HN Reader

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

We have lots of smooth infrastructure that I never noticed until various foreign experts on the internet expressed how wonderful it is.

There is an actual traffic light design I really like. It has a circle of small white leds that switch off one by one as a count down to green

https://www.maxvandaag.nl/sessies/themas/reizen-verkeer/hoe-...

These are absolutely wonderful on busy roads with tons of (car) traffic. Before they had the count down one would just stand there waiting for what seems forever. It can go green any moment, you have to pay attention. The entire state of mind is different. You can just zone out. I even pull out my phone knowing I have time to answer a message or look up at what time a store closes.

I just learn I've only seen the highly predictable ones, apparently in other locations they also have heat sensors to detect how many cyclists are standing there. It may speed up if there are enough. If 1% of the cyclists know what is really going on it would be a lot. Until now I was just happy it turns green when I'm the only traffic for as far as the eye can see.

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

It's the urban planning, but I'll point out that it's the requirements and responibilities put on the drivers as well.

Driving lessons for me consisted for 80% of learning how to ALWAYS ALWAYS track all the cyclists and pedestrians in urban environments, how to approach an intersection and have complete visual on whatever the weaker parties might be doing. A very defensive "assume weird shit can happen any time, and don't assume you can just take your right of way" attitude, and I think our cities are better for it.

In America, it seems that a pedestrian is a second rate cititzen. Conversely, here if you hit the "weaker" party as a driver and it's almost always on you in terms of liability.

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

Very cool, but to me it kind of illustrates a common pattern of thought on here which is that there's theoretically some sort of "optimum" city design which works for everyone which is a fallacy.

There are costs and benefits to everything. In London you can walk ten minutes, jump on the train, get where you want, have a walkable (ish) town centre, go home drunk, and it's accessible to the poor (if we assume away rents which are theoretically solvable).

But then in various American cities you can drive 20 minutes in your own bubble from your suburban house to a parking lot around the corner from the bar/restaurant/whatever. You're shielded from weather and don't have to socialise with undesirables.

Neither of those systems feel inherently "wrong" or "right" to me, they feel like different opinions. I've enjoyed both at different stages of my life for different reasons.

If anything I feel that the "worst case" is when you try to mix both because then you either have hilarious congestion (because cars are too big to fit on medieval streets) or huge walking distances / public transport dead spots (because trains can't cover large areas with low population density).

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

A lot around this is culture. The Dutch have been living with cyclists for years so they work with them.

In London motorcyclists drive to the front by the traffic lights. The motorists accept this. I found London quite safe in this respect for motorcyclists.

In the other hand, riding a motorcycle in the Netherlands doesn’t feel nearly as safe. If you ride to the front by the traffic lights the motorists will get angry and more likely to lead to road rage and increased risk.

Having said that of course the Netherlands is full of cycles lanes.

But in terms of intersections I’m not impressed. On long roads where every other country would give right of way to the long road because it works together with the natural psychology of driving on a long continuous road, in the Netherlands they will give right of way to small side streets. It’s like they have a policy of throwing vehicles into the path of free flow traffic. It’s absurd. And did people coming from other countries results in a few heart stopping moments.

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

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

The image is not very common, most of the time they have elevated the space before and after the bikepath, forcing cars to slow down before going on it.

However one of the downsides is that often the front space is a too bit small in cities, so not always easy to fully go on it without blocking the bike path. And in busy bike paths at times cars will get impatient.

My hometown of Malmö is very bike friendly but let me be frank, no it does not flow smoothly. Cars are required to stop for cyclists and pedestrians on most crosswalks.

And no they do not like it, we have consciously prioritized pedestrians and cyclists at the expense of car drivers patience, fuel, and even congestion when the cars behind them all have to stop for a cyclist to cross.

Drivers get mad, regularly complain, cyclists abuse their privilege by rolling into intersections without even turning their heads towards traffic.

And you know what? I wouldn't have it any other way. I think a healthy society should prioritize healthy alternatives to cars.

> Here you can see that a car drivers waiting for people cycling are never in the way of other people in cars.

Am I blind or does it only work for just one or maybe two cars?

Although this was in the '80s I remember that I (Dutch) walked to school at the age of 5, in a town (technically a city (Enkhuizen)), mostly through a pedestrian area but I had to cross one busy street.

My parents told me later that they secretly followed me the first few times (I never noticed).

Just try to image that you live in a country that is so safe you can let small kids walk to school. Try to imagine what a society could look like if it's designed for people first, not traffic.

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

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

Despite the cycling infrastructure being second to none, I hated my time cycling in Amsterdam earlier this year. The drivers (taxis in particular) are just terrible, very violent, at least in the city center. Having a lot of cycling paths that don't intersect or run along motorways (the ones through parks are especially nice) improves the situation and I did enjoy that part, but I can't shake the first impression of crazy aggressive drivers.

Ljubljana, Slovenia, where I live, has decent cycling infra (cycling paths in almost every street, not as good as Amsterdam), but the drivers are way more considerate, so it's overall much nicer to cycle around, at least to me.

I moved from the U.S. to the Netherlands nine years ago, and I can attest that the bike infrastructure is amazing and has an outsized impact on your quality of life and general happiness.

Being able to bike everywhere — safely, quickly, without any cultural baggage of "being one of those bicycle people" — is a total game-changer.

It's one of those things that sounds kooky to people who haven't actually experienced it. When American friends and family ask me what I love most about living here and I say "the bike infrastructure," reactions range from a polite smile to eye-rolling.

On paper it doesn't sound particularly sexy, but in reality the impact on your day-to-day life is immense. Your health, your connection to the immediate environment, your cost savings, your time/stress savings, your sense of freedom of movement.

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

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

I'm not sure how common this type of intersection is. I live and bike daily in Amsterdam and it took me about a minute to fully understand what's going on here. The picture seems to show a special case where the intersecting road is bike only, and instead of the normal painted arrows that show where bikes should queue up when making a left, there's an open area off to the left where one would wait behind the "shark teeth".

FYI if you are ever biking here in NL, the thing to remember is that if the "haaientanden" point at you, watch out!, as that means you do not have the right of way.

Edit: The side roads are for cars as well, which means you have a strange turning lane in the middle of the intersection where traffic might back up. A simple roundabout seems like a much better solution here unless the goal is to keep cars moving quickly and the turn lane is rarely used.

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

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

Driving in towns and cities in the Netherlands is frightening as a foreigner not used to it as you're constantly afraid about hitting a cyclist. I drive like a grandma there.

And that's how it should be.

I always regret not taking the very advice I gave yesterday about European cities and parking on the outskirts!

Very interesting article. After 12 years of almost daily cycling in the Netherlands, I recently started driving a car as well. I always appreciated the Dutch civil infrastructure, and this new experience only adds to my admiration.

Compared to other European countries, driving in NL definitely requires extra attention. There are many small & vulnerable participants sharing the space, moving in different directions with much less inertia than cars. On the other hand there are plenty of buffer zones, the lanes are cleverly organised and clearly marked, and there's 30 kmh (18 mph) limit in most streets in the city. A smaller car with great visibility is really useful here.

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

you need space to do that, not many cities in Europe have the luxury of being built from scratch and having so much space to dedicate to a single intersection.

Where i live (in Rome) the streets are like this

https://as1.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/04/93/42/24/1000_F_493422444_Hw...

edit: anyway the simplest solution is to turn every intersection into a roundabout, no traffic lights needed, clear right of way, cars can't go fast and in the end it also makes it easier for pedestrians to cross the street.

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

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

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

Needs (2018) in the submission title.

I find bikelanes that are integrated with sidewalks incredibly dangerous and give a false sense of safety. Bikes hitting pedestrians (ex: children wandering out on to the bikelane) is a much larger safety concern than bikes being hit by cars. Taipei uses the sidewalk model and I recommend never using them

I find the Chinese model of bike/scooter lanes w/ barriers integrated into the main road a superior model. The other critical point is integrating bus stops into "islands" in the road so the bike lanes go behind the bus stops is critical. (a stopped bus with passengers going on/off essentially closes off the shoulder for an extended amount of time). Granted the main roads in Chinese cities are generally much wider so I'm not sure if it can be miniaturized the same way. The "turning area" is very useful concept for unblocking traffic and helping with visibility, though it does take up a lot of space. However the one in the example only accommodates one turning car at a time

I also recommend this article, on why in the US, innovation in this area isn't pushed:

America Has No Transportation Engineers

https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/america-has-no-transporta...

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

I appreciate and approve of this detail applied to many interesting design features of an otherwise banal collection of junctions.

I live in Denver, and daily appreciate how much self-harming behavior is built into American road network design standards. It's truly stunning.

Consider reading the book "Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System"[0]

I wish he'd titled it as "the transportation system of the Greater United States". I emphatically disagree with the use of "our".

Anyway, american road networks were designed, funded, built by people who wanted to accomplish ethnic cleansing, and I think it's plainly obvious that this is the case, so it feels strange to even talk about it sometimes.

to my knowledge, no one in the netherlands road design system has been recently thing to accomplish ethnic cleansing, so their road networks can develop towards/with mutuality.

in the USA, at minimum the founders/originators of these systems were openly supremacist and spoke openly about what and how they were doing. I.E:

> If we [road funding authorities, municipal authorities, and their political supporters] could build a highway through their neighborhood, we could get rid of some of them, and make it harder for the rest of them to exist, and we'd see less of them either way.

the "they" was always an ethnic group. The playbook of these supremacists was to squish all people within that group into a tiny compression of humanity, then attack it directly, using the normal tools of colonial empires.

This design highlights a major failing with UK cycle "infrastructure". Here, we often have shared use pavements with sometimes a bit of white paint to designate the pedestrian and cycle lanes, but they cede priority at every single side road. The problem is that it makes cycling using them really awkward as it takes significant energy for cyclists to slow down and then speed up multiple times. The irony is that if you just use the main road instead, then you have priority over all the side roads, so the bike "lane" is pretty much useless.

Of course, we also suffer from just having fragments of cycle infrastructure that don't join up and most of the time, the infrastructure consists of "magic" paint that is somehow going to prevent motorists from parking and blocking the lane (it doesn't and they do).

Edit: Thought I'd share the sheer incompetence that we're faced with. Here's a "cycle lane" in the centre of Bristol that doesn't even use a different colour, so pedestrians aren't particularly aware of it which just leads to unnecessary confrontation - peds and cyclists fighting over the scraps left over from designing for motorists.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/JjfG1YJBwaqyov5H8

There are lots of dedicated cycle lanes in London now which is good. I feel much safer cycling in those.

But as a pedestrian and as a car driver too, there are still a hard-core of dangerous cyclists who refuse to use them and will instead be willfully breaking the law (going through red lights, wrong way/wrong side of the street etc). And just to add insult to injury, they literally add insults! Aggressive shouting, gesticulating etc if your dare to e.g. use a pedestrian crossing or drive on a green light but you are in their way.

Tl;Dr you can build all this stuff but it seems like the aggressive pricks won't use it and will just carry on with no accountability or consequences and we all suffer from it.

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