Safe Cycling Showdown - Good vs. Bad City Design - Plus 1 Minus 2

Not Just Bikes on YouTube covers road/pedestrian/bike safety extensively. link Specific videos: Crossing the street should be safer: link How to quickly build a cycling city: link Wasting money on car infrastructure: link The wrong way to set speed limits: link Safe cycling: ▶ this video "Stroads" are dangerous: link

> The best option is to just take the lane and follow the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles. You get noticed and you don't have conflicts at intersections. You don't need to be physically fit to do it (other than be physically capable of riding a bike). Most people won't be comfortable doing this for the simple reason that they'll be going slower than surrounding traffic and it will piss of drivers, which is scary when you're on a bike and they have two tons of metal right beside you. If the safest way to do something is mildly terrifying and generally viewed as antagonistic, we can't be surprised that most people will avoid doing that thing. I've really been inspired lately by watching the videos on this channel about urban design in the Netherlands: link I didn't realize how much urban cycling raises my blood pressure until I watched this video that compares a journey in Canada to a journey in the Netherlands, it's hard to imagine cycling being so safe and easy outside a college campus: ▶ this video

> "The car was probably driven by someone who needed to do a human thing. Drivers are not evil Captain Planet villains." In other situations where someone annoys hundreds of people, harms the health of hundreds of people, primarily for their own benefit, we'd call that bad, undesirable, and socially shame the person doing it, wouldn't we? The situation is anti-human; it's not a nice situation to exist in as an unaugmented human outside a car, not nice to walk in, to talk in, tarmac road isn't beautiful, vehicle fumes don't smell nice, they're harmful to health, and it's not cheap to build cars and roads everywhere and maintain them. Cars take a huge amount of space to move one person compared to the space of one walking human or one biking human, and they push 'places' further apart to make room for vehicles and car parks. It should be that for such tradeoffs, cars need to have an enormous payback - things which absolutely can't be done without them. For example, emergency services - noisy, but needs to move mutiple people and equipment in a hurry. Delivery vehicles needing to move large quantities of goods around, labour needing to move equipment around. However if it's done for travelling 2 miles because urban design gave no thought to walking or biking so that the only safe and convenient way to cover 2 miles is by car, even though owning a car is a huge cost, that's anti-human design. The NotJustBikes YouTube channel linked above has the message that most people are not 'car people' but will use whatever transport is (the cheapest, the quickest, the most convenient). It's a failing of urban design and big picture thinking when individual car driving is the winner for many short journeys when it could be otherwise. It's a bit of a failure when walking and driving are a sidewalk beside a main road and other routes have no (sidewalks, streetlights, bike lanes, safe crossings, etc). Compare for example the NJB videos: - "Why grocery shopping is better in Amsterdam" - link where he compares shopping for food in Amsterdam with driving to an out of town box store in Canada, and having to drive in Canada. - "Safe cycling showdown - Good vs. Bad city design" - ▶ this video which is a 20 minute video, first 10 minutes is NJB cycling from Amsterdam center to a hardware store ~10Km away on the edge of town, voice overlay is him describing what makes good/bad cycling infrastructure along the way. The next 10 minutes is an equivalent ride in Calgary, Alberta, from city center to out of town hardware store a similar distance, and similar overlay commentary. The contrast is stark.

> Most things we take for granted like being able to get a week's worth of groceries home in one trip or going to enjoy a restaurant that specializes in a niche style, or buying cheap goods at a warehouse store, or being able to get to a hospital within half an hour all require automobile infrastructure It's possible to do these things without a car if your city has prioritized making that a reality. The exact mode depends on the city. Some examples: * In the Netherlands, cycling infrastructure is strong enough that you can bike to a big box store outside the city and load up your bike with what you need [0]. You can fit a week's worth of goods in a cargo bike [1] if that's your style. There is also an argument to be made that you don't need to buy groceries weekly if your city is dense and you have a store nearby. * In Pittsburgh, there are flyer (fast track) busses that will take you to malls in the northern car-oriented suburbs as well as light rail to the southern suburbs. So you can reach most niche stores in the metro area by bus/light rail. Although it's pedestrian hostile in the northern burbs. In the city proper, bus coverage is good enough to get basically anywhere including all the niche restaurants. Though light rail is more frequent and pleasant. Bus frequency and reliability is just OK, not great. Could be improved by changing priorities. My point here is that Pittsburgh's urban form is not great but they still came up with transit solutions that work for average people. * In Toronto, busses run every 10 minutes on an enormous number of routes. This reduces transfer times so much that travel time is nearly on parity with cars, even though the city is very car-oriented. I don't understand your note about hospitals because ambulances get the right of way and can travel in bus lanes. > The fact is taking a leisurely stroll on a nice spring morning when you want to is very different from being forced to walk for miles through freezing rain in November after a long day of hard work. I agree, but it's not so bad in a dense urban area with adequate bus shelters, sidewalk clearing and bus lines scattered everywhere. > Anyone telling you that the simple existence of car infrastructure is the problem has not thought through what elimination of that infrastructure really means. The simple existence of car infrastructure is the problem because it causes sprawl and exacerbates our climate emergency. Cities have already come up with the solution and that is good transit, active transit included. [0]: ▶ this video [1] link

No, 25km/h is the normal maximum speed for a normal person cycling. > On my road bike I sustain 20 mph for most of the ride. A few people manage 32km/h in the Netherlands or Denmark, but only if they have a long commute through the suburbs or a rural area, often for recreation/leisure/exercise. In towns, other people aren't expecting Lance Armstrong to appear, and can step/swerve into your path. You can see from [1] (at the linked point) that there's no way you'll be going fast through the centre of Amsterdam. The path isn't wide enough, there are far too many other cyclists and pedestrians, and the car drivers yielding at the junctions would be startled, at best. The same at 4m32s (a park). At 9m37s it looks like the kind of place you'd get some road/fast cyclists (in fact the narration says so). People who want to go as fast as you would usually select a different route, where possible. [1] ▶ this video