Rethinking Streets for Bikes
rethinkingstreets.com
Rethinking Streets for Bikes
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Re: Rethinking Streets for Bikes
#2Looks like the full text is behind a paywall
Re: Rethinking Streets for Bikes
#3Looks like the full text is behind a paywall
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Re: Rethinking Streets for Bikes
#4This might sound pedanatic but I hate when transportation choices are framed as for cars or for bikes. Transportation is for people. Talking about and designing our street infrastructure as if it’s designed for machines like cars and bikes leads us to designing systems that aren’t very friendly to humans (one needs to look no further than the ever increasing incidents of deaths for people walking or riding a bike).
Re: Rethinking Streets for Bikes
#5Designing to accommodate bikes is the right direction but I wonder if a city could be designed to have a actual physical separation between large vehicles and small ones. Just because of the physics people on bikes are likely to be injured or killed by much larger cars in the event of a collision.
Re: Rethinking Streets for Bikes
#6I quickly read through this. Context: I'm Dutch and live in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
This booklet has one massive flaw: it is constructed using American best-practices. At best, a couple of examples could be considered almost acceptable. Most of them were woefully inadequate and consist of little more than a blob of quickly-fading green paint in ill-considered positions. Worst of all, several examples are clearly flawed, and to me seem even more dangerous than not having any infrastructure at all.
If the goal is to show to unimaginative people that it is indeed physically possible to create something resembling bike infrastructure, then it will do fine. But if you're trying to actually create a good, safe, well-used cycling network, then this is not the way to do it.
If you want good examples, go visit something like https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/ . This booklet almost reads as if it was written by someone who has only heard about cycling infrastructure, but never actually lived in a city which has it. The intention is there, but there's an even longer way to go.
Some trivial stuff to change:
- Add green dye to the asphalt instead of adding a layer of green paint. This means that it will not fade. - Color the whole cycle path, not just a few small parts of it. You're trying to create a continuous network, remember? - Don't use a zebra-crossing style striping at crossings. A continuous green bar would be way easier to see and interpret as something to stop for. - Don't create turn boxes. They are always in dangerous positions and there are better alternatives.
But most important of all: don't just add cycle paths to your main car roads. You wouldn't add a sidewalk and crosswalk to an interstate, would you? Create the main cycle routes on secondary streets, and make them unattractive for cars.
Re: Rethinking Streets for Bikes
#7Designing to accommodate bikes is the right direction but I wonder if a city could be designed to have a actual physical separation between large vehicles and small ones. Just because of the physics people on bikes are likely to be injured or killed by much larger cars in the event of a collision.
The places where people ride bikes en masse, like Amsterdam, have physical separation. Very few people want to have cars whizzing by a few feet from their elbows. If you want people to seriously consider cycling as anything other than a hobby you need physical separation of bicycles from cars.
Unfortunately cycling advocacy organizations in the United States tend to be opposed to physical separation.
Re: Rethinking Streets for Bikes
#8Designing to accommodate bikes is the right direction but I wonder if a city could be designed to have a actual physical separation between large vehicles and small ones. Just because of the physics people on bikes are likely to be injured or killed by much larger cars in the event of a collision.
Could it be? Easily. The hard part is converting from one to the other.
Example, the town of Houten, as seen on this map [1]. Red is cycle-only or cyclist-first, white is regular road. Note the ring road around the town, which carries most long-distance car traffic. The inner roads, where cars mix with cyclists, are only used to reach specific addresses and do not carry any through traffic. This principle has been proven to scale to larger cities as well.
[1]: https://www.bikeauckland.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/h...
Re: Rethinking Streets for Bikes
#9Designing to accommodate bikes is the right direction but I wonder if a city could be designed to have a actual physical separation between large vehicles and small ones. Just because of the physics people on bikes are likely to be injured or killed by much larger cars in the event of a collision.
The places where people ride bikes en masse, like Amsterdam, have physical separation. Very few people want to have cars whizzing by a few feet from their elbows. If you want people to seriously consider cycling as anything other than a hobby you need physical separation of bicycles from cars. Unfortunately cycling advocacy organizations in the United States tend to be opposed to physical separation.
Why is that? I've seen that: dedicated, separated bike paths are unused, and cyclists continue to ride in the street with the cars.
Re: Rethinking Streets for Bikes
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
The places where people ride bikes en masse, like Amsterdam, have physical separation. Very few people want to have cars whizzing by a few feet from their elbows. If you want people to seriously consider cycling as anything other than a hobby you need physical separation of bicycles from cars. Unfortunately cycling advocacy organizations in the United States tend to be opposed to physical separation.
Why is that? I've seen that: dedicated, separated bike paths are unused, and cyclists continue to ride in the street with the cars.
Could you give an example of a bike path where this happens? For context, it should end up looking not unlike https://goo.gl/maps/MCzsE6vg1Sr .