bike only, and instead of the normal painted arrows that show where bikes should queue up when making a left, there's an open area off to the left where one would wait behind the "shark teeth". FYI if you are ever biking here in NL, the thing to remember is that if the "haaientanden" point at you, watch out!, as that means you do not have the right of way. Edit: The side roads are for cars as well, which means you have a strange turning lane in the middle of the intersection where traffic might back up. A simple roundabout seems like a much better solution here unless the goal is to keep cars moving quickly and the turn lane is rarely used.

coolgoose 2y ago
I never understood why people have a tough time understanding the lovely shark teeth signs. It's literally a painted give way sign.
gpvos 2y ago
I haven't read the entire article, but this is a very common situation: main road with two cycle paths crosses a minor road (or has two side roads at the same place). All roads are also for cars. I'm not sure why the article makes such a difference between the two side roads: they seem quite similar apart from the one-car waiting space before the cycle path.
alexanderchr 2y ago
Yeah there is not really space for these eleborate intersections in central Amsterdam. Most are signal controlled or pure spaghetti with trams coming from four directions with almost absolute priority, like this one https://www.google.com/maps/place/52%C2%B021'49.1%22N+4%C2%B055'08.0%22E/@52.3636688,4.9186942,106m https://www.google.com/maps/place/52%C2%B021'49.1%22N+4%C2%B...
hellweaver666 2y ago
Fellow Amsterdam resident here, this kind of layout is very common all over the city (I live in the south of the city but I have seen these all over).

openrisk 2y ago

The article points out very nicely that it is expensive (in space terms) to have cars integrate safely with the pedestrian and bicycle traffic of dense urban areas. The mismatch in size and speed requires buffer zones that must be dedicated to this function only.

vasco 2y ago
Roughly the same size as if the street had 2 car lanes on each side. In fact this is what I've seen living here in Amsterdam for a few years, every once in a while they remove a lane or two from some street and beef up these security features as well as add more pedestrian space. It's cheaper to maintain extra fat sidewalks and stuff than 2 more lanes of asfalct also.
- okwhateverdude 2y ago
  Even better, the gemeente is actively converting streets into fietsstraat. It is amazing and I love it. It makes my commute through the city so much faster and less stressful. When they did the knip experiment on that big through-road near Waterlooplein and there was no car traffic, it was also fantastic. At that time, I was commuting that direction and it was wild how quiet that part of the city became. Cars really are a terrible nuisance and do not belong in the city.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  Also, very often it doesn't reduce flow even for cars. There are tons of times when you remove lanes and it improves are keeps flow constant. 4 lane roads are the worst, you can get the same effect with a 2 lane with a turn. It really depends on how many intersection you have, having a single lane that only branches to 2 in front of an intersection can be more efficient, then constantly 2 lanes. The US style of many lanes, many intersections, is horrible from safety and a flow perspective.
eterps 2y ago
As a Dutch citizen, I love the expanse in terms of space. Lately, they have been allocating a lot more green areas as well, making the whole experience very enjoyable. Example: https://zuidas.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/groenstrook-beeld-1800x970.jpg https://zuidas.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/groenstrook-bee...

adrianh 2y ago

I moved from the U.S. to the Netherlands nine years ago, and I can attest that the bike infrastructure is amazing and has an outsized impact on your quality of life and general happiness. Being able to bike everywhere — safely, quickly, without any cultural baggage of "being one of those bicycle people" — is a total game-changer. It's one of those things that sounds kooky to people who haven't actually experienced it. When American friends and family ask me what I love most about living here and I say "the bike infrastructure," reactions range from a polite smile to eye-rolling. On paper it doesn't sound particularly sexy, but in reality the impact on your day-to-day life is immense. Your health, your connection to the immediate environment, your cost savings, your time/stress savings, your sense of freedom of movement.

sokoloff 2y ago
The underground (plus partly underwater) bicycle parking garage at Amsterdam Centraal is also pretty amazing to experience. So much nicer than the old outdoor one.
dr_dshiv 2y ago
1000% agree. We moved 7 years ago and now have 4 kids. It is so valuable that my preteens can bike to tennis, friends, etc safely, even at night. Or that you can pop a toddler to childcare without a car seat and parking. Last year we finally got a car. I hardly ever use it. And remember, the bike infrastructure was only built in the past 30-40 years. Before that, the Netherlands had a super car-focused infrastructure. It was only after the “stop murdering our children” political campaigns that the car focus shifted. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollands-stop-murdering-children-street-safety-movement https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollan...
enaaem 2y ago
I live in Amsterdam. The freedom to do all your errants and entertainment by bike or walking is amazing. I can literally walk to the zoo, walk to the market, and walk to endless bars and restaurant. The things is this is not some liberal, 15 min city conspiracy. This is how life has always been…

benterix 2y ago

> Here you can see that a car drivers waiting for people cycling are never in the way of other people in cars. Am I blind or does it only work for just one or maybe two cars?

gpvos 2y ago
Correct. That is enough 95% of the time. (I made that number up, but it's not far from the truth.)
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lenlorijn 2y ago
Bikes are small and fast, and only a small fraction of cars will need to turn here as this is a street going in to a neighborhood. The chances of multiple cars wanting to take this turn and there being a long stream of bikes that holds them up is small. So 'never' is not the right word here, but the times this happens is negligible.
palotasb 2y ago
Correct, only one. This specific turn is onto a street that the article describes as "traffic volume here is low, since only residents will use this street." They probably expect the 1-car buffer to be enough for this intersection. You can see in the video that the 1-car buffer is empty most of the time. For intersections where they expect more turning traffic (where the one car buffer wouldn't be enough), they add turning lanes that can accomodate more than one car. You can see an example of this a few hundred meters northeast when Graafseweg intersects the Van Grobbendocklaan: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZmURqawr3oeBX5Sq9 https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZmURqawr3oeBX5Sq9

peoplefromibiza 2y ago

you need space to do that, not many cities in Europe have the luxury of being built from scratch and having so much space to dedicate to a single intersection. Where i live (in Rome) the streets are like this https://as1.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/04/93/42/24/1000_F_493422444_HwKgamOfg5OACxvRKamIBDsckLHlOdsS.jpg https://as1.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/04/93/42/24/1000_F_493422444_Hw... edit: anyway the simplest solution is to turn every intersection into a roundabout, no traffic lights needed, clear right of way, cars can't go fast and in the end it also makes it easier for pedestrians to cross the street.

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leokennis 2y ago
I know few cities beat Rome when it comes to their age, but Den Bosch has had city right since 1185 AD...so it is not exactly "built from scratch".
- peoplefromibiza 2y ago
  I'm not saying that Amsterdam was built from scratch, nor that Rome is somewhat so special that you can't apply solutions used elsewhere, but that urban space is an hard requirement and the more dedicated infrastructures you build, the more the value of the area goes up and so we end up with those beautiful walkable, green, neighborhoods in Milan where the "Vertical Forest" is that only the very rich can afford. And in those parts of the city where space is basically free, people live too far from where they need to go by bike anyway. It's a cat and mouse game, you need very dense, very small, almost flat cities, to get to the point where Amsterdam is, which is not that typical especially in Europe.
xiaq 2y ago
Such old urban places would just be car-free in the Netherlands (sometimes with limited access for delivery and emergency vehicles), a trend fortunately becoming popular in other European cities now. The “urban” in the title is a bit misleading, this intersection is definitely more suburban, or on the boundary of an urban center. (Or rather, the author has a different definition of urban - in my definition cities like den Bosch are really just a small medieval urban core surrounded by continuous medium-density suburban neighborhoods.)

jwr 2y ago

I wish urban designers in Poland learned from this. Our bike lanes are terribly designed, cars turn right into them with very poor visibility. The "solution" is that lawmakers introduce additional restrictions for bikers, which are unclear to everyone, so right now nobody really knows if bikes have priority on bike lane crossings or not.

Jaxan 2y ago
It’s good to realise the Dutch cycling infrastructure did not came out of nowhere. There were huge protests in the 70’s about traffic safety. At that time cars ruled the roads and there a lot of accidents, also involving children. From those protests an culture shift started, towards better cycling infrastructure.
- Tade0 2y ago
  There are many reasons why this is unlikely to happen in Poland, but from the top of my head: -Traffic fatalities have been falling for years now anyway - the 2022 figure per capita is around 20% higher than in the Netherlands, but used to be much, much worse. -Polish cities are sparsely populated due to adminstrative changes and little of the old architecture surviving the war. Official numbers say that Warsaw has a density of 3.6k/km2, while the runner up is much smaller Białystok with ~2.9k/km2. Most hover in the region of 2.0-2.5k/km2. Real numbers might be different, but it's sparse compared with say Amsterdam's ~5k/km2.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    There are plenty of places in the Netherlands with much lower density. They have great cycling and urban design even in tiny towns.
    - Tade0 2y ago
      Those are just two out of many points. I stand corrected on the second, but the first holds - road safety has been improving for 20 years now, why bother?

timonoko 2y ago

This is 1950's Swedish solution, imho. Modern fad is that there shall be no separate bicycle crossings in intersection areas. Bicycles are equal to other vehicles so it makes sense to concentrate the intersecting traffic to one flow, so it is easier to observe.

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stringsandchars 2y ago
> Bicycles are equal to other vehicles so it makes sense to concentrate the intersecting traffic to one flow, so it is easier to observe Swedish bike lanes are the absolute worst I've cycled on - and I've cycled in England, Denmark, Spain and (briefly) the Netherlands. Disregarding the pitiful maintenance of a lot of the bike lanes in Stockholm (which is another discussion), the current model where a bike-lane has been carved from the pedestrian pavement, but which then throws the cyclist out to the road immediately before a junction is a deadly design which I've found to be nerve-wracking both when I'm cycling or driving. The cyclist is hidden behind parked cars, and is in the blindspot of turning trucks, until the very last seconds before suddenly emerging into the flow of traffic when crossing the side-street. I see near-misses almost every day. It amazes me that anyone ever thought this was a good idea - but even more egregious to me is that Swedes seem to think their own invention is somehow so good they want to export it.

eru 2y ago

I love the Netherlands, and not just for their livable street design, I just wish they food weren't so bland. They make even German cuisine look adventurous in comparison.

CalRobert 2y ago
I had some decent ramen in Utrecht recently!
telesilla 2y ago
Surinamese is what you are looking for.
vanderZwan 2y ago
As a Dutch person... this is sadly not just 100% accurate, it's almost part of our culture by now, hahaha. For example, in Gerard Reve's "De Avonden" ("The Evenings", a literary classic in the Netherlands from 1947) the daily bland dinners are described like a recurring cynical joke. Apparently World War 2 is to blame for the shift in food culture. Somehow we never recovered from that. I think we just internalized that Dutch cuisine sucks and focus on getting good food from other cultures (don't complain about our pannenkoeken or stroopwafels though, unless you're looking for a fight).
- nate321 2y ago
  I seriously moved out of the country because the food was making me depressed. The bread is just so bad I couldn’t take it. I loved the infrastructure though.
- fernandotakai 2y ago
  when i moved here, people told me the greatest issue with the country was not the weather, it was the food. and i remember saying "there's no way it's that bad". after being here for 2y, holy shit it's true. one dutch coworker said "we just eat for fuel, not for taste". thankfully it's quite easy to buy amazing ingredients and just do really tasty home meals. > (don't complain about our pannenkoeken or stroopwafels though, unless you're looking for a fight). i would also say dutch bar/finger food is delicious. it's impossible not to have bitterballen while having a beer.

ndsipa_pomu 2y ago

This design highlights a major failing with UK cycle "infrastructure". Here, we often have shared use pavements with sometimes a bit of white paint to designate the pedestrian and cycle lanes, but they cede priority at every single side road. The problem is that it makes cycling using them really awkward as it takes significant energy for cyclists to slow down and then speed up multiple times. The irony is that if you just use the main road instead, then you have priority over all the side roads, so the bike "lane" is pretty much useless. Of course, we also suffer from just having fragments of cycle infrastructure that don't join up and most of the time, the infrastructure consists of "magic" paint that is somehow going to prevent motorists from parking and blocking the lane (it doesn't and they do). Edit: Thought I'd share the sheer incompetence that we're faced with. Here's a "cycle lane" in the centre of Bristol that doesn't even use a different colour, so pedestrians aren't particularly aware of it which just leads to unnecessary confrontation - peds and cyclists fighting over the scraps left over from designing for motorists. https://maps.app.goo.gl/JjfG1YJBwaqyov5H8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/JjfG1YJBwaqyov5H8

zelos 2y ago
It's even worse in my UK village. they don't even paint white lines, just the white outline of a bike every few hundred meters on the road.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
  Here's a premium shared use pavement in Bristol (allegedly a "cycling city") that shows what you're missing https://maps.app.goo.gl/Gw3SBWT9WdYLDTN3A https://maps.app.goo.gl/Gw3SBWT9WdYLDTN3A
  - reddalo 2y ago
    lol are you serious? A "bike path" with f*cking trees and lightposts right in the middle? It looks like one of those EU-funding scams.
    - ndsipa_pomu 2y ago

wouldbecouldbe 2y ago

The image is not very common, most of the time they have elevated the space before and after the bikepath, forcing cars to slow down before going on it. However one of the downsides is that often the front space is a too bit small in cities, so not always easy to fully go on it without blocking the bike path. And in busy bike paths at times cars will get impatient.

cue_the_strings 2y ago

Despite the cycling infrastructure being second to none, I hated my time cycling in Amsterdam earlier this year. The drivers (taxis in particular) are just terrible, very violent, at least in the city center. Having a lot of cycling paths that don't intersect or run along motorways (the ones through parks are especially nice) improves the situation and I did enjoy that part, but I can't shake the first impression of crazy aggressive drivers. Ljubljana, Slovenia, where I live, has decent cycling infra (cycling paths in almost every street, not as good as Amsterdam), but the drivers are way more considerate, so it's overall much nicer to cycle around, at least to me.

jadyoyster 2y ago
That's probably an Amsterdam thing, smaller Dutch cities are lovely and awesome to cycle in. Rotterdam was also not enjoyable to cycle due to aggressive drivers when I visited.
- CalRobert 2y ago
  Hilversum is pretty bad
emptyfile 2y ago
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contrarian1234 2y ago

I find bikelanes that are integrated with sidewalks incredibly dangerous and give a false sense of safety. Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars. Taipei uses the sidewalk model and I recommend never using them I find the Chinese model of bike/scooter lanes w/ barriers integrated into the main road a superior model. The other critical point is integrating bus stops into "islands" in the road so the bike lanes go behind the bus stops is critical. (a stopped bus with passengers going on/off essentially closes off the shoulder for an extended amount of time). Granted the main roads in Chinese cities are generally much wider so I'm not sure if it can be miniaturized the same way. The "turning area" is very useful concept for unblocking traffic and helping with visibility, though it does take up a lot of space. However the one in the example only accommodates one turning car at a time

throw310822 2y ago
Not sure if you mean the Dutch style cycle lanes: in that case, it's just tourists that risk impact with bikes, simply because they're conditioned to ignore them (i.e. the brain is trained to consider dangerous only what's beyond the curb). After a few weeks people just learn to be mindful of bicycles and bicycle lanes as they are normally mindful of roads. In particular, one learns to never change direction suddenly (crossing a bike lane, but also on a shared road) but to stop first and check behind their back for potential cyclists.
- contrarian1234 2y ago
  I guess this conditioning just doesn't happen in Taipei .. I guess then I don't really understand why the sidewalk and bikelane are on the same level at all. Why not have an actual barrier or curb and places to get on/off? it's effectively another road - with the same dangers as a car-road. But it's just some painted asphalt
  - throw310822 2y ago
    A curb is just a sign, at least for pedestrians. If a curb can help you not to cross into a bicycle lane, so can a clearly painted lane.

isoprophlex 2y ago

It's the urban planning, but I'll point out that it's the requirements and responibilities put on the drivers as well. Driving lessons for me consisted for 80% of learning how to ALWAYS ALWAYS track all the cyclists and pedestrians in urban environments, how to approach an intersection and have complete visual on whatever the weaker parties might be doing. A very defensive "assume weird shit can happen any time, and don't assume you can just take your right of way" attitude, and I think our cities are better for it. In America, it seems that a pedestrian is a second rate cititzen. Conversely, here if you hit the "weaker" party as a driver and it's almost always on you in terms of liability.

vanderZwan 2y ago
It also helps that "the car driver is to blame until proven otherwise" is the actual law in the Netherlands, which is motivated precisely because of that power dynamic. Essentially, the responsibility defaults the more dangerous vehicle. (for some reason this always is controversial with a lot of Americans whenever it is brought up in on-line discussions)
- isoprophlex 2y ago
  Having recently read "Amerikanen Lopen Niet" (Americans Don't Walk), the power dynamic you describe seems to be entirely real. Because a car is essential for economic survival in the USA, it's probably difficult for some to accept alternate realities from the status quo.
  - snakeyjake 2y ago
    Americans will never walk. Where I live, today's high temperature is lower than the low temperature in Amsterdam. In August the average low temperature is higher than the average high temperature in Amsterdam. Nobody, not even the hardiest Dutchman is going to walk or cycle when it is 27C at midnight in the summer and 0C at the warmest in the winter with four months of "Amsterdam weather" sprinkled between summer and winter. Plus there's geography. My house is 21m above sea level, 3m higher than the highest point in Amsterdam, and I live 500m from the sea at the very beginning of the rollercoaster of hills and valleys the glaciers carved into the landscape here. To walk or cycle to a store would require several Col du Tourmalet-class hill climbs (that's only a slight exaggeration) along the route. Everywhere south of me is hotter, everywhere north of me is hillier. https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-8pl51/Amsterdam/ https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-8pl51/Amsterdam/ Compare Amsterdam to DC a well-known "swamp" in the US that most people would consider one of its flatter cities. https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-kfds8/Washington/ https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-kfds8/Washington/ Don't be thrown off by the scale: yellow in Amsterdam (of which there is none) is 25m and yellow in DC (of which there is much) is 78m.

panick21_ 2y ago

I also recommend this article, on why in the US, innovation in this area isn't pushed: America Has No Transportation Engineers https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/america-has-no-transportation-engineers https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/america-has-no-transporta...

switch007 2y ago

Driving in towns and cities in the Netherlands is frightening as a foreigner not used to it as you're constantly afraid about hitting a cyclist. I drive like a grandma there. And that's how it should be. I always regret not taking the very advice I gave yesterday about European cities and parking on the outskirts!

nedt 2y ago
It's much easier if you also cycle or just walk. People in cars in a city is pretty weird, we just got way too much used to it.
- switch007 2y ago
  Absolutely. And I do most of the time in the Netherlands. But like many Dutch people, I occasionally drive too ;)

rroose 2y ago

Cool to see my hometown ('s-Hertogenbosch) appear on the front page of HN. I use this intersection almost every week: AMA ;)

dddw 2y ago
How far is it from the intersection to the nearest place you can get a Bosche Bol? :)
- rroose 2y ago
  Most people get their Bossche Bol at Jan de Groot, which is like a 15 minute walk or 5 minutes by bike from the intersection. Beware that there always is a big queue at Jan de Groot because it's very popular. You can also go to a Jumbo supermarket in 's-Hertogenbosch or Rosmalen as they usually sell the exact same Bossche Bol from this bakery.
miniBill 2y ago
How funny it is to hear foreigners try to pronounce it?
- rroose 2y ago
  Not as funny as you would think :) They usually pronounce it pretty well: shertokenboss

Mystery-Machine 2y ago

It also includes a car driving on the cycleway and turning over the full white line at 1:35 and use of the phone while cycling at 1:44

gryzzly 2y ago

It is completely beyond me why other EU countries simply don’t copy the dutch. It’s clearly way better designed, it’s a pleasure for cyclists, drivers and pedestrians and way safer.

dddw 2y ago
Yeah almost everybody copied our airport signage system. Why not the road system... NL is very flat though

brnt 2y ago

Meanwhile, in France: https://tinyurl.com/yjvsm9x9 https://tinyurl.com/yjvsm9x9

m4rc3lv 2y ago

The problem in the Netherlands nowadays is not the interaction between motorists verus cyclists, but ebikes versus normal bikes. Lot of accidents happen on the bycicle roads

lenlorijn 2y ago
By far the largest amount of cyclist deaths and injury are still caused by cars. The ebikes just get more news coverage because they're novel. But cars are heavier and go faster so will almost always be more dangerous to other cyclists and pedestrians.
ben-schaaf 2y ago
When I rode an ebike in the Netherlands I still frequently got overtaken by people on omafietsen. It was the mopeds using the bike paths that were causing problems.

AnonHP 2y ago

Needs (2018) in the submission title.

m4rc3lv 2y ago

The problem nowadays is not the interaction between cyclists and motorists but more between ebikes and normal bikes (on the same pathway)

mattlondon 2y ago

There are lots of dedicated cycle lanes in London now which is good. I feel much safer cycling in those. But as a pedestrian and as a car driver too, there are still a hard-core of dangerous cyclists who refuse to use them and will instead be willfully breaking the law (going through red lights, wrong way/wrong side of the street etc). And just to add insult to injury, they literally add insults! Aggressive shouting, gesticulating etc if your dare to e.g. use a pedestrian crossing or drive on a green light but you are in their way. Tl;Dr you can build all this stuff but it seems like the aggressive pricks won't use it and will just carry on with no accountability or consequences and we all suffer from it.

jrslv 2y ago

Very interesting article. After 12 years of almost daily cycling in the Netherlands, I recently started driving a car as well. I always appreciated the Dutch civil infrastructure, and this new experience only adds to my admiration. Compared to other European countries, driving in NL definitely requires extra attention. There are many small & vulnerable participants sharing the space, moving in different directions with much less inertia than cars. On the other hand there are plenty of buffer zones, the lanes are cleverly organised and clearly marked, and there's 30 kmh (18 mph) limit in most streets in the city. A smaller car with great visibility is really useful here.

pyrale 2y ago

The one thing lacking is marking for pedestrian crossings on the bike lanes. It feels fine in this low-traffic intersection, but in my area (not netherlands), it has become a bit hard to cross bike lanes with high trafic from both pedestrians and cyclists.

DiggyJohnson 2y ago

The notch for the cycle path is actually really interesting to me in that it allows a single car to wait without blocking the flow of the road they are departing. I imagine a lot of RL taillights get clipped but that’s fine at the end of the day.

crote 2y ago
That pretty much never happens. The vast majority of cars just aren't big enough to stick out, and people generally have enough self-preservation to not drive at full speed into a full-sized box truck.

raldi 2y ago

These are the things you can do when you don’t give away both sides of every street to fully-subsidized car storage.

ponderings 2y ago

We have lots of smooth infrastructure that I never noticed until various foreign experts on the internet expressed how wonderful it is. There is an actual traffic light design I really like. It has a circle of small white leds that switch off one by one as a count down to green https://www.maxvandaag.nl/sessies/themas/reizen-verkeer/hoe-zit-het-hoe-werkt-een-wachttijdindicator-bij-fietsstoplichten/ https://www.maxvandaag.nl/sessies/themas/reizen-verkeer/hoe-... These are absolutely wonderful on busy roads with tons of (car) traffic. Before they had the count down one would just stand there waiting for what seems forever. It can go green any moment, you have to pay attention. The entire state of mind is different. You can just zone out. I even pull out my phone knowing I have time to answer a message or look up at what time a store closes. I just learn I've only seen the highly predictable ones, apparently in other locations they also have heat sensors to detect how many cyclists are standing there. It may speed up if there are enough. If 1% of the cyclists know what is really going on it would be a lot. Until now I was just happy it turns green when I'm the only traffic for as far as the eye can see.

AriedK 2y ago
Yeah these ‘predictors’ only make sense if they can give a countdown at a constant rate. The idea is nice but often they countdown at say 1dot/sonly to have the last 5 dots disappear in the last second so they miss their purpose. on the other hand, a consequence on predictable ones is that people will start cycling on the last 2 dots or so instead of waiting for the green light.
Vinnl 2y ago
Oh wow, I never even consciously realised the zoning-out benefit - I already just appreciated them for being able to take off more quickly.

BoggleFiend 2y ago

Interesting that very few (any?) people in the pictures are wearing helmets. In the US, I think it's a lot more common for cyclers to wear helmets. Maybe that comes with a fear of getting clobbered by a car.

forkerenok 2y ago
From what I can remember, the overseeing bodies (whatever they are) are not convinced that requiring helmets would reduce serious incident rates, and in fact convinced that this would decrease overall bike ridership. I'd speculate that the metric of "injuries per kilometer cycled" wouldn't budge because of a helmets requirement. Can't find a good summary of this now, but some bits of this are googleable.
- Mawr 2y ago
  Some sources: [1]: "Cycling UK wants to keep helmets an optional choice. Forcing - or strongly encouraging - people to wear helmets deters people from cycling and undermines the public health benefits of cycling. This campaign seeks to educate policy makers and block misguided attempts at legislation." [2]: "Even if helmets are 85% effective (and assuming q = 0.5 as above), the number of cyclists’ lives saved will still be outnumbered by deaths to non-cyclists if there is a reduction in cycle use of more than 2%" [3]: "Enforced helmet laws and helmet promotion have consistently caused substantial reductions in cycle use (30-40% in Perth, Western Australia). Although they have also increased the proportion of the remaining cyclists who wear helmets, the safety of these cyclists has not improved relative to other road user groups (for example, in New Zealand). The resulting loss of cycling’s health benefits alone (that is, before taking account of its environmental, economic and societal benefits) is very much greater than any possible injury prevention benefit." [...] "Evidence also suggests that even the voluntary promotion of helmet wearing may reduce cycle use." [...] "Even with very optimistic assumptions as to the efficacy of helmets, relatively minor reductions in cycling on account of a helmet law are sufficient to cancel out, in population average terms, all head injury health benefits." [4]: "With 290 cyclist fatalities in 2022, cyclists were the largest group of road casualties. Of these, most were killed by collision with a vehicle (206 bicycle deaths)." [5]: "Cycling levels in the Netherlands have substantial population-level health benefits: about 6500 deaths are prevented annually, and Dutch people have half-a-year-longer life expectancy. These large population-level health benefits translate into economic benefits of €19 billion per year, which represents more than 3% of the Dutch gross domestic product between 2010 and 2013.3. The 6500 deaths that are prevented annually as a result of cycling becomes even more impressive when compared with the population health effects of other preventive measures. In an overview, Mackenbach et al.11 showed that the 22 new preventive interventions that have been introduced in the Netherlands between 1970 and 2010 (e.g., tobacco control, population-based screening for cancer, and road safety measures) altogether prevent about 16 000 deaths per year. Still, our results are likely to be an underestimation of the true total health and economic benefits." [6]: "Riding a bicycle to work every day reduces the risk of premature death by 41% (risk of dying from heart disease: -52%; risk of dying from cancer: -40%)." [...] "Regular cycling boosts physical fitness and compares to 1 to 2 weekly gym sessions." [...] "Bicycle use not only improves physical health, but also has a positive impact on mental health and subjective well-being." [1]: https://www.cyclinguk.org/campaign/cycle-helmets-evidence https://www.cyclinguk.org/campaign/cycle-helmets-evidence [2]: https://www.cyclehelmets.org/1249.html https://www.cyclehelmets.org/1249.html [3]: https://www.cyclinguk.org/article/why-should-highway-codes-advice-cycle-helmets-and-hi-vis-be-revised https://www.cyclinguk.org/article/why-should-highway-codes-a... [4]: https://english.kimnet.nl/publications/publications/2023/11/30/summary-mobility-report-2023 https://english.kimnet.nl/publications/publications/2023/11/... [5]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4504332/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4504332/ [6]: https://www.government.nl/binaries/government/documenten/reports/2018/04/01/cycling-facts-2018/Cycling+facts+2018.pdf https://www.government.nl/binaries/government/documenten/rep...

INTPenis 2y ago

My hometown of Malmö is very bike friendly but let me be frank, no it does not flow smoothly. Cars are required to stop for cyclists and pedestrians on most crosswalks. And no they do not like it, we have consciously prioritized pedestrians and cyclists at the expense of car drivers patience, fuel, and even congestion when the cars behind them all have to stop for a cyclist to cross. Drivers get mad, regularly complain, cyclists abuse their privilege by rolling into intersections without even turning their heads towards traffic. And you know what? I wouldn't have it any other way. I think a healthy society should prioritize healthy alternatives to cars.

brnt 2y ago
Only daft tourists and provincials use a car in a city like Amsterdam. You are right, car traffic doesn't flow, but that is kinda the point. Bikes and pedestrians first, cars second.
Vinnl 2y ago
The question is: is the flow worse for people in general, or only the ones in cars. If those cyclists and pedestrians would've been in cars (i.e. if there wasn't good bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure), would the flow for the average person be better? Would it even be better just looking at people in cars?

wonder_er 2y ago

I appreciate and approve of this detail applied to many interesting design features of an otherwise banal collection of junctions. I live in Denver, and daily appreciate how much self-harming behavior is built into American road network design standards. It's truly stunning. Consider reading the book "Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System"[0] I wish he'd titled it as "the transportation system of the Greater United States". I emphatically disagree with the use of "our". Anyway, american road networks were designed, funded, built by people who wanted to accomplish ethnic cleansing, and I think it's plainly obvious that this is the case, so it feels strange to even talk about it sometimes. to my knowledge, no one in the netherlands road design system has been recently thing to accomplish ethnic cleansing, so their road networks can develop towards/with mutuality. in the USA, at minimum the founders/originators of these systems were openly supremacist and spoke openly about what and how they were doing. I.E: > If we [road funding authorities, municipal authorities, and their political supporters] could build a highway through their neighborhood, we could get rid of some of them, and make it harder for the rest of them to exist, and we'd see less of them either way. the "they" was always an ethnic group. The playbook of these supremacists was to squish all people within that group into a tiny compression of humanity, then attack it directly, using the normal tools of colonial empires.

naming_the_user 2y ago

Very cool, but to me it kind of illustrates a common pattern of thought on here which is that there's theoretically some sort of "optimum" city design which works for everyone which is a fallacy. There are costs and benefits to everything. In London you can walk ten minutes, jump on the train, get where you want, have a walkable (ish) town centre, go home drunk, and it's accessible to the poor (if we assume away rents which are theoretically solvable). But then in various American cities you can drive 20 minutes in your own bubble from your suburban house to a parking lot around the corner from the bar/restaurant/whatever. You're shielded from weather and don't have to socialise with undesirables. Neither of those systems feel inherently "wrong" or "right" to me, they feel like different opinions. I've enjoyed both at different stages of my life for different reasons. If anything I feel that the "worst case" is when you try to mix both because then you either have hilarious congestion (because cars are too big to fit on medieval streets) or huge walking distances / public transport dead spots (because trains can't cover large areas with low population density).

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tmnvix 2y ago
> Neither of those systems feel inherently "wrong" or "right" to me, they feel like different opinions. One of those options is clearly much, much worse for the planet. That's not just my opinion.
- naming_the_user 2y ago
  Sure. The world would be more biodiverse, have less CO2 in the atmosphere, be less "touched" in general if you or I moved into a mud hut, or furthermore pulled out the old KMS card. Realistically it doesn't matter what we do - we can't make the world "more untouched" than it would be if we didn't exist. People have differing opinions on the level of modification that's reasonable to support their own life, their goals, their happiness etc.

hcfman 2y ago

A lot around this is culture. The Dutch have been living with cyclists for years so they work with them. In London motorcyclists drive to the front by the traffic lights. The motorists accept this. I found London quite safe in this respect for motorcyclists. In the other hand, riding a motorcycle in the Netherlands doesn’t feel nearly as safe. If you ride to the front by the traffic lights the motorists will get angry and more likely to lead to road rage and increased risk. Having said that of course the Netherlands is full of cycles lanes. But in terms of intersections I’m not impressed. On long roads where every other country would give right of way to the long road because it works together with the natural psychology of driving on a long continuous road, in the Netherlands they will give right of way to small side streets. It’s like they have a policy of throwing vehicles into the path of free flow traffic. It’s absurd. And did people coming from other countries results in a few heart stopping moments.

ColonelPhantom 2y ago
> On long roads where every other country would give right of way to the long road because it works together with the natural psychology of driving on a long continuous road, in the Netherlands they will give right of way to small side streets. Where was this? In my experience, this only applies to 'access roads', smaller roads not intended for through traffic. Roads intended to move traffic over longer distances do generally prioritize through traffic by giving right of way.

danw1979 2y ago

We could just copy the Dutch road design manual, flip it for the UK and be done with it. This is basically perfect.