As a Dutch person I am pleasantly surprised by this article, it gets basically everything right. One thing though is that our geography works well with biking. I visited the US recently and you can drive for 30 minutes in a car and you are still in LA, if you drive for 30 minutes in the Netherlands you're in a completely different city. Everything is just closer and hence more bike-able.
As a dutch person I would absolutely NOT want to ride a bike in the US, it's simply too dangerous. There are so many cars that are not looking out for cyclists. For example, I never saw my Uber/Lyft driver peek over his shoulder. In the Netherlands we fail our driving exam if we forget this even once. Another example is the insane speed cars fly past the "share the road"-bikelanes. It's crazy. I would feel really unsafe on a bike in the US.
> As a dutch person I would absolutely NOT want to ride a bike in the US, it's simply too dangerous.
I understand this perspective, but as a counter to this, if no one bikes in the US then this won't change. I ride all over San Francisco. In the last 18 years of me living here things have gotten better and better for the cyclist, but there are still many areas that can be improved. I encourage you to support local organizations, like the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, which can pressure local governments to make changes that improve safety for all cyclists.
For too long in the US we've designed our roads with the idea that cars have some right to the road that others do not. We're finally starting to rectify that in cities across the country, and it's only getting better.
In the last 18 years of me living here things have gotten better and better for the cyclist, but there are still many areas that can be improved
I just visited SF, and it was notable to me how much of the city's infrastructure is given over to cars and parking: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/08/19/what-santa-barbara-says. The rhetoric on the Internet made me think the reality on the ground would be different.
Knowing what it was like before, and how much improved it is since then, definitely shouldn’t be taken to mean that it’s ideal by any means.
The point I was making is how much things like SFBC and Critical Mass over the years improved things because of the community involvement.
I’d like to see bicycle boulevards and dedicate roads to bikes, but what we have is better than when I got here, and feels like it’s improveing at a rapid pace now.
You would also fail your driver's test in SF if you don't check for bikers when making a right turn. However, this isn't the case if you do your test elsewhere. SF has pretty good bike infrastructure and awareness.
I just did my driving test in the city, and this was drilled into my head by my instructor.
> You would also fail your driver's test in SF if you don't check for bikers when making a right turn.
Infrastructure shouldn't be designed in a way to cause these types of turning conflicts. The general rule of the road is that vehicles on the right make right turns. Vehicles on the left make left turns, and vehicles in the middle proceed straight through the intersection.
Turning conflicts, like what you're describing, are a significant hazard to cyclists. Cars need to check for traffic[1] on their right, move to the right, and then make their right turn. Cyclists need to pass right turning traffic on the left.
By that measure, we shouldn't have crosswalks at intersections, and walkers should walk into the street, past the right turn lane, to avoid turning conflict.
In some EU countries(Poland) pedestrians have a green light to go, even though cars turning right also have a green light - cars are expected to watch out for pedestrians crossing, even when they have a green light to go.
I live in UK and the part of the traffic codex that seems to be unknown to literally all British drivers is the one that says "pedestrians have priority over cars making a turn" - so if you are crossing a road near an intersection and a car is making a turn into that road you are just crossing, you have absolute priority even in the absence of a designated crossing - but drivers get really upset and honk and wave as if you are in their way.
> part of the traffic codex that seems to be unknown to literally all British drivers is the one that says "pedestrians have priority over cars making a turn"
They have a very efficient system for reminding fellow road users, though. Two fingers in the air slightly apart, a pedestrian’s walking legs upside down, indicating the priority reversal.
People are generally very receptive to this, because it is quintessentially British to understand you have to live together harmoniously to get ahead in life.
I've been followed home and threatened in the US for giving a driver who was tailgating the middle finger. Are you saying that in the UK this would never happen? I certainly wouldn't risk provoking random strangers, especially those who are not following traffic codex.
Wow! All along I'd been thinking that those pedestrians who cross near a junction with barely more than a glance over their shoulder were reckless and unjustified. Now I guess I think it's just reckless.
> In most countries in Europe (certainly in the UK, and other places I have visited), pedestrians have a separate crossing phase to the rest of traffic.
I don't have numbers but I think this is the other way around: UK is the exception while most of Europe have pedestrians cross with turning traffic.
As a pedestrian I prefer the "normal" way of sharing the crossing with turning cars. In UK you'll have to wait for a way too long time for the pedestrian green light, and as a result (?) people cross pretty regularly against the red light. This is the case for London at least -- could also be that people are just more impatient in such a crowded metropolis.
There's a difference between a pedestrian moving at 3 to 6 mph and a cyclist going 10 to 20 mph. This is why crossing intersections as a pedestrian at cyclist speeds is much more hazardous to cyclists (compared to pedestrians moving at typical pedestrian speeds) because drivers don't expect someone moving that fast when they're making a turn across a crosswalk.
There's no way to eliminate turn conflicts except for eliminating all grade crossings. Even on protected bike lanes the right hook is still a significant risk. Drivers need to have it drilled in to their head to look before turning. Even if a bike isn't entering from a protected lane, there could be a pedestrian using the crosswalk.
> Even on protected bike lanes the right hook is still a significant risk.
That's because the infrastructure design is deficient here (which is putting a straight through lane to the right of a right turn lane). Either the cyclist needs to stay in the lane that's meant for straight through traffic, or there needs to be some form of intersection control that only allows traffic to proceed in a phased fashion like a traffic light.
For the latter option, the light would only allow cyclists to proceed through the intersection or allow other vehicles to proceed through the intersection, but not both at the same time.
The hook usually happens at unsignalized intersections (e.g. an alleyway) in my experience. Adding more signals is not the solution. Nor is making "every lane a bike lane." Even in a wide sharrow'ed lane a driver will make a pass, followed by a right turn which cuts the biker off.
Drivers often make mistakes here, and especially bicyclists. A lot of cars try to turn from the middle lane, which makes passing on the left more dangerous for cyclists. On top of that, many cyclists attempt to pass on the right, while cars are turning right.
You are absolutely correct, but so many people don’t know the rules well enough to even realize they’re breaking them.
Cyclists also willfully break traffic rules in SF with alarming regularity. Stop signs are generally regarded as ornamental, and even lightly traveled red lights. I am reminded of this every time my seven year-old cycling companion asks why such and such a person hasn't followed the rules when they blow past us.
As a occasional cyclist with a habit of casually breaking all possible traffic rules that are relatively safely breakable, my thinking is that if I crash with a car, it is me who dies regardless who was right. So as long the traffic culture amongst car drivers is so ignorant toward cyclists that me following traffic rules and actually trying to use the rights the rules give me results to life expectancy calculated in weeks, I keep my relaxed attitude towards traffic rules. Once the driving culture is such that I can drive safely by following rules, I start considering following them. The ball on this one is on cars, not cycles.
(To be fair, when I drive a car, I find myself driving similarly badly way too often. So I definitely do not claim changing the culture is easy)
To be fair, SF seems to have four-way stop signs at basically every intersection. I don't think we have four-way stop signs anywhere in Europe. Coming to a full stop and accelerating again every hundred meters slows you down a lot more on a bike. It's a pretty stupid road design for cars too, it kills your fuel economy.
Many cyclists would agree that a rolling stop allows them to get through, when there is no traffic, the intersection much faster and more safely due to the dangers of an intersection. I'm not arguing for blowing through at top-speed, and they must stop when pedestrians are in a cross-walk.
Just because it's the law, doesn't mean it's correct.
Coming to a full stop on a bike is downright dangerous. The act of unclipping from your pedal, stopping, and then starting again and having to clip back into your pedal is far more dangerous than just slowing down sufficiently to make sure there's no oncoming traffic. You're more likely to fall over when transitioning between moving and stopped on a bike than any other time, and falling over at an intersection is very dangerous.
There's nothing dangerous about stopping, I do it all the time and have never fallen. Cyclists who lack the skills to ride with clipless pedals just shouldn't use them. Or at least switch to something like Speedplay which make it easier to clip in and out.
I ride clipped all the time in the city and don't have this problem. If you can't safely use clips in the city, it's your choice to use them anyway. Saying that due to clips, "Coming to a full stop on a bike is downright dangerous" may be precise for you and your usage, but it's not a general rule as you made it sound.
I have never had clips, clipless pedals or anything similar. All of my bikes have had flat pedals with a bit of rubber and/or protrusions to keep my feet in place.
I have literally never felt that to be a disadvantage. I'm not racing, I'm commuting.
I've never used clips on my pedals when commuting because of the fact that there are times I have to come to a stop where I may not have time to unclip.
Using clips while riding in city traffic is like using cruise control while driving in city traffic.
Riding without clipless pedals means your feet slip all around and you have to pay more attention to your feet while pedaling. Or you have to use toe-clips, which are a PITA because you have to flip the pedal over to get your toe in.
With clipless pedals, you just mash your foot in and go, and your foot is now in the perfect position and you don't have to think about it. But that transition time is more hazardous than simply having your feet on the pedals all the time.
> Riding without clipless pedals means your feet slip all around and you have to pay more attention to your feet while pedaling.
The pedals on my bicycle have some slight metal protrusions that keep my feet in place while riding and work just fine with conventional shoes. Plus, in dry weather, I don't have a problem with my feet slipping off the pedals. Even in wet weather, they don't really slip that much unless I'm not careful about it.
The same thing also applies to motorists and pedestrians. Also, generalizations like this lead to the attitude that it's somehow the cyclists fault if they get hit by the car even if they are following the rules.
I don't follow your argument. Grandparent had pointed out correct cyclist behavior at intersections to avoid accidents. Parent had commented that both motorists and "especially" cyclists made mistakes resulting in violations of traffic rules and expected behavior. I added the observation that many cyclists' incorrect behavior in San Francisco is willful, not only accidental.
Both parent and I agree with GP's point that, "Turning conflicts...are a significant hazard to cyclists"; I simply argued for vigilance in the presence of deliberate rule-breaking by cyclists. Surely you would not argue for less vigilance by motorists? SF drivers are a whole other rant...
If you meant to say that I am making a hasty or sweeping generalization, I did no such thing. I make no claim as to the proportion of two-wheeled scofflaws. Anybody who rides in SF can see it, and some riders have owned up in child comments herein. If your complaint is against motorists who justify their own shitty driving with claims that cyclists are 'always' flouting the rules, then I agree that this is dangerously fallacious. But such a sweeping generalization nonetheless starts with cyclists who clearly break traffic rules.
That's why I wish they would stop. This is about saving lives. And if you are also a rider then you know the apportionment of blame becomes moot when 1800kg of SUV hits 80kg of cyclist. I think GP is absolutely right that good infrastructure design is key to avoiding such risks, but like all transportation systems it has to be built on the assumption that traffic rules will be followed.
There's a myriad of reasons why this is the case. Traffic signals and signage aren't designed for cyclists. Google a little.
Further, this is a false equivalence. When a cyclist fails to be diligent, the risks are fairly small. When a motorists fails to be diligent, other people die.
I ride the streets that I'm speaking about. San Francisco has a team of engineers who redesign road infrastructure, markings, and signage to promote safe cycling. I think they do good work and I benefit directly from their work. I think the infrastructure is better suited to cycling than your dismissive comment implies.
I disagree with your characterization that the risks to motor vehicle-bicycle interactions are fairly small risks as long as motorists are diligent. But I don't suggest that you accept my risk assessment. My equivalence is grounded in California law[0]. Cyclists have equal responsibility with other drivers. Both groups of vehicles need to be operated diligently.
San Francisco has a team of engineers who redesign road infrastructure...
They're adapting roads which were created entirely with motorists in mind in an attempt to promote safe cycling. The infrastructure is more well suited to cycling than it was previously, but I'm not sure that folks from Portland would agree. Folks from Copenhagen, most especially wouldn't agree.
In any case, it's a subjective assessment.
You disagree with my characterization and feel like the law somehow proves you right?
Yes, it is equally illegal for a motorist and a cyclist to blow a stop sign. If a motorist blows a stop sign and has a collision with another motorist, cyclist, or pedestrian, then likely outcome is injury in one of those cases, and death in the other two.
If a cyclist blows a stop sign and causes a collision, the likely outcome is that they'll end up a stain on someone else's car. It's possible they could injure, or even kill a pedestrian, which has happened all of once that I can tell.
The risk is vastly different. Bicycles aren't really ever considered to be deadly weapons.
Cars also willfully break traffic rules in SF with alarming regularity. Almost no one signals, cars rarely come to a full stop at crosswalks (instead inching forward, implying the pedestrian needs to hurry up), and even though I don't have a radar gun I'm pretty sure I see drivers operating at speeds far above the speed limit. Not to mention the drivers who shout out death threats at bikes for merely occupying the lane...
I have a very simple rule. Traffic laws and enforcement of said laws should be proportional to the accident rate.
If the average car driver has 2x, 10x, 100x or anything like higher accident rate than cyclists, and car traffic is several time larger than bike traffic, then it make logical sense that most traffic law and enforcement is put on addressing car traffic and drivers. The only consideration is when funding for such enforcement and laws don't follow strict scaling, in which you have to find the point where putting more funding in bike traffic laws actually produce lower accidents.
Cars and trucks and buses don't really go the same speed and it still works for them. Plus, on city streets where traffic is going 40 mph or less, the speed difference isn't really that great.
Buses and trucks are a bit bigger and less vulnerable than bikes, and their speed difference with cars isn't remotely as big as that between cars and bikes. It's really not a comparable situation.
Bikes taking up the place of a car, would really slow car traffic down to a crawl. There's a good reason they get separate lanes.
> and their speed difference with cars isn't remotely as big as that between cars and bikes.
Cyclists can go between 10 to 20 mph. Some faster ones can go 25 to 30 mph. On a city street, you have cars going between 20 to 30 mph. On other roads, they may be going up to 40 mph. Given typical speeds, you have a 0 to 30 mph difference.
On highways, there are trucks that are limited to 55 to 60 mph amongst cars that go 70 to 85 mph. In that case, you have speed differences ranging from 10 to 30 mph.
> Bikes taking up the place of a car, would really slow car traffic down to a crawl.
Not really. If there are multiple lanes of traffic going in the same direction, then they don't slow down traffic any more than a bus would. If there's a single lane of traffic going in that direction, then cyclists are far more easy to pass compared to a bus or truck. In many states, it is legal to pass cyclists by crossing a double-yellow line when safe to do so. Second, it's much easier to see around a cyclist compared to a bus or car.
> Cyclists can go between 10 to 20 mph. Some faster ones can go 25 to 30 mph. On a city street, you have cars going between 20 to 30 mph. On other roads, they may be going up to 40 mph. Given typical speeds, you have a 0 to 30 mph difference.
Are you talking about cyclists or motorcyclists here? Racing bikes, recumbent bikes or e-bikes? Because regular cyclists do not get anywhere near those speeds.
Average cycle speed is about 15 kph, which is approximately 10 mph. 40 mph is more than 60 kph. Muscle-powered cyclists might reach those speeds if they're professional Tour de France racers going downhill, and even then only the downhill experts.
Also, on highways you've got multiple lanes, allowing for easy overtaking.
> Are you talking about cyclists or motorcyclists here? Racing bikes, recumbent bikes or e-bikes? Because regular cyclists do not get anywhere near those speeds.
I'm talking about cyclists. On a hybrid/commuter bike, I have no problem cruising at 15 mph (and I'm middle-aged and a bit overweight rider). Most people who regularly commute can maintain speeds similar to what I can. Could you cite your source about the average speed of 15 km/h?
> Also, on highways you've got multiple lanes, allowing for easy overtaking.
There are many streets in cities that have multiple-lanes for same direction traffic.
Average cycling speed depends a lot on how hard the cyclist is willing to work for it. Most aren not willing to work at all, and on a regular city bike, that means most people will go about 15 km/h. Speed maniacs (like me) will have an average speed of over 20 km/h (on a cargo bike) or even 30 km/h on a sport or racing bike.
I'm completely unable to not work myself into a sweat when cycling, but I'm not remotely average. Average cyclists include children, elderly people, disabled people. People with kids, people with cargo, and many, many people not in any kind of hurry.
> There are many streets in cities that have multiple-lanes for same direction traffic.
In Amsterdam, there's about a handful, and some of those have higher speed limits. They're the main thoroughfares that you don't want obstructed with slow traffic. The vast, vast majority of streets have only a single lane for cars in each direction, and a bike lane or bike path next to it.
It actually is a joke how bad some tests are. In a lot of cities in Florida your test is done in a parking lot with no real world driving with other cars, and it omits a lot of things, like parallel parking. Ideally licenses should be able to be transferred across states, but tests like the majority of ones in Florida mean drivers from there may be inadequately prepared for driving in some other states like CA.
Still, the US is not the only place with very mixed standards for driving tests. I once heard that the easiest way to get a Dutch driving license was on the Caribbean island of Saba, where you'd get your license if you could drive around the central square without causing an accident. I knew someone who got his license there, and he didn't dare to drive a car in Netherland. Fortunately he had a Dutch motorbike license.
Your comment is ignorant and insulting, since you're basically calling him a liar.
My US driving test was a joke. I pulled out of a parking space, pulled up to a road, took a right turn, drive 100-200 feet to an intersection, took a right turn, then took another right turn into the same parking lot I had just left, then parked. That was my entire driving test.
The original comment never stated that all driving tests everywhere in the US are all a joke. Believing that is ridiculous: the US is a big place and things vary dramatically from locality to locality.
The guy is correct. MY driving test was a joke, and other people have testified their tests were a joke too. Therefore the statement is correct. He never said ALL driving tests in the US are a joke.
It sounds like you're taking this personally, and have some kind of issue because you failed two driving tests.
> For too long in the US we've designed our roads with the idea that cars have some right to the road that others do not.
This used to be the case too in Netherland. Until the 1990s, cars had right of way over bikes in most (not all) situations. A car coming from the left would have right of way over a bike coming from the right. This was only fixed in the 1990s.
Bikes have always been popular, but quite a lot of the things described in this article have been fairly recent developments.
Agreed. I don't blame anybody for not wanting to ride in the city. But I've been in SF since 2000 and I'm amazed at the progress that has been made in this direction. (Thanks in no small part to the SFBC.)
And these improvements are happening all over the US. I've been pleasantly surprised to re-visit places and see how much progress has been made.
I've lived here for 20 years and I think you probably just have Stockholm Syndrome. The built environment is still trash and hasn't changed noticeably the entire time. There have been a few tiny marginal improvements, such as a handful of signals for bikes. Bike share I guess. Otherwise total stasis.
Not to mention the coast, Embarcadero to Marina to the presidio, all super bike friendly. In general I think the city is quite bikeable. Sure I wouldn't want my kids to bike around it, but I wouldn't want them in SF in general lol.
Change will happen faster if the decision makers realize induced demand - building car capacity (supply) induces more demand of drivers... building safe bike infrastructure induces more people to ride.
> One thing though is that our geography works well with biking. I visited the US recently and you can drive for 30 minutes in a car and you are still in LA, if you drive for 30 minutes in the Netherlands you're in a completely different city.
That's not geography, that's urban planning, or a lack of it. America's geographic size meant that we could sprawl, not that we had to.
And indeed, especially in the post-WW2 era, we collectively chose to sprawl out far and wide, greatly favoring the automobile at the expense of walking, biking, and transit.
> I would feel really unsafe on a bike in the US.
That makes sense, since yeah, it's dangerous as hell. Got hit twice the last year before I moved to Munich.
> That's not geography, that's urban planning, or a lack of it.
You're basically right, but it's land use regulation. We have plenty of 'planning' in the US, and it mostly keeps in place what's already there. If you look at the places built in the US before zoning codes and 'planning', a lot of them are actually quite nice because they were built more to adapt than things these days, which are "built to a finished state" to borrow a phrase from the folks at Strong Towns.
I seem to recall from a geography A-level course about 35 years ago in the UK that historically Los Angeles' spread was something to do with the city fathers offering incentives to adjoining communities to become part of Los Angeles - something like 'call yourself Los Angeles and we'll give you access to our water or electrical grid'.
Los Angeles had the water supply from Owens Lake, which enabled it to dictate terms to a lot of surrounding land whose owners wanted to develop (e.g. the San Fernando Valley).
It's a huge, fairly flat coastal basin, and although the city limits don't cover the whole area, Los Angeles itself is 500 sq mi, which is larger than Phoenix, or 50% more land than New York City. It's really, really big.
I visited LA for the first time last year, I remember descending to LAX and being absolutely blown away by the sheer scale of LA stretching for dozens of miles below. The same approach into London Heathrow/Gatwick seems positively rural in comparison.
I used to think the opening city shots in Blade Runner were an obvious exaggeration but apart from the Tyrell Corp building it looked pretty much the same.
That doesn't sound right at all, it's almost the opposite of the current situation. Only a small part of the Los Angeles sprawl is officially in the city of Los Angeles. Another hundred communities aren't officially called Los Angeles, but might as well be.
It's history. In medieval times European villages were an hour's walk apart at most. Then they grew. So now we have towns that are within half an hour relaxed cycling.
The US was still rather empty by the time faster transport came along.
And no one ever drove you off your bike in Munich yet? Lucky you!
I use my bike every day and I don't mind the winter either. I still can count the times I've been hit. Near misses though happen almost daily. Especially with cars turning right not watching bike lanes.
I was tempted to say the same, but urban planning is certainly an aspect of geography. It's just not necessarily to do with the physical landforms, though the parent here could have been referring to both the flat nature of the Netherlands and the urban planning.
Aside from this , it's overall pretty repuslive to see how my hometown continues developing with the expectation that people will just drive out and drive back.
As an American, whenever I see articles about Dutch cycling culture, the thing that stands out to me is that nobody is wearing helmets.
In the US, I wouldn't dream of doing that - it's just too dangerous, because there's too much risk of being involved in a high speed collision. But, after having spent some time in the Netherlands, it's come to feel like a minor injustice every time I put my helmet on. It's a little reminder of how, in the US and much the rest of the world, we have blithely turned our public right-of-way into a space that's fundamentally dangerous for humans to be in.
I'm Dutch and do my daily commute on my casual bike without a helmet. In the weekends I ride my road bike and wear a helmet. I've once had an accident on my road bike and broke my helmet (along with my collar bone). A few weeks later I went out on my casual bike (not wearing a helmet) to buy a new helmet for my road bike. On my way back, holding the new helmet in my right hand, my steer got tangled up in the helmet and I fell. Undeniable conclusion: Having a helmet with you on a casual bike actually causes accidents!
As a dutch person I'd most definitely make assumptions about an adult on an ordinary bike wearing a helmet. No one does that here except tourists sometimes or people who need a helmet all the time.
But were you on a racing bike, going at speed? In that situation the Dutch use helmets too.
For normal traffic use, people in the Netherlands use bikes where you sit in an upright position, and they don't go very fast (like 15 km/h). You can take quick evasive action away from the road, or put a foot on the ground to prevent a fall. It's hard to imagine breaking a helmet on a non-racing bike here.
Normal riding, once was on a flat road on an ordinary city bike (saddle ~same height as handlebars, not full tuck like a racer), the other was downhill on a mountain bike (on asphalt). In both cases I flipped over the front, because the front wheel turned perpendicular to the direction of travel.
I average around 20-22kph on my 8km commute riding my current bike. It's nothing particularly special, just an 8-speed city bike, and I certainly don't go all-out, I ride at what feels like a comfortable speed for the bike.
Biking in Copenhagen, I definitely see a fair share of people on granny bikes dawdling along, they're much more likely to crash due to sudden mechanical failure, or due to inattention from staring at their damn phones.
But either way, we're only talking about solo accidents. You can certainly also hit your head against the hood of a car, for instance.
Besides, I like wearing the helmet. It concentrates airflow across the top of my head, and it gives me more area to put stickers on.
Most children you see wearing bike helmets on playgrounds rode their bikes there and just neglected to remove them. There are also a few children with seizure disorders who routinely wear helmets for protection.
Something I frequently see in the Netherlands and surprises me is how some driver parks his car, takes the child from the special seat with two belts, put him into a wood box in the front of his bike, and gets into traffic while checking his phone.
I have a friend who takes her three children in a bike because she does not have a big enough car for three children seats.
I believe in countries/cities like these its safer to not use a helmet. Drivers see that your being unsafe and give you much more room and are more aware of you. Less accidents and less deaths in total by not wearing a helmet!
I couldn't find the study that was posted on hn, but there are lots of articles.
I've seen that stated many times. As far as I can tell, it traces back to a news article that did fun things like cherry picking individual observations from a study to support a claim even though the study's overall findings were contradictory.
My own sense is that the science seems pretty clear that, provided you are in a wreck, wearing a helmet greatly reduces your risk of serious injury and death. Helmets aren't perfect, and they may primarily be designed for lower-engery impacts, but even insufficient energy dissipation is better than zero energy dissipation.
There's a secondary claim that not wearing a helmet results in safer behavior than wearing one, and that outweighs any potential benefit. I'm not aware of any quality research to back that claim, and you'd never be able to get a study to pin the question down past an institutional review board, so I'm inclined to say that cuts very close to what we called a fundamentally unanswerable question back in my class on experiment design. (Well, actually we used the acronym most the time. ^_^ ) My personal sense is to think that expecting your garden variety distracted, chronically fatigued, or nonzero BAC driver to notice whether you're wearing a helmet in the first place, let alone modify their behavior accordingly, is giving them more credit than they've earned.
Including on bike helmet safety labels. Fact is, they really are designed for falls and not for collisions with motor vehicles. In that situation, they may just be a "better than nothing", possibly not enough to make any difference to the outcome.
My bicycle doesn't have nearly as many air bags as a typical car.
You're right, though. Cars are fundamentally dangerous. High risk of violent injury or death, and, even in the best case, they subtly harm your health and longevity by encouraging a sedentary lifestyle. Damned expensive, too. Perhaps we should all just move to Rotterdam so we wouldn't have to deal with them so much.
It's really not an unreasonable point. As a society, we make rules all the time about safety )that may or may not be rooted in actual statistics). I certainly did lots of things as a kid that would be seen by at least many people I know as reckless today in terms of safety equipment.
An argument can be made that you should wear a helmet of some sort in many circumstances where it's not required (or expected) today. Look at downhill skiing. It's still far from universal but no one (besides racers) wore a helmet until 20 years ago or so. I still don't wear one.
Assuming you are landing on a horizontal surface, it's only the vertical component of the fall that you have to worry about. A fall from 2 meters accelerates you to about 22 km/h (27 km/h for 3 meters). Helmets are design to protect you from a 2-3 meter fall onto an anvil (depending on the standard). As long as you don't hit anything vertical (the curb, a telephone pole, a car, etc), a helmet will give you good head protection no matter how fast you are going (and will also give you some protection against abrasions).
Depending on how fast you are going, a helmet may even help for hitting things. Quite a few people don't exceed 25 km/h on their bikes, especially in city situations. Similarly, if you are aware of a dangerous situation, then slowing down may give you some protection. It's absolutely not going to help if you are bombing along at 40 km/h and get doored, but at that point, nothing really will.
> It's absolutely not going to help if you are bombing along at 40 km/h and get doored, but at that point, nothing really will.
One thing that would help is taking the lane when going at those speeds. People don't normally drive their cars going 40 km/h in the door zone, so the same thing should apply when riding a bicycle.
From experience I came off in London at slow speed an definitely had concussion that night.
I still managed to walk to train station with the bike which had a puncture - only in the morning when I got up did I notice I had dried blood all down one side of my head
Consumer Reports does excellent research, I recently discovered, not only their own original research on products but they provide the background literature too:
The majority of serious injuries from cycling have one thing in common, says Fred Rivara, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington. “Two thirds of hospitalizations and three quarters of deaths from bicycle injuries are due to head injuries,” he says. “The most effective way to prevent that from occurring is to wear a helmet.”
Indeed, extensive research has demonstrated that a helmet is the best way[0] riders can protect themselves against head injuries—especially those that are potentially fatal.[1]
Statistics bear it out: According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, in the majority of bicyclist deaths the most serious injuries are to the head, highlighting the importance of wearing a bicycle helmet. Helmet use has been estimated to reduce the odds of head injury by 50 percent and the odds of head, face, or neck injury by 33 percent.
Tangentially, here's how they test bike helmets:
In our tests we strap helmets onto head forms and use an apparatus that drops the helmets at about 14 mph onto a flat anvil to find out how well they withstand impact. An electronic sensor inside the head form monitors the force that would be transmitted to a rider’s skull in an accident.
We also test the strength of helmet chinstraps, attachment points, and buckles. We drop an 8 3⁄4-pound weight 2 feet so that it yanks on the straps to simulate the force that might occur in a crash.
I generally agree, but I want to point out that there is a huge range of impact protection depending on the general shape (e.g. 'aero' vs 'skater' style), construction (hard shell downhill MTB helmet vs typical road helmet) and fit. I can't count the number of times I've seen a cyclist with a terribly ill-fitting, poorly positioned helmet. I've seen many completely exposed foreheads, thanks to too much rearward tilt, and mostly exposed skull bases thanks to the impractical aero/race-inspired design that's dominated the road market for decades.
Personally, though I ride a road bike, I wear a fairly standard MTB helmet. Really, I like the visor more than anything, but I do think it has better protection all-around.
I also use MTB (Shimano SPD) pedals: they're easy to clip in and out of, and I can wear normal-looking shoes that I can actually walk normally in.
The racing stuff is just ridiculous: it gets you a tiny improvement in performance at a huge penalty in usefulness. If you're not actually racing, it's pointless.
Yeah, but surely that comes at a cost, of less protection for certain types of falls. See the parent's comment about mostly-exposed skull bases for instance. Personally, I'd rather have better protection even if that means a little less airflow and a few grams more mass. (Of course, you can go to an extreme here; those full-face MTB racing helmets are really too much IMO.)
I know about fit and positioning, but I haven't heard there are differences in safety due to shape or the "aero/race-inspired design". Where can I find out more about it? Has any research been done?
It's not just high speed that makes helmets useful: you can get a brain injury just falling over when you're stopped, if you hit your head on something hard (like asphalt or concrete, which most roads and sidewalks and curbs tend to be made of).
People's bodies simply were not evolved for a concrete environment. Helmets are how we deal with that.
You'd be surprised at how good people are instinctively at not bonking their head on stuff. In an ordinary bike accident -- e.g. swerving for something unexpected, and then falling -- you'll not hit your head on anything. Road rash is no fun either but you're not more likely to hit your head on a bicycle than you are when just walking around.
>In an ordinary bike accident -- e.g. swerving for something unexpected, and then falling -- you'll not hit your head on anything.
You can't say that with 100% certainty. There could be a curb there, and you might not catch yourself properly, and hit your head on it.
Sorry, but I'm not going to bet my life on your feelings of "how good people are". Putting on a helmet isn't some kind of huge burden; it's no different than wearing a seat belt in a car.
>Road rash is no fun either but you're not more likely to hit your head on a bicycle than you are when just walking around.
When you're walking around, your head isn't traveling 10-30 mph. The relative likelihood is irrelevant, what's important is velocity.
I'm a long-time bike commuter in the U.S (Portland, OR suburbs). Your comment reminds me of a Dutch colleague I once worked with. He was adamant that cycling conditions were too dangerous here. As a relative statement compared to the Netherlands, I'm sure that's true. For me personally, the health benefits and general enjoyment make it worthwhile. Also, it's important to know what you're doing when cycling in traffic, even in a "bike friendly" city. Unfortunately, there's no formal education in the USA around that topic, like there is for driving an automobile.
>>> As a dutch person I would absolutely NOT want to ride a bike in the US, it's simply too dangerous.
A lot of Americans also think it's too dangerous. It's an obstacle to getting more people on bikes.
When people at my workplace see me with my bike, or find out that I'm a cyclist, they beg me to be careful, promise to wear a helmet, and so forth. I have friends who are avid cyclists, but who limit their riding to dedicated bike paths or off-road trails, because they don't feel safe riding on the roads.
Just looking at pictures and videos, it's apparent to me that cyclists in the US and Netherlands have very different riding habits due to the differences in conditions. The Dutch seem so carefree. Americans seem to have a much more wary, defensive, and sometimes aggressive style, and may prefer more maneuverable bikes for a reason. You'd probably get used to it, as lots of us do.
We also probably have to pay more attention to planning our routes to avoid the worst of traffic. I know all of the dedicated bike paths and side roads in my town. Google Maps gives different routes for bikes and cars. Residential streets have lots of cars but not a lot of traffic volume. I actually encounter relatively few cars on my rides.
Much as I defend cycling in the US, I'd still prefer the Dutch environment.
Google Maps for bikes is notoriously bad around Amsterdam, though. Open Streetmap is generally better. Google tends to avoid bike-only routes and prefers to send you along car routes.
(It's not as bad as it once was, but it still has the annoying tendency to avoid the Sarphatistraat, for example.)
>I have friends who are avid cyclists, but who limit their riding to dedicated bike paths or off-road trails, because they don't feel safe riding on the roads.
That's basically how I am. I live in the DC area, and luckily for me there's tons of really nice bike paths like the W&OD trail. I can easily ride 50+ miles in one ride here just sticking to these trails, and see a lot of different parts of the area. Or I'll ride on subdivision roads that are very low-traffic. But there's no way I'm riding on normal high-traffic roads around here; it's just too dangerous.
If you go around telling people, "Body armor required," then they are not going to feel laissez-faire.
The other side is the presumed liability on the part of the car. Cars have almost all the responsibility to ensure they do not collide with a bike in the Netherlands. That makes cycling more pedestrian, you can just go and overall not worry about things around you.
In my view, when you're on the bike, what you're thinking about is riding, and you have to be a lot more wary on US roads, helmet or not. I think the statistics back that up. Sometimes I go out without a helmet, and I still have to be ready to dodge a car or an obstacle in the road.
But I do think that helmets get more attention than they deserve. Oddly enough, among experienced cyclists, a helmet is just part of the equipment. You either wear one or you don't. But non-cyclists (the folks who "advise" me at my workplace), the helmet is the first thing they ask about.
Oh, one more thing, European roads tend to be in a lot better condition. I had a near-accident last week because I didn't notice a gaping hole in the road that would have sent me over the bars.
> I visited the US recently and you can drive for 30 minutes in a car and you are still in LA, if you drive for 30 minutes in the Netherlands you're in a completely different city.
But what difference does that make? Why would I be more likely to visit a different city rather than another part of a bigger city?
It's cultural, as well. One time a car of people in Houston drove me off the road onto the curb. They screamed out of their window "why you biking out here, you trying to die?"
The natural origin should be walking (except for motorways, some tunnels, etc., and I guess in most cases also outside city/village limits). But I read that in US suburbs, many streets are not even suitable for that, which boggles my mind.
Very select cities are pretty good for biking. Boulder CO, for instance is pretty great b/c most people there bike. But yeah for a lot of places it's a nightmare.
Also our metro areas tend to spread out quite a bit, so to get from one area to another typically involves biking >5 miles.
I'd also like to congratulate Utah for recently completing over 100 miles of commuter-friendly bike trails that connect nearly all of the most populous cities.
Portland, Oregon is another great example. It has the best biking infra I've seen in the US mixed with a driving culture that, for the most part, actually affords priority consideration to pedestrians and bikers. While not perfect, a lot of best practices can and probably should be derived from what Portland has done to improve bike infra.
I no longer live there, but do you know where they ended up on the Folsom bike lane? There was a lot of back and forth, drivers getting really angry at bikers protesting the removal of the bike lane.
The geography is fine, really. LA is flat and has decent-ish weather (too hot at times though)
The buildings and motorways are an absolutely hellscape of trash design, though. Whole damn city is an asphalt desert with a building sprinkled here and there. Why? Because laws force businesses and homes to have parking that often takes up more space than the building itself.
A lot of the good road bike trails in the US are built next to slow-moving rivers and canals for that very reason. Rivers tend to carve the land or reroute until the slope is gentle and nearly constant. My favorite way to find road bike trails in the US is by looking near large rivers.
There is a lot of cycling in Limburg as well. Especially sport cycling ("wielrennen"), not despite but rather because of the hills!
I grew up there and my friends and I used our (regular) bikes a lot to get from town to town. Because of the hills it was exhausting but doable. When I went to study up north, I remember being surprised how easy cycling is in the rest of our (flat) country: you can easily go on for hours!
>"One thing though is that our geography works well with biking."
And the topography doesn't hurt - its flat as a pancake.
Also isn't it possible to basically ride between every city in the Netherlands? I once biked from Rotterdam to Den Hague using only bike paths and protected bike lanes. I got the impression that I could continue riding to Amsterdam in the same fashion if wanted to.
> I got the impression that I could continue riding to Amsterdam in the same fashion if wanted to.
You definitely could. A couple of years ago I've actually done a trip like that, Rotterdam to The Hague to Amsterdam (then onwards to Amersfoort) — it was about 150 km long, and all of that was on designated bike paths and lanes.
That sounds like a nice trip. Yeah the bike paths between Rotterdam and Delft were particularly memorable, you were basically biking through open farm land following a canal. It was like riding through a postcard. Cheers.
I wouldn't be surprised if this were true of continental Europe as a whole. It was actively surprising to me that this wasn't possible in America until I remembered how damn big that place is.
Ive nearly been hit by cars twice as a law abiding pedestrian in the 6 months I have been in Seattle,so theres no way I am cycling here. And as a city on the West Coast, I am sure it is more bike friendly than most in the states. Fortunately, I work and live near downtown, so I can walk my daily commute.
Another factor is the population density. I live in a region that is geographically just a bit larger than the Netherlands and has a population of about 300,000 (The Upper Peninsula of Michigan).
Of course that doesn't apply in US areas that do have higher population density, but there's a lot of country over here.
I’ve stopped peaking over my shoulders ever since I’ve gotten a car with a bunch of sensors and cameras. Now it seems like it is more dangerous to take the time to look back and instead just rely on the fairly reliable sensor indicator in the side review mirrors. It’s not even like you can do both, unfortunately, since you either look here or there.
I wonder how much driving will change with technology before we get full self driving cars?
But ya, the USA still sucks for bikes. It’s not just the cars, but that you are in the same road with the cars in the first place. Netherlands is much better in that regard, with bike trails everywhere and intersections heavily engineered with an eye towards cyclist safety. Not to mention the laws are heavily biased toward cyclists.
I’ve stopped peaking over my shoulders ever since I’ve gotten a car with a bunch of sensors and cameras.
When I ride in newer cars, I'm always surprised at how poor the outward visibility is. Front pillars have gotten enormous in order to house airbags, and the rear pillars seem to always be absurdly think with tiny, useless corner windows (for crush/rollover strength?). It's no wonder that you're more dependent on technology.
Yes. Front pillars are thicker both for airbags, and also for crush/rollover protection, and rear visibility is bad because the beltline has increased, for crash protection and also for aerodynamics. Basically, cars now are MUCH safer than they were 10-20 years ago with these changes, but like anything, there's a price to pay, and it's visibility.
Luckily, rear cameras and radar sensors give me much better visibility now than I ever had with older cars that had more glass.
Yeah that's a bit shit nowadays; I've almost hit a cyclist at a roundabout the other day because he was behind one of the pillars, staying behind there thanks to the combination of his and my speeds. Always check twice.
That is totally true! I’ve noticed that even if did turn my head, I wasn’t seeing much compared to the last car I bought twenty years ago. The rear window is also much smaller than I’m comfortable with, but the sensors make up for it.
That's correct: a car's roof (or rather the pillars that hold it) has to be strong enough to not get crushed in case the car gets flipped. That's why pillars are so thick nowadays.
What car has sensors that can detect bikes or pedestrians? My Subaru has rear radar, which is great at detecting vehicles that I literally can’t see, but I would never trust that to alert me to bikes or people.
Mine detects pedestrians and cyclists easy enough. This is 2016 Acura sense, with both side and rear sensor packages. There is also the backup camera, which works really well, but I’m generally get the pedestrian warning before they enter my camera or mirror range. I still turn my head while backing up, it’s when I’m changing lanes at speed where the sensors really start to change behavior (where there is a cost to looking back and not forward).
Basically everything, except one thing: the speed threshold where physically separate bike lanes are mandatory is 50km/h, not 30. That happily coincides with the in-city speed limit for cars.
You will still find many physically separated bike lanes even on 50-kph roads if they carry heavy traffic, but it's not mandated by law. It just happens that sharing a road with cyclists also slows down cars, and that decreases traffic throughput.
> It just happens that sharing a road with cyclists also slows down cars, and that decreases traffic throughput.
The equation is not so simple if you consider that one person in a bicycle is one less car on the road, thus occupying a lot less space for the overall traffic.
> As a dutch person I would absolutely NOT want to ride a bike in the US, it's simply too dangerous.
well, while it's very safe to ride a bike here in Netherlands, sh*t still happens regularly and crazy drivers are there. Past year I had this accident : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUY7psClcbQ
In which the cyclist is at fault, as the minivan is on the intersection before the cyclist and thus has right of way. Right of way only counts when arriving at the same time, often neglected in analysis.
I‘m pretty sure this is wrong. If the van can‘t make the turn safely before the cyclist arrives/collides he has to let him pass. The question of who arrives first at an intersection is irrelevant in europe.
No, going straight has priority over turning traffic, a bike has priority over a minivan, and it's the responsibility of everyone to not cause a collision. The cyclist is right three times over.
LA resident here for eleven years (coming from ATL which has its own horrible traffic and is worse by miles for bike commuting, fwiw).
> I visited the US recently and you can drive for 30 minutes in a car and you are still in LA, if you drive for 30 minutes in the Netherlands you're in a completely different city.
My not-so-pedantic comments to these facts are (a) LA is freaking HUGE (if ever fly into LAX at night, pay attention to when the earth becomes a solid carpet of city lights. It's a looong way from the shoreline). We aren't constrained by water on three or four sides like say, NYC/Manhattan or San Francisco.
And, (b), at LA's 101/10/405/surface street speeds, thirty minutes may only be three or four miles (or two, if you venture to travel at The Wrong Times), while you can get to one of the major secondary cities (Anaheim, for example) in about fifty minutes if you time it well.
So, while technically true, those points aren't representative of How Things Really Are, imho.
(me: exclusive transit/bike commuter here for 6+ years)
Almost everything :) It says that there needs to be a separated, protected bike lane on every road that has a maximum speed over 30 km/h. This is not true (and pretty infeasible, too). The vast majority of average boring roads in residential areas have a 50 km/h maximum speed and no separated bike lanes (and often, if the road is small/quiet enough, not a marked bike lane at all). Most countryside roads have a 80 km/h maximum speed and no bike lanes.
I bet some details were left out that accidentally made it incorrect. I can imagine that there's some law/guideline going on that if a road is particularly busy, then it needs to be either max 30 kph or have separated bike lanes. But most suburban roads or countryside aren't particularly busy.
> The vast majority of average boring roads in residential areas have a 50 km/h maximum speed […]
Look closely though, a lot has changed in the last decade. Most of the residential streets are now 30 km/h, with only the larger arterial thoroughfares (which do have tend to have separate cycling lanes) and roads in industrial areas left at 50 km/h.
> Most countryside roads have a 80 km/h maximum speed and no bike lanes.
A lot of those remaining roads that don't have a separate cycling lane have been turned into 60 km/h roads.
Wherever in our country do you live that this is not the case?
> As a dutch person I would absolutely NOT want to ride a bike in the US,
It depends where you are. I used to spend a lot of time in Raleigh and Cary, North Carolina and often borrowed a bike to cycle from Cary to Raleigh and around both places, I was told by many Americans that it was dangerous but in fact I only had one slightly difficult moment in hundreds of kilometres of cycling and that was a low speed bus that came within ten centimetres of me.
It got only one thing wrong: there are roads that allow 50km/h and 60km/h without dedicated cycling roads (or with curbs). The former sometimes has no cycling indication, the latter is seen with a 1.5 width car lane with two smaller res bicycle lanes around it.
These are rarely seen in cities though but are very common in rural areas (the Dutch rural, which would probably be 'suburban' in the US).
> One thing though is that our geography works well with biking.
Yeah, that one. Your country is ridiculously flat with highest peak of around 300m above see level.
On the other hand, there are a lot of raining days in Netherlands! I was very surprised that Dutch don't care too much about weather, they ride on sunny days same as on rainy days.
The Dutch rain typically comes in 15 minute blocks as bands of clouds cross the country. So most Dutch cyclists would check the Buienradar rain radar app on their phones and adjust their departure time accordingly.
Coincidentally to this discussion, last weekend I fell off my bike in Amsterdam: Cycling too fast, in the rain, hurrying to an appointment, and misjudged a turning, braked too hard, skidded, and hit the gutter.
That was my second bike crash in Amsterdam. The first was 8 years ago, when I was cycling, carrying a TV. Also in the rain.
Well part of the reason everything is so spread out and part of the reason cars drive like that IS because it is such a car-centric infrastructure. More bikers and a political push to change zoning laws and city planning would help alleviate all of the issues you mentioned
It feels dangerously unsafe to even ride a motorcycle with a helmet and skid gear in car-heavy, “share the road” areas. Biking with a 20lbs road bike and just a helmet when 3000+lbs pickups are zooming past you feels like Russian roulette.
This isn't really surprising to anyone that pays attention to cars. The safety innovations of the 90s (crumble zones, etc) added a lot of weight, and cars have just gotten a LOT bigger.
The Accord, for instance, gained almost 2 feet in length and 6 inches in width between the late 80s and today.
Of course, the trucks were smaller back then too - The Ford Ranger (1989) model weighed only 2800lbs.
Same here. The two interviewees really did a good job and the whole story conveys Dutch biking lifestyle really well. One note: they did pave over some canals in Utrecht back in the day, but they are being opened up again as we speak.
Electric assist bicycles are basically a smaller / lightweight alternative to scooters; I don't see (but I could be wrong) how e-bikes would be more prevalent if scooters already aren't.
Edit: Huh, I hadn't read the article yet; it appears not to be about moped-/motorcycle-like scooters as I expected (because there has been an increase in such scooters in the Netherlands in the last five to ten years or so), but about electrified kick scooters. (Dutch uses different words for each (scooter and step), so I had no idea about the double meaning.)
Ebikes have become very popular in the Netherlands among the elderly. They're used to cycling but find the effort of a conventional bike harder as they get older.
Incidentally the one age group in the Netherlands with an increase in road deaths in recent years has been 65+. That's largely attributed to them using Ebikes to travel much faster, while having comparatively slow reaction times and less resilience to injuries sustained in the higher speed crashes.
There’s an interesting clip from a documentary in 1972 about the neighborhood De Pijp in Amsterdam, when it was still very much a car-centric city. At the time children in the area protested how dangerous the streets had become and how they lacked safe areas to play.
Compared to the situation now, it’s vastly improved. Fortunately the car did not win and the city did not destroy itself with a highway through the middle.
Edit
Here’s another (recent) documentary you might find interesting:
It was the same with Denmark. And especially Copenhagen. They went from a very car-centric society to a remarkably bike-centric one. Despite bad weather. All due to the Oil Crisis. Unlike other governments in the rest of EU, it seems that both the Dutch and the Danes understood a change was needed.
I've read urbanism brochures from the 1960s, when the Technical University was getting moved from central Copenhagen to a suburb (Lyngby), and it's remarkable how car-centric the design was. An old airport, where the runway was converted into a huge parking lot, and commuting by car was carefully considered to weight all decisions.
Actually, in 1972 the Netherlands did have a rapidly growing car industry on their own soil. Three years later it sold a majority stake to Volví after growth dropped off, but up until 1973 it was growing at a rapid pace. It was a significant source of jobs in the south, where it was based. They employed >80k people and were building a new factory.
I used to live in housing designed for factory workers of DAF. The company didn’t succeed because of other issues. But it is typically Dutch that they chose to design their cities for people instead of giving away what amounts to a subsidy paid for by lower quality of life.
Also, NEDCAR/VDL still has quite a large factory in the south of the netherlands, although it is only used for final assembly and mainly producing for different manufacturers. (also, it does some parts manufacturing for car factories in the ruhr area).
I'm curious how you though the article failed to cover this issue? In fact, that's the first example that the article covers, that car-centric planning in Rotterdam post-WWII was changed to be bike-friendly in the 1970s.
Did the article get rewritten after you commented?
Amsterdam is ~1000 years old. Parts of it are very unfriendly to cars simply because they were never built to be accessible.
In contrast, Rotterdam was mostly rebuilt after WWII. This gave them the opportunity to make the city more accessible for cars. Still you can get around Rotterdam by metro quite easily, and you are a first class citizen on a bike or on foot. i know lots of people living in Rotterdam who don’t own a car.
Everytime friends from outside Rotterdam cycle here, I warn them that it's not like te rest of the country. In Amsterdam it's not really frowned uppon if you go through a dormant red trafficlight, I wouldn't recommend that in Rotterdam. A lot of children in Rotterdam (in South) don't grow up with a bike, which is very much in contrast with the article imho.
I'm just pointing that out that it's not a total idyllic bike-paradise here imo.
>In Amsterdam it's not really frowned uppon if you go through a dormant red trafficlight, I wouldn't recommend that in Rotterdam.
This really isn't limited to Amsterdam. Even at the zebra crossings where bikes are technically obliged to stop for pedestrians...they (and to be honest, I) most often don't.
Most people here use it as a test of whether you are from Amsterdam. You can tell the locals because they're the ones weaving their bike through the crowd at zebra crossings. I am definitely guilty of this but I use my discretion - because I know the area I have a good idea of how busy it is at which times at which lights. That's why locals do it but tourists shouldn't.
The people who make these unreasonable regulations in the first place must know that they won't be complied with, which makes me wonder if their purpose was simply revenue generation all along.
Bicycle Dutch, the blog you posted, also has a great YouTube channel detailing Dutch bike infrastructure and some of its history: https://www.youtube.com/bicycledutch
A main one not pointed out: cars are always (extreme negligence would be the tipping point) liable for crashes with cyclists and pedestrians. That's quite supportive for keeping an eye out for possible danger. To support that liability insurance is obligatory for motorists.
The one on left vs. right really is not even close to an issue. I would guess most MPs of most parties cycle to work. There is literally not a (native) child that doesn't bike by 7. We even have courses for newcomers to learn how to cycle.
My Dutch law teacher explained it to me this way: "If you are in an airplane, with your bike, then parachute down to a highway and get hit by a car. The car might have a chance to not be liable, but probably still will be."
The reasoning behind this is, whatever accident happens, one of the two people involved is protected by a ton of glass and steel, one is out in the open. The one that is protected inherently has to bear more responsibility.
There’s something to be said about which parties favor encouraging or discouraging car use in cities or restrictions of motorized vehicles on the cycle paths (which the interview also did not really cover).
Also, road design in the netherlands is specifically designed to seperate cars and bikes as much as possible. ( a crash between bikes is far less dangerous compared to a car-bike crash).
If that is not possible, they design roads in a way which forces people to slow down to "safe" speeds. (50km/h or lower usually).
It isn't all fun and games. I had to ride the bike to school for 5 years. Over in the neighbouring city. A 45 minute ride. Alone. Through wind, rain, wind and wind. And rain. That's also part of the culture, because it's safe and ok to send kids, 12 years old, on their own, in the dark over unlit forest roads. Through the wind. Also wind. Saves on bus fare. Which is also typically Dutch.
I would have killed to swap my 60-90min bus journey for your bike ride... and yes I regularly cycled for leisure in the conditions you mentioned. That said I know not everyone is a glutton for that kind of suffering which is why I am hopeful electric bikes will take off in a big way. The electric assist will make the wind (and hills) a non-issue and then you can just cruise anywhere if you dress right. If electric bikes replace cars for most daily journeys the world would be a much more enjoyable place to exist in.
Zero transfers. It was a school bus. Cycling for 45 minutes is much more enjoyable and rewarding than using a smartphone (which didn't exist at the time)
Subjective I suppose. In high school I had a school bus ride about 40 minutes long every day to a trade school-type place you could elect to go to instead of taking some classes at the high school. I liked using the time for either web browsing, games, sleeping, or homework. I would've surely found cycling less enjoyable.
When I lived in the Netherlands it always seemed like anyone over 30 had a war story of how they used to cycle in such harsh conditions.
I used to cycle 18km to get to work and if I would tell a Dutch person it was always "Oh that's nothing, I used to cycle twice that distance in the snow uphill when I was younger!"
Generally the rain was fine, it was the wind that can make you feel like someone is pushing against your bike that really got to me.
A lot of kids do this in The Netherlands. And as far as I can tell, not a lot have a problem with it. It's part of the culture. And as said by another commenter, most kids ride in groups. I think it's healthy to let kids ride on their own and take responsibility, both physically and mentally.
6 years, 35 minutes ride for me, admittedly mostly over a well-lit separate bike path, and most kids rode in groups of friends there. Only exception was when there was black ice on the road, then I took the bus. Strong side wind could be worse than rain, actually. Every country has its own way of building character. As we say in Dutch: we aren't made of sugar.
Good memories. I always took some extra tools with me when it was freezing, to put my bike 'back together' after falling because of those invisible ice patches. Or maybe some else's bike.
My kids ride their bikes to school. During the winter we install studded tires. And yes, it saves on bus fare. Plus, they can get up a few minutes later in the morning and still be on time at school -- what an incentive.
I would have loved that kind of independence at age 12, but with the fear of traffic, paedophiles, kidnappers and whatever, I wasn't even allowed to walk to the end of the road unsupervised.
That's too bad. When I was 12 (late 1970s, Midwest US) I rode my bike all over the place. No mobile phone either. I'm sure there were as many pedophiles and kidnappers then as now, but I never encountered any. I think the risk of a totally random stranger doing anything is very overblown. And traffic was certainly less aware of bikes. You learned to pay attention to cars.
When I was 12 (late 70s, Australia) I rode my bike all over the place. Rode to and from school, about 25 minutes each way. And through the forest at the edge of town -- we'd disappear for hours there, riding as far as the next town (1 hour downhill :-)
We knew where the dodgy guy hung out near the public toilets in the park, and avoided him (the teacher at school was a different matter).
I think ... people were less alienated from society then. It seems different now.
There's been a few high profile cases of e.g. the van luring kids with puppies or the abduction and rape from the street, but those are edge cases - most cases of pedophiles are from e.g. teachers and family. People you trust and drop your guard around. Not "stranger danger".
When and where was this? Just curious. In the early 90's in the US at age 8-9 I was allowed to ride all around the neighborhood and to school, as long as I was with a friend and not alone. We moved to Europe in 1995 and by then most people had stopped trick-or-treating in the neighborhood due to the TV news scares of razor blades in apples and whatnot, it seemed like the public trust had hit rock bottom.
My parents were very unusual, to the point that my friends' parents would lie to them to cover for me, but the practicalities meant I still couldn't do much of what they did. I didn't own a useful bike, didn't have money for the bus etc.
Don’t forget about the rain suit which basically gave you the option to arrive at school wet from your own sweat accumulating inside of it instead of the rain.
> The Dutch use bikes as a tool to feed their transit system: 50 percent of all trips that take place on the transit system in the Netherlands begin with a bicycle ride.
This is why I'm still waiting for Google Maps and the likes to include an "I have a bike and am willing to use it to get to the closest train/metro/bus station" option.
Don’t believe the lies! All the pictures in this article show a sunny city with happy cyclists. Apart from the last 2 months this is demonstrably false since everyone who lives in the Netherlands knows that if starts to rain the second you get outside to grab your bike and a strong headwind will follow you relentlessly, even when you make a 180 turn.
Those are the facts. Don’t believe this propaganda.
I mean sure, you're right, the weather in the Netherlands is as nice as those picture only for a couple of months per year, but that's not the point of the article, nor does it prove/disprove anything.
The Dutch cycle year round, and while it is true that traffic in the summer is like double, cycling is still the main form of transportation for a significant portion of the population.
Having been to Amsterdam just last week I was really surprised by a) the weather (it rained intermittedly every 1-2h) and b) that only a small percentage of the cyclists seemed to be prepared for the rain.
I cycle to work most days in Munich, so the climate is roughly the same, and I have rain gear and I'm used to cycling in the rain... I couldn't imagine cycling with an umbrella, but that's a different story... Maybe I was just getting a cold, but I was freezing while being soaked just walking around in the city (with my rain jacket, didn't bring the rain pants).
Nowhere in this article is any mention of the weather so how can this be lies about the weather?
Anyway, firstly I've been cycling the half hour distance to work for about 20 years now and the number of times it rained is just a small percentage.
Secondly, you if possible you can time your usage of the bike according to the weather forecast.
Thirdly, we (the Dutch) always complain about everything. The weather included.
Still I wouldn't want to live anywhere else (for a long time).
I was amazed at how mellow everyone in Amsterdam seemed while riding their bikes.
In US cities, most cyclist act like they're in a race. They must run every stop sign, charge down every hill, graze every pedestrian... in downtown Amsterdam most people were going at a leisurely pace and if you get in their way, they just ding a little bell at you.
That's how you have to ride to survive in car-centric America. You need to assume every car at an intersection has an incentive to hit you and run lights/stop signs to get distance and maintain speed. I'm a pretty normal cyclist most of the time but after several "Pittsburgh left" collisions at intersections I'm fighting for my life.
Strongly disagree. I've heard this argument before. I'm a cyclist and my experience with cyclists who run red lights is that the majority (if not the vast majority) ride so slowly that I can still pass them after they've run a red that I did not run without too much effort. So I doubt that you gain much distance.
Plus, the credibility hit that ALL cyclists take for this alone makes this not worthwhile in my view. Cyclists who respect the law like myself get blamed for the actions of bad cyclists. I've often wondered if this contributes to bad driving around cyclists, e.g., "punishment passes".
> I've often wondered if this contributes to bad driving around cyclists, e.g., "punishment passes".
Of course it does, just like the few drivers who cavalierly pass a cyclist then make a right hand turn in front of them causing a collision or near collision contributes to cyclist animosity towards all drivers. The only thing unforgivable to most people is the proof that the people around us are humans and not robots: they make mistakes, they change their mind, they break the rules.
The point of these articles is to point out that creating the infrastructure properly eases most of the tension. Treating a bicycle as a separate form of transportation is better than treating them like a vehicle in most scenarios and making some limited exceptions for passing or driving on the sidewalk.
> The point of these articles is to point out that creating the infrastructure properly eases most of the tension.
I'm not sure it's mainly an infrastructure problem. In my experience, US style infrastructure tends to amplify conflicts at intersections. The right hooks you mention become a lot more common, sometimes to the point where I refuse to use a particular facility solely because of this. But, it does make many newbie cyclists feel safer, which is important.
Ultimately I think we need a combination of the intersection protection measures mentioned in the article and also driver education to solve this problem.
I would say that is because in the US only the people most into biking use their bikes to commute. They have to want to bike enough to put up with no bike lanes and such. This attracts people who want to ride fast, there is also very little community to hold each other accountable for riding like that.
It feels safer because it is safer. Having to be aware of traffic that's moving at a substantially different speed than one's self is extra cognitive load that benefits neither the fast or slow traffic. Humans have a finite amount of attention they can give to what they're doing. This applies to kayaks and boats as much as it does to bikes and cars.
> In US cities, most cyclist act like they're in a race. They must run every stop sign, charge down every hill, graze every pedestrian...
Seems like a pretty biased sample to me. I'm a cyclist, and the vast majority of cyclists I know respect the law and common sense. Yes, there are jerks out there, but they'd most likely still be jerks if they switched to driving.
It's possible that my own sample of cycling friends is biased too, but few cyclists I see on the road are as bad as phil248 described. And the worst drivers I see on the road are considerably more dangerous than the worst cyclists, by a long shot.
> In US cities, most cyclist act like they're in a race.
Eh, I think it depends where you go in the US. When living in Portland I couldn't afford a car and so I biked exclusively, and people were super mellow. Cyclists would even gently chide other cyclists for running red lights, failing to signal, not having lights, etc.
Traffic works quite the same for cars as it does for bikes in that from 8-9 and around 6 you have a huge number of cyclists rushing to and from work, school etc, and it can get pretty crazy. You don't really experience that as a tourist who leaves the hotel around 10 and is walking around for a restaurant around 7. Your experience does exist but it's not always like that.
But there's also a lot of infrastructure to support the mellowness. Dedicated cycling lanes on both sides, priority around traffic lights, under/overpasses to reduce stops, flat roads and dense urban centres (with decent public transportation for larger distances) makes it easy to get to your destination quickly without having to race or compete for space. That certainly helps.
Being in the way is also very rare. You'd be amazed how we can cycle around you without you even feeling bothered. Ringing your bell is rare and mostly used to notify other cyclists.
The best way to be in traffic is to not stand out. Whether it is car, cyclist or pedestrian. Just don't bother other people.
> Ringing your bell is rare and mostly used to notify other cyclists.
And tourists, who wander onto the bike lanes without realizing it. Mind you there's a lot of cramped and busy areas where it's far too easy to do so.
If you visit Amsterdam, look at the ground, stay off the red pavement unless you intend to cross it, in which case you look both ways and do a firm walk across it.
Indeed, riding through city center Amsterdam without a bell is suicide. Foreign pedestrians don't really look out for cyclists when they cross a street.
It's so dangerous to ride bikes in cities nowadays that that only the most dangerous bikers dare to ride.
If we had the infrastructures to protect the non-racers, you would have non-racers on the road and would feel like that the vast majority of bikers are mellow.
Get off the red paths and we're good. Jokes (?) aside, I don't think that's because of the cyclist profile but more about the people in the Netherlands in general. People are just not in a rush.
Cycling fast in the city centre is just too dangerous. The (big) city centres are small and crowded. Cycling really fast would result in grave accidents. Cycling for exercise is almost exclusively done outside the cities. Another reason to keep the pace down when commuting, is to minimize sweating.
I was turning left to park at lunch and a bicyclist blew through two stop signs at ~45mph and almost t-boned me. I had wrongly assumed he'd stop at the two stops signs and I had plenty of time. Luckily he happily pulled into oncoming traffic to swerve around me.
I'm sure in the near future he'll be donating organs to some lucky recipient.
This is so inaccurate, it's almost laughable. The max speed in sprints during the Tour de France [1] is 43.5mph. Unless you encountered a Tour de France rider, I doubt the cyclist blew through at ~45mph.
If the cyclist had just descended a steep hill, being in the realm of 45mph is not at all unbelievable. I hit 35mph coasting down a very small hill on my commute every day.
They would not be blowing stop signs at 45mph unless there was a mechanical issue which stopped them form slowing down. The difference between 35mph and 45mph is huge on a bike.
I don't believe OP suggested that the cyclist deserves to die, but rather if the cyclist continues that behavior, the cyclist will die in a cycling accident.
Maybe you don’t mind being in wrecks where people are significantly injured. But I do mind if some poor misguided soul splatters themselves on the side of my truck. I almost gunned it to get out of his way, but thankfully noticed the pedestrians in front of me.
Another way in which biking in (some parts of) the US isn't casual: pretty much every biker you see in Silicon Valley has bike shorts, a jersey advertising a race or energy drink, clip-in shoes and is riding at VO₂ max. I feel out of place tooling around in street clothes.
This is suchs a strange concept to me as a dutchman.
Americans seem to think biking is mainly a sport instead of a mode of transportation.
Most dutch people ride on bicycles which are either A) in a constant semi-broken state (students are notorious for this) or B) riding a luxery city bike (usually high income families).
But it makes sense if you think about it: it's a highly risky, not very rewarding experience to bike to work in the US so only the people really into it/passionate about it do it. I would expect a large overlap between people passionate about biking and those that dress in lycra and ride road bikes.
Other reasons that I could see for that:
- longer average commute distance for US bike commuters vs other places (which means, you want a nicer/faster bike and comfortable/aerodynamic clothing)
- there is a cultural element to it, especially for a certain age group (aka MAMILs) plus the higher relative price of racing equipment isn't an issue for this group
Plus, racing bikes are really very nice bikes. I like to compare it like driving a Ferrari to work, sure, it's not the best place to take advantage of such a car/engine, but it's still a better experience than a regular car (but YMMV, depends on the quality of the road).
Bicycling being slower, less comfortable, less safe, taking constant physical exertion, being unable to reasonably transport much on a bike etc. does make it seem like a sport or frivolity more than a practicality unless you can't afford anything better, even a motorcycle or electric scooter. Especially during uncomfortable weather.
You only have to drive across the border to Germany to find full-kit alpine hikers (poles and all) walking their leisurely stroll in their local park. This reflects essentially the same attitude as what the GP described.
It was a slight exaggeration... but only slight. When I was visiting my bro in Freiburg I was amazed at the number of full-kit w*s walking up and down the relatively flat paved path that hugged the Dreisam river. Half of them were practically dragging the poles behind them too.
In Amsterdam and Copenhagen alike, a lot of bikes are sort of community property, usually involuntarily.
I ride a reasonably nice bike for transport, which I keep well-maintained and always secure with two locks.
But most bikes I see are in a rather sorry state, with rusty dangling chains, wobbly wheels, flat tires and busted accessories. Yet they seem to still perform adequately well for their task.
In Berlin the joke is you rent your bikes for an indefinite time-period when you buy it. Having your bike stolen every few months hurts less when you paid €20 (and suspected it was already stolen before).
As a sport cyclist and bike commuter in the UK I’m able to separate these two activities in my mind.
If I’m pootling to the shops a mile away on my Brompton I generally don’t even bother with a helmet.
If however, I’m off for a 60-100 mile training ride with my club mates I wouldn’t dream of doing it in anything other than bib shorts, jersey and cleated shoes.
I mean you wouldn’t wear a business suit to the gym or jeans to go swimming would you?
Padded shorts and tight fitting lycra are the most comfortable things to wear if you’re going to cycle a long way, long time or just want to go fast on a bike.
If you don’t want to do those things wear what you like, that’s fine too.
> pretty much every biker you see in Silicon Valley has bike shorts, a jersey advertising a race or energy drink, clip-in shoes and is riding at VO₂ max.
Where and when are you looking? That's more or less how I look biking past Portola Valley on the weekends (on the rare occasions I get out anymore). But on the weekdays during commute hours, you'll find me on the Stevens Creek trail or Mountain View's bicycle boulevard instead, wearing normal work clothes, biking more slowly, and pulling a two-kid trailer. Most cyclists I see there don't look anything like what you're describing.
What part of Seattle are you talking about? During commute periods I see mostly people wearing "normal" clothing (well, normal for Seattle, anyway...) on bikes. Folks kitted up are usually out biking on the weekends.
Try tooling around on an old bike in street clothes – but at VO₂ max. Easy way to make the bike short-race jersey-energy drink-clipin shoes feel very out of place...
> Dutch design manual classifies roads depending on the speed of the cars traveling in them. If there’s any major difference in speed, then full separation is required
> What is the speed threshold?
> Anything where cars are traveling faster than 30 kph. So, what’s that, 19 mph?
As a Dutchman, this is so obviously wrong that it makes me doubt everything factual in the book they wrote. 50 roads without physical separation are the default, and 60 roads are often back roads where there is not enough traffic to warrant the space (=money) required for a separated cycling lane so those typically also have no physical barriers.
I guess the limit is 70km/h, as I can't off the top of my head think of any 70-80 road where cyclists don't have separate infrastructure, though I'm sure one can find an exception.
I was very surprised to learn that in Germany, they have no trouble with having people drive without even an indicated bike lane (I'd feel unsafe driving on a 50 road if people drive 50, there is no space left over, and there is no bike lane outlined) on 100km/h roads.
> Cycle tracks are all paved with this easily identified red pavement, an inch-thick top coat of dyed red asphalt
Inch-thick? 2.6cm? Have they even been to the country at all? Never have I ever seen the red paint so thick that you'd notice it when driving onto it, I'm fairly certain that doesn't exist anywhere in the country. The only tactile paint we have is the white lines on the sides of highways, which I assume is to wake dozers up.
That's because they're talking about a "Dutch design manual". Not a law. So obviously local governments won't implement this if it is prohibitively expensive. It's just a suggestion.
'inch-thick top coat', they're talking about a top coat, not just the paint. To make sure the paint doesn't wear after a couple of months the entire top part of the cycling path is red asphalt. Though I doubt it is 2,6cm everywhere as it differs per municipality. But its definitely thicker than a coat of paint most of the time.
My wife and I were in Amsterdam a few weeks ago for a music festival and we were blown away by how easy it was to get around on a bike. I don't have much to add to what's in the article just to say that I was shocked by how comfortable riding a bike in Amsterdam is. I live in Austin, TX and would never in a million years ride to work here. There is so little infrastructure to make regular bicycle riding less risky.
I once rented a tourist bike in Amsterdam because my own bike broke down and the OV bikes were all rented out. I was surprised how often other cyclists rang the bell to me and how people were keeping me distance. That tourist bike was a big warning sign to every other cyclist.
Less tourists, but also significantly more well-behaved cyclists. Amsterdam is notorious for cyclists and pedestrians alike ignoring traffic lights and road rules. Amsterdam is the exception rather than the rule.
Oddly enough I’m in Dordrecht, NL right now on a work trip and it’s bike heaven here. Bike lanes the size of car lanes. Bike depos next to the train station that are a block long. Everywhere you go there’s close to 50 bikes parked outside.
It’s a great place to visit. Lots of nice people and history.
The thing about NL is that it's totally flat and a tiny piece of land. The biking culture is a result of their geography, not anything else. For example, in Norway, where biking infrastructure is quite decent and people are generally positive about biking/being environmentally responsible, biking is simply impossible in most cases because of the larger hilly landmass and the cold snowy winters.
Yeah I'm sure five decades of deliberate city planning have nothing to do with it. Berlin is also perfectly flat, quite dense and has a nice climate and yet in the Netherlands three times as many people commute by bike.
norway is a huge country. sure you have bigger hills, but nobody lives there. what about those places where people actually live? snow isnt that big of a problem, you have salt for that. the simple problem is norwegians have too much money for cars.
biking in the netherlands was never about the environment or vitue signalling, we do it because its necessary. tax and cost of housing is very expensive relative to our salaries. a lot of people cannot really afford cars so we need another option. its more similar to biking in china or vietnam in that sense.
It helps. But a few decades of deliberate infrastructure investments is what has made this a viable mode of transport in the Netherlands. This has been policy for decades and given the success in increasing safety, the policies have only become more pro cyclists over time.
It's a data driven thing at this point. If repeated accidents happen on a particular bit of road, there will very likely be some follow up in the form of infrastructure work to fix things. Any new infrastructure that gets planned, this stuff is designed in from day 1. Much of this work is planned in order of priority based on things like accident statistics.
Many US cities are actually quite suitable for adapting them to cyclists. The roads are wide and there's plenty of room to start fixing the infrastructure to have separate bike lanes, safer intersections, etc. You can start simple with some road markings. It's not rocket science.
The Netherlands are (is?) also very flat. If you go up a tower with a viewing area in one of the bigger cities, you'll see what I mean. You can see really far in the horizon! Maybe it's just easier to bike there so more people do it?
E-bikes are flattening terrain. Source: I live in Seattle, am an avid biker, and those Lime e-bikes are everywhere. People who wouldn't dream of biking because of the hills are now out on casual errands with those things.
Unfortunately I don't get the economics of lime ebikes.
You pay $6/hr to ride one, which, assuming a very generous average speed of 14.5mph (the maximum of the bike), is an end user cost of $0.41 per mile minimum.
It costs me ~$0.35 per mile to drive a car. I also don't have to bother with any apps or worry about the battery being charged, both of which are inconveniences.
Also, just to set the record straight, I own an e-bike as well, and my cost to ride (assuming a 500*30 mile battery endurance) is 4 cents per mile, about 1/10x of what I'd pay for a limebike.
There is an upfront cost, yes, but you're also getting a much better quality bike than what you would get with a lime bike (which seems to be an almost-bottom-of-the-barrell chinese made ebike)
I once drove my bike through The Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, France and Belgium.
They all have bike lanes (well France sometimes have them) but what is different is that most bike lanes in The Netherlands are separated from other lanes. So you are and feel mutch safer.
So I believe that bike lanes are not enough. They should be realy separated from other trafic.
The other thing is that Europe doesn't have nearly as many huge SUVs as America. Helps a ton with visibility, driver awareness, braking speed, and less momentum in collisions.
Oh yes, those huge things (trucks, too) with dark tinted windows are the pox on wheels. On a motorbike you sit higher and can look over regular passenger cars, and you can see all the road in front of you. But if you ride behind one of these antisocial fuck-you-I've-got-mine hulks you can't see the road, and it's life-threatening.
Even being in a car these damn things are a problem. I would prefer a refund sedan as my next car, but because your visibility gets negatively impact when sitting in a low cat like that with all the SUVs around you, it will likely have to be a higher car like a Rav4 again.
To be fair, modern safety standards have made it virtually impossible to see out of cars anymore, forget SUVs.
My 2016 VW Golf was very difficult to see out of, and that's a small(ish) box on wheels! I barely even bothered to look out of the mail slit rear window, I just use the backup camera.
Our Tesla 3 is even worse; the rear 3/4 view is virtually impossible, and the trunklid is so high you'll only see the roof of the car behind you. Again, you're far safer relying on the camera at that point. The car also has huge blind spots due to the insane US side mirror laws that require flat glass on the driver's side. I'm anxiously awaiting the 3 going on sale in Europe so I can buy an aspheric replacement that allows me to see more than the grille of the car on my left.
Well, I believe that Dutch roads are quite ok because the speed limits are usually followed and drivers are attentive.
In other parts of Europe, road traffic is often much faster that speed limits (Central and Southern Europe) and drivers are not cooperative at all. Yeah, nothing that separated bike roads wouldn't solve.
I love this, but I wonder if cycling in The Netherlands is similar to my experience in Germany.
I would classify myself as a "wielrenner". In Berlin for example, whilst the cycling infrastructure is also generally good as a cyclist you're practically forced to use these really thin cycle paths full of "fietser"s (to continue the Dutch terminology). That, in combination with generally very bumpy paths, can make getting from A-B quickly highly frustrating. However, cycling on the road is a nightmare. In some situations its forbidden altogether, and generally drivers are really aggressive about your mere presence even when they're perfectly capable of driving around you. Coming from the UK, I'd actually rather drive on the road with the knowledge that I'm a first-class citizen of said road, and be able to cycle at my own pace.
(I don't speak german but using google translate it looks like yellow is accident risk, light green is proportion of cyclists and dark green is cycling-related spending)
the bike alone doesn’t replace the private automobile, and neither does public transit, but when you combine the two, that’s when the magic happens. Then the car becomes redundant in cities.
I love the picture of a guy moving a bed on an oversized and strange (to my eyes) three wheeler.
The one 'bakfiets' in the picture may be a rental, but I know a lot of people owning one. All my friends and myself included own one. When I bring the kids to school in the 'bakfiets'. There is a 'bakfiets' traffic jam. It's also great for groceries and going to the beach!
I am reading articles like this to further my diabolical plot to make my little corner of America more people-friendly, in spite of how unpopular such goals seem to be with so many Americans (which is why I am jokingly calling it a diabolical plot). So actual info is good.
Visiting San Francisco and San Jose every year, I don't see many improvements. US is for cars right now how it looks like. Uber, Light Train, renting a car, but no options to just take a bike from hotel to a conference site.
Bike shares (docked and dockless) are growing in the bay area. I know many non-cyclists use them daily for their last mile commute from the train. You could probably use these in SF to go from a hotel to a conference venue. Also, numerous large SV companies have their own campus bikes as well.
From having spent quite some time in Amsterdam, I would say that you're safer on a bike than on foot. When a biker rings the bell on you in Amsterdam it's not a heads up or suggestion to get out of the way like in the rest of the world; it's quite possibly the last thing you will ever hear. From my experience, they go fast and expect you to move out of the way. Or you could try to not walk in bike lanes, I guess; not that I had much luck identifying them.
Well, you walked into a bike lane. If you walk into a car lane in the US, if the comments on that Uber crash are any indication, a good number of people are perfectly fine with you dieing under the wheels of an inattentive motorist and the police will blame you on the statement of the same motorist alone.
The good news is that people don't generally die from pedestrian-bike collisions; it's a freak event and you are much better off watching your step in the rain unless you slip and fall, a much more common cause of death.
This is something I need to tell people way too often, and I like the way you put it.
All the time I hear about "life-threatening" speed freaks on bicycles. No. That's not how it works. I'd gladly be hit by 250 lbs going 20 mph any day, when the alternative is being hit by 2000 lbs going 30 mph. Even disregarding that the latter is truly life threatening and the former is not, the cyclist is just as likely to get injured when hitting someone, unlike the car driver.
The only reason bicycles appear dangerous is because the city planners encourage cyclists and pedestrians to occupy the same roads, which would be ridiculous if it weren't so sad.
If the pavement below your feet is red, move off of it.
Pretend it is hot lava, or stained red with the
spilled blood of other naive visitors, if that helps. :-)
I recall red pavement from Hamburg, as well - is it
a pattern/standard only for the more coastal/flat places,
or common throughout Northern EU countries?
I lived in Amsterdam for more than ten years and recently moved to a smaller city. Amsterdam really has it's own bike "culture". Cyclist in the rest of Holland are far more forgiving to pedestrians and other traffic in general in my experience. I have no trouble cycling in Amsterdam, but I do have to pay a lot more attention than normally.
> But the biggest education — while it’s not mandatory throughout the country, it’s done by most schools — is students around grade four or five, in the 10 and 11 age range, start taking cycling skills courses.
Having been raised in The Netherlands, and being educated from kindergarten till university, and having three kids older than 11 years... I've never heard about a _cycling skill course_ in Dutch schools. Sure, there a classes (part of primary school education) about traffic rules, but children learn to cycle in their play time. I guess 75% of kids know how to drive a bicycle before they're 6 years old.
> Between the ages of 11 and 12 they have to take a written exam to show that they understand the rules of the road. They also do a practical exam.
Indeed, these exist. But the only training for that practical exam that I'm aware of is that the teacher is biking the route (it is known in advance) once with the kids, like a week before that "fietsexamen".
Oh, and nowadays that exam is part of Fietsexamen Nederland (related to Veilig Verkeer Nederland?), not the Fietsersbond.
The US mostly has different land use laws than the Netherlands. For example, minimum parking requirements and minimum setbacks from property lines basically require sprawl. You get more bang for buck on bike infrastructure when a neighborhood in denser than what is usually allowed in the US. There is usually stiff resistance to changing the US zoning rules.
From the few months living in Amsterdam (30km from sea, 1km from a huge lake) for studies, the difference between this and my home 150km inlands is huge. The kind of wind we get maybe four times a year is a bi-weekly occurrence in Amsterdam. Super annoying to have to bike to school, even if it's normally only like 7 minutes, against yet another feels-like-huge-storm wind.
By having flat roads and the fact that bikes are cheaper than cars? I honestly don't think one needs to do much to create a biking culture. Maybe some investment and biking lanes separated from roads are needed.
Adding bike lanes to existing infrastructure may not be as simple as it seams. Then there's culture. Kids in The Netherlands learn to ride bicycles when really small. My son is 5, cycling to and from school. My daughter is 2 years old, cycling around the house. That's important for a life long appreciation of the clean, cheap and healthy bike.
Before all the political action in the 70s to create a biking culture, the car was much more dominant in the Netherlands. It's a direct result of people protesting against cars and car-centric infrastructure starting back then.
Then how do you explain that other flat places don't have a similar number of cyclists as the Netherlands? Paris, Berlin, London are all pretty much perfectly flat.
Bikes are expensive personal transportation, compared to not owning any, they take up space in every home with muddy, oily mechanisms, they take up a lot of space in bicycle parks outside every desirable destination serving to push everything further apart for humans on foot, they don't mesh well with pedestrians (in a collision with a pedestrian and a fast moving metal bike, the pedestrian loses), they require equipment you might need to carry (locks, helmets, other), they need ongoing maintenance, they don't go well with nice clothes and tend to require places to change, carrying a change of clothes,
or even showers, after any but short journeys in mellow weather.
>they take up space in every home with muddy, oily mechanisms
Usually, unless it's a very nice cycle at high risk of theft, it's not kept in one's home. It's just locked up outside. Bike garages are exceedingly common, especially in larger buildings or offices. Or at train stations.
>they take up a lot of space in bicycle parks outside every desirable destination serving to push everything further apart for humans on foot
Bike parking is an issue, especially in high congestion areas like train stations, but pushing things further for humans is most certainly not an issue in the Netherlands.
>they require equipment you might need to carry (locks, helmets, other)
Almost no one wears helmets in the NL in daily cycling and the locks are fixed to the bike or wrapped around the frame. This is really a non-issue in the NL.
>they need ongoing maintenance
Not much...and so do humans (you've still got to take care of yourself; even biking contributes to that).
> they don't go well with nice clothes and tend to require places to change, carrying a change of clothes, or even showers, after any but short journeys in mellow weather.
Most of the year the weather is mellow; people routinely wear suits/formal clothing without issue on bikes; many offices have shower facilities but most people don't use them because the weather is mild and people don't race. All of this isn't really an issue in the Netherlands.
I feel like you've posed a lot of complaints that really don't apply or really aren't such a concern in the Netherlands. Cities here tend to work very well for both pedestrians and cyclists.
Come visit the NL sometime...I think ít will change your perspective.
Dutch-style bicycles go perfectly well with nice clothes, the oil is inside the chain compartment and they don't really become very muddy inside the city.
Yes of course walking is better but not everything people want to do is within easy walking distance, and bikes are preferable to huge infrastructure for public transport within a city.
Not everything is, but most daily things should be. And when things aren't, there can be public transport, bike hire, taxi hire, car hire. But they shouldn't be the default, the city shouldn't be designed around them, designed for them, they shouldn't be necessary.
bikes are preferable to huge infrastructure for public transport within a city
preferable to whom?
Everyone pooling their resources should make for way way better solutions than everyone solving the same problems individually over and over.
A lot of my shopping can be done within walking distance, and I do that. I'll only bring my bike if I need to bring more stuff home than I can carry, as a bike dramatically increases your load-transporting capacity, compared to walking.
However, if I need to go to the hardware store ~5km away, I would have to take a long walk of about an hour, or take a ride on two busses taking a total of ~30-40 minutes each way, or I could simply jump on my bike and be there in ~15 minutes.
Yes, we should absolutely pool our resources as much as possible, but not everyone is going the same place at the same time.
Maybe. I'd rather breathe pedal bicycle air than internal combustion exhaust fumes, for sure. And I'd rather pay bike prices than car prices, sure.
But, designing for not-cars feels like a choice of designing for humans or designing for bikes, not both. If things are close enough for walking then most people don't need bikes. If there's dense, regular, clean, affordable public transport, you can't really bring one bike per person onto it and you shouldn't need to. If things are far enough apart that everyone needs a bike, and everywhere you go has a wasteland of a few thousand bike parking spaces to cover everyone who might go there at once, then you've designed for individual vehicles not people, and cars would be more comfortable and faster. In that sense, I would think it just as much of a failure either way.
Like, if you have poisonous plants, and you want edible fruits, but what you get is harmless inedible plants, in one way it's a lot better, but in another way it's no better at all.
Bicycle and pedestrian traffic mesh rather well with each other, and both mesh well with public transit. I submit Copenhagen as an example, you should come visit sometime :-)
The problem with car traffic is that it only really meshes well with car traffic. Making it mesh with public transit requires a lot of parking, and cars take up way too much space on the streets compared to bikes, the density is way too low for the amount of people moved.
Modern commuter bikes are simple, reliable and low maintenance, usually with hub gears and sometimes with belt drives that don't need lubrication. Even chains can be kept running for years and years with no maintenance at all. And you can absolutely bike in your normal clothes, people do it every single day here, summer or winter.
I was on a train (in the UK) a few weeks ago. It was crowded, to the point of standing room only, maybe a hundred people in a few carriages I didn't count - and two people brought their bikes. One didn't fit in the bike space because of a high child carrier on it, a space which took up half a carriage couldn't take two bikes. And they took a lot longer to load and unload than the people took to step on and off, and everyone had to make room for them to unload, wait for them.
There's no way it would have worked if even 10-20% of the people had brought bikes, let alone everyone.
I Googled Copenhagen Bike Parking, and this was one of the top results: http://jtwonggg.com/2017/11/06/photo-diary-copenhagen-street... - those bike parks are not meshing nicely with a human world, they're big areas of nothing of any interest to living walking humans except for the individual bike owner, space taken up by matter storage that you have to walk further to get past, they're ugly, they're a greedy use of public space for "my personal transport", and that size of parking almost has to be replicated all over the place. Even if bike parks were underground, that's still prime city usable space which could be put to use by things of interest to more people.
The picture with the outdoors clothes racks and Zara shop - lots of pedestrians. Imagine a cyclist trying to go fast down that street - they can't, there's too many people. This either means the pedestrians have to dive out of the way (maybe urged by a demand of a ringing bell) or that the cyclist has to go at walking speed - and in that case may as well be walking. And if there was a rush hour of cyclists, that street would become a much less pleasant place for people to walk.
Bikes let you go further - ten miles is a fairly short bike trip but a long walk - but they do it by letting you go faster. You can't go faster in dense pedestrian traffic unless you prioritise the bike and make the pedestrians second class who have to watch out and make way, and that - each bike taking precedent over dozens of pedestrians - seems the wrong kind of tradeoff.
but then, Copenhagen appears to be a city with car-streets, and in that situation, preferring a bike over a car in a place spread out for cars, is possibly the best compromise you're going to get.
Getting squeezed on trains is something that happens everywhere, especially during rush hour. Bikes or no bikes. It seems to be that the train you took wasn't adequately furnished to handle bikes. Is there an additional fee to bring a bike on the train? If not, the train should be better furnished to meet the demands.
The Danish train network is the one I have most experience with, especially around the Copenhagen area. The local S-trains have open areas in the middle part, with bike racks that pack in the bikes pretty well, and there's room for people standing with bikes to approximately double the capacity. There is also smaller compartments at either end of every trainset. During rush hour, at least two trainsets run coupled together, and there's a train every 10 minutes (every 5 minutes on the busiest routes). It has only ever been tight for space to the level of having to wait for the next train once or twice in my experience.
The bike parking in the picture you linked is at Nørreport station, the second-busiest station on the network, that area supports thousands of commuters every day, both by public transit and by bike. It's the only station on the network that has restrictions against getting on and off the trains with a bike during rush hour, due to it being a very busy underground station.
A picture is not going to give you an adequate perspective of the space available, take a look at Google Maps' satellite view or even better Street View. The area is very spacious and open, with plenty of room for pedestrians, yet it still supports parking for hundreds and hundreds of bikes, packed rather densely for efficiency. If each of the people riding those bikes had been in cars, the parking space demands would be insane.
Pedestrians are humans, cyclists are humans, we don't look at it like "us versus them". Good bike parking facilities are in everyone's interest. Public transit is a great backbone, but it cannot serve everyone perfectly, so bicycles fill in the gaps for a lot of people. For some of us, it often becomes the primary mode of transport, because it's small, unobtrusive, agile, affordable and healthy.
The other pic you mention is Strøget, which is a pedestrian street; No vehicles allowed other than deliveries outside of normal business hours. It's specifically made as a walking shopping street, not a transport street, and literally no one in Copenhagen would dream of commuting through there in the busiest seasons, as it can be literally packed shoulder to shoulder with tourists.
As all experience shows here in Copenhagen, if you down-prioritize cars, there is absolutely oodles of space for both pedestrians and cyclists, it really brings a perspective on how much space cars take up for no good reason. I would love for the inner city to be completely car-free, only allowing buses and a delivery driver here and there. It would free up so much space that your concerns about cyclists taking up space would be thoroughly disproven. As one of the bike-heaviest cities in the world, there is still plenty of space for both cyclists and pedestrians.
Dense clean affordable public transport isn't, unfortunately. (At least in the US where we can barely keep our sparse, dirty, expensive PT running.) Bikes help bridge gaps in the transit network. That's one of the main reasons they're so heavily used even in the countries with the best transit. (Visit any Dutch train station...)
>"Bikes are expensive personal transportation, compared to not owning any"
I will admit that my bike cost $550, but it's also a really nice bike. You can get a perfectly serviceable, reliable and comfortable bike for less than half that. And it'll last for years and years with minimal maintenance (or none at all, even).
Yes, obviously owning something is more expensive than not owning something. But if you walk everywhere, you also have to account for time spent going 5kph instead of 20kph, not to mention shoes that wear out quicker. I used to commute 3km by foot, and my shoes wore out very quickly, even good quality sneakers didn't last long.
Not to mention payment for using public transit or taxi services or car rentals.
>"they take up space in every home with muddy, oily mechanisms"
I park my bike outside, locked to a bike rack. I ride in the city, it has never been muddy. I do a lot more maintenance than the average cyclist, I wipe down the chain if I've been riding in the rain, and I actually lube the chain and other mechanisms once in a while. Most people don't do anything at all, and their bikes still give them years of service. On my bike the chain is exposed, I prefer it like that for ease of maintenance. Most commuter bikes have enclosed chains, some have belt drives.
>"they take up a lot of space in bicycle parks outside every desirable destination serving to push everything further apart for humans on foot"
They do take up some space, but dramatically less than most other forms of transport. Based on my experience here in Copenhagen, it really isn't an issue. Bikes left abandoned on sidewalks and in bike racks are regularly marked and then taken away, especially if they're obviously broken. There is plenty of space for pedestrians here.
>"they don't mesh well with pedestrians (in a collision with a pedestrian and a fast moving metal bike, the pedestrian loses)"
That is why we have sidewalks, bike paths and streets for motorized traffic, grade separated from each other. On shared traffic streets, cyclists slow way down and everything flows nicely. Only idiots would race their bikes down a street like that, it happens extremely rarely. Pedestrian/cyclist collisions do happen, but they're usually very low-speed affairs, unless a pedestrian steps out in front of a bike on a bike path, without looking. Certainly not the cyclist's fault.
>"they require equipment you might need to carry (locks, helmets, other)"
My primary lock is fixed to the bike frame and locks the rear wheel, it's completely unobtrusive. My secondary lock is a chain lock, which I carry wrapped around the seat post, again completely unobtrusive, it just stays with the bike always.
My helmet either stays with the bike (if it's in a shed or the weather is nice, secured by the chain lock that also secures the bike to a fixed object. Or I clip it to my messenger bag, or simply carry it with me, it's very lightweight. Or you could do what most casual cyclists do, and not bother with a helmet at all.
>"they need ongoing maintenance"
I do basic maintenance with tools everyone should have in their house anyway: Screwdrivers, hex keys, pliers and old rags. The only stuff I've had to buy specifically for the bike is chain lube, and you could get by with something like household 3-in-1 oil. Or just not bother at all, and get the chain replaced every 3-5 years or so.
The maintenance needs for a commuter bicycle are very light. They're literally designed to be dependable and low-maintenance.
>"they don't go well with nice clothes and tend to require places to change, carrying a change of clothes, or even showers, after any but short journeys in mellow weather."
Even when it was ~35C here during the summer, I never needed more than to splash some cool water in my face, and maybe change my t-shirt to a fresh one. Most workplaces here have lockers and showers, because cycling is so popular, they're mostly meant for the hardcore lycra-clad cyclists. Ordinary commuters simply ride in their work clothes or whatever, no problem at all. Take it easy, and you won't sweat. Or get an electric bike, they're becoming very popular for this reason.
As a dutch person I would absolutely NOT want to ride a bike in the US, it's simply too dangerous. There are so many cars that are not looking out for cyclists. For example, I never saw my Uber/Lyft driver peek over his shoulder. In the Netherlands we fail our driving exam if we forget this even once. Another example is the insane speed cars fly past the "share the road"-bikelanes. It's crazy. I would feel really unsafe on a bike in the US.