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Baronjutter posted:http://goo.gl/maps/DdKff Other than Entropist's good suggestion... a general traffic law upgrade saying that car drivers are ALWAYS responsible/guilty of an accident with a cyclist or pedestrian, unless they can prove otherwise beyond reasonable doubt, did wonders here. It forces car drivers to care about the less protected cyclists, because if they don't, they can get in deep poo poo real quick if they're in an accident.
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Apr 15, 2015 10:03
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BC already has a law effectively stating that drivers aren't supposed to run into pedestrians even when those pedestrians don't have right of way. I think the laws in the US and the rest of Canada are similar. How is that different from the Dutch law? On the other hand, BC effectively treats cyclists as motorists who're required to wear a helmet. That's got to be the exact opposite the Dutch approach.
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Apr 15, 2015 19:12
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Legal fault does not equal liability. Yes you are legally required to yield to a pedestrian in a cross walk. But that does not by default mean that you are 100% legally liable for that accident.
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Apr 15, 2015 19:17
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There's also cultural differences. Here is the dutch reaction to a cyclist getting hit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeJ-d86pKsw Compare that to local reaction I've heard about this accident here in Victoria. It's all "well she should have slowed down before the intersection!" "We need to install barriers to slow the bikes down" "Too many cyclists think they own the road, she should have been more aware". "They should make the bikes stop and let the more important trucks have right of way". Basically there's still, even in Victoria, this idea that riding a bike is just a hobby or a special interest group that needs to get out of the way of drivers, which are serious people trying to get to work to do their job. Also accidents just happen, it's part of driving. You can't expect drivers to drive perfectly safe, so peds and bikes need to be aware. Victim blaming? No it's about personal responsibility for your safety! Also once I saw a bike go through a red light at a minor intersection with no one around, yet they get mad when us drivers go through a stop sign and run them down, talk about hypocrisy.
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Apr 15, 2015 19:28
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The mass and velocity difference between a bike and a car is so great that putting bikes on roads with cars is essentially accepting that you are killing bicyclists. It's not a function of 'drive better' or 'bike better' it's a function of mass, velocity, and time. Statistics eventually wins out, and then we find out that yes bicyclists still have less mass and velocity than the cars that hit them, sucks to be a bicyclist, if only that massive fast thing hadn't pulped them. You can go around in circles about who should be more responsible, or you can acknowledge physics. Mass wins. Velocity helps. If you want bicyclists to be safe, they need to avoid interaction with more massive objects in motion. This means separate spaces for cars and bicycles, even if it's an artificial barrier that provides the separation. There is a very good reason the average freight train and highway intersection is a bridge with no interaction between the two vehicles. There's a very good reason you don't have daycares in the middle of freeways. Why do we insist that bicyclists be on the road? If you actually care about bicyclist safety, you need to be willing to pay for bicyclist transit infrastructure that isn't open to cars.
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Apr 15, 2015 19:47
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Seriously though getting in the habit of ignoring stop signs/red lights on your bike is something that will get you killed.
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Apr 15, 2015 19:52
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Yeah, the dutch figured this out a long time ago and have backed it up with data. Both in terms of improved safety but also improved modeshare of bikes and reduced car use. The reduced car use means less wear and tear on existing roads and less need to build new ones, so the "huge expense" of building the cycle network pays for it self by reducing the need for even more expensive roadworks. (ps does anyone actually have a link to a study laying this out? I'd love something to show to people who think investing in good bike infra is a waste of money or won't benefit them) But people here are too stupid to understand that. It turns into weird identity politics. Cyclists are treated as a special interest group, minorities. It's endless complaints about all the money "wasted" on them and "how come my gas tax is paying for their lanes!? They don't pay gas tax!!" . Bikes and cars do have to interact though, there will be crossings unless you build a huge skylines style network of elevated bike lanes or something. But once again, the dutch have it all mostly figured out and implemented. You give clear priority, you make sure crossings happen at close to 90 degree with good visibility as possible, and you provide spaces of about 1 car length for cars to stop for peds/bikes without blocking the lane. Traffic flows, bikes flow, everyone is safe. It's not hard and it's certainly not anything that should become an identity politics issue. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Apr 15, 2015 |
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Apr 15, 2015 19:59
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Isn't the place you live in like Canada's Florida as far as proportion of retirees? You really shouldn't be surprised that the mostly rural island you live on where the biggest "city" doesn't break 100k isn't all that hot on bikes .
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Apr 15, 2015 20:04
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Nintendo Kid posted:Isn't the place you live in like Canada's Florida as far as proportion of retirees? You really shouldn't be surprised that the mostly rural island you live on where the biggest "city" doesn't break 100k isn't all that hot on bikes . There's nearly 800,000 people on the island and Victoria is 380k and very dense and urban for a city its size. (the 2nd biggest city is about 100k) It's also the #1 city in Canada for modeshare of bikes. Victoria proper is fairly progressive, it's all the outlying "cities" that are barely suburbs or neighbourhoods that drag the region down. A lot of olds though... but they mostly keep to a few neighbourhoods. \/ Yeah it's about half as big as Ireland (although 90% of that is impassable mountain) Victoria really does have at least 300k in its core area, the borders are absolutely arbitrary and the divisions are extremely tiny. The whole city is like 10km wide. What population and stats would be needed to get the coveted Nintendo Kid Stamp of Impressedness? Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Apr 15, 2015 |
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Apr 15, 2015 20:43
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Baronjutter posted:There's nearly 800,000 people on the island and Victoria is 380k and very dense and urban for a city its size. (the 2nd biggest city is about 100k) Victoria is 80k people, you only get to 380k by including all its suburbs you so detest. Also there's 800,000 people on the island but it's loving huge, it's nearly as large as the entire state of Maryland which has got 6 million people. 800k isn't very impressive. It also appears that the size of the urbanized area of Greater Victoria is around 88% the size of NYC with 4.5% the population. It's tiny and barely dense at all. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Apr 15, 2015 |
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Apr 15, 2015 20:55
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The way Victoria is split up is really weird though, lumping in Oak Bay or Saanich with Sidney or Langford doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
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Apr 15, 2015 21:14
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God I fucking love Diablo 3 gold, it even paid for this shitty title
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Baronjutter posted:There's also cultural differences. Here is the dutch reaction to a cyclist getting hit This is a good vid and I recommend everyone watches it. You also asked for a study. I did a quick google, and found a page listing a number of scientific reports with possibly interesting information about this: http://www.copenhagenize.com/2011/08/case-for-bicycle-infrastructure.html I also found this: http://www.ocs.polito.it/biblioteca/mobilita/EconomicSignificance.pdf . Only read the summary, but they say the cost reduction from the general increase in health caused by less accidents, less air polution and more exercise in a cycling culture has a significant positive effect on both GDP and the employment rate. Add to that the fact, that those who decide to stay in their car have less busy roads to go through (cyclists take up less space than cars and are on a separate path anyway), and they suffer less from traffic jams, get to work faster, you got another big economic advantage. One important conclusion is that when cycling is promoted in a place that DOES NOT have good cycle facilities such as separated paths, the economic advantage is still there, but is way way smaller. Additionally, in this case the amount of accidents INCREASES. It's only when the cycle facilities are in operation that the economic advantages start rising exponentially and the number of accidents start dropping fast to levels lower of what they were before. I think that's important to realize. Car-heavy places need to overcome a bit of an energy barrier before the advantages become obvious.
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Apr 15, 2015 21:29
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Baronjutter posted:Yeah it's about half as big as Ireland (although 90% of that is impassable mountain) Victoria really does have at least 300k in its core area, the borders are absolutely arbitrary and the divisions are extremely tiny. The whole city is like 10km wide. What population and stats would be needed to get the coveted Nintendo Kid Stamp of Impressedness? Dog, the point is you have a very small city and moderate sized, rather non-dense metro area, but you act like it's surprising that you don't have big city amenities or development styles going on. And that's to say nothing of how you really can't expect all the extra old people to be friendly to any sort of development that won't benefit them (same problem significant parts of florida got). And like, sure, you're the "highest modeshare of cyclists in Canada" but that appears to be based on the fact that 9,000 people bike per day out of a typical day's 180,000 commuters for the metro area. That may be the biggest share but it's still a tiny group of people.
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Apr 15, 2015 21:36
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To add perspective, Amsterdam is the largest city in the Netherlands and has about 800k people in it, suburbs included.
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Apr 15, 2015 22:43
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John Dough posted:To add perspective, Amsterdam is the largest city in the Netherlands and has about 800k people in it, suburbs included. To add some more perspective, according to March 2015 numbers, Amsterdam city has a population of 822k. The number of bicycles in Amsterdam city is an estimated 881k (2012 estimate). E: Okay this is weird. I had some other number here from the Amsterdam metropole region, but apparently there's multiple amsterdam city regions defined, each has a random set of surrounding municipalities, and each contain a bunch of things I wouldn't consider suburbs. So there's no real point in listing that, I'll stick to the 822K number. Carbon dioxide fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Apr 15, 2015 |
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Apr 15, 2015 23:04
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John Dough posted:To add perspective, Amsterdam is the largest city in the Netherlands and has about 800k people in it, suburbs included. Amsterdam metro is much larger than that though. Your figure excludes the metro area even though you probably couldn't tell you had crossed over from Amsterdam into Amstelveen without looking at the street signs. It is all one continious built up area of ~1.5 million. Groningen is a stronger example. A fairly isolated city of 200k with excellent bicycle infrastructure.
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Apr 15, 2015 23:09
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Alright Nihilism, if you insist. Amsterdam city region has a population of 1.4 million. No wait, the Amsterdam metropolitan area has a population of 2.4 million and crosses multiple provinces, including the cities of Lelystad and Aalsmeer. You know what, if we're gonna use that kind of definition, why not consider the Randstad, including Rotterdam, as one big suburb of Amsterdam? It has a population of 7.1 million. Or shall we define the entirety of West-Europe as a suburb of Amsterdam? Why not? Come on, settle on a definition already. 
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Apr 15, 2015 23:22
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Carbon dioxide posted:Alright Nihilism, if you insist. Defintions or urban areas are difficult. I agree the metro area will always be vague depending on the definition you use. But just the municipality also makes no sense since that excludes the fully enclosed muncipality of Diemen and Amstelveen which is closer to much of the city than much of South-east and places like Badhoevendorp, Hoofddorp, Zwanenburg and Purmerend which would just not exist (in their current form) without Amsterdam. When you go out to some of the other places sometimes included, Almere, Haarlem or sometimes even Utrecht that is more debatable. But 882k is lowballing it, i feel the 1.4-1.5 million number is closer to reality. For Rotterdam you have a similar weird definition. Rotterdam muncipality includes Hook of Holland which is 40km and about a hour drive from the city center but excludes Schiedam which is really a continious built up area with Rotterdam (you literally can't tell you've crossed into a another city on the street apart from the signs). But this is a massive derail. Base your arguments on Groningen, it is a much stronger argument since it is not in any way part of the Randstad. NihilismNow fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Apr 15, 2015 |
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Apr 15, 2015 23:36
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Does anyone know the name of the thing that is like a rotary, but one of the crossroads has right of way all the way through? Like this: http://sketchtoy.com/64942907 I don't have any idea what to call it, the gps calls it a traffic circle but when I think traffic circle this isn't what I think of.for obvious reasons (I think of a rotary) and I assume the feature has a proper name.
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Apr 16, 2015 01:33
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Cities of any size can have nice things. 380 is hardly too small for basic good bike infra, there's cities far smaller than that with comprehensive bike lanes/paths, trams, all the nice things. 50% of the dwellings in Victoria are "apartments under 5 stories", only 15% are detached houses. Even if you only focus on the very urban core of the city which has about 150k, it's comparable to population and density to many european cities of a similar size. There's no reason it can't support or benefit from a dutch style network of bike infra, the reasons are cultural and political, not an issue with total population or density or any other raw statistic. Build the infrastructure and we could easily get close to dutch levels of cycling, which would have a huge ROI for the city.
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Apr 16, 2015 01:57
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GlyphGryph posted:Does anyone know the name of the thing that is like a rotary, but one of the crossroads has right of way all the way through? There isn't any special name for it, it's simply a traffic circle that's likely to be replaced sooner rather than later. New Jersey has had a lot of traffic circles that were formerly "equal weighted" for right of way modified to have clear priority for one of the crossing roads prior being replaced with a straight up traffic light or an overpass interchange. Sometimes they just stay as the heavily directed circle when the major route is very important and the connecting routes are much less important, here's an instance of a circle that's going to stay as is for that reason: https://www.google.com/maps/place/4...1s0x0:0x0?hl=en Baronjutter posted:Cities of any size can have nice things. 380 is hardly too small for basic good bike infra, there's cities far smaller than that with comprehensive bike lanes/paths, trams, all the nice things. 50% of the dwellings in Victoria are "apartments under 5 stories", only 15% are detached houses. Even if you only focus on the very urban core of the city which has about 150k, it's comparable to population and density to many european cities of a similar size. There's no reason it can't support or benefit from a dutch style network of bike infra, the reasons are cultural and political, not an issue with total population or density or any other raw statistic. Build the infrastructure and we could easily get close to dutch levels of cycling, which would have a huge ROI for the city. The reasons you can't have nice bike infrastructure is: 1) Whole bunch of old people around. Old people oppose pretty much anything and they vote heavily. 2) You still have a tiny population of people who actually bike and are presumably willing to lobby for it. It may be the highest for a metro area overall in the country but 9000 people usually don't have much of a say 3) European cities of a similar size had the advantage of being bombed to gently caress repeatedly and not having populations that could afford cars anyway for quite some time. As such they had way more impetus to start up bike focused infrastructure, lots of which started as simply "not car focused" originally. Also no, not really, cities of any size rarely can just have nice things. Without things like literally killing millions and devastating cities in multiple world wars, it would have been quite likely for European cities to have motorized the way North America did. Victoria, like so many other North American cities needs extensive pushes to build new bike infrastructure (but really who cares about that if you can get actual good public transit I say), instead of merely continuing to have robust infrastructure and building off of it for decades. And again like you got a real small actual city there, this has severe impacts on what can be afforded and done without cooperating with increasingly unfriendly suburbs and more outlying areas. The province level government clearly doesn't place heavy importance on it, and that's who you might need to rely on due to the small size of local government. If we were talking of a single municipality of 380,000 it would be a whole different story than a municipality of 80,000 plus a bunch of neighbor cities/suburbs/etc.
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Apr 16, 2015 02:30
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I get to attend a bikeway design conference in a couple weeks. Perhaps I should ask what population density is necessary to warrant bike infrastructure expenditures. What do you all think it is? 100 people per square mile or so?GlyphGryph posted:Does anyone know the name of the thing that is like a rotary, but one of the crossroads has right of way all the way through? That's old-school. They'd be better off replacing it with a throughabout / hamburger roundabout.
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Apr 16, 2015 02:56
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Anyone else taking the PE this Friday? I'm burnt out on studying and kinda just want this poo poo to be over. I'm so hosed if I get some of the harder transportation questions in the morning. I know gently caress all about it still.
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Apr 16, 2015 03:09
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:Anyone else taking the PE this Friday? I'm burnt out on studying and kinda just want this poo poo to be over. I'm so hosed if I get some of the harder transportation questions in the morning. I know gently caress all about it still. If it's your first time taking it, don't sweat it  Chances are you'll pass, and most people I know who passed on their first try said it was a lot easier than they expected. If you've been prepping with something like Six Minute Solutions and/or still have your old college texts and notebooks, you should be in great shape.Let me know if you've got any last-minute transportation questions. You can shoot me a PM, too, if you want.
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Apr 16, 2015 03:17
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lavaca posted:BC already has a law effectively stating that drivers aren't supposed to run into pedestrians even when those pedestrians don't have right of way. I think the laws in the US and the rest of Canada are similar. How is that different from the Dutch law? Do you have a link? The best I could find was MVA 181 (a) quote:181 Despite sections 178, 179 and 180, a driver of a vehicle must It's not exactly very strong language in there. As for bikes, "a person operating a cycle on a highway has the same rights and duties as a driver of a vehicle" BC MVA 183 (1) As bike lawyer David Hay put it, that's like saying the lions and the antelope have the same rights. BC MVA for reference: http://www.bclaws.ca/civix/document/LOC/complete/statreg/--%20M%20--/47_Motor%20Vehicle%20Act%20[RSBC%201996]%20c.%20318/00_Act/96318_05.xml
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Apr 16, 2015 06:26
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Lead out in cuffs posted:It's not exactly very strong language in there. Well, to be fair, it's a "must" clause, that's one of the strongest words you're likely to find in a legal document.  But I agree with your overall point, just nit-picking.
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Apr 16, 2015 07:28
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Hell, here's the case law (with examples provided by the provincial auto insurance company): http://www.icbcclaiminfo.com/node/26 It's tricky, being law, but basically unless the pedestrian is in a crosswalk, there's a whole lot of victim-blaming that happens.
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Apr 16, 2015 08:54
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Nintendo Kid posted:The reasons you can't have nice bike infrastructure is: Let's look at these points from a Dutch cultural perspective, shall we? 1) Most old people here would oppose any traffic change that makes it LESS likely for cyclists to go there. Either they can't safely drive a car anymore, or if they do, they prefer to drive really slowly. Most of them ride a bicycle (with an electrical motor as a helper) to the supermarket or simply walk. Cars driving fast through their neighbourhood scare them, because it makes road crossings for pedestrians most dangerous. Additionally, they might have a strong opinion about the environmental impact of any project. In other words, old people are all in favour of a more extended and safer bike network, and lots of shared slow residential streets where cars can't go faster than bikes. 2) It's hard to find a Dutch city with a tiny cycling population so let's extend our view a bit... It's been shown, both in cities in America, and in Scandinavia, that as soon as you get some cycling infrastructure going, the cyclists will come. On top of that, many Dutch car drivers lobby for better bike infrastructure, because it makes their roads less crowded (bikes take up less space), and in the case of separated roadways, makes things much safer for the drivers. If the bikes are on another part, there's no chance that a driver suddenly has to slam the brakes, causing a collision with the car behind him, because he didn't see a cyclist in front of him in time. Car drivers are in favour of better bike infrastructure, because it's to their own advantage. 3) This is partially true. The bombing part is a bit exaggerated, many European cities are still intact from medieval times. It is a fact that the poverty that's a result of the war was a reason bikes got more popular. However, in the Netherlands, modern (built some decades after the war) towns tend to have even more extensive cycling infrastructure than older ones. Examples are Houten (https://www.google.nl/maps/@52.0163926,5.1796381,15z most neighbourhoods only have a single entrance road from the Rondweg, forming an inescapable maze for cars, but they are all connected by bike paths, the tiny black lines) and Almere. That's because for new city design, the designers can make all their wet dreams come true. Changing existing infrastructure is always harder. On the other hand, there's the Belgian city of Brussels. Brussels used to have a large amount of cyclists, but its government believed cars were the future, so they removed most bike infrastructure and were left with car roads. The result? The most clogged city in a large region, lots of air pollution, and a lot more accidents. It seems that in recent times, some people have discovered that cycling through Brussels is faster than driving a car - if you can survive it. They are lobbying for rebuilding a cycling infrastructure and make the city more pleasant again and give the remaining cars more room. The city is very slow to react, though. In conclusion, while your arguments are probably not wrong from an American perspective, the only reason for that is an American cultural background. Most North-Americans haven't ever seen a different way, so they simply don't know that things could be better. That some relatively cheap projects in favour of cyclists would be advantageous to both car drivers and the elderly. That makes me kinda sad, and I can only hope that there will be more information campaigns focusing on the advantages for everyone instead of only on the advantages of a minority of loud sport cyclists. I mean, in the Netherlands, nobody listens to the lycra-wearing sport cyclists either. If anything, they're seen as idiots that go way too fast for their own good and endanger the lives of other cyclists, such as commuters, with their crazy law-breaking way of cycling. They also tend to annoy car drivers. The government listens to the complaints of commuting cyclists and drivers... I mean, there's a strong economic advantage in that. Cichlidae posted:I get to attend a bikeway design conference in a couple weeks. Perhaps I should ask what population density is necessary to warrant bike infrastructure expenditures. What do you all think it is? 100 people per square mile or so? I'm not a fan of basing this purely on average population density. To give some Dutch examples: if you go to a very rural place with nothing more but a single farm with a house every few hundred meters or so - don't bother too much. Maybe draw some lines on the road near intersections to show there might be crossing cyclists. There are often cycleways connecting towns and some touristy cycle paths through parks and the like, but that is about it. The cycleways are kinda important if the towns are not too far apart. It's not too uncommon to cycle 5 - 15 km (one-way) to work or school. Some people would cycle 30-40 km to work one-way, but then you're getting in the territory of the much rarer sport cyclist, and it's probably not necessary to invest in those. I do have to admit that in the Netherlands you don't find highways surrounded by miles of nothingness. Usually, there's some tiny local access roads nearby. Even if there's no dedicated cycling infrastructure, cyclists can take those to get from town to town safely. That's for rural areas. What about towns? Well, if you have a tiny village (pop. 300 or so) with just two or three streets, and in the middle some stores or a supermarket, and maybe a school... DEFINITELY invest in at least some infrastructure. Maybe not separated bike paths, but at least barriers at the corners of intersections so they can cross safely. This will help convince the locals to cycle the few hundred meters to the general store instead of taking the car there. You can reduce the size of the supermarket parking lot by a third or so, just dump some bicycle parking racks next to the door, and use the reclaimed land for something nice. Local kids can now cycle to school or even go get the groceries by themselves. Villages/towns with a population over a few thousand tend to have multiple access roads, sometimes multiple lane roads too - and at that point you can't live without separated bike paths anymore. There's too many cars to have cyclists share those main roads with cars safely. Have separated bike paths for the main roads, a shared space thing for residential areas, and if possible connect residential areas with small stretches of bike path, so that cars have to go around to a main road while cyclists can take a more direct route. Any city larger than that is just an extension from that idea on a larger scale. Although, once the city becomes larger than a few miles wide, in the ideal case there's a bunch of 'cycle highways'. Dedicated, straight cycleways that don't have to be parallel to any road and connect important parts of the city with each other. E.g. a straight path from downtown to the university campus. Or a sort of spiderweb pattern starting from the city center. In the Netherlands, something like that tends to happen when a new urban area is being designed. It's not as common in older cities, because it's kinda impossible to make straight lines in older cities. quote:That's old-school. They'd be better off replacing it with a throughabout / hamburger roundabout. Funny names. What are those?
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Apr 16, 2015 08:58
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Boy I wish we had such things here in central California.  The closest thing my town of 92k has is some  bike path lanes/markings painted on the sides of the roads.A hamburger roundabout/throughabout is a roundabout with a straight lane cutting through it in one direction of traffic. I believe its meant to be used where a higher speed road intetsects with a low traffic road in a place with very good visibility. I've never encountered one myself. My town has no major roundabouts that I know of.
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Apr 16, 2015 15:14
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Baronjutter posted:Cities of any size can have nice things. 380 is hardly too small for basic good bike infra, there's cities far smaller than that with comprehensive bike lanes/paths, trams, all the nice things. 50% of the dwellings in Victoria are "apartments under 5 stories", only 15% are detached houses. Even if you only focus on the very urban core of the city which has about 150k, it's comparable to population and density to many european cities of a similar size. There's no reason it can't support or benefit from a dutch style network of bike infra, the reasons are cultural and political, not an issue with total population or density or any other raw statistic. Build the infrastructure and we could easily get close to dutch levels of cycling, which would have a huge ROI for the city. Sometimes it's also about the smaller towns in the area. You can see that there are still some very nice routes and bike-specific infra there, despite the relatively low population density for the Netherlands. e: Also, I don't think all that world war stuff you were saying is true. The Netherlands hasn't been bombed very much at all and has good bike infra, unlike Germany which was bombed all over. The damage was already fixed up before car use really took off and was countered by cycling advocates, which happened a few decades later. Entropist fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Apr 16, 2015 |
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Apr 16, 2015 15:34
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Carbon dioxide posted:Funny names. What are those? The worst things (not really though I do dislike them), and about as common as the nameless thing I brought up earlier around here. We seem to be about 1/3rd the ones I mentioned, 1/3rd real rotaries, and then one third "hamburger" ones that combine all the inefficiencies of a rotary and an intersection (lots of merging into blindspots combined with two or more different intersections with lights) for no noticeable benefit that I can see, since they are basically enormous traffic jams from 6am to 9pm every day of the week. I'm sure people who know about this stuff must have a good reason for building them, but they are my third most hated traffic structure. My trip to work every day has 2 through rotaries (I do not get to drive on the through parts), 2 regular rotaries, and 1 hamburger. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Apr 16, 2015 |
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Apr 16, 2015 15:40
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Carbon dioxide posted:I'm not a fan of basing this purely on average population density. To give some Dutch examples: if you go to a very rural place with nothing more but a single farm with a house every few hundred meters or so - don't bother too much. Maybe draw some lines on the road near intersections to show there might be crossing cyclists. There are often cycleways connecting towns and some touristy cycle paths through parks and the like, but that is about it. The cycleways are kinda important if the towns are not too far apart. It's not too uncommon to cycle 5 - 15 km (one-way) to work or school. Some people would cycle 30-40 km to work one-way, but then you're getting in the territory of the much rarer sport cyclist, and it's probably not necessary to invest in those. I do have to admit that in the Netherlands you don't find highways surrounded by miles of nothingness. Usually, there's some tiny local access roads nearby. Even if there's no dedicated cycling infrastructure, cyclists can take those to get from town to town safely. Entropist fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Apr 16, 2015 |
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Apr 16, 2015 15:47
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Thanks for the great dutchposting, Carbon dioxide. Paris is also realizing they've built them selves into a car corner and have been taking drastic action. In just a few years they've reduced car ownership from 60% to 40% simply through making sidewalks and transit better and parking more difficult. They've done some modest improvements to cycling but Paris is a huge city with many very wide busy roads or tiny narrow roads. Even so, Paris announced it wants to become the "cycling capital of europe" and are investing big money to make this happen. It will un-clog their roads, clean their air, and help people get around more efficiently. What pragmatic mayor or traffic engineer wouldn't love that? I don't think they'll get the percentage modeshare of the better dutch cities, but Paris is huge so they might "win" in terms of total cyclists. Watch out netherlands? I've heard nothing good about Brussels. A charming european capital strangled by ever thickening vines of highways and stroads that choke the life out of the city. Here in north america we get excuses like "Oh we can't copy the dutch, it's a different culture, they just love to bike there it's in their blood!". Bullshit, it's in the infrastructure. You build a bunch of highways, people drive. You build a bunch of bike infra, they ride their bike, you build a good metro they ride it. People take the most convenient method of transport and the culture adapts around that. If for example you initiated a 5 year plan in Victoria to build dutch-level cycling infastructure, by the time it was done the "culture" would have adapted to it and you'd be seeing not only dutch comparable stats for transport mode-share but also attitudes towards safety. The city is very slowly building some kinda crappy paint-based infrastructure and even that has been getting numbers up. A recent survey showed something like 70% of people who don't cycle said they'd love to, if the infrastructure was there. I don't even own a bike and my work is only a 15 min walk away, but I'd love to ride a bike sometimes and save a little time. I don't because even though part of the route has some painted-on lanes, a few small parts of the route are 4 lane streets with no room for bikes where you have to "take the lane" and I don't have enough lycra to bike like that. People want a safe route to and from their destination and a single gap is enough to make people not cycle. We have some good regional trails or "bike highways" that are nearly tire to tire during rush hour, and some of our more busy arterial have gotten some bike lanes by turning 3-lane one-way streets into 2 lane. But once again, for most people's trips those routes huge detours or only a small part of their trip. People will say "we built this new bike lane why isn't it crowded?!". It's like building a wheelchair ramp half way up the stairs to a building and asking why wheelchair use hasn't doubled. You need to provide complete routes, then you see the boom in cycling. The city is investing more and more money into it, but it's always controversial. It's very hard to sell people on projects that will only begin to work in the future. The far future if they build at such a slow pace... Here, this is "How the dutch got their cycle paths" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o Nothing to do with bombs. Post-war development around the world was universally car-centric. The best cities in europe were the places not bombed and thus not re-built for cars. Basically the dutch responded to cars killing people and their cities by fighting against car use, while in north america we just tried to make driving safer and told people to get the gently caress off the street and into a car if you wanted to be safe. If your kid was killed on their way to school the problem isn't the cars or infastructure, you are a bad parent for letting your child walk. Mostly it's about holding hands though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4jBpdTicRI Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Apr 16, 2015 |
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Apr 16, 2015 15:52
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Cichlidae posted:If it's your first time taking it, don't sweat it It is my first time, yeah. I'm mostly worrying over nothing. Picked the geotech afternoon session since that's my job and I think the only thing I'm really stumbling on still is some structural poo poo (anything related to inertia), random transportation poo poo I can't find info anywhere (vertical clearance between something and a vertical curve to name one) and some of the crazier foundation problems which I'm reviewing right now.
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Apr 16, 2015 17:41
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This amused me: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/us/lindstrom-minnesota-umlaut-scandinavian-roots-governor-dayton.html?_r=0 Umlauts and sign rules.
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Apr 16, 2015 17:59
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Agreeing that past "not being farms left and right" cycling infrastructure being relevant depends little on population density. Instead, if the local population could reasonably make many (most?) of their daily trips on bike, cycling infrastructure is relevant on all roads with a daily car traffic peak above some threshold. If the local children could distance-wise bike to school, make their routes safe and watch them bike to school. If the local workforce could distance-wise get to work on bike, make their routes safe and watch them bike to work. If grocery shopping could be reached by bike, make it safe and let people make quick trips to buy small amounts, and perhaps overconsumption will fall. And when you've enabled some of those trips the community might change shape to allow more of them.
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Apr 16, 2015 18:06
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GlyphGryph posted:The worst things (not really though I do dislike them), and about as common as the nameless thing I brought up earlier around here. We seem to be about 1/3rd the ones I mentioned, 1/3rd real rotaries, and then one third "hamburger" ones that combine all the inefficiencies of a rotary and an intersection (lots of merging into blindspots combined with two or more different intersections with lights) for no noticeable benefit that I can see, since they are basically enormous traffic jams from 6am to 9pm every day of the week. Interesting. The only think I can think of that's somewhat similar is when a highway or so has exits that end up on a big roundabout, while the main highway has an overpass over the entire width of the roundabout. That way the cars on the highway don't have to take the roundabout, the drivers on the road to which the highway exits/entrances attach have the advantage of a roundabout, and there's no extra merging or intersecting compared to the default situation. nielsm posted:If grocery shopping could be reached by bike, make it safe and let people make quick trips to buy small amounts, and perhaps overconsumption will fall. ... alright that's a bit of an exaggeration. But I can easily carry a few days worth of groceries on my bike. Carbon dioxide fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Apr 16, 2015 |
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Apr 16, 2015 18:30
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Yeah, you'd be surprised how much you can carry on a bike. I usually grab groceries on the way home from work every other day, doesn't cost much time at all and I can easily carry it on the bike.
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Apr 16, 2015 19:20
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The cargo bike, most frequent cargo: lazy children https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huE7M4JQMYk
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Apr 16, 2015 19:59
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SUV of the cycle path .
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Apr 16, 2015 20:48
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