A common urban intersection in the Netherlands (2018)

The question is: is the flow worse for people in general, or only the ones in cars. If those cyclists and pedestrians would've been in cars (i.e. if there wasn't good bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure), would the flow for the average person be better? Would it even be better just looking at people in cars?

Walking doesn't mean never driving.

Every trip to a grocery store, restaurant, bar, friend's house, transit station, etc. that can be done by walking or cycling is one car trip off of the roads. That has benefits.

Of course some places are not suited to this. But there are places that could be, and those places combined have a lot of people living in them.

Dismissing the idea in all of America as an absolute is missing a lot of potential, and a lot of what is already happening.

And from my experience looking at real estate prices, houses in areas with good scores for walkability, cycling, and transit are very much in demand and priced higher than those without. There is at least some segment of the market that very much wants these qualities.

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.

In what way do cyclists require unique and expensive infrastructure that both isn't the consequence of interactions with cars and that wouldn't be covered by general taxation unless general taxation literally didn't pay for any infrastructure?

Maybe isolated recreational paved bike paths, needlessly expensive public lockup places, and smaller scale urban infrastructure to avoid accomodate only pedestrians and bikes in forward thinking places? If cars weren't so common, would cyclists require 8+ lane highways, or even relatively wide roads? Seems like we pay into a pool of infrastructure funding that is often already very expensive and that has little to do with cars, if they didn't exist we'd broadly be saving public money, both on direct and indirect costs such as pollution, deaths, traffic control devices, public policy, or accommodating the demands of everything but personal cars as necessary. They should be treated as an expensive luxury, which they should be, but in some cases they're a necessary burden that the poor should be releaved of.

If cars weren't default, EV or not, we'd all be like "who's going to pay for that!?"

Likewise with trains, we all pay for them with taxes, but the people who use them often pay directly for the continued operation in terms of what is not their personal obligation (maintenance, construction, staffing), usually a relatively marginal source of revenue, but it keeps it going. You pay for trains through general taxation, and you pay somehow for the continued operation of your personal vehicle, and so do bikes, but cars demand much more from external sources like trains do, and like trains, there's no free ride, unless you bike, which has relatively minimal external demands. You pay for the continuance of the operation of a uniquely burdensome private luxury, and it's not subsidizing anything.

Roads also open up some amount of significant economic commercial and personal opportunity, which should also be factored in, but also paid for like others. If it's a problematic amount, then you make different choices, and if that didn't balance out at a system level, we'd make different infrastructure choices.

> 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.

I get the same eye rolling when people ask me what I like most living in the centre of a major urban metropolis (Toronto) and I respond with "not having to own a car". Having everything (work, my daughter's school, groceries, cultural amenities, etc) within a 15 minute walk is fantastic and there's ample car-sharing for occasions where a car is required. People think I'm this eccentric hippie or something when I just don't want to spend time in a car on a daily basis.