What is a Bicycle Highway? Perspectives from Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, UK
Presented by George Liu at the Department of the Built Environment, Eindhoven University of Technology
Open Access Paper: Practitioners’ perspective on user experience and design of cycle highways
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590198219300107
A bicycle highway should be wide enough, wider than the normal width of bike paths, should have no level crossings (underpasses or overpasses), no traffic lights where you need to stop or crossings where you should give way to cars. And no scooters or mopeds. And it should have a separation between low speed bikes and high speed bikes. So four lanes for bikes, two in each direction, a low speed lane and a high speed lanes with raised lines or barriers. And just between cities and towns, not in cities or towns, that would be too expensive in the short term. That’s something for the long term. We could start with bike highways from the suburbs and outskirts of the city to science parks, universities and high profile business and office parks. And slowly extend them to neighboring towns and cities.
I find it interesting that the quote about not being an afterthought came from the UK – considering the fact that the so-called cycle superhighways in London are mostly just a bit of blue paint [maybe 1.5m wide] on the side of a busy road and motorised vehicles aren't even prohibited from driving in them.
Yet another person talking about cycling highways and clearly doesn't have the cycling experience or know how to grasp that different types of cyclists want different things. Above everything else is the correct space to be safe and the removal from the existing infra of those that pose the threat.
He uses a poor example initially that represents not a single road in the history or urban roads. He ignores that without the space and safety plus directness in the first instance you will not encourage mass cycling and restrict motoring. So to answer his question, cyclists don't care if the view is not great, how safe they feel invokes a feeling of pleasant, ffs this is cycling 101!
Without taking that space away directly from motoring you fail instantly, because direct wide routes for motoring will always mean people chose cars, even in NL this is the case for commuting. He fails to grasp that a faster urban commuter or sports cyclist (people who are from their sub group male in their 20s-50s and likely to drive to work) does not want nor need a 'nice' environment, whatever the definition of nice is. They want safety and be able to get from A-B in good time, if you remove motors by definition you make it nice and pleasant as you're not having to make constant decisions to keep you from harm, something that a narrowed segregated lane that meanders and criss cross a 'motor' road does not do. This we see in NL often, the criss crossing of motor roads by cycle infra is the location of the greatest number of cycling deaths in Netherlands
As a faster urban commuter and sports cyclist (and one that tours, one that potters around with my grand kids too), I would rather have a bland highway if that means I am safe/r and that I have space to get around other people on bikes going slower and a safe space to the pathway with pedestrians on it (something the presenter also ignores) so that I do not impinge on their safety and they legitimately have enough space for themselves, including for example a young child with a parent side by side or a mobility assisted cyclist that has a wider bike, maybe are hearing impaired. Without that space we have no leeway for safety, another failure of understanding your own built cycle infra and its restrictions.
So that does mean a full lane of a motoring road IS appropriate, in fact for bidirectional in very busy cities or where you have a lot of cycling, say Copenhagen, that 4m for bi-directional is in fact not always wide enough. If we are to plan for ALL cycling types and mass cycling then we must understand and acknowledge the differing cycling types and their requirements in the first instance.
This person fails at the first hurdle, wanting 'nice' instead of space and safety for all which comes first every single time. Please reconsider who you are designing our cities for and how they get about and what they primary goal is by that mode. Get some help understanding the target groups in motor vehicles and what will make them change from driving to cycling and why certain built infra still fails in places like Netherlands to convert and in fact often increases danger to pedal cyclists. They clearly don't have the full picture on this, not even close in all honesty. Understand desire lines, understand that taking roads back from motorists means low cost and instant highways for people on bikes, understand that whilst some aspects of Dutch infra is good it is not the best solution to reducing motoring and increasing cycling. We already know this as motoring is increasing in NL whi;st cycling stagnates despite the hundreds of millions of Euros spent. The wanting to change for the better is good but you fail to grasp the very basics of cycling and why people would choose to do that for a significant portion of the demographic of a population.
1st: German highways have lots of green and trees, and all of it is wellbeing taken care of. Not that more than 0,0001% of highway-users would care, but they have them anyways. 2nd misconception: Germany has since decades a good cycling-roads-network, connecting every village and every town, the population is 1/4 of the USA, so, still, the country is huge, and already has the network the speaker dreams of. This is propaganda and not science: The speaker overestimates the importance of the "experience", while the approach about the "experience" is already perfect, but he is too biased to see: The bike-highway, as every highway, has to be able to transport vast amounts of citizens, safe and FAST. If needed, open up a victionary, and look up "transportation", cause you don´t seem to understand the meaning yet. Sometimes a car-highway has to curve around hills, but a bike-highway should avoid even these turns, cause building a (simple but convenient) bike-tunnel (through a hill) is magnitudes cheaper than building the same car-tunnel, sometimes at least. The bike-highway isn´t allowed to have any turns at all, that´s the premise, even if it is actually/in reality impossible, and every party knows that, still, people are doing their best to avoid curves, and bring a worker at 5:00/5°C in the morning as fast and relaxed as possible to his 90minutes-far-away-job… After having read all of the above, you recognize, that the speaker is against bike-highways that are there to bridge distances for cheap (virtually for free), but pleads more for a wealthy-people-bike-highway-utopia, that´s gonna be utterly useless for all the rest. Segregation is written in big, big letters all over this speech. He seems to misunderstand what "bike-highway" even stands for. If he would tell a German, that one has to appreciate the "experience" of driving on a highway, the German will understand "the experience of driving at 400km/h", since there is several other kinds of street for normal, or even simply recreational (the only thing this video is about: recreational cycling) driving…
5 Comments
Bike highways should be away from cars and away from pollution. Bike share data can be used for routing.
A bicycle highway should be wide enough, wider than the normal width of bike paths, should have no level crossings (underpasses or overpasses), no traffic lights where you need to stop or crossings where you should give way to cars. And no scooters or mopeds. And it should have a separation between low speed bikes and high speed bikes. So four lanes for bikes, two in each direction, a low speed lane and a high speed lanes with raised lines or barriers. And just between cities and towns, not in cities or towns, that would be too expensive in the short term. That’s something for the long term. We could start with bike highways from the suburbs and outskirts of the city to science parks, universities and high profile business and office parks. And slowly extend them to neighboring towns and cities.
I find it interesting that the quote about not being an afterthought came from the UK – considering the fact that the so-called cycle superhighways in London are mostly just a bit of blue paint [maybe 1.5m wide] on the side of a busy road and motorised vehicles aren't even prohibited from driving in them.
Yet another person talking about cycling highways and clearly doesn't have the cycling experience or know how to grasp that different types of cyclists want different things. Above everything else is the correct space to be safe and the removal from the existing infra of those that pose the threat.
He uses a poor example initially that represents not a single road in the history or urban roads. He ignores that without the space and safety plus directness in the first instance you will not encourage mass cycling and restrict motoring.
So to answer his question, cyclists don't care if the view is not great, how safe they feel invokes a feeling of pleasant, ffs this is cycling 101!
Without taking that space away directly from motoring you fail instantly, because direct wide routes for motoring will always mean people chose cars, even in NL this is the case for commuting. He fails to grasp that a faster urban commuter or sports cyclist (people who are from their sub group male in their 20s-50s and likely to drive to work) does not want nor need a 'nice' environment, whatever the definition of nice is. They want safety and be able to get from A-B in good time, if you remove motors by definition you make it nice and pleasant as you're not having to make constant decisions to keep you from harm, something that a narrowed segregated lane that meanders and criss cross a 'motor' road does not do. This we see in NL often, the criss crossing of motor roads by cycle infra is the location of the greatest number of cycling deaths in Netherlands
As a faster urban commuter and sports cyclist (and one that tours, one that potters around with my grand kids too), I would rather have a bland highway if that means I am safe/r and that I have space to get around other people on bikes going slower and a safe space to the pathway with pedestrians on it (something the presenter also ignores) so that I do not impinge on their safety and they legitimately have enough space for themselves, including for example a young child with a parent side by side or a mobility assisted cyclist that has a wider bike, maybe are hearing impaired. Without that space we have no leeway for safety, another failure of understanding your own built cycle infra and its restrictions.
So that does mean a full lane of a motoring road IS appropriate, in fact for bidirectional in very busy cities or where you have a lot of cycling, say Copenhagen, that 4m for bi-directional is in fact not always wide enough. If we are to plan for ALL cycling types and mass cycling then we must understand and acknowledge the differing cycling types and their requirements in the first instance.
This person fails at the first hurdle, wanting 'nice' instead of space and safety for all which comes first every single time. Please reconsider who you are designing our cities for and how they get about and what they primary goal is by that mode. Get some help understanding the target groups in motor vehicles and what will make them change from driving to cycling and why certain built infra still fails in places like Netherlands to convert and in fact often increases danger to pedal cyclists. They clearly don't have the full picture on this, not even close in all honesty.
Understand desire lines, understand that taking roads back from motorists means low cost and instant highways for people on bikes, understand that whilst some aspects of Dutch infra is good it is not the best solution to reducing motoring and increasing cycling. We already know this as motoring is increasing in NL whi;st cycling stagnates despite the hundreds of millions of Euros spent.
The wanting to change for the better is good but you fail to grasp the very basics of cycling and why people would choose to do that for a significant portion of the demographic of a population.
1st: German highways have lots of green and trees, and all of it is wellbeing taken care of. Not that more than 0,0001% of highway-users would care, but they have them anyways.
2nd misconception: Germany has since decades a good cycling-roads-network, connecting every village and every town, the population is 1/4 of the USA, so, still, the country is huge, and already has the network the speaker dreams of.
This is propaganda and not science: The speaker overestimates the importance of the "experience", while the approach about the "experience" is already perfect, but he is too biased to see: The bike-highway, as every highway, has to be able to transport vast amounts of citizens, safe and FAST. If needed, open up a victionary, and look up "transportation", cause you don´t seem to understand the meaning yet. Sometimes a car-highway has to curve around hills, but a bike-highway should avoid even these turns, cause building a (simple but convenient) bike-tunnel (through a hill) is magnitudes cheaper than building the same car-tunnel, sometimes at least. The bike-highway isn´t allowed to have any turns at all, that´s the premise, even if it is actually/in reality impossible, and every party knows that, still, people are doing their best to avoid curves, and bring a worker at 5:00/5°C in the morning as fast and relaxed as possible to his 90minutes-far-away-job… After having read all of the above, you recognize, that the speaker is against bike-highways that are there to bridge distances for cheap (virtually for free), but pleads more for a wealthy-people-bike-highway-utopia, that´s gonna be utterly useless for all the rest. Segregation is written in big, big letters all over this speech. He seems to misunderstand what "bike-highway" even stands for. If he would tell a German, that one has to appreciate the "experience" of driving on a highway, the German will understand "the experience of driving at 400km/h", since there is several other kinds of street for normal, or even simply recreational (the only thing this video is about: recreational cycling) driving…