Students at my university in Berlin need to cross a busy road to travel between campus areas, which meant jaywalking or a long trip to a crossing with traffic lights down the road. A steady stream of students late to their next class sprinting across a six lane road is not great.
At some point students started painting their own crosswalk, which would be removed again and again by authorities, until the city eventually got the hint and installed a permanent crosswalk with a traffic light and a pedestrian island.
Sometimes the way to get something is fixed is by demonstrating the fix.
One such report (in German): https://www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2025/10/zebrastreifen-e... in Eberswalde; apparently firefighters were called in to remove the paint but were unsuccessful in their attempts to wash away the white stripes, and police launched an investigation into suspected interference with road traffic.
And another in Dresden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQUpQZAeA3whttps://www.diesachsen.de/en/politics/a-zebra-crossing-in-dr... "In the summer of 2025, unknown individuals painted a crosswalk on the roadway along the busy street in Neustadt to provide safe access to the Heinrich Schütz Conservatory. The city promptly blocked off the crossing with warning cones [...] stating that unauthorized crosswalks constitute not only property damage but also a dangerous interference with traffic. Furthermore, traffic signs installed without authorization constitute an administrative offense under the Road Traffic Code."
The Straftatbestand (§ 315b StGB) exists for all alterations of traffic. After all, you could conceivably start to manipulate traffic lights [1], remove STOP-signs or erect low-visibility barriers.
(do note that "serious" or "schwer" (lit. heavy) is a qualifier in german law, that increases the charges significantly. The serious part here is that it isn't some alteration that can be immediately removed (e.g. a traffic cone))
Update on that other situation in the district of Neustadt that you mentioned: The city actually just completed a legal crosswalk there, just last week. Here's the article by our public broadcast: https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/sachsen/dresden/dresden-radeb...
The architect Christopher Alexander documented this in "Alexander, C. (1975). The Oregon Experiment. New York: Oxford University Press" - one of the foundations for the whole Pattern Language movement which strongly influenced software design.
Guerrilla urbanism is pretty much illegal to do everywhere, including in the article's subject city of San Francisco. The goal is to not get caught by authorities while doing it
Of course it's formally illegal. My point is that, while in SF authorities accepted and formalised an intervention, in other parts of the world there's a real threat of criminal proceedings, and not for modifying traffic infrastructure significantly, but for FILLING A POTHOLE.
Other interventions haven't been met so kindly. For example, last year after California passed a state-wide law banning street parking within 15 feet of an intersection (to improve visibility of pedestrians), some people tried to paint curbs (red curbs mark prohibited parking), frustrated the city was acting too slowly to repaint curbs everywhere. I don't remember if they were ever caught, but presumably they would have received a fine as it caused alot of headaches--it cast doubt on the validity of many parking fines issued after the law took effect as the parking enforcers couldn't know which curbs had been officially repainted, yet.
As for the guerilla bike lane on JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park, that entire 1-mile section of JFK was later closed off to cars entirely. It required a city-wide ballot initiative, IIRC, and was very contentious. But the city government was in favor of it, which may have something to do with why they were so accommodating earlier with the bike lane.
> It required a city-wide ballot initiative, IIRC, and was very contentious.
It's still very contentious and was on the ballot again yesterday to undo the previous ballot measure and make it available to car again. The proposal to undo was defeated.
Seems like what’s different is that in Romania, the administration views it as an insult. In the US, it’s viewed as a political issue (comfort of cyclists vs drovers).
You're onto something. Of course, the cases I linked were pretty different and there's a mix of institutional rigidity in there, but that's how I'd interpret the Romanian attitude as well.
Besides completely missing the fact that I'm pointing out different attitudes and what happens if you get caught, how does "just don't get caught" not apply equally to something like murder?
Murder makes the world worse, but guerilla road painting done right makes it better. So the advice for road painting is "do it right and don't get caught" while the advice for murder is instead "don't do it"
Unfortunately that’s also how the Seven got away with it like generations before them. I’ve been wondering lately if the private force is a net negative on society.
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stvo_2013/__25.html
"(3) Pedestrians must cross roadways quickly and by taking the shortest route perpendicular to the direction of travel, taking care to avoid vehicular traffic. If traffic density, speed, visibility, or traffic flow so requires, a roadway may only be crossed at intersections or junctions, at traffic lights within markings, at pedestrian crossing aids, or at pedestrian crossings (sign 293). When crossing the roadway at intersections or junctions, pedestrian crossings or markings at traffic lights must always be used."
Maybe there's no penalty, but a 6 lane road probably has traffic density/speed/flow enough to get to the "may only be crossed at intersections or junctions"
That law isn't about jaywalking. The concept of the US-english word "jay" doesn't exist ). There is no german language equivalent.
Also, this is one of the paragraphs that is just there. It's not enforced. Do you know any German that ever get fined for it? Is the police out with cameras looking for slow pedestrians? Naa, they are out with cameras looking for too speedy cars instead!
) maybe "Landei" ? But it's never used in traffic context. We simply had a car-lobby creating vile words to modify law-makers behavior like it happened in the USA at ca. 1910.
Buenos Aires has much better solution: pedestrians carry crosswalk lines in their imagination, and they can apply them anywhere it's needed, at zero cost to the municipality.
No, it doesn't. I live in Germany since forever (born here), in many different regions. Never ever got a fine, never ever saw or heard people that got a fine. At most the police gives a warning, if they even notice.
For me a pedestrian traffic sign is a hint that I can now go. But it certainly isn't a requisite. If the street is empty of traffic AND if there are no little kids around, then I'll just go.
Why not little kids? We know from science that they can't judge the speed and distance of cars. When I can see "The car is far away and slow", they don't really know. So I don't want a bad example to them. And that makes you able to observe me at a red traffic light with a completely free street --- kids might be around!
The word "jaywalking" is often used colloquially to refer to crossing the street anywhere that isn't a controlled crossing; it's not always strictly referring to the law.
The term itself was made up by the US auto industry in the 1920s in an attempt to shift blame of traffic fatalities towards pedestrians. And it worked. Before that, streets (which are built by the state) belonged to everyone and drivers were almost always held responsible for accidents.
They made up the term jaywalking by combining "walking" with the term "jay" which was a slang term for a country bumpkin or idiot from out of town. They hired actors to spread the slur to refer to those out of towners that don't know how to "properly" behave around streets in a modern city. They even paid Boy Scouts to hand out warning cards and staged mock funerals
It worked incredibly well. The word "jay" is a slur used to refer to "country bumpkins" or out-of-town idiots. They paid actors to spread the slur and even staged mock funerals until their newly made up slur spread and people started calling each other that.
All of this led to the 1928 Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance and notably a lot of laws in LA that shifted the liability to pedestrians instead of motorists.
Today if you "jaywalk" in most of the country you get called an asshole. It was an incredibly successful act of social engineering
The origin story for the Union Jack-inspired sidewalks on my university’s quad was the president looking out his window on a snowy day and seeing all of the footprints in the snow and asking the facilities to put diagonals in.
Guess some schools have wiser faculty than others.
The city and the school are different management structures. The issue is the mayor of the city isn’t focused solely on the school nor should he be. But this means change takes longer.
No, actually it's less dangerous to break the law in Germany than in the USA.
In USA, the fines are often higher. And damages to be paid are WAY WAY HIGHER. If you do a criminal offense, then you get way more years in prison in the USA than in Germany. The police treats you even worse in the USA than in Germany.
So if you break the law ... then better do it in Germany.
Also, go around in Germany and ask germans "Did you ever get a fine for walking just over the read? Or by walking over the road when the pedestrian light was red?". I'll wage 50€ that it will take you more than a day until you find the first occurrence. Ask around "Have you ever got speed ticket in a car" will get you however instant answers.
You guys blow some imaginative danger out of proportion. And I really wonder if there is ONE country with laws that written but no one looks after? Isn't that usual? We even have german saying on this: "Papier ist geduldig".
Fun fact: in the USA, each year the various police forces KILL more people than in Germany the various police forces shoot. Where the german police shoots include warning shoots, or killing a dangerous boar. And this "way higher" even holds if we normalize the numbers by population count.
Incarceration rate in the USA is also way higher than in Germany.
I'd wager people to come up with verifiable statistics where "breaking law" is more dangerous than in USA. They probably exist, in niche areas. Would still be fun to learn.
As somebody who did try to get a crosswalk near my home, I can say with some degree of certainty that calling the local DOT is generally a lost cause.
A bit of backstory... My little cluster of townhomes sits beside a 35mph, wide (was 4 lanes, reduced to 2+bike lanes), busy suburban road. Cars regularly go 50mph because the road is wide and smooth and 50 feels right. People have died crossing the road (2 in the 7 years I've lived here). There's a bus stop on both sides of the intersection, housing on both sides, a park on one side down a block, and a golf course on the other side, also one block down.
The response from VDOT was essentially "there's currently no proof of pedestrian need" This despite bus stops, parks, and housing existing. And pedestrian deaths. And frequently seeing with my own eyes people dashing across the road, trying not to get squished,
It's complete idiocy from the various traffic planning orgs. It's 100% car-first, consequences be damned. Bike lanes are added reluctantly, and usually as a requirement to get federal funding; little attention paid to utility... did I mention the bike lanes on the road above go "nowhere"? They literally end several blocks on either side of the local school complex, start again, then stop before the local shopping center. So you can't actually use them to get anywhere you'd want to go.
Well of course. Just how there's no proof of "train need" before tacks get built. Why do we ever build tracks if there is no preexisting train traffic to justify the need?!
Getting transient college students to engage with the slow process of government is difficult.
The college students also generally don’t vote in that location lowering the desire of public government to engage with them as much. Again transient. You’re right to ask but I’m guessing this was the primary issue.
Wasn't the context here in Germany, where the executive finally made a zebra crossing?
* We don't have "college students". We have however real students, e.g. in University.
* Over here it's not custom to go with micro-management problems to an elected person, e.g. to the member of parliament of your area. Whenever I see the (partially propaganda) shows where russians ask the dictator Putin about day-to-day things and they even air this yearly in the TV I cringe. Or when I see in US movies that people go with low things to their congressman... that simple isn't custom in Germany. And thus the elected people are much LESS likely looking if people wanting something would elect them or not.
* Normally it is the executive, not the legislative, that decides over these matters. In Germany, the executive isn't elected by the public.
* In Germany we have the idea of "main point of living" (Hauptwohnsitz) and "secondary point of living" (Zweitwohnsitz). And in quite a few towns you have to pay an extra-tax on the Zweitwohnsitz. There are ways to mitigate this, but the easiest solution as a student is just to take your Hauptwohnsitz at your university town. And there you can then vote (you can't vote at your Zweitwohnsitz). And so it happens that the town magistrates of student towns are usually a bit different than of "normal" towns, e.g. the town mayors from the green party. All these young students voting more for this party than e.g. the german liberals.
So, all in all, from the POV of the story in Berlin ... little of what you wrote made sense. Except your first sentence. Infrastructure building is a slow, a tremendously slow process in Germany (however, once we have it, it's usual very nice. We germans call shit on our railway ... but it's lightyears better than e.g. the US railways system!). And even a zebra crossing falls under the infrastructure categorization.
Given the expertise of the faculty, fair chance that happened - and possibly that was what really prompted the city to eventually build a crosswalk. Plus many former students likely ended up in exactly the positions that would make these decisions.
Doesn't make for a good story though. What I relayed above has become university lore. Its accuracy is hard to judge decades later.
Easier than everyone just doing nothing and jaywalking until magically a crosswalk appear? Doesn't sound like it to me, law of least effort and all that.
> And then…nothing. Caltrans didn’t notice. Passing motorists were thrilled but figured the improvement had taken place at the direction of Caltrans. It wasn’t until Ankrom leaked his actions to the press that the true story was known.
> The original sign with Ankrom’s artwork remained until 2009 when the whole thing was replaced by Caltrans. The paint had faded, but the message remained with a lasting impact. The replacement sign erected by the Department of Transportation proudly sports the 5 North placard exactly where Ankrom had put it nearly a decade prior, and it remains there to this day to help motorists that would otherwise be just as confused as he was.
And an update from 2023:
> In 2001, artist Richard Ankrom posted a "5 North" sign on the 110 N. in DTLA to alert drivers to get in the left lane for the 5 turnoff. His work was so impeccable (and helpful), Caltrans at first didn't notice, then allowed it to stay. "5 North" is now part of permanent signage.
I’ve been a semi autonomous employee at a number of places and I wonder how much that was “Caltrans” and how much it was George the sign maker just making a sign to replace the old one with all the same information as the current sign.
Sometimes you just do things and dare the bosses to say something about it. If they had their way they might have changed it back. But it’s already made and it’s not worth the grief to do anything about it. Too many people like or need George.
He likely spent a few hundred dollars on the sign - sourcing the proper metal of that size, the reflectors, the masks, and so on.
As to the time investment:
> He spent more than three months preparing, researching the color and shape of the signs, mixing his own custom paint to get the colors just right, and applying a bit of faux patina to finish it off. Ankrom even spent time tracking down the button-shaped reflectors used on other legitimate signs and convincing the supplier to give him some. Once he was satisfied that it looked authentic, he came up with a plan to install it.
---
Caltrans has 15,000 miles of state highways that they have signage for. A single sign may only get reviewed once a decade because of that.
Doing single things in isolation is "easy" without going through the required public comments and such. Maintaining it for the entire state is much more challenging.
Caltrans is so frustrating how they do signage and freeway identification. N-S roads sometimes become referred to as E-W roads in signage sometimes simultaneously. Hardly ever showing exit numbers. Actually using the freeways formal longform name in signage. Outside of signs theres also the all too frequently seen deadly combo of zero left shoulder + lowest cement divider you’ve ever seen + modern headlights dazzling you in the opposite lane.
In Geneva, activists painted bike lanes in three streets in 2023, causing about 2000 swiss francs in damages (or improvements, depending on your view).
The Swiss police under prosecutor Walther Cimino proceeded to investigate as if they were a crime syndicate, gathering forensics but also identifying 96 sympathizers and putting them under heavy surveillance, which included requesting total records from their banks, employers, phone companies, email providers (Google through the US DoJ), and even CCTV and purchases from their local supermarket.
I'm afraid of the possibility that what used to be "grassroots civil disobedience" will now be labeled "eco-terrorism" and prosecuted accordingly.
This is an intractable problem with normal sidewalk/streets. Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between. This is why both drivers and pedestrians hate bikers.
Ideally we have entirely separate paths for bikes. Of course this is infeasible for most established cities. Doesn't mean they are't inherently a problem in these cases though.
Entirely separate paths for bikes are absolutely feasible in established cities (see New York which has huge protected bike lanes running north and south up and down manhattan) with little cost to car infra
>Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between.
The NYC bike lanes are inherently problematic. These are the "in between" that I'm talking about. They are not entirely separate paths in the way that I mean. They are a new lane within the existing path. What I mean by a separate path is something that is above, below, or in an entirely different location than the road/sidewalk.
Normally, if you’re turning right you’re in the rightmost lane, so nobody to your right is going straight. And likewise for left. A bike lane puts straight-through traffic to the right of turning cars so they come in from your blind spot. A "yield to bikes" rule doesn’t help much when you can’t see who you’re yielding to. And car traffic presents the same problem for bikes. They have to deal with this by merging all the way across traffic or cross and become a pedestrian. The fact that they may have to become a pedestrian is a major flag that they inherently dont fit.
Parking and buses have the same problem. The sidewalk and the road were designed to touch. When you put a bike lane between them, every trip from curb to car, bus, etc. has to cross it.
It’s essentially splitting 1 road into 2 with separate rules. It's inherently problematic. You can't introduce bikes without increasing the rule complexity and worsening the experience for everyone else.
There is plenty of basic intuition here.
- Pairs. Each pair of modes (car,bike,pedestrian) needs its own set of rules. Two modes is one pair. Three modes is three pairs, so adding one mode triples the relationships.
- Introducing a "middle": Every segment of one street crosses every segment of the other. Adding a middle lane on both sides takes an intersection from 9 overlap zones to 25, and from 4 where different modes meet to 16.
- Fixed width: The street doesn’t get wider. Any space dedicated to bikes costs car lanes, parking, or sidewalk.
Since bikes/scooters are much faster than pedestrians, it causes problems like this when they use pedestrian infra. For an example, I was driving up to a yield-to-peds xwalk a while ago, and on the sidewalk there was a scooter going at full clip. I slowed down because I had a hunch he would do this, but he took a hard 90 deg turn at the xwalk and went straight through at speed. If I hadn't done that, I might have run him over. A pedestrian could never have done that.
Something similar to this dynamic happens anywhere you would "look both ways" as a driver but don't have far enough visibility to extrapolate a safe window of passage relative to the speed of oncoming traffic. It can happen when parked cars block your view of oncoming traffic, or when parked cars block view of the bike lane, or when parked cars, trees, hedges, fences etc block view of the sidewalk that a non-pedestrian is using.
The issue is the parked cars not the bike lane. Planners are aware of this. There is recent efforts to “daylight” intersections as they call it when they work to increase these sightlines.
I think this reasoning is like “you can be right and dead”. If you’re cycling at 20km/hr, some bike lanes are arranged so that it’s very hard for a driver to see you whether you have the right of way or not. You can’t legally mandate someone to see what they physically cannot see.
> A bike lane puts straight-through traffic to the right of turning cars, coming up from behind in your blind spot.
Bike lanes making riders less safe has been known for decades. John Forrester’s book “Effective Cycling” [1] catalogues a lot of these dangers and warns cyclists to not assume that bike lanes are safer.
John Forester is globally recognized as a clown who's conclusions have never been supported by real world evidence. He was employed by DOTs to tell them what they wanted to hear ("don't build infrastructure for bikes") and in doing so set US infrastructure back decades.
Vehicular cycling techniques can help in situations where there is no bicycle infrastructure, but they are not safer than good bicycle infrastructure.
As I understand it, in those days cyclists in the U.S. were largely given two bad options:
Option A: A separate, safe bike lane through the park, not useful for actual transit but nice for leisure.
Option B: A line of white paint at the side of the travel lane that will guide you into the “door zone”, along the right side of cars turning right (and right into you), and other dangerous situations.
Note that there was hardly ever Option C, actual bike infrastructure that was both safe and useful for transit. So this idea that one single cyclist “killed” good bike infrastructure is ignoring that it was never an option to begin with.
Modern on-street painted bike lanes were less than 10 years old in the US when Effective Cycling was published, only a handful of California cities had a few miles of them. The average US cyclist had never even seen one.
So the options at the time were riding on the sidewalk or in the street, and Effective Cycling became popular because it contained some genuinely good advice for cycling on a street with no infrastructure. Unfortunately Forester felt that this was the best and only way to safely cycle, which is why he immediately became popular with state and local DOTs who did not want to build bike lanes.
He wrote the CalTrans Bicycle Guide which later became the national AASHTO Bike Guide. These guides prohibited protected bike lanes and discouraged dedicated bike infrastructure until 2012.
It is not an exaggeration, he set national cycling infrastructure policy in the US that stood for decades.
I think the real issue is where is the space for the truly seperated bike lanes? I've personally experienced the new segregated lanes as a distinct regular threat to my safety as a cyclist, I was safer before the lanes were put in (at great tax payer cost and local businesses griping about less parking space) I'm in a smaller city now and they're spending a lot of money they don't have making these segregated lanes, creating the same problem all over again and making the driving feel claustrophobic to boot! I understand making a road feel less safe, or too narrow is a strategy to calm traffic down, but the old roads were just short of two lanes wide and felt quite safe in comparison. The worst spots in Vancouver aside from the dunsmiur upgrade I was referring to above are also bike corridors, a round about may slow a car down but for a 2 wheeler it does not, it's still not safe for the bike as cars try to cross or turn onto the bike lane, it truly is an all or nothing, I felt safer biking in raw Broadway or grandville street traffic then the adjacent mixed traffic bike corridors.
So here's the thing. Seattle drank all the urbanistic Kool-Aid and started doing all the road sabotage with bike lanes, bulbouts, road diets, and so on with the goal to eliminate pedestrian and bike deaths.
Edit: my personal theory is that these "improvements" on average do nothing whatsoever. They "worked" in some places in Europe because they made traffic so shitty that more people were forced to use bikes. In turn, this provided driver education, by showing them how badly average drivers behave.
Why would cycling infrastructure reduce pedestrian incidents? They'd presumably decrease cyclist collisions. And since cycling has increased ~25% over the same time frame, steady rates of traffic incidents involving cyclists amounts to an increase in safety: https://www.kuow.org/health/2026-09-21/seattle-had-record-br...
The infrastructure sabotage was done as a part of the Zero Vision program, that included both pedestrian and bike safety. It achieved neither.
> And since cycling has increased ~25% over the same time frame
The percentage of bike commutes in Seattle is in the noise, around 2-3% of the non-remote-work commutes. So the data is too noisy for any reasonable statistical significance.
For example, this year was deadly with 4 cyclist deaths (to date). In 2024 there were no cyclist deaths.
Did they observe more crashes on roads that received upgrades? Doesn't sound like it, these are overall numbers. Maybe more people are walking/biking now, maybe just noise (10 and 18 ped deaths is really good for a major city already, in LA it's 160+).
> Did they observe more crashes on roads that received upgrades?
No statistically significant correlation.
From my personal observations, sabotage of arterials resulted in a lot of traffic shifting onto the side streets that are much less safe. But our local DoT doesn't have enough traffic data to confirm or disprove this, I tried to FOIA it.
Look at the dates on these studies. Nearly all of them come from the period of the global crime drop, a result of the leaded gasoline phaseout.
I recently tried to replicate some of the studies of bike lane effects and quite often found the _opposite_ of the original studies. For example, in Seattle the business tax receipts declined more steeply on streets within 1 block of a protected bike lane compared to controls.
I tried giving you the benefit of the doubt, but your word choices make it clear you're not approaching this topic in good faith. This means your anecdotes are even more worthless than normal.
Get your attempted study published and reviewed, then I'll take your observations seriously.
Do an experiment: try to find papers in pro-urbanist publications that look past 2016 in the US cities like SF or Seattle. 2016 is a good starting point, as it's the year when a lot of Vision Zero construction kicked off.
> We examined changes in counts and per capita rates of all, pedestrian, and bicyclist fatal motor vehicle collisions between 2007 and 2019 for 18 U.S. cities that took early Vision Zero pledges. Only 2 of the 18 cities have experienced statistically significant decreases in total fatalities since taking a Vision Zero pledge and only one city experienced a statistically significant decrease in pedestrian fatalities.
Yes I'd rather ride in traffic then be seperate, when I used to commute in Vancouver cars have a convoluted sign saying they are to yeald to bikes on right turn, or no right turn at all and I would get 'right hooked' at least once a week, I always had my eye out and would stop before getting pasted, but yelling at a driver who's in the wrong probably isn't helping them be aware of what they're doing wrong, I'm just 'yet another angry cyclist' since I'm upset they broke the rules and tried to kill me with their 4000lb+ metal brick!
I just looked it up and this is exactly what I mean by a separate location. Minneapolis has a bit of this too. I mean you could also use 3 dimensions space and put bikes up or down to resolve the core tension. All of these are of very limited viability so I understand from a pragmatic perspective why cities arent just doing this.
Have you been to NYC recently? 2 years ago it was utter chaos with delivery folks and crazies in rental bikes gunning at full throttle. It was quite scary compared to something like Paris or Munich.
I’ll take a full lane here in Miami. Screw these thin bike lanes next to the curb with F-150s and Cybertrucks. I’ve seen too many bike falls. Pass me safely and that’s that.
> This is why both drivers and pedestrians hate bikers
Drivers and pedestrians hate each other too. Everyone gripes about any minor impediment to their own travel, particularly other modalities, but also their own. I mean, drivers universally complain about being "stuck in traffic", but they are traffic.
I think there are some scales of magnitude to this issue. I also feel like you're a bit dishonest by omitting them.
I never care a lot about cars when commuting on foot, and I don't have a problem stopping for pedestrians when driving. Pedestrians are very predictable unless they're a small child running after a ball into the street or something similar. Those problems are solved with 30-zones and street planning in most settlements.
Most of the time it's just looking left and right before crossing, and in case of busy crossings, waiting for someone to safely stop for you.
Most of the hate towards cyclists stems from them having the right of way while also behaving incredibly unpredictably. In the European city I live in, most cyclists signal less often than BMW drivers, which leads to a lot of ambiguity, which kills. As such, traffic education places immense responsibility onto drivers to basically track and predict every cyclist around their vehicle, such that they avoid potential accidents.
I consider myself a pretty chill, calm person. I couldn't believe how angry and annoyed sitting in my car would make me. Cars really do something weird to your brain, in no time at all.
I'm very glad I'm in a city with superb public transportation.
In Seattle, local residential streets are often designated as "stay healthy" streets, where bikes and pedestrians have right-of-way. You can drive a car there, but it will be slow (intersections are narrowed to discourage fast driving). Cars take parallel streets if they're going more than a block or two.
I haven't checked the statistics but it seems to work. There's one near me that's packed with bikes during coomute hours, and I think the cost to the city was negligible.
I wouldn't paint Seattle as a picture of success when it comes to bikes. We've spent untold millions on bike lanes, reduced vehicle capacity with road diets, reduced parking and access to small businesses and made life more difficult for delivery drivers and ADA access.
After all that, the mode share of biking has actually gone down in Seattle over the last decade, to under 3%. It turns out if your city has hills, rain and darkness much of the year, there is no amount of money that will convince people to ride a bike. We've effectively subsidized a recreational interest for a very small population, a group so small that the top profession of the ~12k who do cycle is "college professor". And as a pedestrian who has to share with cyclists almost every day, it's been a net negative. In my own neighborhood they've made sidewalks unusable for pedestrians in the quest to encourage more cyclists.
Stockholm is colder, further north, (though admittedly less hilly).
I can't argue that the bike infra improvements in Seattle haven't made a huge difference, but I'm not at all convinced this is because it is intrinsically unlikeable.
For what it's worth, the environmentally incredibly bikeable SD/LA has such bad infra that they have both fewer bikers and far more deaths.
"After all that, the mode share of biking has actually gone down in Seattle over the last decade, to under 3%" <-- your article is from 2018 and that is like 8 years old, an eternity ago.
There is significantly more bike infrastructure now then in 2018. Plus the lime scooters and bikes have radically shifted the balance of bikes vs cars to the point where I'd say that bikes now rule the street in most of the dense parts of Seattle.
I would imagine there are at least 10x more people using those lanes than there was before affordable e-bikes and "bike shares" showed up. You've got people who would never, ever ride in a million years be caught dead on a bike using those bike lanes to run errands, go to visit people, commute to work, etc. Just sit down anywhere in the dense parts of the city and you'l see them go by constantly!
I doubt the people who put those bike lanes in back in 2018 and before ever could have imagined how popular they are now thanks to lime bikes, electric scooters and such. Its honestly pretty remarkable and thank god somebody had the thought to build up that stuff back then!
This is more in the direction of what I'm talking about. I think it's a pretty good model and affirms not contradticts what I'm saying because you do have to sacrifice drivability (unless you can just add streets like this - but I assume not).
It's pretty easy to do in most cities, you just have to eliminate a lane of traffic and/or parking spots. It's quite rare for a modern city to have streets too narrow to do that.
Bike lanes don't just compete against car lanes. They also compete against sidewalks and bus/tram lanes.
There is also the question of what you are going to do with your bike once you are at your destination, where are you going to park it?
For those who went to Amsterdam as a pedestrian, I don't know how it felt, but to me, it was not great. Lots of narrow sidewalks littered with stuff, the stuff in question is often bikes, so you have to step onto the adjacent bike lane, where you are usually greeted by an angry cyclist, because for some reason, parking your bike on the sidewalk is fine but stepping on the bike lane is not.
So, as a pedestrian, I wished Amsterdam converted its car lanes into trams and sidewalks rather than bike lanes. And yes, I hated bikes for as long as I stayed in Amsterdam, and so did everyone in my group.
The cars vs bikes debate tend to get a lot of attention, but the bikes vs pedestrians and public transit aspect matters too.
Note that bikes + buses can be a particularly dangerous combination. Buses are long and can block off the path of a careless cyclist as they turn, who may fall right under the wheels of the bus.
To provide a different anecdote, Amsterdam is the best city I've ever had the pleasure of exploring as a pedestrian.
There were well-maintained sidewalks everywhere I needed to go. The reduced amount of automobile traffic made it easier to cross smaller roads and intersections without risking my life. At larger intersections, I often received a crossing signal almost immediately upon requesting one, instead of waiting multiple minutes.
Negotiating interactions with cyclists was trivial, because I could always make eye contact with them. Unlike drivers, who barely pay attention to those outside of cars, have their heads buried in their phone, or are obscured behind tinted glass.
It was also the quietest major city I've ever visited, which I largely attribute to the prevalence of bikes instead of automobiles. Some of the semi-tractors / HGVs I saw making deliveries were even electric, which is a great reduction in noise and other forms of pollution.
If I ever have the pleasure of visiting Amsterdam again, I intend to rent a bike. I hope to explore more of the city via the obviously superior mode of transportation, as demonstrated by so many locals.
American tourists somehow lacking any kind of situational awareness and stumbling into bike lanes right in front of traffic have pretty much become a meme in Amsterdam. You wouldn't step in front of a car speeding past, so why would you suddenly become suicidal when it is a bike?
As someone who regularly walks on what is almost certainly the street with the busiest cycle path in the world[0], and who regularly walks through some incredibly congested mixed-use streets: it just... isn't a problem? Stay in your designated area, yield when you are not, behave predictably, and things will be Just Fine.
> Bike lanes don't just compete against car lanes. They also compete against sidewalks and bus/tram lanes.
Tram lanes are a travesty, but bus lanes make pretty decent bike lanes. I biked through Seattle to work for a year or so in 2018/2019 where bikes are allowed in bus lanes, and it's a good compromise. There's a couple of streets where the bus lanes are always full of busses, but most of the bus lanes are a nice place to ride; unless they've got rails, of course.
Seattle has put in a lot more separated bike lanes since I've been there, but on routes I wouldn't have used anyway, so I dunno. There was one on my route that was terrible, but I don't think they used that pattern very often; they put a separated bike lane between parking and the side walk, and parking ended close to an intersection where many cars wanted to turn right; limited visibility and limited space made it hard to get to the center or left of the lane to avoid conflicts with vehicles turning right.
IMHO, there's a conflict between bike infrastructure appropriate for beginner / slow bicyclists and infrastructure appropriate for experienced / faster bicyclists. Separated lanes can be nice, but they make it harder to mix with motor vehicles when that's appropriate and desirable. If separated bike infrastructure makes me take a longer path or wait for a signal change to turn left, but lack of infrastructure (and the traffic situation) would have let me mix with motor vehicles and take a permissive left without waiting for a signal change, that's a negative for me --- but the extra wait isn't an issue for someone who wouldn't have mixed with traffic for that left turn anyway.
I agree: Amsterdam was the scariest pedestrian experience ever! To add to the described situation delivery cars often stop in bike lanes, which shifts bikes not to the car lane but to a sidewalk! I was practically assaulted when cyclist hit me from behind and was yelling and swinging bike lock at me for not letting him the right of way. Downtown Amsterdam? Never again.
> eliminate a lane of traffic and/or parking spots
It's out of the question in most places, it slows car traffic down and makes it harder for people to park in places where parking is already scarce. Then residents and customers of local businesses have nowhere to park.
>It's out of the question in most places, it slows car traffic down
If you actually make a sufficiently high-quality bike network to convince people to bike that would otherwise drive, I would expect this to speed car traffic up by taking a lot of cars off the road.
Not everywhere is San Francisco. Where I live, it's below freezing almost half the year. No one wants to add bike lanes that will only get lightly used 3 months a year.
I bike 9 to 10 months out of the year in southern Wisconsin. It would do people well to get outside and spend less time on their screens in the Winter.
So what? People bike there. They make products for winter cycling commuting. They don’t sell them to people in miami after all. There is a market evidently.
And then, so what about the lane? Drive all you want it doesn’t affect you, other than lessening the risk you kill a cyclist or someone you know dies riding a bike.
I like the comfort of my car too much to freeze my ass on a bike. Cities were built around the vision of economic prosperity and a car for everyone, and they should stay that way.
Depends where you are but bikes are actually kind of fun. It doesn't mean you can't have cars. I have both but bikes are more practical around central London at any rate.
Then don’t? How come every bike lane thread has these annoying people assuming a bike lane means a gun goes to the head and forces you on a bike. Keep driving if you want. Doesn’t matter. But why fight a bike lane when it doesn’t affect your life at all, I will never understand.
> I like the comfort of my car too much to freeze my ass on a bike.
you usually don't get cold when cycling. If anything you are warming up.
> Cities were built around the vision of economic prosperity and a car for everyone,
That is a false statement. Most cities predate the existence of cars for a start.
Also economic prosperity is unrelated to cars. If anything cars are a financial burden for most people and people buy them because they feel they are forced to need them, not because they want them. This is the antithesis of prosperity.
for me prosperity implies not spending a big chunk of my day trapped in a metal box with no way to get out. are you really saying that everyone except a couple freaks like me would rather fight traffic and sit on your ass than take nice walk? to the degree that we shouldn't even be allowed to have little pockets where driving isn't the only modality?
the US is huge, and its all car all the time. you have thousands of options of where to live like that - I have like 5. and you think I shouldn't even have that.
This is very geography/climate dependent though. There are conditions where most people would not bike regardless of how high quality the bike network is.
Are these conditions that typically can't be found in the Netherlands?
I guess heavy snow isn't too common there, maybe if we plowed the bike paths? Ok, now I'm getting distracted imagining a bike-path-plow, it would presumably be mounted on a powered bike of some sort, or maybe on those little parking enforcement trikes.
Bidirectional dedicated bike paths are usually at least car-sized. They will fit a regular plow just fine. Monodirectional bike lanes usually lack separation from the rest of the road, so they get plowed for free as a side-effect of plowing the car lane.
It's a self-fulfilling situation. It's that way only because those places have designed their infrastructure to be car dependent.
The opposite is also true: If you take a place where people primarily walk and bike, and take out the sidewalks and bike lanes to widen the road, people will also be pissed.
All you're pointing out is that humans are resistant to change. We already know that is true. The question is not whether people don't like change, the question is: which is better urban planning? What is a better environment to live in?
There should be more friction added to car travel. More walkable neighborhoods with local business around the corner would pop up right where people are if the norm wasn't "everyone make endless individual trips to Walmart."
So stupid all the suburbanites blocking my driveway to come eat at nice restaurants because all they have out there is fast food; such a huge waste of resources
It's absolutely impossible everywhere except where it has been tried and works great. Car centric design is a poor match for dense urban development and reverting the city to be more transit and pedestrian focused almost always improves the situation, bringing more people to shops and restaurants and revitalizing previously moribund downtown districts.
Natives might have a different take, but I was recently in Berlin (which you might consider an 'established city'), and this seemed like a solved problem there. Bike lanes are at sidewalk grade, above the curb, with rumble strip or other tactile indicator for the boundary. You do NOT walk in the bike lane, it's just like walking in the car lane.
Considering the rise of additional micromobility vehicles, this is such an obvious solution when you see it in practice.
The locals will happily tell you that the bike lanes are not plentiful enough/not maintained well enough/don't get winter service (who wants to ride a bike in snow and during black ice conditions? Berliner!)
Insulating bicycles from other vehicles is not the only path to road safety. When forced to interact with bikes more often, car drivers drive more safely and conservatively. Not sure that works everywhere or depends on better driver education and general empathy.
Motorbikes in the US are the same problem, 30 years behind.
We have decades of bicyclists clamoring for infrastructure, and they've been starting to get it.
Meanwhile, e-bikes and delivery apps have caused a recent explosion in the number of motorbikes on the road. Cars think they're too slow. Cyclists think they're too fast. They're nimble and vulnerable like bicycles, but can be regulated like cars. Like taxis, they're often piloted by people who come from places with chaotic road cultures, and who have a financial incentive to bend the rules to get there faster.
Ideally, we'd be like the Dutch and have different outlets for different classes of transportation (mass + speed + amount of protection). Instead, everyone just gets pissed at everyone who moves differently than they do, and the road network fails to keep up with anyone's needs.
I beg to differ. And I used a bike daily for commute (okay, when it wasn't raining) and a car otherwise.
The roads are for everybody. Bikes, cars, lorries, farmers. We should (and can) learn to live next to each other.
If you aren't a kid or aren't driving a bike for leisure on the weekend, then "separate from the street" bike ways have several drawbacks. Especially if you want to go speedy from A to B.
- often they aren't cleaned like the normal streets. So expect weeds growing into the lane, dog poop, farmers mud remnants, glass shards. Things a car driver sometimes see, but to a much lesser degree.
- kids play there, making the biker need to speed down
- dog owners walk there dogs there. Especially the long telescope lines are bad as bikers aren't usually not that good with rope jumping
- people walk there and if a bike rings the bell, they usually first turn around "What in gods own world could ring on a way dedicated to bikes?" seems to be an important question to be answered. Way more important than just going to the side.
- if a parking lot separates the bike way from the street, then the passengers in the cars just open the doors, not looking if some bike comes
- every street crossing is usually not level with the bike lane. So as a biker you always go 1-3 cm up/down twice for every crossing street. Some bikes have very narrow tires, that's not fun
- at the street crossings the car drivers are used to check for other cars. But they are less likely to check for bikes. This improves currently in Germany, but it's still not at the same level
So if I want to go fast from A to B by bike, I actually prefer to use the normal street. And if I go by car and see a bike then I can understand this. Except if the bike drives intentionally in the middle of the street. Don't do that, drive on the right side (except in UK or so ...)
Can't recall which European city it was (not AMS) where it was impossible to ride bikes on footpath but easy for padestrians. Very interesting hurdles were added. I wish I was more enthusiastic about taking photos. I had seen it on a very small stretch though. Somehwere in Belgium? I can't recall. In fact some of those hurdles/obstacles looked very artsy :)
And also there were dedicated bike lanes which should be a must in any self-respecting place.
It's a method for a cyclist turning left at an intersection. Turning left from the bike lane on the right is of course impossible, because the land is on the right, despite being a basic function of biking somewhere.
So the cyclist wants to turn left. They go through the intersection and move off to the side, near any pedestrians waiting to cross. When the light turns they and the pedestrians can cross.
Otherwise the biker must leave the bike lane and merge across traffic.
In either case the bike lane is inherently problematic.
Your unexamined premise is that the car lanes are natural and good, while the bike lane is a problematic imposition on them.
"Turning left from the bike lane on the right is of course impossible"... if there is a lane of fast-moving automotive traffic directly on the cyclist's left. From the cyclist's perspective, the car lane is the "inherently problematic" one.
I don't think it's fair to say either is inherently problematic, just that there is inherent conflict with different mode types. Then, imho, you ought to look at the overall social cost/benefit of each mode type and prioritize accordingly.
They do have good urban cycling design, but I think a big part of it is merely the expectancy of both drivers and pedestrians that bikes are everywhere.
In the Piers Anthony novel "On a Pale Horse", the protagonist is taught a lesson about empathy and perspective by being forced to experience the same scenario as a pedestrian, a bicyclist, and a driver.
Reading your comment and many others makes me think that the most "intractable" problem with shared transportation infrastructure isn't making it physically safe, it's getting people to treat other road users as human. Even a car-only road still has this problem.
I think about that scene a lot, both when riding and when driving. What feels like a safe speed and safe distance while driving feels like neither when outside the car.
>It's not really infeasible, we have this in Holland everywhere and our cities are a lot narrower than the US ones.
I said it is inherently problematic, not exactly that it's infeasible.
The Netherlands is excellent support for my claim because of what you just said. The cities support less car traffic and slower driving speeds. Something has to give and in that case its drivability. In fact there are a lot more streets where cars can't go at all, or are just mostly bikes correct?
And the 3 modes/lanes in one place is still not even solved while minimizing cars. Cyclist are more than 1/3rd of Dutch road deaths and the Fietsersbond has even argued that the middle lane. https://swov.nl/sites/default/files/bestanden/downloads/FS%2...
One slight problem with that: drivability is actually better.
Let's say you have space for two lanes. You can either a) install two car lanes, so >95% of people drive, or b) install one car lane and one bike lane, so 75% of people cycle. Which one is more drivable? Hint: it's the one with significantly fewer cars.
Similarly: car infrastructure takes up a lot of space. If your destination is 10% closer because cycling means far less car infrastructure is needed, you'll actually end up driving there faster.
A street's car traffic capacity is far less important than its total traffic capacity, and the last-mile driving speed is a rounding error on the whole trip. If you like driving, you should be in favor of building more bike infrastructure!
Less car traffic is great for liveable cities though. In my city they have pedestrianised major roads recently and it's been really amazing. People sitting on benches, enjoying the sun, where before it was hard to talk because of all the traffic noise. Unfortunately those streets have gone up in price a lot too because it's much better to live there now.
And yes but those road deaths are caused by cars. There's just more victims on bikes because there's so many bikes around.
Vancouver in Canada did a really good job with bike routes. Instead of putting bikes in a lane on a main road, they turned side roads into a kind of bicycle highway. It’s the best cycling infrastructure I’ve ever seen.
"Ideally we have entirely separate paths for bikes. Of course this is infeasible for most established cities."
Not a problem, we just reduce lanes for cars. Bikes use way less space, do not contribute to bad air, keep their riders healthy - well, except when car drivers kill them.
usually at the expense of one or the other, usually cars.
FWIW I think that is a fine trade-off. I think people don’t truly realise how poorly cars scale until they take a really large step back and take a holistic view on infrastructure- which is inherently difficult for most people as they are so close and bought-in that they can’t even conceive of life being different than what they’re used to.
And they reach for exceptions to prove the requirement, when less cars in cities frees up the roads for those that truly need it (LGV and disabled access, but slow thus disincentivised unless actually required and thus less likely to cause accidents).
It's not necessarily at the expense of cars; the people riding bicycles on the bike lane are no longer driving cars blocking the way ahead of you, and parking their car in your favourite spot. Since bicycles use space more efficiently than cars, this can actually be a win for both the cyclists and the remaining drivers (who now have one less lane, but even less traffic). However this only happens if cycling adoption is high enough, which is why the bike routes have to be well connected.
Sometimes it doesn't even require sacrificing a lane, because many North American cities have lanes that are wildly larger than necessary or even appropriate given the posted speed limits. The lanes can simply be narrowed, and then this also causes the drivers to naturally drive at safer speeds, reducing traffic accidents, speeding tickets, and the unplanned delays that those both cause.
The bike lane space has to come from somewhere, parking space for bikes has to come from somewhere, intersections have to be set up to disadvantage one for the other.
Street space really is zero-sum, though more people in bikes and out of cars free’s up so much infrastructure that it can make less space work even better for cars- I’m sure urban designers are aware of this.
The major issue I presume that is faced in urban design is how to handle people coming from far away, the regional hub/spoke design (with train stations around a radial that have good parking allowing train access into the city) is not something actively pursued by advanced economies for some (presumably good) reason.
The bit you are missing is the space efficiency. Cars take up the most space by a large margin and getting people into more dense forms of transit (anything else) frees up space to be more efficiently used. Space is the most precious commodity in a city as many people are competing for every square meter.
This is also why suburbs and rural areas are a better fit for cars. Space is much more available and you can afford to be wasteful with it.
I see the problem more that motorised traffic tends to take all available space (due to their size and congestion concerns) and cyclists and pedestrians get to fight over the scraps left over.
Ultimately, motorised traffic tends to disrupt other forms of transport as people get used to travelling longer distances to get to shops, work etc. This then results in out-of-town hypermarkets which pretty much require people to use cars to get to them. The resultant traffic inevitably results in congestion, so more space is assigned to building roads and facilities get built further apart which of course just exacerbates the whole congestion issue.
> Ideally we have entirely separate paths for bikes. Of course this is infeasible for most established cities
Maybe in the US which has gone all in on providing space for cars and their parking, but it's quite feasible in old European cities that are much older. Often it relies on reducing the space available for cars. There's good examples of how some European cities were able to change drastically.
The Netherlands is a great example as during the 1970s, it was heavily biased towards motorised vehicles. The "Stop de Kindermoord" (approximately "Stop the child killing") campaign was key to changing attitudes and nowadays, cities such as Amsterdam are held up as examples of designing for multi-mode transport.
Bikes do pretty well on roads, especially in cities or quiet roads outside. We will all live in peace once we have self-driving cars instead of careless and violent human drivers. This already works pretty well in many cities in for example Spain.
It really makes me sad seeing it. Bike lanes are also a messy problem in Italy where I live.
In these last years they added more bike lanes in parts of my city, but by taking small chunks from the margins of the roads, leaving as only barrier between the twos just a white painted line. I guess they noticed and started adding poles in between the twos, just not everywhere.
In many parts you're forced to ride your bike on the margin of the road, since there is no separate lane.
There's also the issue with crossings, since many of these by law can only be used by pedestrians, unless they're marked, which in most cases aren't.
In such situations, you're treated as a vehicle on par with a car.
You may imagine how it feels getting fined because you've been hit by a car
Some DOTs have given official support to Tactical Urbanism, with methods for communities to propose and implement small projects themselves on accelerated timelines like bike lanes or pedestrian crosswalks.
It’s effectively crowdsourcing urban planning, I’m in support.
I honestly think if we invited this type of empowerment/interaction in the physical world a bit more it would probably be good for spurring creativity in society (I think we do a pretty good job of it in software). It’s just a nice reminder that everything is just made up by someone else, likely no smarter than you.
Also I can’t believe this was 10 years ago, I remember being super involved in SPUR in SF (and getting coffee there almost every day) and going to talks about this kind of thing
It's admittedly appealing because it feels far closer to ordinary citizens having an influence, but I can't help feel like this is a failure on the part of the professionals whose responsibility the planning and implementation of this is.
Have we really gotten to the point where we can't trust public infrastructure to be properly implemented, and so the only solution is to take it into our own hands? What are the tax dollars paying for then?
I think in many places we have gotten to the point where the planning, processes, and public approval process for some of these simple projects is more costly in time and money than just building it as a temporary experiment and revisiting it in a year or two to measure the outcome.
Not that there shouldn't still be some kind of standards and community approval, but I think we can afford to set that at a lower bar for certain categories of easily reversible projects.
And hopefully incorporating more of these ideas can teach us to be more efficient on transit infrastructure projects in general, where the US often significantly trails other countries on cost and implementation time.
Changes are stymied by bureaucracy put in place due to fear of litigation. The primary reason that things are studied, studied again, given community input, and checked for environmental impact is that if a city or municipality gets sued due to a road change, the onus is on them to demonstrate that they didn't create an unsafe condition. For example in cases where cars crash and are liable for property damage, car owners try to sue the city to claim that the area was unsafe. Pointing to a massive paper trail like this removes liability from a set of city or municipal concerns.
A municipal or state government will not be held liable for the consequences of shitty infrastructure unless there's like 9/11 levels of "the system was blinking red and you ignored it" and even then it's coin toss at best. Like maybe if they kill a ton of people there might be a lawsuit that sticks that's sooooo unlikely for the scope of the kind of thing we're talking about here.
The bureaucracy is put in place because none of the people putting it in place are paying for it, headcount is power, control over resources is power, etc, etc, and all the other perverse incentives you see in government workplaces. And of course once the gravy train is running all these parties have an incentive to keep it running.
I mean, this is the "bullshit" that our DOT told us when talking about guerilla urbanism at a real city meeting. I agree that it's frustrating, but it is what we were told. I don't know how to "disprove" a defensive posture. And yes, our city goverment has been sued in cases on the grounds of poor street design (though they've only had to pay out once in 20 years.)
> The bureaucracy is put in place because none of the people putting it in place are paying for it, headcount is power, control over resources is power, etc, etc, and all the other perverse incentives you see in government workplaces. And of course once the gravy train is running all these parties have an incentive to keep it running.
Do you have any real experience in city or local government?
>. I don't know how to "disprove" a defensive posture. And yes, our city government has been sued in cases on the grounds of poor street design (though they've only had to pay out once in 20 years.)
You ask them how much money they'd pay out to lawsuits, how much money they were paying out before adopting those policies. You ask them how much these policies cost (I bet they haven't even calculated it because they'd rather not have that number exist). Etc. Etc You make them spell out the math for you.
>And yes, our city goverment has been sued in cases on the grounds of poor street design (though they've only had to pay out once in 20 years.)
Suing the .gov is often the only way to get them to shape up and do the thing they should have in the first place. Getting sued doesn't mean much. It's all about the results.
The fear might be real in the minds of the decision makers but that doesn't mean it's well founded or the policies that arise out of it are not wasteful.
>Do you have any real experience in city or local government?
> The fear might be real in the minds of the decision makers but that doesn't mean it's well founded or the policies that arise out of it are not wasteful.
I mean I 100% agree with this by the way. We tried to tell the DOT to look at its own stats. The one lawsuit they actually paid out in was from street design before the formation of the DOT itself and the fact that they fell behind on the paving schedule. If you actually amortize the payout over 30 years (I think the city has had one of these roughly every 30 years) it ends up being some minuscule part of the budget. But they still shut us down.
We kind of have reached that point. You can look at the cost overruns and public consultation before every new project as failures of the system to deliver what people want.
In my region of the world this exists and every year residents can vote for projects in their immediate vicinity.
I use a 5km stretch of bike lane daily going to work and back which was built this way. It runs along a railway line, so while it was navigable previously, off-season (so now) it would be covered in mud.
The initiative was spearheaded by just one lady who had an idea and a concrete proposal how to implement it.
Similar grassroots (heh, quite literally) activism is the idea of guerrilla gardening. Around here, a local nonprofit Villi vyöhyke (Wild Zone) [1] started as a small group of guerrillas but is now advocating, consulting and involved in many major rewilding projects initiated by municipalities and private companies.
I still think the better way to go is to find lawyers who will aggressively seek civil suits against the idiots who hit cyclists.
Two of the prominent members of our club were hit by a drunk driver outside a small town. Nobody died but bikes destroyed, nasty bruises, cracked ribs and vertebrae.
The driver shouldn’t have still had his license based on previous offenses. But his dad was a politician. Mayor I believe, and had been bailing that piece of shit out of trouble for who knows how long. I bet daddy would stop protecting him if he was on the hook for a couple million in damages. And/or corruption charges.
One of the victims was in fact a lawyer but I think he was property law not criminal.
It's nice to see that other countries are opening up to bikers. This is a very applaudable action of the local government. I hope and wish for everyone in the world to have the same bike infrastructure like we (the Dutch) do.
It's terrible that it needs civilian incentives and a fatal accident first before something happens.
That said, in my experience, cyclists are the #1 group when it comes to disobeying traffic rules. There are a lot of crazy idiots driving cars or riding motorcycles but at least the vast majority of them stops at a red light, doesn't ride on the sidewalk, doesn't go against one-ways, etc.
if youve never listened to it, the podcast episode linked in the article about guerrilla public service is a really nice listen. Their episodes are pleasant, half scripted half chatty. Recommend!
There's another side of stuff like this. People living up in the hills above LA near trail heads will put up fake no parking zones in front of their houses. People have gotten real tickets in fake zones.
a counterexample of good tactical urbanism in Los Angeles People's Vision Zero, a group painting crosswalks where the city itself won't budge on safety demands (motonormativity is the rule)
If you haven't noticed this entire thread is about illicit infrastructure. There could be a moral argument to be had (which you are not making) but no one is denying the vandalism aspect.
Thats such a wild assumption. Your saying the government always folows the will of the public? Theres nothing people want that governments are giving them?
unless the city governance is in the pocket of the wealthiest members of the city's population, and those members don't want the goods. I witnessed this first hand in Los Angeles when I lived there.
It's very easy to save money when you don't pay workers and aren't worried about safety or accessibility. They'd made and were using several wooden bridges before this one, but all of them failed and were washed away. Maybe they get lucky and this one will stay up for a long time, and be continuously maintained by volunteers, but I'm very glad that the bridges in my city are more expensive because they were built by engineers who have to get designs approved and their work inspected and maintained regularly.
This happened where I live over 10 years ago, a huge investment that collapsed when they tried to hammer the support off. This was overseen by Cowan and had many engineers signing off.
The bottom line is when there is political interest, even guerrilla infra might work, but nothing survives corruption and neglect. The case of the makeshift bridge is only a matter of making the required tests and adaptations to make it legal or condemning the structure and building a new one.
This is great! They saw a problem, found a solution, and just fixed it. Better than complaining about it for 5-10 years waiting for someone else to do something
This is similar to The Oval at Ohio State University. Instead of planning walkways across a field of grass, they looked where students actually walked and then paved those routes.
I think this applies to so many things. Centrally planned things rarely work exactly as planned, especially if the people doing the planning are separate from those executing the plan.
Much of the time, it's better to observe what's working in practice (even if in a messy way) and systemize it rather than have a perfect concept that disintegrates upon contact with reality.
The return of Civil Disobedience as a tool for inspiring social change.
Maybe not as profound or important as the Civil Rights movement. But important nonetheless for public safety. (Assuming the guerrilla bike lanes themselves are safe and well thought out.)
Students at my university in Berlin need to cross a busy road to travel between campus areas, which meant jaywalking or a long trip to a crossing with traffic lights down the road. A steady stream of students late to their next class sprinting across a six lane road is not great.
At some point students started painting their own crosswalk, which would be removed again and again by authorities, until the city eventually got the hint and installed a permanent crosswalk with a traffic light and a pedestrian island.
Sometimes the way to get something is fixed is by demonstrating the fix.
One such report (in German): https://www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2025/10/zebrastreifen-e... in Eberswalde; apparently firefighters were called in to remove the paint but were unsuccessful in their attempts to wash away the white stripes, and police launched an investigation into suspected interference with road traffic.
And another in Dresden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQUpQZAeA3w https://www.diesachsen.de/en/politics/a-zebra-crossing-in-dr... "In the summer of 2025, unknown individuals painted a crosswalk on the roadway along the busy street in Neustadt to provide safe access to the Heinrich Schütz Conservatory. The city promptly blocked off the crossing with warning cones [...] stating that unauthorized crosswalks constitute not only property damage but also a dangerous interference with traffic. Furthermore, traffic signs installed without authorization constitute an administrative offense under the Road Traffic Code."
In Los Angeles https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-10-16/risking-... "Risking arrest, he paints illicit crosswalks across L.A. ‘We can’t wait any longer’" (initially repainting faded crosswalks, rather than creating new ones)
And an example in Saskatoon, visible only in the 2015 street view image https://maps.app.goo.gl/3zWAkjtSEATswcWm8
"dangerous interference with traffic"
Indeed, it could lead to cars slowing down and who could want that in Autoland germany.
The Straftatbestand (§ 315b StGB) exists for all alterations of traffic. After all, you could conceivably start to manipulate traffic lights [1], remove STOP-signs or erect low-visibility barriers.
[1] https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/traffic-...
And this is what would be dangerous. But adding a crosswalk is not, if the law says otherwise it is a bad law.
Haha, Dresden.
Just next street, 6 years ago, some guys painted a Zebrastreifen, and got charged for Serious interference with road traffic: https://www.dnn.de/lokales/dresden/falscher-zebrastreifen-in...
(do note that "serious" or "schwer" (lit. heavy) is a qualifier in german law, that increases the charges significantly. The serious part here is that it isn't some alteration that can be immediately removed (e.g. a traffic cone))
Update on that other situation in the district of Neustadt that you mentioned: The city actually just completed a legal crosswalk there, just last week. Here's the article by our public broadcast: https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/sachsen/dresden/dresden-radeb...
That's essentially a desire path, in crosswalk form:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path
The architect Christopher Alexander documented this in "Alexander, C. (1975). The Oregon Experiment. New York: Oxford University Press" - one of the foundations for the whole Pattern Language movement which strongly influenced software design.
Actively painting the desire path is next level though ':)
There's a cool project where desire paths were intentionally planned and paved later: https://popupcity.net/radar/elephant-paths-paving-the-way-fo...
It's not the first time I run into this idea, it's indeed probably a great way to design paths!
Pretty good way to design software, too. See what users do, then make that thing or make it better.
Of course, this is isn't perfect -- the user doesn't always know what they want.
Dangerous game. In Romania at least, even fixing a pothole would get you a fine, possible jail time and requirement to unfix it.
[0] https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/actualitate/comuna-unde-fostul...
[1] https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/actualitate/situatie-absurda-i...
[2] https://www.antena3.ro/actualitate/locale/satul-sa-astepte-d...
Guerrilla urbanism is pretty much illegal to do everywhere, including in the article's subject city of San Francisco. The goal is to not get caught by authorities while doing it
Of course it's formally illegal. My point is that, while in SF authorities accepted and formalised an intervention, in other parts of the world there's a real threat of criminal proceedings, and not for modifying traffic infrastructure significantly, but for FILLING A POTHOLE.
Other interventions haven't been met so kindly. For example, last year after California passed a state-wide law banning street parking within 15 feet of an intersection (to improve visibility of pedestrians), some people tried to paint curbs (red curbs mark prohibited parking), frustrated the city was acting too slowly to repaint curbs everywhere. I don't remember if they were ever caught, but presumably they would have received a fine as it caused alot of headaches--it cast doubt on the validity of many parking fines issued after the law took effect as the parking enforcers couldn't know which curbs had been officially repainted, yet.
As for the guerilla bike lane on JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park, that entire 1-mile section of JFK was later closed off to cars entirely. It required a city-wide ballot initiative, IIRC, and was very contentious. But the city government was in favor of it, which may have something to do with why they were so accommodating earlier with the bike lane.
> It required a city-wide ballot initiative, IIRC, and was very contentious.
It's still very contentious and was on the ballot again yesterday to undo the previous ballot measure and make it available to car again. The proposal to undo was defeated.
Seems like what’s different is that in Romania, the administration views it as an insult. In the US, it’s viewed as a political issue (comfort of cyclists vs drovers).
You're onto something. Of course, the cases I linked were pretty different and there's a mix of institutional rigidity in there, but that's how I'd interpret the Romanian attitude as well.
Did you not see the ‘do not be caught while doing it’ part?
Besides completely missing the fact that I'm pointing out different attitudes and what happens if you get caught, how does "just don't get caught" not apply equally to something like murder?
Murder makes the world worse, but guerilla road painting done right makes it better. So the advice for road painting is "do it right and don't get caught" while the advice for murder is instead "don't do it"
Depends on if eventually everyone would want the person you murdered murdered or not, eh?
I present… [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_McElroy]
Nice slippery slope, btw.
I bet Romania has something similar.
As some guerilla gardeners like to call it, it's not illegal, it's pre-legal.
Nor California!
Society is relatively lenient towards college students being mischievous.
It helps that colleges have their own police forces with a standing directive to not be too harsh on students.
Although maybe that’s a US thing? We are a weird country.
The college police force is a US thing.
Oxford University had its own police until quite recently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_University_Police
Heidelberg had a student jail.
https://www.tourism-heidelberg.com/explore/historical-sights...
Unfortunately that’s also how the Seven got away with it like generations before them. I’ve been wondering lately if the private force is a net negative on society.
Could be a US thing, but that's very cool to hear that!
Here in the UK, it seems the best way to get potholes fixed is to paint a penis around it: https://themanc.com/art-and-culture/manchester-graffiti-arti...
Similarly, tweaking a cycle path with duct tape: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0ziqlGgc8_k.
A few days later, the city council made this change permanent.
That may be because this is a clearer win for everybody involved.
There is no such thing as 'jaywalking' in Germany.
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stvo_2013/__25.html "(3) Pedestrians must cross roadways quickly and by taking the shortest route perpendicular to the direction of travel, taking care to avoid vehicular traffic. If traffic density, speed, visibility, or traffic flow so requires, a roadway may only be crossed at intersections or junctions, at traffic lights within markings, at pedestrian crossing aids, or at pedestrian crossings (sign 293). When crossing the roadway at intersections or junctions, pedestrian crossings or markings at traffic lights must always be used."
Maybe there's no penalty, but a 6 lane road probably has traffic density/speed/flow enough to get to the "may only be crossed at intersections or junctions"
That law isn't about jaywalking. The concept of the US-english word "jay" doesn't exist ). There is no german language equivalent.
Also, this is one of the paragraphs that is just there. It's not enforced. Do you know any German that ever get fined for it? Is the police out with cameras looking for slow pedestrians? Naa, they are out with cameras looking for too speedy cars instead!
) maybe "Landei" ? But it's never used in traffic context. We simply had a car-lobby creating vile words to modify law-makers behavior like it happened in the USA at ca. 1910.
Buenos Aires has much better solution: pedestrians carry crosswalk lines in their imagination, and they can apply them anywhere it's needed, at zero cost to the municipality.
You'd never know that from the way that Germans and Austrians will stand at a red crossing signal on a completely clear road
Crossing a street at a red traffic light as a pedestrian can get you a fine. Crossing a road far enough from a traffic light won't.
No, it doesn't. I live in Germany since forever (born here), in many different regions. Never ever got a fine, never ever saw or heard people that got a fine. At most the police gives a warning, if they even notice.
For me a pedestrian traffic sign is a hint that I can now go. But it certainly isn't a requisite. If the street is empty of traffic AND if there are no little kids around, then I'll just go.
Why not little kids? We know from science that they can't judge the speed and distance of cars. When I can see "The car is far away and slow", they don't really know. So I don't want a bad example to them. And that makes you able to observe me at a red traffic light with a completely free street --- kids might be around!
Got a warning once for doing the English thing of wandering across - I was setting a bad example for the kids!
They cross at red. I have seen that.
The word "jaywalking" is often used colloquially to refer to crossing the street anywhere that isn't a controlled crossing; it's not always strictly referring to the law.
The term itself was made up by the US auto industry in the 1920s in an attempt to shift blame of traffic fatalities towards pedestrians. And it worked. Before that, streets (which are built by the state) belonged to everyone and drivers were almost always held responsible for accidents.
They made up the term jaywalking by combining "walking" with the term "jay" which was a slang term for a country bumpkin or idiot from out of town. They hired actors to spread the slur to refer to those out of towners that don't know how to "properly" behave around streets in a modern city. They even paid Boy Scouts to hand out warning cards and staged mock funerals
Yes, I know. But few people are aware of this history; it doesn't change what I said.
“Jaywalking” is partially a psyop by the burgeoning automobile industry to blame the victims instead of the drivers.
I suppose it didn’t work that well because as a rule a car or bike hitting a pedestrian is still almost always at fault.
It worked incredibly well. The word "jay" is a slur used to refer to "country bumpkins" or out-of-town idiots. They paid actors to spread the slur and even staged mock funerals until their newly made up slur spread and people started calling each other that.
All of this led to the 1928 Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance and notably a lot of laws in LA that shifted the liability to pedestrians instead of motorists.
Today if you "jaywalk" in most of the country you get called an asshole. It was an incredibly successful act of social engineering
They also killed mass transit so let’s call it a draw.
That's two losses for us and two wins for them
Downvoted, but true. If there is no crosswalk, you can cross. But, it might be dangerous or impossible as cars have right of way.
The origin story for the Union Jack-inspired sidewalks on my university’s quad was the president looking out his window on a snowy day and seeing all of the footprints in the snow and asking the facilities to put diagonals in.
Guess some schools have wiser faculty than others.
The city and the school are different management structures. The issue is the mayor of the city isn’t focused solely on the school nor should he be. But this means change takes longer.
In Germany! That's a dangerous place to be breaking the law. I hope they knew what they were doing.
No, actually it's less dangerous to break the law in Germany than in the USA.
In USA, the fines are often higher. And damages to be paid are WAY WAY HIGHER. If you do a criminal offense, then you get way more years in prison in the USA than in Germany. The police treats you even worse in the USA than in Germany.
So if you break the law ... then better do it in Germany.
Also, go around in Germany and ask germans "Did you ever get a fine for walking just over the read? Or by walking over the road when the pedestrian light was red?". I'll wage 50€ that it will take you more than a day until you find the first occurrence. Ask around "Have you ever got speed ticket in a car" will get you however instant answers.
You guys blow some imaginative danger out of proportion. And I really wonder if there is ONE country with laws that written but no one looks after? Isn't that usual? We even have german saying on this: "Papier ist geduldig".
Fun fact: in the USA, each year the various police forces KILL more people than in Germany the various police forces shoot. Where the german police shoots include warning shoots, or killing a dangerous boar. And this "way higher" even holds if we normalize the numbers by population count.
Incarceration rate in the USA is also way higher than in Germany.
I'd wager people to come up with verifiable statistics where "breaking law" is more dangerous than in USA. They probably exist, in niche areas. Would still be fun to learn.
This wouldn't be Ernst-Reuter-Platz would it?
Did they ever actually try and do things the proper way (e.g. file a request, show up to a town hall)? Because that may have actually been easier.
As somebody who did try to get a crosswalk near my home, I can say with some degree of certainty that calling the local DOT is generally a lost cause.
A bit of backstory... My little cluster of townhomes sits beside a 35mph, wide (was 4 lanes, reduced to 2+bike lanes), busy suburban road. Cars regularly go 50mph because the road is wide and smooth and 50 feels right. People have died crossing the road (2 in the 7 years I've lived here). There's a bus stop on both sides of the intersection, housing on both sides, a park on one side down a block, and a golf course on the other side, also one block down.
The response from VDOT was essentially "there's currently no proof of pedestrian need" This despite bus stops, parks, and housing existing. And pedestrian deaths. And frequently seeing with my own eyes people dashing across the road, trying not to get squished,
It's complete idiocy from the various traffic planning orgs. It's 100% car-first, consequences be damned. Bike lanes are added reluctantly, and usually as a requirement to get federal funding; little attention paid to utility... did I mention the bike lanes on the road above go "nowhere"? They literally end several blocks on either side of the local school complex, start again, then stop before the local shopping center. So you can't actually use them to get anywhere you'd want to go.
"there's currently no proof of pedestrian need"
Well of course. Just how there's no proof of "train need" before tacks get built. Why do we ever build tracks if there is no preexisting train traffic to justify the need?!
Getting transient college students to engage with the slow process of government is difficult.
The college students also generally don’t vote in that location lowering the desire of public government to engage with them as much. Again transient. You’re right to ask but I’m guessing this was the primary issue.
Wasn't the context here in Germany, where the executive finally made a zebra crossing?
* We don't have "college students". We have however real students, e.g. in University.
* Over here it's not custom to go with micro-management problems to an elected person, e.g. to the member of parliament of your area. Whenever I see the (partially propaganda) shows where russians ask the dictator Putin about day-to-day things and they even air this yearly in the TV I cringe. Or when I see in US movies that people go with low things to their congressman... that simple isn't custom in Germany. And thus the elected people are much LESS likely looking if people wanting something would elect them or not.
* Normally it is the executive, not the legislative, that decides over these matters. In Germany, the executive isn't elected by the public.
* In Germany we have the idea of "main point of living" (Hauptwohnsitz) and "secondary point of living" (Zweitwohnsitz). And in quite a few towns you have to pay an extra-tax on the Zweitwohnsitz. There are ways to mitigate this, but the easiest solution as a student is just to take your Hauptwohnsitz at your university town. And there you can then vote (you can't vote at your Zweitwohnsitz). And so it happens that the town magistrates of student towns are usually a bit different than of "normal" towns, e.g. the town mayors from the green party. All these young students voting more for this party than e.g. the german liberals.
So, all in all, from the POV of the story in Berlin ... little of what you wrote made sense. Except your first sentence. Infrastructure building is a slow, a tremendously slow process in Germany (however, once we have it, it's usual very nice. We germans call shit on our railway ... but it's lightyears better than e.g. the US railways system!). And even a zebra crossing falls under the infrastructure categorization.
Given the expertise of the faculty, fair chance that happened - and possibly that was what really prompted the city to eventually build a crosswalk. Plus many former students likely ended up in exactly the positions that would make these decisions.
Doesn't make for a good story though. What I relayed above has become university lore. Its accuracy is hard to judge decades later.
Easier than everyone just doing nothing and jaywalking until magically a crosswalk appear? Doesn't sound like it to me, law of least effort and all that.
It reminds me of The Guerrilla Artist Who Fixed L.A.'s Worst Freeway Sign
https://thelandmag.com/richard-ankrom-guerrilla-public-servi...
https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-an-artist-helped-millions-...
> And then…nothing. Caltrans didn’t notice. Passing motorists were thrilled but figured the improvement had taken place at the direction of Caltrans. It wasn’t until Ankrom leaked his actions to the press that the true story was known.
> The original sign with Ankrom’s artwork remained until 2009 when the whole thing was replaced by Caltrans. The paint had faded, but the message remained with a lasting impact. The replacement sign erected by the Department of Transportation proudly sports the 5 North placard exactly where Ankrom had put it nearly a decade prior, and it remains there to this day to help motorists that would otherwise be just as confused as he was.
And an update from 2023:
> In 2001, artist Richard Ankrom posted a "5 North" sign on the 110 N. in DTLA to alert drivers to get in the left lane for the 5 turnoff. His work was so impeccable (and helpful), Caltrans at first didn't notice, then allowed it to stay. "5 North" is now part of permanent signage.
I’ve been a semi autonomous employee at a number of places and I wonder how much that was “Caltrans” and how much it was George the sign maker just making a sign to replace the old one with all the same information as the current sign.
Sometimes you just do things and dare the bosses to say something about it. If they had their way they might have changed it back. But it’s already made and it’s not worth the grief to do anything about it. Too many people like or need George.
Boss: Next on the list is the I5 overpass sign at mile marker {something}.
George: The info in the book doesn't match what's shown in the asset management photograph.
Boss: Update the book to whatever is on the road and go from there.
Selective enforcement goes both ways and effective employees know this.
You didn’t tell me to do that, so I am not doing it.
You didn’t tell me not to do this, so it’s done.
It just highlighted how slow government works:
This guy took a few days and a few dollars to put up a sign.
Caltrans took 8 years, undoubtedly thousands of dollars, stack and stack of paperwork, and a bunch of workers to do the same.
He likely spent a few hundred dollars on the sign - sourcing the proper metal of that size, the reflectors, the masks, and so on.
As to the time investment:
> He spent more than three months preparing, researching the color and shape of the signs, mixing his own custom paint to get the colors just right, and applying a bit of faux patina to finish it off. Ankrom even spent time tracking down the button-shaped reflectors used on other legitimate signs and convincing the supplier to give him some. Once he was satisfied that it looked authentic, he came up with a plan to install it.
---
Caltrans has 15,000 miles of state highways that they have signage for. A single sign may only get reviewed once a decade because of that.
Doing single things in isolation is "easy" without going through the required public comments and such. Maintaining it for the entire state is much more challenging.
Caltrans is so frustrating how they do signage and freeway identification. N-S roads sometimes become referred to as E-W roads in signage sometimes simultaneously. Hardly ever showing exit numbers. Actually using the freeways formal longform name in signage. Outside of signs theres also the all too frequently seen deadly combo of zero left shoulder + lowest cement divider you’ve ever seen + modern headlights dazzling you in the opposite lane.
The short film he and his friends made about the process is definitely worth a watch: https://youtu.be/Clgl63CWOkM
In Geneva, activists painted bike lanes in three streets in 2023, causing about 2000 swiss francs in damages (or improvements, depending on your view).
The Swiss police under prosecutor Walther Cimino proceeded to investigate as if they were a crime syndicate, gathering forensics but also identifying 96 sympathizers and putting them under heavy surveillance, which included requesting total records from their banks, employers, phone companies, email providers (Google through the US DoJ), and even CCTV and purchases from their local supermarket.
I'm afraid of the possibility that what used to be "grassroots civil disobedience" will now be labeled "eco-terrorism" and prosecuted accordingly.
Someone's eco-terrorist is someone else's eco-freedom fighter
You can remove eco.
well yes, that's the original quote.
so much wasted money that could have been used to fix the road instead. But proving whatever point they had was better in their minds
This is an intractable problem with normal sidewalk/streets. Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between. This is why both drivers and pedestrians hate bikers.
Ideally we have entirely separate paths for bikes. Of course this is infeasible for most established cities. Doesn't mean they are't inherently a problem in these cases though.
Entirely separate paths for bikes are absolutely feasible in established cities (see New York which has huge protected bike lanes running north and south up and down manhattan) with little cost to car infra
You misread me.
>Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between.
The NYC bike lanes are inherently problematic. These are the "in between" that I'm talking about. They are not entirely separate paths in the way that I mean. They are a new lane within the existing path. What I mean by a separate path is something that is above, below, or in an entirely different location than the road/sidewalk.
Normally, if you’re turning right you’re in the rightmost lane, so nobody to your right is going straight. And likewise for left. A bike lane puts straight-through traffic to the right of turning cars so they come in from your blind spot. A "yield to bikes" rule doesn’t help much when you can’t see who you’re yielding to. And car traffic presents the same problem for bikes. They have to deal with this by merging all the way across traffic or cross and become a pedestrian. The fact that they may have to become a pedestrian is a major flag that they inherently dont fit.
Parking and buses have the same problem. The sidewalk and the road were designed to touch. When you put a bike lane between them, every trip from curb to car, bus, etc. has to cross it.
It’s essentially splitting 1 road into 2 with separate rules. It's inherently problematic. You can't introduce bikes without increasing the rule complexity and worsening the experience for everyone else.
There is plenty of basic intuition here.
- Pairs. Each pair of modes (car,bike,pedestrian) needs its own set of rules. Two modes is one pair. Three modes is three pairs, so adding one mode triples the relationships.
- Introducing a "middle": Every segment of one street crosses every segment of the other. Adding a middle lane on both sides takes an intersection from 9 overlap zones to 25, and from 4 where different modes meet to 16.
- Fixed width: The street doesn’t get wider. Any space dedicated to bikes costs car lanes, parking, or sidewalk.
When you turn off a road, you need to look for pedestrians and motorbikes. Why is a bicycle so different?
For busy cycle routes, specific infrastructure to deal with this is installed like separate lights and banned turns to de-conflict the road.
Since bikes/scooters are much faster than pedestrians, it causes problems like this when they use pedestrian infra. For an example, I was driving up to a yield-to-peds xwalk a while ago, and on the sidewalk there was a scooter going at full clip. I slowed down because I had a hunch he would do this, but he took a hard 90 deg turn at the xwalk and went straight through at speed. If I hadn't done that, I might have run him over. A pedestrian could never have done that.
Something similar to this dynamic happens anywhere you would "look both ways" as a driver but don't have far enough visibility to extrapolate a safe window of passage relative to the speed of oncoming traffic. It can happen when parked cars block your view of oncoming traffic, or when parked cars block view of the bike lane, or when parked cars, trees, hedges, fences etc block view of the sidewalk that a non-pedestrian is using.
The issue is the parked cars not the bike lane. Planners are aware of this. There is recent efforts to “daylight” intersections as they call it when they work to increase these sightlines.
I think this reasoning is like “you can be right and dead”. If you’re cycling at 20km/hr, some bike lanes are arranged so that it’s very hard for a driver to see you whether you have the right of way or not. You can’t legally mandate someone to see what they physically cannot see.
Bicyclists are a lot faster than pedestrians while being even more fragile.
> A bike lane puts straight-through traffic to the right of turning cars, coming up from behind in your blind spot.
Bike lanes making riders less safe has been known for decades. John Forrester’s book “Effective Cycling” [1] catalogues a lot of these dangers and warns cyclists to not assume that bike lanes are safer.
[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516945/effective-cycling/
John Forester is globally recognized as a clown who's conclusions have never been supported by real world evidence. He was employed by DOTs to tell them what they wanted to hear ("don't build infrastructure for bikes") and in doing so set US infrastructure back decades.
Vehicular cycling techniques can help in situations where there is no bicycle infrastructure, but they are not safer than good bicycle infrastructure.
As I understand it, in those days cyclists in the U.S. were largely given two bad options:
Option A: A separate, safe bike lane through the park, not useful for actual transit but nice for leisure.
Option B: A line of white paint at the side of the travel lane that will guide you into the “door zone”, along the right side of cars turning right (and right into you), and other dangerous situations.
Note that there was hardly ever Option C, actual bike infrastructure that was both safe and useful for transit. So this idea that one single cyclist “killed” good bike infrastructure is ignoring that it was never an option to begin with.
Modern on-street painted bike lanes were less than 10 years old in the US when Effective Cycling was published, only a handful of California cities had a few miles of them. The average US cyclist had never even seen one.
So the options at the time were riding on the sidewalk or in the street, and Effective Cycling became popular because it contained some genuinely good advice for cycling on a street with no infrastructure. Unfortunately Forester felt that this was the best and only way to safely cycle, which is why he immediately became popular with state and local DOTs who did not want to build bike lanes.
I guess I don’t buy the narrative that we’d have some kind of cycling paradise in the U.S. if it weren’t for this one guy.
He wrote the CalTrans Bicycle Guide which later became the national AASHTO Bike Guide. These guides prohibited protected bike lanes and discouraged dedicated bike infrastructure until 2012.
It is not an exaggeration, he set national cycling infrastructure policy in the US that stood for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forester_(cyclist)#1978_C...
I think the real issue is where is the space for the truly seperated bike lanes? I've personally experienced the new segregated lanes as a distinct regular threat to my safety as a cyclist, I was safer before the lanes were put in (at great tax payer cost and local businesses griping about less parking space) I'm in a smaller city now and they're spending a lot of money they don't have making these segregated lanes, creating the same problem all over again and making the driving feel claustrophobic to boot! I understand making a road feel less safe, or too narrow is a strategy to calm traffic down, but the old roads were just short of two lanes wide and felt quite safe in comparison. The worst spots in Vancouver aside from the dunsmiur upgrade I was referring to above are also bike corridors, a round about may slow a car down but for a 2 wheeler it does not, it's still not safe for the bike as cars try to cross or turn onto the bike lane, it truly is an all or nothing, I felt safer biking in raw Broadway or grandville street traffic then the adjacent mixed traffic bike corridors.
So here's the thing. Seattle drank all the urbanistic Kool-Aid and started doing all the road sabotage with bike lanes, bulbouts, road diets, and so on with the goal to eliminate pedestrian and bike deaths.
What was the result?
A stunning INCREASE in pedestrian deaths and no significant effect on bike deaths: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/as-...
Edit: my personal theory is that these "improvements" on average do nothing whatsoever. They "worked" in some places in Europe because they made traffic so shitty that more people were forced to use bikes. In turn, this provided driver education, by showing them how badly average drivers behave.
Why would cycling infrastructure reduce pedestrian incidents? They'd presumably decrease cyclist collisions. And since cycling has increased ~25% over the same time frame, steady rates of traffic incidents involving cyclists amounts to an increase in safety: https://www.kuow.org/health/2026-09-21/seattle-had-record-br...
The infrastructure sabotage was done as a part of the Zero Vision program, that included both pedestrian and bike safety. It achieved neither.
> And since cycling has increased ~25% over the same time frame
The percentage of bike commutes in Seattle is in the noise, around 2-3% of the non-remote-work commutes. So the data is too noisy for any reasonable statistical significance.
For example, this year was deadly with 4 cyclist deaths (to date). In 2024 there were no cyclist deaths.
Did they observe more crashes on roads that received upgrades? Doesn't sound like it, these are overall numbers. Maybe more people are walking/biking now, maybe just noise (10 and 18 ped deaths is really good for a major city already, in LA it's 160+).
Your personal theory is refuted by studies in the US, here's the classic lit review on this subject if you're interested: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2776010/
> Did they observe more crashes on roads that received upgrades?
No statistically significant correlation.
From my personal observations, sabotage of arterials resulted in a lot of traffic shifting onto the side streets that are much less safe. But our local DoT doesn't have enough traffic data to confirm or disprove this, I tried to FOIA it.
> Your personal theory is refuted by studies in the US, here's the classic lit review on this subject if you're interested: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2776010/
Look at the dates on these studies. Nearly all of them come from the period of the global crime drop, a result of the leaded gasoline phaseout.
I recently tried to replicate some of the studies of bike lane effects and quite often found the _opposite_ of the original studies. For example, in Seattle the business tax receipts declined more steeply on streets within 1 block of a protected bike lane compared to controls.
I tried giving you the benefit of the doubt, but your word choices make it clear you're not approaching this topic in good faith. This means your anecdotes are even more worthless than normal.
Get your attempted study published and reviewed, then I'll take your observations seriously.
Do an experiment: try to find papers in pro-urbanist publications that look past 2016 in the US cities like SF or Seattle. 2016 is a good starting point, as it's the year when a lot of Vision Zero construction kicked off.
Go on, I'll wait.
Still waiting.
Oh, there are almost no publications? Wonder why. And the ones that do appear tend to be relegated to rarely cited journals. E.g.: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19427867.2022.2...
> We examined changes in counts and per capita rates of all, pedestrian, and bicyclist fatal motor vehicle collisions between 2007 and 2019 for 18 U.S. cities that took early Vision Zero pledges. Only 2 of the 18 cities have experienced statistically significant decreases in total fatalities since taking a Vision Zero pledge and only one city experienced a statistically significant decrease in pedestrian fatalities.
John Forrester spewed completely disproven garbage and harmed cycling for decades by this influence on policy.
Yes I'd rather ride in traffic then be seperate, when I used to commute in Vancouver cars have a convoluted sign saying they are to yeald to bikes on right turn, or no right turn at all and I would get 'right hooked' at least once a week, I always had my eye out and would stop before getting pasted, but yelling at a driver who's in the wrong probably isn't helping them be aware of what they're doing wrong, I'm just 'yet another angry cyclist' since I'm upset they broke the rules and tried to kill me with their 4000lb+ metal brick!
the beltline on Atlanta comes to mind
I just looked it up and this is exactly what I mean by a separate location. Minneapolis has a bit of this too. I mean you could also use 3 dimensions space and put bikes up or down to resolve the core tension. All of these are of very limited viability so I understand from a pragmatic perspective why cities arent just doing this.
Yeah I think atlanta only got this as a freebie due to it being built on top of their abandoned rail road.
In europe there's also a great culture of bike /walking dirt only pathways too, but I agree its not very practical solution for cities
Have you been to NYC recently? 2 years ago it was utter chaos with delivery folks and crazies in rental bikes gunning at full throttle. It was quite scary compared to something like Paris or Munich.
I’ll take a full lane here in Miami. Screw these thin bike lanes next to the curb with F-150s and Cybertrucks. I’ve seen too many bike falls. Pass me safely and that’s that.
> This is why both drivers and pedestrians hate bikers
Drivers and pedestrians hate each other too. Everyone gripes about any minor impediment to their own travel, particularly other modalities, but also their own. I mean, drivers universally complain about being "stuck in traffic", but they are traffic.
> Drivers and pedestrians hate each other too
I think there are some scales of magnitude to this issue. I also feel like you're a bit dishonest by omitting them.
I never care a lot about cars when commuting on foot, and I don't have a problem stopping for pedestrians when driving. Pedestrians are very predictable unless they're a small child running after a ball into the street or something similar. Those problems are solved with 30-zones and street planning in most settlements. Most of the time it's just looking left and right before crossing, and in case of busy crossings, waiting for someone to safely stop for you.
Most of the hate towards cyclists stems from them having the right of way while also behaving incredibly unpredictably. In the European city I live in, most cyclists signal less often than BMW drivers, which leads to a lot of ambiguity, which kills. As such, traffic education places immense responsibility onto drivers to basically track and predict every cyclist around their vehicle, such that they avoid potential accidents.
Cars turn people into psychopaths. They're the only mode of transport that essentially wishes other people simply didn't exist.
I consider myself a pretty chill, calm person. I couldn't believe how angry and annoyed sitting in my car would make me. Cars really do something weird to your brain, in no time at all.
I'm very glad I'm in a city with superb public transportation.
Sorry I'm late, I was being traffic. Toot toot.
They definitely belong with pedestrians, it is a pedestrian vehicle.
The roads are always full of cars, the pavements are maybe 0.001% utilised outside of places like central NYC. There is plenty of capacity for bikes.
In Seattle, local residential streets are often designated as "stay healthy" streets, where bikes and pedestrians have right-of-way. You can drive a car there, but it will be slow (intersections are narrowed to discourage fast driving). Cars take parallel streets if they're going more than a block or two.
I haven't checked the statistics but it seems to work. There's one near me that's packed with bikes during coomute hours, and I think the cost to the city was negligible.
I wouldn't paint Seattle as a picture of success when it comes to bikes. We've spent untold millions on bike lanes, reduced vehicle capacity with road diets, reduced parking and access to small businesses and made life more difficult for delivery drivers and ADA access.
After all that, the mode share of biking has actually gone down in Seattle over the last decade, to under 3%. It turns out if your city has hills, rain and darkness much of the year, there is no amount of money that will convince people to ride a bike. We've effectively subsidized a recreational interest for a very small population, a group so small that the top profession of the ~12k who do cycle is "college professor". And as a pedestrian who has to share with cyclists almost every day, it's been a net negative. In my own neighborhood they've made sidewalks unusable for pedestrians in the quest to encourage more cyclists.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-bike-...
Your stats are nearly a decade old. Cycling popularity has increased, not decreased, even surpassing the pre-pandemoc levels: https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2026/08/17/july-bike-counts-...
That's one bridge downtown, and as noted in the article, the summer peak coincides with the nearby I5 closure and the World Cup in Seattle.
The 2024 Community Survey shows bike usage has barely budged compared to the amount invested.
https://www.communitiescount.org/commuting-to-work
The Fremont bridge isn't downtown.
> We've effectively subsidized a recreational interest for a very small population
Many such cases
Stockholm is colder, further north, (though admittedly less hilly).
I can't argue that the bike infra improvements in Seattle haven't made a huge difference, but I'm not at all convinced this is because it is intrinsically unlikeable.
For what it's worth, the environmentally incredibly bikeable SD/LA has such bad infra that they have both fewer bikers and far more deaths.
"After all that, the mode share of biking has actually gone down in Seattle over the last decade, to under 3%" <-- your article is from 2018 and that is like 8 years old, an eternity ago.
There is significantly more bike infrastructure now then in 2018. Plus the lime scooters and bikes have radically shifted the balance of bikes vs cars to the point where I'd say that bikes now rule the street in most of the dense parts of Seattle.
I would imagine there are at least 10x more people using those lanes than there was before affordable e-bikes and "bike shares" showed up. You've got people who would never, ever ride in a million years be caught dead on a bike using those bike lanes to run errands, go to visit people, commute to work, etc. Just sit down anywhere in the dense parts of the city and you'l see them go by constantly!
I doubt the people who put those bike lanes in back in 2018 and before ever could have imagined how popular they are now thanks to lime bikes, electric scooters and such. Its honestly pretty remarkable and thank god somebody had the thought to build up that stuff back then!
You might imagine that there are 10x the amount of people riding bikes, but the numbers just don't support it.
Bikes already have right of way. You are allowed to take the lane and bike in the road and pretend you are a car.
This is more in the direction of what I'm talking about. I think it's a pretty good model and affirms not contradticts what I'm saying because you do have to sacrifice drivability (unless you can just add streets like this - but I assume not).
It's pretty easy to do in most cities, you just have to eliminate a lane of traffic and/or parking spots. It's quite rare for a modern city to have streets too narrow to do that.
Bike lanes don't just compete against car lanes. They also compete against sidewalks and bus/tram lanes.
There is also the question of what you are going to do with your bike once you are at your destination, where are you going to park it?
For those who went to Amsterdam as a pedestrian, I don't know how it felt, but to me, it was not great. Lots of narrow sidewalks littered with stuff, the stuff in question is often bikes, so you have to step onto the adjacent bike lane, where you are usually greeted by an angry cyclist, because for some reason, parking your bike on the sidewalk is fine but stepping on the bike lane is not.
So, as a pedestrian, I wished Amsterdam converted its car lanes into trams and sidewalks rather than bike lanes. And yes, I hated bikes for as long as I stayed in Amsterdam, and so did everyone in my group.
The cars vs bikes debate tend to get a lot of attention, but the bikes vs pedestrians and public transit aspect matters too.
Note that bikes + buses can be a particularly dangerous combination. Buses are long and can block off the path of a careless cyclist as they turn, who may fall right under the wheels of the bus.
To provide a different anecdote, Amsterdam is the best city I've ever had the pleasure of exploring as a pedestrian.
There were well-maintained sidewalks everywhere I needed to go. The reduced amount of automobile traffic made it easier to cross smaller roads and intersections without risking my life. At larger intersections, I often received a crossing signal almost immediately upon requesting one, instead of waiting multiple minutes.
Negotiating interactions with cyclists was trivial, because I could always make eye contact with them. Unlike drivers, who barely pay attention to those outside of cars, have their heads buried in their phone, or are obscured behind tinted glass.
It was also the quietest major city I've ever visited, which I largely attribute to the prevalence of bikes instead of automobiles. Some of the semi-tractors / HGVs I saw making deliveries were even electric, which is a great reduction in noise and other forms of pollution.
If I ever have the pleasure of visiting Amsterdam again, I intend to rent a bike. I hope to explore more of the city via the obviously superior mode of transportation, as demonstrated by so many locals.
American tourists somehow lacking any kind of situational awareness and stumbling into bike lanes right in front of traffic have pretty much become a meme in Amsterdam. You wouldn't step in front of a car speeding past, so why would you suddenly become suicidal when it is a bike?
As someone who regularly walks on what is almost certainly the street with the busiest cycle path in the world[0], and who regularly walks through some incredibly congested mixed-use streets: it just... isn't a problem? Stay in your designated area, yield when you are not, behave predictably, and things will be Just Fine.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RQrKP9a0XE
> Bike lanes don't just compete against car lanes. They also compete against sidewalks and bus/tram lanes.
Tram lanes are a travesty, but bus lanes make pretty decent bike lanes. I biked through Seattle to work for a year or so in 2018/2019 where bikes are allowed in bus lanes, and it's a good compromise. There's a couple of streets where the bus lanes are always full of busses, but most of the bus lanes are a nice place to ride; unless they've got rails, of course.
Seattle has put in a lot more separated bike lanes since I've been there, but on routes I wouldn't have used anyway, so I dunno. There was one on my route that was terrible, but I don't think they used that pattern very often; they put a separated bike lane between parking and the side walk, and parking ended close to an intersection where many cars wanted to turn right; limited visibility and limited space made it hard to get to the center or left of the lane to avoid conflicts with vehicles turning right.
IMHO, there's a conflict between bike infrastructure appropriate for beginner / slow bicyclists and infrastructure appropriate for experienced / faster bicyclists. Separated lanes can be nice, but they make it harder to mix with motor vehicles when that's appropriate and desirable. If separated bike infrastructure makes me take a longer path or wait for a signal change to turn left, but lack of infrastructure (and the traffic situation) would have let me mix with motor vehicles and take a permissive left without waiting for a signal change, that's a negative for me --- but the extra wait isn't an issue for someone who wouldn't have mixed with traffic for that left turn anyway.
I agree: Amsterdam was the scariest pedestrian experience ever! To add to the described situation delivery cars often stop in bike lanes, which shifts bikes not to the car lane but to a sidewalk! I was practically assaulted when cyclist hit me from behind and was yelling and swinging bike lock at me for not letting him the right of way. Downtown Amsterdam? Never again.
On the positive side: if you hadn't yielded to a car, you would've been dead!
> eliminate a lane of traffic and/or parking spots
It's out of the question in most places, it slows car traffic down and makes it harder for people to park in places where parking is already scarce. Then residents and customers of local businesses have nowhere to park.
>It's out of the question in most places, it slows car traffic down
If you actually make a sufficiently high-quality bike network to convince people to bike that would otherwise drive, I would expect this to speed car traffic up by taking a lot of cars off the road.
Not everywhere is San Francisco. Where I live, it's below freezing almost half the year. No one wants to add bike lanes that will only get lightly used 3 months a year.
I bike 9 to 10 months out of the year in southern Wisconsin. It would do people well to get outside and spend less time on their screens in the Winter.
Scandinavia, The Netherlands, London, Paris. Great for cycling, shit weather.
Buy a coat and some gloves.
No one wants to. Great plan you have.
Have you ever heard of Oulu, Finland?
Have you ever heard of the sprawling Midwest?
So what? People bike there. They make products for winter cycling commuting. They don’t sell them to people in miami after all. There is a market evidently.
And then, so what about the lane? Drive all you want it doesn’t affect you, other than lessening the risk you kill a cyclist or someone you know dies riding a bike.
Denmark has excellent bike infrastructure and terrible weather.
NO
I like the comfort of my car too much to freeze my ass on a bike. Cities were built around the vision of economic prosperity and a car for everyone, and they should stay that way.
Depends where you are but bikes are actually kind of fun. It doesn't mean you can't have cars. I have both but bikes are more practical around central London at any rate.
Then don’t? How come every bike lane thread has these annoying people assuming a bike lane means a gun goes to the head and forces you on a bike. Keep driving if you want. Doesn’t matter. But why fight a bike lane when it doesn’t affect your life at all, I will never understand.
> I like the comfort of my car too much to freeze my ass on a bike.
you usually don't get cold when cycling. If anything you are warming up.
> Cities were built around the vision of economic prosperity and a car for everyone,
That is a false statement. Most cities predate the existence of cars for a start.
Also economic prosperity is unrelated to cars. If anything cars are a financial burden for most people and people buy them because they feel they are forced to need them, not because they want them. This is the antithesis of prosperity.
for me prosperity implies not spending a big chunk of my day trapped in a metal box with no way to get out. are you really saying that everyone except a couple freaks like me would rather fight traffic and sit on your ass than take nice walk? to the degree that we shouldn't even be allowed to have little pockets where driving isn't the only modality?
the US is huge, and its all car all the time. you have thousands of options of where to live like that - I have like 5. and you think I shouldn't even have that.
This is very geography/climate dependent though. There are conditions where most people would not bike regardless of how high quality the bike network is.
The effect is a lot less pronounced that you might expect. See, for example, this video talking about Oulu, Finland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
Are these conditions that typically can't be found in the Netherlands?
I guess heavy snow isn't too common there, maybe if we plowed the bike paths? Ok, now I'm getting distracted imagining a bike-path-plow, it would presumably be mounted on a powered bike of some sort, or maybe on those little parking enforcement trikes.
Bidirectional dedicated bike paths are usually at least car-sized. They will fit a regular plow just fine. Monodirectional bike lanes usually lack separation from the rest of the road, so they get plowed for free as a side-effect of plowing the car lane.
In the city where I live (which is _usually_ pretty bike friendly) the plow moves the snow from the car lanes onto the bike lanes a lot of the time :/
In Scandinavia they have an army of tiny tractors for this purpose:
https://cykelmagasinet.se/facit-finns-nu-sopsaltade-cykelvag...
So what? On nice days you get a safer way to bike. Why are people in favor of more risk of death to others?
Buy a coat and a pair of gloves. You're not made of sugar.
It's a self-fulfilling situation. It's that way only because those places have designed their infrastructure to be car dependent.
The opposite is also true: If you take a place where people primarily walk and bike, and take out the sidewalks and bike lanes to widen the road, people will also be pissed.
All you're pointing out is that humans are resistant to change. We already know that is true. The question is not whether people don't like change, the question is: which is better urban planning? What is a better environment to live in?
There should be more friction added to car travel. More walkable neighborhoods with local business around the corner would pop up right where people are if the norm wasn't "everyone make endless individual trips to Walmart."
So stupid all the suburbanites blocking my driveway to come eat at nice restaurants because all they have out there is fast food; such a huge waste of resources
Eliminating parking on a single street is hardly a death sentence for nearby businesses.
And the whole idea is to encourage biking, ergo less parking is a good thing.
It's absolutely impossible everywhere except where it has been tried and works great. Car centric design is a poor match for dense urban development and reverting the city to be more transit and pedestrian focused almost always improves the situation, bringing more people to shops and restaurants and revitalizing previously moribund downtown districts.
Cool. Leave your car somewhere else.
Natives might have a different take, but I was recently in Berlin (which you might consider an 'established city'), and this seemed like a solved problem there. Bike lanes are at sidewalk grade, above the curb, with rumble strip or other tactile indicator for the boundary. You do NOT walk in the bike lane, it's just like walking in the car lane.
Considering the rise of additional micromobility vehicles, this is such an obvious solution when you see it in practice.
The locals will happily tell you that the bike lanes are not plentiful enough/not maintained well enough/don't get winter service (who wants to ride a bike in snow and during black ice conditions? Berliner!)
The complaining never stops.
Insulating bicycles from other vehicles is not the only path to road safety. When forced to interact with bikes more often, car drivers drive more safely and conservatively. Not sure that works everywhere or depends on better driver education and general empathy.
https://time.com/archive/6683576/signal-failure/
https://bikecity.amsterdam.nl/en/experiment-traffic-lights-d...
http://dutchcycling.nl/get-inspired/sarphatistraat-amsterdam...
Motorbikes in the US are the same problem, 30 years behind.
We have decades of bicyclists clamoring for infrastructure, and they've been starting to get it.
Meanwhile, e-bikes and delivery apps have caused a recent explosion in the number of motorbikes on the road. Cars think they're too slow. Cyclists think they're too fast. They're nimble and vulnerable like bicycles, but can be regulated like cars. Like taxis, they're often piloted by people who come from places with chaotic road cultures, and who have a financial incentive to bend the rules to get there faster.
Ideally, we'd be like the Dutch and have different outlets for different classes of transportation (mass + speed + amount of protection). Instead, everyone just gets pissed at everyone who moves differently than they do, and the road network fails to keep up with anyone's needs.
> Bikes don't belong on the road
I beg to differ. And I used a bike daily for commute (okay, when it wasn't raining) and a car otherwise.
The roads are for everybody. Bikes, cars, lorries, farmers. We should (and can) learn to live next to each other.
If you aren't a kid or aren't driving a bike for leisure on the weekend, then "separate from the street" bike ways have several drawbacks. Especially if you want to go speedy from A to B.
- often they aren't cleaned like the normal streets. So expect weeds growing into the lane, dog poop, farmers mud remnants, glass shards. Things a car driver sometimes see, but to a much lesser degree.
- kids play there, making the biker need to speed down
- dog owners walk there dogs there. Especially the long telescope lines are bad as bikers aren't usually not that good with rope jumping
- people walk there and if a bike rings the bell, they usually first turn around "What in gods own world could ring on a way dedicated to bikes?" seems to be an important question to be answered. Way more important than just going to the side.
- if a parking lot separates the bike way from the street, then the passengers in the cars just open the doors, not looking if some bike comes
- every street crossing is usually not level with the bike lane. So as a biker you always go 1-3 cm up/down twice for every crossing street. Some bikes have very narrow tires, that's not fun
- at the street crossings the car drivers are used to check for other cars. But they are less likely to check for bikes. This improves currently in Germany, but it's still not at the same level
So if I want to go fast from A to B by bike, I actually prefer to use the normal street. And if I go by car and see a bike then I can understand this. Except if the bike drives intentionally in the middle of the street. Don't do that, drive on the right side (except in UK or so ...)
Can't recall which European city it was (not AMS) where it was impossible to ride bikes on footpath but easy for padestrians. Very interesting hurdles were added. I wish I was more enthusiastic about taking photos. I had seen it on a very small stretch though. Somehwere in Belgium? I can't recall. In fact some of those hurdles/obstacles looked very artsy :)
And also there were dedicated bike lanes which should be a must in any self-respecting place.
Trampolines!
Copenhagen does this quite well: https://ramblershighway.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/201...
Have you heard of "The Copenhagen left"?
It's a method for a cyclist turning left at an intersection. Turning left from the bike lane on the right is of course impossible, because the land is on the right, despite being a basic function of biking somewhere.
So the cyclist wants to turn left. They go through the intersection and move off to the side, near any pedestrians waiting to cross. When the light turns they and the pedestrians can cross.
Otherwise the biker must leave the bike lane and merge across traffic.
In either case the bike lane is inherently problematic.
Your unexamined premise is that the car lanes are natural and good, while the bike lane is a problematic imposition on them.
"Turning left from the bike lane on the right is of course impossible"... if there is a lane of fast-moving automotive traffic directly on the cyclist's left. From the cyclist's perspective, the car lane is the "inherently problematic" one.
I don't think it's fair to say either is inherently problematic, just that there is inherent conflict with different mode types. Then, imho, you ought to look at the overall social cost/benefit of each mode type and prioritize accordingly.
They do have good urban cycling design, but I think a big part of it is merely the expectancy of both drivers and pedestrians that bikes are everywhere.
In the Piers Anthony novel "On a Pale Horse", the protagonist is taught a lesson about empathy and perspective by being forced to experience the same scenario as a pedestrian, a bicyclist, and a driver.
Reading your comment and many others makes me think that the most "intractable" problem with shared transportation infrastructure isn't making it physically safe, it's getting people to treat other road users as human. Even a car-only road still has this problem.
I think about that scene a lot, both when riding and when driving. What feels like a safe speed and safe distance while driving feels like neither when outside the car.
> Of course this is infeasible for most established cities.
It simply is not. The problem is sacrificing an unreasonable amount of space to drivers. There is a ton of space for human-scale vehicles.
It's not really infeasible, we have this in Holland everywhere and our cities are a lot narrower than the US ones.
>It's not really infeasible, we have this in Holland everywhere and our cities are a lot narrower than the US ones.
I said it is inherently problematic, not exactly that it's infeasible.
The Netherlands is excellent support for my claim because of what you just said. The cities support less car traffic and slower driving speeds. Something has to give and in that case its drivability. In fact there are a lot more streets where cars can't go at all, or are just mostly bikes correct?
And the 3 modes/lanes in one place is still not even solved while minimizing cars. Cyclist are more than 1/3rd of Dutch road deaths and the Fietsersbond has even argued that the middle lane. https://swov.nl/sites/default/files/bestanden/downloads/FS%2...
One slight problem with that: drivability is actually better.
Let's say you have space for two lanes. You can either a) install two car lanes, so >95% of people drive, or b) install one car lane and one bike lane, so 75% of people cycle. Which one is more drivable? Hint: it's the one with significantly fewer cars.
Similarly: car infrastructure takes up a lot of space. If your destination is 10% closer because cycling means far less car infrastructure is needed, you'll actually end up driving there faster.
A street's car traffic capacity is far less important than its total traffic capacity, and the last-mile driving speed is a rounding error on the whole trip. If you like driving, you should be in favor of building more bike infrastructure!
Less car traffic is great for liveable cities though. In my city they have pedestrianised major roads recently and it's been really amazing. People sitting on benches, enjoying the sun, where before it was hard to talk because of all the traffic noise. Unfortunately those streets have gone up in price a lot too because it's much better to live there now.
And yes but those road deaths are caused by cars. There's just more victims on bikes because there's so many bikes around.
Tho Onion should have also had “'Infeasible,' Says Only Nation Where This Does Not Happen” to link to.
Vancouver in Canada did a really good job with bike routes. Instead of putting bikes in a lane on a main road, they turned side roads into a kind of bicycle highway. It’s the best cycling infrastructure I’ve ever seen.
Bikes can totally belong on the same streets as cars if said cars can't go fast thanks to traffic calming infrastructure.
Minneapolis is very successfully demonstrating that this is not infeasible.
"Ideally we have entirely separate paths for bikes. Of course this is infeasible for most established cities."
Not a problem, we just reduce lanes for cars. Bikes use way less space, do not contribute to bad air, keep their riders healthy - well, except when car drivers kill them.
It is not at all infeasible. Many cities do this successfully.
usually at the expense of one or the other, usually cars.
FWIW I think that is a fine trade-off. I think people don’t truly realise how poorly cars scale until they take a really large step back and take a holistic view on infrastructure- which is inherently difficult for most people as they are so close and bought-in that they can’t even conceive of life being different than what they’re used to.
And they reach for exceptions to prove the requirement, when less cars in cities frees up the roads for those that truly need it (LGV and disabled access, but slow thus disincentivised unless actually required and thus less likely to cause accidents).
It's not necessarily at the expense of cars; the people riding bicycles on the bike lane are no longer driving cars blocking the way ahead of you, and parking their car in your favourite spot. Since bicycles use space more efficiently than cars, this can actually be a win for both the cyclists and the remaining drivers (who now have one less lane, but even less traffic). However this only happens if cycling adoption is high enough, which is why the bike routes have to be well connected.
Sometimes it doesn't even require sacrificing a lane, because many North American cities have lanes that are wildly larger than necessary or even appropriate given the posted speed limits. The lanes can simply be narrowed, and then this also causes the drivers to naturally drive at safer speeds, reducing traffic accidents, speeding tickets, and the unplanned delays that those both cause.
In Chicago, more people ride the Ashland bus than drive down Ashland every day. We still couldn’t take a lane for bus rapid transit.
People are already stupid, put them in a car and their brains start leaking out of their ears.
The bike lane space has to come from somewhere, parking space for bikes has to come from somewhere, intersections have to be set up to disadvantage one for the other.
Street space really is zero-sum, though more people in bikes and out of cars free’s up so much infrastructure that it can make less space work even better for cars- I’m sure urban designers are aware of this.
The major issue I presume that is faced in urban design is how to handle people coming from far away, the regional hub/spoke design (with train stations around a radial that have good parking allowing train access into the city) is not something actively pursued by advanced economies for some (presumably good) reason.
The bit you are missing is the space efficiency. Cars take up the most space by a large margin and getting people into more dense forms of transit (anything else) frees up space to be more efficiently used. Space is the most precious commodity in a city as many people are competing for every square meter.
This is also why suburbs and rural areas are a better fit for cars. Space is much more available and you can afford to be wasteful with it.
> The bike lane space has to come from somewhere
> though more people in bikes and out of cars free’s up so much infrastructure that it can make less space work even better for cars
Yes, you've reiterated my point...
And how many do it thoroughly, not just in small parts?
The same person is a driver, biker or pedestrial at different times of the same day.
Toxic entitled drivers hate bikers. Some bikers are toxic on sidewalks. Most sane people are actually able to exist with all three.
> Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between.
Bikes belong both on road and in between. Childrens bikes belong on side walk. Bikes moving in small speed can be on sidewalks too.
Chicago is putting these in everywhere to varying degrees of robustness based on traffic flows and it's fabulous.
Cars are the least suited to cities of these.
I see the problem more that motorised traffic tends to take all available space (due to their size and congestion concerns) and cyclists and pedestrians get to fight over the scraps left over.
Ultimately, motorised traffic tends to disrupt other forms of transport as people get used to travelling longer distances to get to shops, work etc. This then results in out-of-town hypermarkets which pretty much require people to use cars to get to them. The resultant traffic inevitably results in congestion, so more space is assigned to building roads and facilities get built further apart which of course just exacerbates the whole congestion issue.
> Ideally we have entirely separate paths for bikes. Of course this is infeasible for most established cities
Maybe in the US which has gone all in on providing space for cars and their parking, but it's quite feasible in old European cities that are much older. Often it relies on reducing the space available for cars. There's good examples of how some European cities were able to change drastically.
The Netherlands is a great example as during the 1970s, it was heavily biased towards motorised vehicles. The "Stop de Kindermoord" (approximately "Stop the child killing") campaign was key to changing attitudes and nowadays, cities such as Amsterdam are held up as examples of designing for multi-mode transport.
https://www.dutchreach.org/car-child-murder-protests-safer-n...
Bikes do pretty well on roads, especially in cities or quiet roads outside. We will all live in peace once we have self-driving cars instead of careless and violent human drivers. This already works pretty well in many cities in for example Spain.
Maybe not so well on roads, but streets are a good place for bikes. Especially E-Bikes that can keep up with city traffic.
Or we could just fund public transit.
I’m a driver and a pedestrian and I don’t hate cyclists because I’m not a psychopath.
The cars are the problem, not the bikes or pedestrians.
Great, then you agree with me that its problematic to have all three in the same place.
Cars don't belong in dense city centers. Bikes are not the problem.
I find drivers mostly hate themselves, but do occasionally take time out to hate other road users as well.
The logical escalation of desire paths - https://99percentinvisible.org/article/least-resistance-desi...
It really makes me sad seeing it. Bike lanes are also a messy problem in Italy where I live.
In these last years they added more bike lanes in parts of my city, but by taking small chunks from the margins of the roads, leaving as only barrier between the twos just a white painted line. I guess they noticed and started adding poles in between the twos, just not everywhere.
In many parts you're forced to ride your bike on the margin of the road, since there is no separate lane.
There's also the issue with crossings, since many of these by law can only be used by pedestrians, unless they're marked, which in most cases aren't. In such situations, you're treated as a vehicle on par with a car.
You may imagine how it feels getting fined because you've been hit by a car
Some DOTs have given official support to Tactical Urbanism, with methods for communities to propose and implement small projects themselves on accelerated timelines like bike lanes or pedestrian crosswalks.
It’s effectively crowdsourcing urban planning, I’m in support.
I honestly think if we invited this type of empowerment/interaction in the physical world a bit more it would probably be good for spurring creativity in society (I think we do a pretty good job of it in software). It’s just a nice reminder that everything is just made up by someone else, likely no smarter than you.
Also I can’t believe this was 10 years ago, I remember being super involved in SPUR in SF (and getting coffee there almost every day) and going to talks about this kind of thing
It's admittedly appealing because it feels far closer to ordinary citizens having an influence, but I can't help feel like this is a failure on the part of the professionals whose responsibility the planning and implementation of this is.
Have we really gotten to the point where we can't trust public infrastructure to be properly implemented, and so the only solution is to take it into our own hands? What are the tax dollars paying for then?
I think in many places we have gotten to the point where the planning, processes, and public approval process for some of these simple projects is more costly in time and money than just building it as a temporary experiment and revisiting it in a year or two to measure the outcome.
Not that there shouldn't still be some kind of standards and community approval, but I think we can afford to set that at a lower bar for certain categories of easily reversible projects.
And hopefully incorporating more of these ideas can teach us to be more efficient on transit infrastructure projects in general, where the US often significantly trails other countries on cost and implementation time.
Changes are stymied by bureaucracy put in place due to fear of litigation. The primary reason that things are studied, studied again, given community input, and checked for environmental impact is that if a city or municipality gets sued due to a road change, the onus is on them to demonstrate that they didn't create an unsafe condition. For example in cases where cars crash and are liable for property damage, car owners try to sue the city to claim that the area was unsafe. Pointing to a massive paper trail like this removes liability from a set of city or municipal concerns.
Nah, that's just the bullshit they tell you.
A municipal or state government will not be held liable for the consequences of shitty infrastructure unless there's like 9/11 levels of "the system was blinking red and you ignored it" and even then it's coin toss at best. Like maybe if they kill a ton of people there might be a lawsuit that sticks that's sooooo unlikely for the scope of the kind of thing we're talking about here.
The bureaucracy is put in place because none of the people putting it in place are paying for it, headcount is power, control over resources is power, etc, etc, and all the other perverse incentives you see in government workplaces. And of course once the gravy train is running all these parties have an incentive to keep it running.
> Nah, that's just the bullshit they tell you.
I mean, this is the "bullshit" that our DOT told us when talking about guerilla urbanism at a real city meeting. I agree that it's frustrating, but it is what we were told. I don't know how to "disprove" a defensive posture. And yes, our city goverment has been sued in cases on the grounds of poor street design (though they've only had to pay out once in 20 years.)
> The bureaucracy is put in place because none of the people putting it in place are paying for it, headcount is power, control over resources is power, etc, etc, and all the other perverse incentives you see in government workplaces. And of course once the gravy train is running all these parties have an incentive to keep it running.
Do you have any real experience in city or local government?
>. I don't know how to "disprove" a defensive posture. And yes, our city government has been sued in cases on the grounds of poor street design (though they've only had to pay out once in 20 years.)
You ask them how much money they'd pay out to lawsuits, how much money they were paying out before adopting those policies. You ask them how much these policies cost (I bet they haven't even calculated it because they'd rather not have that number exist). Etc. Etc You make them spell out the math for you.
>And yes, our city goverment has been sued in cases on the grounds of poor street design (though they've only had to pay out once in 20 years.)
Suing the .gov is often the only way to get them to shape up and do the thing they should have in the first place. Getting sued doesn't mean much. It's all about the results.
The fear might be real in the minds of the decision makers but that doesn't mean it's well founded or the policies that arise out of it are not wasteful.
>Do you have any real experience in city or local government?
Worse, state. MIC prior to that.
> The fear might be real in the minds of the decision makers but that doesn't mean it's well founded or the policies that arise out of it are not wasteful.
I mean I 100% agree with this by the way. We tried to tell the DOT to look at its own stats. The one lawsuit they actually paid out in was from street design before the formation of the DOT itself and the fact that they fell behind on the paving schedule. If you actually amortize the payout over 30 years (I think the city has had one of these roughly every 30 years) it ends up being some minuscule part of the budget. But they still shut us down.
We kind of have reached that point. You can look at the cost overruns and public consultation before every new project as failures of the system to deliver what people want.
> a failure on the part of the professionals whose responsibility the planning and implementation of this is.
Don't forget the short-sighted NIMBYism.
In my region of the world this exists and every year residents can vote for projects in their immediate vicinity.
I use a 5km stretch of bike lane daily going to work and back which was built this way. It runs along a railway line, so while it was navigable previously, off-season (so now) it would be covered in mud.
The initiative was spearheaded by just one lady who had an idea and a concrete proposal how to implement it.
Similar grassroots (heh, quite literally) activism is the idea of guerrilla gardening. Around here, a local nonprofit Villi vyöhyke (Wild Zone) [1] started as a small group of guerrillas but is now advocating, consulting and involved in many major rewilding projects initiated by municipalities and private companies.
[1] https://www.villivyohyke.fi/en/
I still think the better way to go is to find lawyers who will aggressively seek civil suits against the idiots who hit cyclists.
Two of the prominent members of our club were hit by a drunk driver outside a small town. Nobody died but bikes destroyed, nasty bruises, cracked ribs and vertebrae.
The driver shouldn’t have still had his license based on previous offenses. But his dad was a politician. Mayor I believe, and had been bailing that piece of shit out of trouble for who knows how long. I bet daddy would stop protecting him if he was on the hook for a couple million in damages. And/or corruption charges.
One of the victims was in fact a lawyer but I think he was property law not criminal.
It's nice to see that other countries are opening up to bikers. This is a very applaudable action of the local government. I hope and wish for everyone in the world to have the same bike infrastructure like we (the Dutch) do.
Title needs (2016) appending
It's terrible that it needs civilian incentives and a fatal accident first before something happens.
That said, in my experience, cyclists are the #1 group when it comes to disobeying traffic rules. There are a lot of crazy idiots driving cars or riding motorcycles but at least the vast majority of them stops at a red light, doesn't ride on the sidewalk, doesn't go against one-ways, etc.
if youve never listened to it, the podcast episode linked in the article about guerrilla public service is a really nice listen. Their episodes are pleasant, half scripted half chatty. Recommend!
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/guerrilla-public-serv...
110 comments
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23325319>
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Guerrilla Public Service Redux (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23325319 - May 2020 (110 comments)
Guerrilla Bike Lanes: San Francisco Makes Illicit Infrastructure Permanent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12953150 - Nov 2016 (137 comments)
Guerrilla Bike Lanes in San Francisco - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12333604 - Aug 2016 (266 comments)
There's another side of stuff like this. People living up in the hills above LA near trail heads will put up fake no parking zones in front of their houses. People have gotten real tickets in fake zones.
a counterexample of good tactical urbanism in Los Angeles People's Vision Zero, a group painting crosswalks where the city itself won't budge on safety demands (motonormativity is the rule)
https://www.reddit.com/r/BikeLA/comments/1pl8guj/i_started_a...
>painting crosswalks where the city itself won't budge
So, political vandals?
direct action gets the goods.
If you haven't noticed this entire thread is about illicit infrastructure. There could be a moral argument to be had (which you are not making) but no one is denying the vandalism aspect.
But people obviously don't want the "goods", by and large. Otherwise the city would budge.
Thats such a wild assumption. Your saying the government always folows the will of the public? Theres nothing people want that governments are giving them?
unless the city governance is in the pocket of the wealthiest members of the city's population, and those members don't want the goods. I witnessed this first hand in Los Angeles when I lived there.
Huh? Are cities near you known for quick and easy-to-navigate bureaucratic processes?
Crosswalks are popular. The issue is more complicated than you think.
[citation needed]
Reminds me of https://translate.kagi.com/www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-366...
It's very easy to save money when you don't pay workers and aren't worried about safety or accessibility. They'd made and were using several wooden bridges before this one, but all of them failed and were washed away. Maybe they get lucky and this one will stay up for a long time, and be continuously maintained by volunteers, but I'm very glad that the bridges in my city are more expensive because they were built by engineers who have to get designs approved and their work inspected and maintained regularly.
Actually it's easy to inflate prices when politicians are corrupt, also https://translate.kagi.com/globoplay.globo.com/v/3474112
This happened where I live over 10 years ago, a huge investment that collapsed when they tried to hammer the support off. This was overseen by Cowan and had many engineers signing off.The bottom line is when there is political interest, even guerrilla infra might work, but nothing survives corruption and neglect. The case of the makeshift bridge is only a matter of making the required tests and adaptations to make it legal or condemning the structure and building a new one.
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20261104150424/https://99percent...
More public spending will eventually lead those byciclers out of the state
This is great! They saw a problem, found a solution, and just fixed it. Better than complaining about it for 5-10 years waiting for someone else to do something
This is similar to The Oval at Ohio State University. Instead of planning walkways across a field of grass, they looked where students actually walked and then paved those routes.
I think this applies to so many things. Centrally planned things rarely work exactly as planned, especially if the people doing the planning are separate from those executing the plan.
Much of the time, it's better to observe what's working in practice (even if in a messy way) and systemize it rather than have a perfect concept that disintegrates upon contact with reality.
if you want it done right, you often have to do it yourself
I like guerrilla housing. City does not build enough flats, so you occupy unused parking lot or sidewalk, and build house there!
The return of Civil Disobedience as a tool for inspiring social change.
Maybe not as profound or important as the Civil Rights movement. But important nonetheless for public safety. (Assuming the guerrilla bike lanes themselves are safe and well thought out.)
what an absurd the hipster population taking over spaces of deadly, noisy and polluting vehicles and having the state collaborating with them /j