The case for physically separated bike lanes

"Tom Keats" wrote

[snip]

So many people look at the Dutch fietspaden and think they're
perfect for everywhere. I opine those were largely implemented
during post-war reconstruction. Rather than being slapped down
as Urban Design afterthoughts, I think the Dutch took advantage
of an opportunity to make their cycling facilities more integral
features of their overall traffic system, and it works for them,
along with their flat terrain. North American cities are not
ready for fietspaden, and if they tried to implement them, the
results would be half-hearted, incomplete and self-nullifying.
Probably even dangerous.

[snip]

I think that Dutch bike facility building began about 1930 as part of
the intercity road building that began as cars became common.

I think that the first cycle tracks were built as a demonstration
project by the All Dutch Cyclists Union. That wasn't (and isn't)
quite such a cycling oriented organization as it sounds. It is more
commonly known by the second name it adopted - the Royal Dutch
Touring Club - when it decided to admit motorists in the early 1900s
It's rather is if the USA's League of American Wheelmen/Bicyclists
had decided to admit motorists, and mutated into the AAA.

I think that there wasn't so much war damage in the Netherlands as
some other places, owing to the Germans having overrun the
Netherlands so quickly. I think, though, that downtown Rotterdam was
blitzed, and had to be totally rebuilt in modern style, with a new
street pattern, after the war. I haven't seen it, but I have never
ever heard of downtown Rotterdam quoted as an example of how to build
bike facilities.

I think the roadbuilding program continued when economic recovery
picked up after the war, in the late 1940s. This might well have
been with the help of the Marshall Plan, so US money might have been
behind some of the Netherlands' bike network

I don't think there was anything like the US drift to the suburbs in
that period. There would have been some "new town" building, though,
especially associated with such projects as draining the Zuyder Zee.
During that period the Swedish and the English were among the world's
leaders in town planning, and the Dutch may well have observed
Britain's Stevenage as an example of how to build bike oriented
towns. Most towns stayed the way they always had been, without bike
facilities

When I was growing up in Europe in the 1940s it was generally
believed that the Netherlands, and Denmark, had lots of bikes because
they were flat, and compact, and that they had lots of cycle tracks
because they had lots of bikes

I think that after WWII the world, including the Netherlands, home of
Shell Oil, regarded mass motorisation as the wave of the future.
The first step in this was the moped, and the controversy began, was
the moped a sort of bicycle, or was it a sort of motorcycle. In 1952
the Dutch voted to define it as a bicycle, and for the next twenty
years Dutch cycle tracks became, de facto, moped tracks. That's why
they tend to have sight lines suitable for vehicles going quite fast,
but surfaces suitable only for vehicles with sprung suspensions

In 1973 the first oil crisis hit, and the Arabs cut off the flow to
the Netherlands and Shell. As a fuel conservation measure, driving a
car on Sundays became illegal. The Netherlands, and the world,
assumed there would be an oil shortage for the foreseeable future,
and the foreseeable future did last for at least five years.

The Dutch assumed that the fuel shortage would cause a mass switch to
more fuel efficient vehicles, i.e. mopeds. Foreseeing an increase in
moped accidents to correspond with the increase in mopeds they passed
a compulsory helmet law (for mopeds, not bikes) Moped riding and
moped buying immediately collapsed, and bike riding began to increase
for the first time in years.

Meanwhile bike riding had begun to revive in the USA. The low point
was probably symbolized when the Verrezano Narrows Bridge was built
without sidewalk or cycle track, and the revival began when Dr Paul
Dudley White advised President Eisenhower to take up cycling after
his heart attack. Davis, California, became overrun with bikes when
the Agricultural School of the University of California was expanded
into a full scale university in the early 1960s.

The citizens of Davis were rather horrified to fined their streets
cluttered up with bikes, and wanted to ban them. Eco-warrior types
were beginning to campaign that it was the cars that should be banned
instead. This became an issue in the town elections of 1966, and the
result was compromise: apartheid (Suitably, the Dutch for
separation). Special ghettos in the gutter were marked out for
bikes, and thus was the bike lane invented

Jeremy Parker

"Tom Keats" wrote in message
news
In article ,
"Bill Sornson" writes:

Good lord, no wonder you people (not an Imus ref.) hate bike
lanes. Those
things are atrocities.

That's what's meant by "physically separated" bike lanes,
as per the subject line.

[snip]

Of course, there is no such thing as a "physically separated bike
lane" That's just a euphemism for the facility that dare not speak
its name, the cycle track. "Cycle track" has become an obscenity,
not to be spoken in polite society.

The problems with cycle tracks have been known for some time. Half a
century ago, here in Britain, one for Britain's greatest town
planners and traffic engineers, Professor Sir Colin Buchanan,. wrote,
in his book "Mixed Blessing, The Motor in Britain"
"The meagre efforts to separate cyclists from motor traffic have
failed, tracks are inadequate, the problem of treating them at
junctions and intersections is completely unsolved, and the attitude
of cyclists themselves to these admittedly unsatisfactory tracks has
not been as helpful as it might have been."

Jeremy Parker