I wish urban designers in Poland learned from this. Our bike lanes are terribly designed, cars turn right into them with very poor visibility. The "solution" is that lawmakers introduce additional restrictions for bikers, which are unclear to everyone, so right now nobody really knows if bikes have priority on bike lane crossings or not.
I love the Netherlands, and not just for their livable street design, I just wish they food weren't so bland. They make even German cuisine look adventurous in comparison.
As a Dutch person... this is sadly not just 100% accurate, it's almost part of our culture by now, hahaha. For example, in Gerard Reve's "De Avonden" ("The Evenings", a literary classic in the Netherlands from 1947) the daily bland dinners are described like a recurring cynical joke.
Apparently World War 2 is to blame for the shift in food culture. Somehow we never recovered from that.
I think we just internalized that Dutch cuisine sucks and just focus on getting good food from other cultures (don't complain about our pannenkoeken or stroopwafels though, unless you're looking for a fight).
This design highlights a major failing with UK cycle "infrastructure". Here, we often have shared use pavements with sometimes a bit of white paint to designate the pedestrian and cycle lanes, but they cede priority at every single side road. The problem is that it makes cycling using them really awkward as it takes significant energy for cyclists to slow down and then speed up multiple times. The irony is that if you just use the main road instead, then you have priority over all the side roads, so the bike "lane" is pretty much useless.
Of course, we also suffer from just having fragments of cycle infrastructure that don't join up and most of the time, the infrastructure consists of "magic" paint that is somehow going to prevent motorists from parking and blocking the lane (it doesn't and they do).
Isn't it funny how part of the solution is a bit like introducing a one-car buffer into the queue, reducing back pressure? Makes me wonder how much traffic planning and distributed systems could learn from each other (or perhaps already have, I'm not an expert in either).
As someone living in the netherlands, primary use is for decoupling risk. Look at the pedestrian side, they only cross a single lane where they have to look in a single direction. This makes pedestrian behaviour so obvious that its hard to miss someone looking straight at you while you're crossing. Same with car behaviour, no matter where the car is, the nose is pointing straight at you before crossing the conflict zone. The line of communication you have before a potential accident is insanely useful. It does not matter wether a stop sign or right of way was there if you're dead.
The "buffer" reduces decision complexity even more because people treat them like train blocks. The only annoyance I have is when people actually break-and-check at these points even though its better to roll the car slowly trough to save the people right behind from brake checking entire queues.
The article doesn't deal with what happens when the queue gets bigger than one. It looks like a second car would queue on the main road, blocking traffic.
To eliminate this you could turn the buffer into a whole extra lane with room for say 5 cars to queue, but this would compromise on the nice feature where the partially turned car gets to completely turn and have great vision of the cycle lanes in both directions.
It's an interesting article, but from a systems design perspective I'd be much more interested in how they handle a change in requirements like "there are now five times more cars turning left here than the intersection was designed for".
To an extent, it's a self-solving problem. If you have great non-car transport options and an increase in traffic makes car driving less appealing, then more people will use those non-car transport options rather than joining the queue.
At least where I live, such a type of intersection is used when a residential street branches off a large main road. You do not have a high volume of traffic going into this residential street, and "waiting for a crossing cyclist" does only take 1-2 seconds. So a buffer size of 1 is usually enough.
I wish more urban areas were as good as The Netherlands. Where I live, there are occasionally some footpaths on the sides of the roads that are half a cycle lane. People constantly walk in the cycle lanes and cycle on the footpaths. Other than that, its just normal urban roads
As a semi regular tourist to the Netherlands from North America it took a bit to adjust to all the modes of traffic at once but now I can easily navigate and stay safe around bikes, mopeds, trams, skinny cars etc. But I’m also a seasoned traveller in the region.
So, there would be an adjustment period for the population of your country, and it might take a while, and depending on culture might not be easy.
Probably any change in country takes some time to adjust to traffic. Coming from the Netherlands, I got quite confused when driving in San Francisco, by many wide roads without any clear road markings. Which parts are meant for overtaking, pre-sorting for turns, parking on the side of the road or just parallel driving lanes? On several roads that could fit 3-6 cars I couldn't tell the direction of traffic on the middle lane(s) or the lane separations.
I live in England, so there are already bike lanes and such, they're just not as widespread as I wish they were and its almost always part of a car lane or a pedestrian lane
The first day in Netherlands I learned that when surface under my feet changes, when I'm crossing the line between two surfaces I need to look back over my shoulder because there might be someone coming in fast. I apply this rule since I learned it in every country I live and it works great.
The article points out very nicely that it is expensive (in space terms) to have cars integrate safely with the pedestrian and bicycle traffic of dense urban areas. The mismatch in size and speed requires buffer zones that must be dedicated to this function only.
Roughly the same size as if the street had 2 car lanes on each side. In fact this is what I've seen living here in Amsterdam for a few years, every once in a while they remove a lane or two from some street and beef up these security features as well as add more pedestrian space.
It's cheaper to maintain extra fat sidewalks and stuff than 2 more lanes of asfalct also.
Even better, the gemeente is actively converting streets into fietsstraat. It is amazing and I love it. It makes my commute through the city so much faster and less stressful. When they did the knip experiment on that big through-road near Waterlooplein and there was no car traffic, it was also fantastic. At that time, I was commuting that direction and it was wild how quiet that part of the city became. Cars really are a terrible nuisance and do not belong in the city.
This is 1950's Swedish solution, imho. Modern fad is that there shall be no separate bicycle crossings in intersection areas. Bicycles are equal to other vehicles so it makes sense to concentrate the intersecting traffic to one flow, so it is easier to observe.
This specific turn is onto a street that the article describes as "traffic volume here is low, since only residents will use this street." They probably expect the 1-car buffer to be enough for this intersection. You can see in the video that the 1-car buffer is empty most of the time.
For intersections where they expect more turning traffic (where the one car buffer wouldn't be enough), they add turning lanes that can accomodate more than one car. You can see an example of this a few hundred meters northeast when Graafseweg intersects the Van Grobbendocklaan: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZmURqawr3oeBX5Sq9
Bikes are small and fast, and only a small fraction of cars will need to turn here as this is a street going in to a neighborhood. The chances of multiple cars wanting to take this turn and there being a long stream of bikes that holds them up is small. So 'never' is not the right word here, but the times this happens is negligible.
I'm not sure how common this type of intersection is. I live and bike daily in Amsterdam and it took me about a minute to fully understand what's going on here. The picture seems to show a special case where the intersecting road is bike only, and instead of the normal painted arrows that show where bikes should queue up when making a left, there's an open area off to the left where one would wait behind the "shark teeth".
FYI if you are ever biking here in NL, the thing to remember is that if the "haaientanden" point at you, watch out!, as that means you do not have the right of way.
Edit: The side roads are for cars as well, which means you have a strange turning lane in the middle of the intersection where traffic might back up. A simple roundabout seems like a much better solution here unless the goal is to keep cars moving quickly and the turn lane is rarely used.
These types of interactions are pretty much everywhere outside of historical city centers and the like where you don't have space for it. You might not find them in the old town of Ams, but as soon as you head out a bit, you see them everywhere. Same in Delft and pretty much anywhere else with historic architecture.
Can someone explain this, the italicized part below, in more detail?
>> When you approach from the side street, as a driver, the order of dealing with other traffic is different, but the priority is similar. First you will notice a speed bump. The complete intersection is on a raised table. Pedestrians would not have priority if the street was level, but now that it isn’t the “exit construction” rule could apply and in that case a crossing pedestrian would have priority. But for that rule to apply the footway should be continuous, and that is not the case here.
An entrance or exit construction is a place on a road where you aren't just turning onto the road but exiting the road entirely. The most common example from any country would be a private driveway. Pedestrians, cyclists and cars going along the sidewalk, bike path or road have priority against anyone turning into the driveway or turning onto the road from the driveway.
The Netherlands generalizes this concept to some low-priority side streets. If there is a continuous sidewalk (i.e., the cars go up a bump to the level of the sidewalk as opposed to the pedestrians stepping down from the sidewalk to the level of the street). This is not the case in this specific intersection.
That's some word salad but let me make things clear,
All intersections have signs indicating priority.
All intersections have road markings indicating right of way.
All intersections have a level change indicating priority.
Either you bump up to pedestrians, which also reduces your speed. Or pedestrians step down to asphalt.
All intersections have/dont have color change to indicate right of way.
All intersections have/dont have pavement type indicating right of way (usually bricks for street or pedestrians, black asphalt for roads, red asphalt for cyclists.)
Although you could probaly find some rulebreakers in there, its universally accepted as such.
I haven't read the entire article, but this is a very common situation: main road with two cycle paths crosses a minor road (or has two side roads at the same place). All roads are also for cars. I'm not sure why the article makes such a difference between the two side roads: they seem quite similar apart from the one-car waiting space before the cycle path.
Yeah there is not really space for these eleborate intersections in central Amsterdam. Most are signal controlled or pure spaghetti with trams coming from four directions with almost absolute priority, like this one https://www.google.com/maps/place/52%C2%B021'49.1%22N+4%C2%B...
In general, separate bike lines are nothing special in the Netherlands, even in Amsterdam. However, it's an old, compact city with narrow streets, so you're unlikely to see these types of intersections in those streets. Same is true for other old city centers with compact layouts.
You're more likely to see this if you go to places with more space, such as suburbs built in the last century (which basically means going to another town or city that Amsterdam grew into, because in the Netherlands city distribution is also compact). As you can see from the picture this street is in such a neighborhood.
Also, the general concept of having a distance of one car between crossing and bike lane is universal whenever there is space. I can give you a personal anecdote (at the cost of doxxing myself). I grew up in Oldeberkoop, a tiny village with around 1500 people in it that somehow has its own wikipedia page[0].
Just outside of the village is a crossing with an N-road, which is Dutch for "provincial national road but not quite highway". In the early nineties it was still a simple crossing, no separate bike lanes, and I recall traffic accidents happening once or twice every year. For context, nowadays the speed limit on provincial roads is 100 km/h[2], although in the early nineties it was still 80 km/h. That didn't matter though: everyone was speeding as if they were on a highway and going 120 to 140 km/h.
In mid nineties the crossing was changed to a roundabout, solving the speeding problem, and separate bike lanes were added (this also reduced traffic noise a lot). In the early 2000s the roundabout was changed to the safer design described in the article: more space between corner and bike lane, and a bigger island in the middle of the road for pedestrians[3]. I haven't heard of any incidents in the years since.
Recall: this is a village of 1500 people. When the article says:
> I would like to emphasise that this intersection is not special in any way. You can find many similar examples all over the country. That is because the design features stem from the design manuals which are used throughout the country.
... it is not exaggerating. This is the norm with any new intersection that is being built, or any existing one that is due for its two-decade maintenance.
Bike lanes yes. But where are all the safety features you can see here? Bike lanes are often separated, but not always. On many streets they are just painted on. They are rarely color marked, which is fine when you know where the bike lane but in new places you sometimes miss that there is a bike lane because it is not obvious at the crossing.
Even proper, separated bike lanes often terminate in right turn lanes for cars (even in places where there is a lot of bikes and in places where there would be a lot of space), leading to weird situations where a car is trapped in a wall of cyclists from every side.
In practice it mostly works but I'm not surprised car ownership in the city is on the rise, because the city still prioritizes cars way too much. Copenhagen is mostly a regular city with consistent bike lanes.
Bike lanes are everywhere in most big cities in France too... But they're bad, very bad.
We desperately need this principle of elevated bike lanes that cars should be worried to cross.
I have code an open-source framework to assess the cyclability of territories : https://villes.plus
It only takes into account quality bike lanes, based on OSM data, run every trimestre.
For instance, painted bike lanes or shared bus lanes are excluded.
Amsterdam's score is around 90 %.
The best French city, Strasbourg, has around 45 %. There is some inherent variability as each run takes random points among a data set to build the segments to be tested.
> Bike lanes are everywhere in most big cities in France too... But they're bad, very bad.
We once cycled from Germany to Colmar in France. Cycling through Colmar is indeed a scary experience, especially if you have a trailer with a small child in it: https://maps.app.goo.gl/wJU4GLWrmqF9EDes8
I'm still failing to understand why the urbanism departments are so bad in councils of even our big metropolitan areas. We could just contract with corps like Copenhaguenize to get to the state of the art right away when rebuilding roads, but "on a des idées" so why not improvise? Or it's just corruption and favoritism...
Nice project though, might ping you for something related :)
Is this intentional bait for the somewhat notorious "Copenhagen is Great ... but it's not Amsterdam" video by the Not Just Bikes channel? ;)
(as a Dutchie living in Malmö: I love Copenhagen, and I'm already happy that it's a million times better than 99% of the rest of the world. Still, it's also true that the Netherlands has a head-start of a few decades on everyone else and that it does show if you look closely)
In general I try to avoid nationalism - a lot of what one perceives as "my country ABC is the best at XYZ!" is just "I was born in ABC so I am used to XYZ!".
But...for the small niche of cycling infrastructure, the top 10 list is The Netherlands in places 1 to 10, then no country in places 11 to 50, and then Denmark in place 51.
What is important to consider is that cycling infrastructure is all around great in The Netherlands everywhere. Not just in the center of Amsterdam. Industrial estates, villages in the middle of nowhere, roads through forests, popular attractions or theme parks, islands: everything is reachable by bike, usually with bike lanes that are well maintained and physically separated from the main road, and often with bicycles having right of way on roundabouts etc.
I moved from the U.S. to the Netherlands nine years ago, and I can attest that the bike infrastructure is amazing and has an outsized impact on your quality of life and general happiness.
Being able to bike everywhere — safely, quickly, without any cultural baggage of "being one of those bicycle people" — is a total game-changer.
It's one of those things that sounds kooky to people who haven't actually experienced it. When American friends and family ask me what I love most about living here and I say "the bike infrastructure," reactions range from a polite smile to eye-rolling.
On paper it doesn't sound particularly sexy, but in reality the impact on your day-to-day life is immense. Your health, your connection to the immediate environment, your cost savings, your time/stress savings, your sense of freedom of movement.
1000% agree. We moved 7 years ago and now have 4 kids. It is so valuable that my preteens can bike to tennis, friends, etc safely, even at night. Or that you can pop a toddler to childcare without a car seat and parking. Last year we finally got a car. I hardly ever use it.
And remember, the bike infrastructure was only built in the past 30-40 years. Before that, the Netherlands had a super car-focused infrastructure. It was only after the “stop murdering our children” political campaigns that the car focus shifted.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollan...
The underground (plus partly underwater) bicycle parking garage at Amsterdam Centraal is also pretty amazing to experience. So much nicer than the old outdoor one.
I live in Amsterdam. The freedom to do all your errants and entertainment by bike or walking is amazing. I can literally walk to the zoo, walk to the market, and walk to endless bars and restaurant.
The things is this is not some liberal, 15 min city conspiracy. This is how life has always been…
Although this was in the '80s I remember that I (Dutch) walked to school at the age of 5, in a town (technically a city (Enkhuizen)), mostly through a pedestrian area but I had to cross one busy street.
My parents told me later that they secretly followed me the first few times (I never noticed).
Just try to image that you live in a country that is so safe you can let small kids walk to school. Try to imagine what a society could look like if it's designed for people first, not traffic.
> My parents told me later that they secretly followed me the first few times (I never noticed).
Ha, not in the Netherlands, but we started doing exactly the same with our 5-year old recently. She wanted to walk to a friend's house alone a few weeks ago and my wife followed her in spy-like fashion to make sure she arrived safely. We also started dropping her off a few blocks before kindergarten so that she can walk the remaining distance "alone" (again secretly followed).
That is how it worked when I was a kid on the 80s in Spain. I took the bus to school alone as an 8yo -- and I was considered a wimpy kid; my sister walked to school alone at 6.
Meanwhile here in Canada they attach colored ribbons on their backpacks so they won't be allowed off the bus unless an adult is there to escort them home. Watching a 10yo being escorted back and forth to the bus stop is so sad.
Personally, I blame the speed and amount of car traffic in our streets. Drivers routinely break the speed limits and oftentimes by the time they come to a stop they are already blocking the crosswalk.
My kids walked to school from about age 7 or so. Same as when I was young. When I do drop them off (because we are late or there is a blizzard or whatever) I'm a bit ashamed and hope no one sees me driving. Now we have 2 pedestrian crossings on the way to school. one really busy, but luckily it has lights. The one without lights is designed so the road shrinks to single file so cars can't meet at the crossing, but have to take turns passing.
it was the 80s, I used to walk to school at 6, passing through an hospital, in a town, quite a big one, named Rome.
It's just that parents nowadays forgot that kids are functioning humans, can learn stuff and can do stuff on their own.
edit: for the downvoters, look at what Japan does or how women in Denmark do with their kids, instead of thinking "this man must be crazy, how in the hell I can leave my kids alone in this world full of dangers, they will surely die" and react like i tried to kidnap your kids to boil them and then eat them.
you need space to do that, not many cities in Europe have the luxury of being built from scratch and having so much space to dedicate to a single intersection.
edit: anyway the simplest solution is to turn every intersection into a roundabout, no traffic lights needed, clear right of way, cars can't go fast and in the end it also makes it easier for pedestrians to cross the street.
I'm not saying that Amsterdam was built from scratch, nor that Rome is somewhat so special that you can't apply solutions used elsewhere, but that urban space is an hard requirement and the more dedicated infrastructures you build, the more the value of the area goes up and so we end up with those beautiful walkable, green, neighborhoods in Milan where the "Vertical Forest" is that only the very rich can afford.
And in those parts of the city where space is basically free, people live too far from where they need to go by bike anyway.
It's a cat and mouse game, you need very dense, very small, almost flat cities, to get to the point where Amsterdam is, which is not that typical especially in Europe.
Such old urban places would just be car-free in the Netherlands (sometimes with limited access for delivery and emergency vehicles), a trend fortunately becoming popular in other European cities now.
The “urban” in the title is a bit misleading, this intersection is definitely more suburban, or on the boundary of an urban center. (Or rather, the author has a different definition of urban - in my definition cities like den Bosch are really just a small medieval urban core surrounded by continuous medium-density suburban neighborhoods.)
I wish urban designers in Poland learned from this. Our bike lanes are terribly designed, cars turn right into them with very poor visibility. The "solution" is that lawmakers introduce additional restrictions for bikers, which are unclear to everyone, so right now nobody really knows if bikes have priority on bike lane crossings or not.
I love the Netherlands, and not just for their livable street design, I just wish they food weren't so bland. They make even German cuisine look adventurous in comparison.
As a Dutch person... this is sadly not just 100% accurate, it's almost part of our culture by now, hahaha. For example, in Gerard Reve's "De Avonden" ("The Evenings", a literary classic in the Netherlands from 1947) the daily bland dinners are described like a recurring cynical joke.
Apparently World War 2 is to blame for the shift in food culture. Somehow we never recovered from that.
I think we just internalized that Dutch cuisine sucks and just focus on getting good food from other cultures (don't complain about our pannenkoeken or stroopwafels though, unless you're looking for a fight).
[dead]
Surinamese is what you are looking for.
I had some decent ramen in Utrecht recently!
This design highlights a major failing with UK cycle "infrastructure". Here, we often have shared use pavements with sometimes a bit of white paint to designate the pedestrian and cycle lanes, but they cede priority at every single side road. The problem is that it makes cycling using them really awkward as it takes significant energy for cyclists to slow down and then speed up multiple times. The irony is that if you just use the main road instead, then you have priority over all the side roads, so the bike "lane" is pretty much useless.
Of course, we also suffer from just having fragments of cycle infrastructure that don't join up and most of the time, the infrastructure consists of "magic" paint that is somehow going to prevent motorists from parking and blocking the lane (it doesn't and they do).
It's even worse in my UK village. they don't even paint white lines, just the white outline of a bike every few hundred meters on the road.
Isn't it funny how part of the solution is a bit like introducing a one-car buffer into the queue, reducing back pressure? Makes me wonder how much traffic planning and distributed systems could learn from each other (or perhaps already have, I'm not an expert in either).
As someone living in the netherlands, primary use is for decoupling risk. Look at the pedestrian side, they only cross a single lane where they have to look in a single direction. This makes pedestrian behaviour so obvious that its hard to miss someone looking straight at you while you're crossing. Same with car behaviour, no matter where the car is, the nose is pointing straight at you before crossing the conflict zone. The line of communication you have before a potential accident is insanely useful. It does not matter wether a stop sign or right of way was there if you're dead.
The "buffer" reduces decision complexity even more because people treat them like train blocks. The only annoyance I have is when people actually break-and-check at these points even though its better to roll the car slowly trough to save the people right behind from brake checking entire queues.
The article doesn't deal with what happens when the queue gets bigger than one. It looks like a second car would queue on the main road, blocking traffic.
To eliminate this you could turn the buffer into a whole extra lane with room for say 5 cars to queue, but this would compromise on the nice feature where the partially turned car gets to completely turn and have great vision of the cycle lanes in both directions.
It's an interesting article, but from a systems design perspective I'd be much more interested in how they handle a change in requirements like "there are now five times more cars turning left here than the intersection was designed for".
Build more bike lanes.
To an extent, it's a self-solving problem. If you have great non-car transport options and an increase in traffic makes car driving less appealing, then more people will use those non-car transport options rather than joining the queue.
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At least where I live, such a type of intersection is used when a residential street branches off a large main road. You do not have a high volume of traffic going into this residential street, and "waiting for a crossing cyclist" does only take 1-2 seconds. So a buffer size of 1 is usually enough.
The backpressure is a feature and ensures people like me take a bike and train to work instead of driving
I wish more urban areas were as good as The Netherlands. Where I live, there are occasionally some footpaths on the sides of the roads that are half a cycle lane. People constantly walk in the cycle lanes and cycle on the footpaths. Other than that, its just normal urban roads
As a semi regular tourist to the Netherlands from North America it took a bit to adjust to all the modes of traffic at once but now I can easily navigate and stay safe around bikes, mopeds, trams, skinny cars etc. But I’m also a seasoned traveller in the region.
So, there would be an adjustment period for the population of your country, and it might take a while, and depending on culture might not be easy.
Probably any change in country takes some time to adjust to traffic. Coming from the Netherlands, I got quite confused when driving in San Francisco, by many wide roads without any clear road markings. Which parts are meant for overtaking, pre-sorting for turns, parking on the side of the road or just parallel driving lanes? On several roads that could fit 3-6 cars I couldn't tell the direction of traffic on the middle lane(s) or the lane separations.
I live in England, so there are already bike lanes and such, they're just not as widespread as I wish they were and its almost always part of a car lane or a pedestrian lane
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The first day in Netherlands I learned that when surface under my feet changes, when I'm crossing the line between two surfaces I need to look back over my shoulder because there might be someone coming in fast. I apply this rule since I learned it in every country I live and it works great.
Where I live there will be pedestrians on left side of asphalt roads and street food stalls on footpaths if the footpaths exist at all.
India?
The article points out very nicely that it is expensive (in space terms) to have cars integrate safely with the pedestrian and bicycle traffic of dense urban areas. The mismatch in size and speed requires buffer zones that must be dedicated to this function only.
Roughly the same size as if the street had 2 car lanes on each side. In fact this is what I've seen living here in Amsterdam for a few years, every once in a while they remove a lane or two from some street and beef up these security features as well as add more pedestrian space.
It's cheaper to maintain extra fat sidewalks and stuff than 2 more lanes of asfalct also.
Even better, the gemeente is actively converting streets into fietsstraat. It is amazing and I love it. It makes my commute through the city so much faster and less stressful. When they did the knip experiment on that big through-road near Waterlooplein and there was no car traffic, it was also fantastic. At that time, I was commuting that direction and it was wild how quiet that part of the city became. Cars really are a terrible nuisance and do not belong in the city.
This is 1950's Swedish solution, imho. Modern fad is that there shall be no separate bicycle crossings in intersection areas. Bicycles are equal to other vehicles so it makes sense to concentrate the intersecting traffic to one flow, so it is easier to observe.
> Here you can see that a car drivers waiting for people cycling are never in the way of other people in cars.
Am I blind or does it only work for just one or maybe two cars?
Correct, only one.
This specific turn is onto a street that the article describes as "traffic volume here is low, since only residents will use this street." They probably expect the 1-car buffer to be enough for this intersection. You can see in the video that the 1-car buffer is empty most of the time.
For intersections where they expect more turning traffic (where the one car buffer wouldn't be enough), they add turning lanes that can accomodate more than one car. You can see an example of this a few hundred meters northeast when Graafseweg intersects the Van Grobbendocklaan: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZmURqawr3oeBX5Sq9
Bikes are small and fast, and only a small fraction of cars will need to turn here as this is a street going in to a neighborhood. The chances of multiple cars wanting to take this turn and there being a long stream of bikes that holds them up is small. So 'never' is not the right word here, but the times this happens is negligible.
Correct. That is enough 95% of the time. (I made that number up, but it's not far from the truth.)
I'm not sure how common this type of intersection is. I live and bike daily in Amsterdam and it took me about a minute to fully understand what's going on here. The picture seems to show a special case where the intersecting road is bike only, and instead of the normal painted arrows that show where bikes should queue up when making a left, there's an open area off to the left where one would wait behind the "shark teeth".
FYI if you are ever biking here in NL, the thing to remember is that if the "haaientanden" point at you, watch out!, as that means you do not have the right of way.
Edit: The side roads are for cars as well, which means you have a strange turning lane in the middle of the intersection where traffic might back up. A simple roundabout seems like a much better solution here unless the goal is to keep cars moving quickly and the turn lane is rarely used.
These types of interactions are pretty much everywhere outside of historical city centers and the like where you don't have space for it. You might not find them in the old town of Ams, but as soon as you head out a bit, you see them everywhere. Same in Delft and pretty much anywhere else with historic architecture.
I never understood why people have a tough time understanding the lovely shark teeth signs.
It's literally a painted give way sign.
Can someone explain this, the italicized part below, in more detail?
>> When you approach from the side street, as a driver, the order of dealing with other traffic is different, but the priority is similar. First you will notice a speed bump. The complete intersection is on a raised table. Pedestrians would not have priority if the street was level, but now that it isn’t the “exit construction” rule could apply and in that case a crossing pedestrian would have priority. But for that rule to apply the footway should be continuous, and that is not the case here.
https://www.theorieexamen.nl/theory-exam/what-is-a-entrance-...
An entrance or exit construction is a place on a road where you aren't just turning onto the road but exiting the road entirely. The most common example from any country would be a private driveway. Pedestrians, cyclists and cars going along the sidewalk, bike path or road have priority against anyone turning into the driveway or turning onto the road from the driveway.
The Netherlands generalizes this concept to some low-priority side streets. If there is a continuous sidewalk (i.e., the cars go up a bump to the level of the sidewalk as opposed to the pedestrians stepping down from the sidewalk to the level of the street). This is not the case in this specific intersection.
That's some word salad but let me make things clear,
All intersections have signs indicating priority.
All intersections have road markings indicating right of way.
All intersections have a level change indicating priority. Either you bump up to pedestrians, which also reduces your speed. Or pedestrians step down to asphalt.
All intersections have/dont have color change to indicate right of way.
All intersections have/dont have pavement type indicating right of way (usually bricks for street or pedestrians, black asphalt for roads, red asphalt for cyclists.)
Although you could probaly find some rulebreakers in there, its universally accepted as such.
Fellow Amsterdam resident here, this kind of layout is very common all over the city (I live in the south of the city but I have seen these all over).
I haven't read the entire article, but this is a very common situation: main road with two cycle paths crosses a minor road (or has two side roads at the same place). All roads are also for cars. I'm not sure why the article makes such a difference between the two side roads: they seem quite similar apart from the one-car waiting space before the cycle path.
Yeah there is not really space for these eleborate intersections in central Amsterdam. Most are signal controlled or pure spaghetti with trams coming from four directions with almost absolute priority, like this one https://www.google.com/maps/place/52%C2%B021'49.1%22N+4%C2%B...
In general, separate bike lines are nothing special in the Netherlands, even in Amsterdam. However, it's an old, compact city with narrow streets, so you're unlikely to see these types of intersections in those streets. Same is true for other old city centers with compact layouts.
You're more likely to see this if you go to places with more space, such as suburbs built in the last century (which basically means going to another town or city that Amsterdam grew into, because in the Netherlands city distribution is also compact). As you can see from the picture this street is in such a neighborhood.
Also, the general concept of having a distance of one car between crossing and bike lane is universal whenever there is space. I can give you a personal anecdote (at the cost of doxxing myself). I grew up in Oldeberkoop, a tiny village with around 1500 people in it that somehow has its own wikipedia page[0].
Just outside of the village is a crossing with an N-road, which is Dutch for "provincial national road but not quite highway". In the early nineties it was still a simple crossing, no separate bike lanes, and I recall traffic accidents happening once or twice every year. For context, nowadays the speed limit on provincial roads is 100 km/h[2], although in the early nineties it was still 80 km/h. That didn't matter though: everyone was speeding as if they were on a highway and going 120 to 140 km/h.
In mid nineties the crossing was changed to a roundabout, solving the speeding problem, and separate bike lanes were added (this also reduced traffic noise a lot). In the early 2000s the roundabout was changed to the safer design described in the article: more space between corner and bike lane, and a bigger island in the middle of the road for pedestrians[3]. I haven't heard of any incidents in the years since.
Recall: this is a village of 1500 people. When the article says:
> I would like to emphasise that this intersection is not special in any way. You can find many similar examples all over the country. That is because the design features stem from the design manuals which are used throughout the country.
... it is not exaggerating. This is the norm with any new intersection that is being built, or any existing one that is due for its two-decade maintenance.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldeberkoop
[1] https://www.wegenwiki.nl/Provinciale_weg
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_Netherland...
[3] https://www.google.com/maps/@52.9331081,6.1326563,3a,75y,49....
It's not that much different from Copenhagen where I live. Bike lanes are everywhere.
Bike lanes yes. But where are all the safety features you can see here? Bike lanes are often separated, but not always. On many streets they are just painted on. They are rarely color marked, which is fine when you know where the bike lane but in new places you sometimes miss that there is a bike lane because it is not obvious at the crossing.
Even proper, separated bike lanes often terminate in right turn lanes for cars (even in places where there is a lot of bikes and in places where there would be a lot of space), leading to weird situations where a car is trapped in a wall of cyclists from every side.
In practice it mostly works but I'm not surprised car ownership in the city is on the rise, because the city still prioritizes cars way too much. Copenhagen is mostly a regular city with consistent bike lanes.
Bike lanes are everywhere in most big cities in France too... But they're bad, very bad.
We desperately need this principle of elevated bike lanes that cars should be worried to cross.
I have code an open-source framework to assess the cyclability of territories : https://villes.plus
It only takes into account quality bike lanes, based on OSM data, run every trimestre.
For instance, painted bike lanes or shared bus lanes are excluded.
Amsterdam's score is around 90 %.
The best French city, Strasbourg, has around 45 %. There is some inherent variability as each run takes random points among a data set to build the segments to be tested.
> Bike lanes are everywhere in most big cities in France too... But they're bad, very bad.
We once cycled from Germany to Colmar in France. Cycling through Colmar is indeed a scary experience, especially if you have a trailer with a small child in it: https://maps.app.goo.gl/wJU4GLWrmqF9EDes8
Of course it isn't much better in Germany.
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I'm still failing to understand why the urbanism departments are so bad in councils of even our big metropolitan areas. We could just contract with corps like Copenhaguenize to get to the state of the art right away when rebuilding roads, but "on a des idées" so why not improvise? Or it's just corruption and favoritism...
Nice project though, might ping you for something related :)
> run every trimestre
From another non-native speaker, the term you are looking for is "quarter". As in: a quarter of a year, as 12/4=3 months.
Is this intentional bait for the somewhat notorious "Copenhagen is Great ... but it's not Amsterdam" video by the Not Just Bikes channel? ;)
(as a Dutchie living in Malmö: I love Copenhagen, and I'm already happy that it's a million times better than 99% of the rest of the world. Still, it's also true that the Netherlands has a head-start of a few decades on everyone else and that it does show if you look closely)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjzzV2Akyds
In general I try to avoid nationalism - a lot of what one perceives as "my country ABC is the best at XYZ!" is just "I was born in ABC so I am used to XYZ!".
But...for the small niche of cycling infrastructure, the top 10 list is The Netherlands in places 1 to 10, then no country in places 11 to 50, and then Denmark in place 51.
What is important to consider is that cycling infrastructure is all around great in The Netherlands everywhere. Not just in the center of Amsterdam. Industrial estates, villages in the middle of nowhere, roads through forests, popular attractions or theme parks, islands: everything is reachable by bike, usually with bike lanes that are well maintained and physically separated from the main road, and often with bicycles having right of way on roundabouts etc.
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Hahah, I would never! :D It definitely shows that the Netherlands had an early start and still an advantage. Kudos on that!
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Berlin is full of bike lanes, but they're built ass-backwards and inconvenient for everyone - motorists, pedestrians and cyclists alike.
I moved from the U.S. to the Netherlands nine years ago, and I can attest that the bike infrastructure is amazing and has an outsized impact on your quality of life and general happiness.
Being able to bike everywhere — safely, quickly, without any cultural baggage of "being one of those bicycle people" — is a total game-changer.
It's one of those things that sounds kooky to people who haven't actually experienced it. When American friends and family ask me what I love most about living here and I say "the bike infrastructure," reactions range from a polite smile to eye-rolling.
On paper it doesn't sound particularly sexy, but in reality the impact on your day-to-day life is immense. Your health, your connection to the immediate environment, your cost savings, your time/stress savings, your sense of freedom of movement.
1000% agree. We moved 7 years ago and now have 4 kids. It is so valuable that my preteens can bike to tennis, friends, etc safely, even at night. Or that you can pop a toddler to childcare without a car seat and parking. Last year we finally got a car. I hardly ever use it.
And remember, the bike infrastructure was only built in the past 30-40 years. Before that, the Netherlands had a super car-focused infrastructure. It was only after the “stop murdering our children” political campaigns that the car focus shifted. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollan...
> without any cultural baggage of "being one of those bicycle people"
Arguably you technically do have that cultural baggage, it's just that it's a core part of the Dutch national identity so it doesn't stand out ;)
The underground (plus partly underwater) bicycle parking garage at Amsterdam Centraal is also pretty amazing to experience. So much nicer than the old outdoor one.
I live in Amsterdam. The freedom to do all your errants and entertainment by bike or walking is amazing. I can literally walk to the zoo, walk to the market, and walk to endless bars and restaurant.
The things is this is not some liberal, 15 min city conspiracy. This is how life has always been…
Although this was in the '80s I remember that I (Dutch) walked to school at the age of 5, in a town (technically a city (Enkhuizen)), mostly through a pedestrian area but I had to cross one busy street.
My parents told me later that they secretly followed me the first few times (I never noticed).
Just try to image that you live in a country that is so safe you can let small kids walk to school. Try to imagine what a society could look like if it's designed for people first, not traffic.
> My parents told me later that they secretly followed me the first few times (I never noticed).
Ha, not in the Netherlands, but we started doing exactly the same with our 5-year old recently. She wanted to walk to a friend's house alone a few weeks ago and my wife followed her in spy-like fashion to make sure she arrived safely. We also started dropping her off a few blocks before kindergarten so that she can walk the remaining distance "alone" (again secretly followed).
That is how it worked when I was a kid on the 80s in Spain. I took the bus to school alone as an 8yo -- and I was considered a wimpy kid; my sister walked to school alone at 6.
Meanwhile here in Canada they attach colored ribbons on their backpacks so they won't be allowed off the bus unless an adult is there to escort them home. Watching a 10yo being escorted back and forth to the bus stop is so sad.
Personally, I blame the speed and amount of car traffic in our streets. Drivers routinely break the speed limits and oftentimes by the time they come to a stop they are already blocking the crosswalk.
My kids walked to school from about age 7 or so. Same as when I was young. When I do drop them off (because we are late or there is a blizzard or whatever) I'm a bit ashamed and hope no one sees me driving. Now we have 2 pedestrian crossings on the way to school. one really busy, but luckily it has lights. The one without lights is designed so the road shrinks to single file so cars can't meet at the crossing, but have to take turns passing.
I will say that my daughters are five and seven and I don’t let them bike or walk to school alone here in Hilversum, which is choking on SUV’s.
My daughter’s commute https://youtu.be/UWp7YiM3rzM?si=QoF4BgLEbnltcyg6
> Just try to imag[in]e that you live in a country that is so safe you can let small kids walk to school.
The USA is already that safe.
> Try to imagine what a society could look like if it's designed for people first, not traffic.
The normal approach is to build overpasses or underpasses so that pedestrians have no need to go into the road.
https://tylervigen.com/the-mystery-of-the-bloomfield-bridge
it was the 80s, I used to walk to school at 6, passing through an hospital, in a town, quite a big one, named Rome.
It's just that parents nowadays forgot that kids are functioning humans, can learn stuff and can do stuff on their own.
edit: for the downvoters, look at what Japan does or how women in Denmark do with their kids, instead of thinking "this man must be crazy, how in the hell I can leave my kids alone in this world full of dangers, they will surely die" and react like i tried to kidnap your kids to boil them and then eat them.
you need space to do that, not many cities in Europe have the luxury of being built from scratch and having so much space to dedicate to a single intersection.
Where i live (in Rome) the streets are like this
https://as1.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/04/93/42/24/1000_F_493422444_Hw...
edit: anyway the simplest solution is to turn every intersection into a roundabout, no traffic lights needed, clear right of way, cars can't go fast and in the end it also makes it easier for pedestrians to cross the street.
I know few cities beat Rome when it comes to their age, but Den Bosch has had city right since 1185 AD...so it is not exactly "built from scratch".
I'm not saying that Amsterdam was built from scratch, nor that Rome is somewhat so special that you can't apply solutions used elsewhere, but that urban space is an hard requirement and the more dedicated infrastructures you build, the more the value of the area goes up and so we end up with those beautiful walkable, green, neighborhoods in Milan where the "Vertical Forest" is that only the very rich can afford.
And in those parts of the city where space is basically free, people live too far from where they need to go by bike anyway.
It's a cat and mouse game, you need very dense, very small, almost flat cities, to get to the point where Amsterdam is, which is not that typical especially in Europe.
Such old urban places would just be car-free in the Netherlands (sometimes with limited access for delivery and emergency vehicles), a trend fortunately becoming popular in other European cities now.
The “urban” in the title is a bit misleading, this intersection is definitely more suburban, or on the boundary of an urban center. (Or rather, the author has a different definition of urban - in my definition cities like den Bosch are really just a small medieval urban core surrounded by continuous medium-density suburban neighborhoods.)
> Such old urban places would just be car-free in the Netherlands
that's the hardest part that everyone always ignores.
first you have to remove cars from the streets, than it's becomes easier to implement biking infrastructures.
I've been a long time petitioner to completely ban car traffic from the neighborhood where I live, but it's been a lost battle in the past 20 years.
Changing human habits it's harder than it looks.