I live in a country that is cycling walhalla, where there are more bikes than citizens, where a good chunk of the population go to work and do groceries by bike and we do all of the above.
And the best solution for this is to create a separate space for bicycles that can't be accidentally violated without running into some sort of barrier. The next best thing is probably to include certain things in the the education for the drivers license that give people the empathy and perspective of what it feels like if you are on a bicycle and some asshole overtakes you with 70 km/h and half an arm of distance.
The Dutch cycling embassy website provides some basic principles on this: https://dutchcycling.nl/expertises/cycling-behaviour/ and on infrastructure https://dutchcycling.nl/expertises/cycling-infrastructure/
So right now there is this huge push in EU to make more bike infrastructure. But people making it ... don't bike. At least not everywhere. And where they don't they will inevitably make bad bike infrastructure. This could just be corners that are too tight. Bad incline on a corner for example will not be obvious to someone who never bikes, could be just a few degrees. But on a bike it's deadly! Maybe not on dry asphalt, but bring some rain, sand, whatever and people will fall.
And then we can start talking about culture.
Also... The Dutch reach. Open the driver's side door with the other hand to make sure you look for cyclists. In 12 years in Amsterdam I have never won the 'door prize'.
Tokyo is pretty sweet to bike around right now, despite the lack of dedicated bike lanes. It’s not as great as my times in Netherlands / Denmark, but it’s great nevertheless. It’s a bit weird, because almost everyone switches between roads and sidewalks, but you get used to it. For that, you need to make biking the superior mode of transportation for certain trips. With e-bikes, that is the case for a lot of activities within Tokyo.
That's true, but you have to bootstrap it. People will also not bike if it's not safe or attractive to do. In the city I live in, the city center was pretty unsafe for pedestrians and cyclists until the end of the 70s. Two persistent politicians decided to pretty much ban cars from the city center [1], which led to a lot of protests. They persisted and in 1977 the switch was flipped on a single day. Nowadays everyone here is in favor of this and other cities have made the same change, because people realize now that a city center without cars is much nicer: you can walk around much more carelessly, the air is cleaner, etc. Also, it made biking far more attractive, because you can get from the outskirts of the city to some shop much faster by bike than by car.
Since then, the cycling network has been continuously optimized to be able to travel between different points in the city as possible as quickly as possible and with as few interactions with cars as possible. And there are other amenities like traffic light that increase priority for cyclists when it is raining (to encourage people to cycle even when it is raining).
The same is true outside the cities, where there is a dense cycling network, largely separated from car roads. Both for fast work <-> home routing and for recreational cycling. The latter is the so-called fietsknooppunten network that prefers nice routes through nature, etc. over short routes [2].
[1] Article in Dutch: https://www.aanpakringzuid.nl/actueel/nieuws/verhalen/straks... , Google translation: https://www-aanpakringzuid-nl.translate.goog/actueel/nieuws/...
[2] Fietsknooppunten: https://www.fietsknoop.nl/planner
I cycle to work, and I came here to ask if there's a crowd sourced city map that shows cyclist traffic accident black spots as part of my cycle route is genuinely frightening due to traffic.
Interesting. I haven't really heard of such issues here much. How it works here:
- The car is responsible: the car driver has to pay 100% of the damage.
- The cyclist or pedestrian is responsible: the car driver has to pay at least 50% of the damage.
- For kids up till 14, the car driver is always 100% responsible for the damage.
I guess this helps, because for the cyclist there is always a risk of being partially responsible if you intentionally cycle into a car. At the same time, since the car driver is always responsible for damages (50% or up, depending on the blame), they are more careful by default.
IANAL, but: https://www.brugmanletselschadeadvocaten.nl/fietsongeluk/#:~...
Automatic blame is naive thinking.
> We then log a sensor events [sic] if the majority of cells in the sensor frame agree to the same value within a threshold parameter [...]. This ensures that sensor events are only logged when large objects like cars block the sensor’s field-of-view , i.e., one or more small objects like branches or distance pedestrians in the sensor’s field-of-view will not trigger this condition. While there is no guarantee that this approach strictly identifies cars, we empirically saw during testing that passing cyclists and pedestrians rarely satisfied this condition at the typical passing distance due to the wide field-of-view of the VL53L8.
Also interesting that it's quite cheap to build:
> The whole system can cost less than $25 [...]
From the paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713325
For these faster roads it is necessary to have dedicated cycling infrastructure, including Dutch-style safe intersections. Otherwise only risk-tolerant or desperate people will cycle.
Having biked a lot in SF, my impression is the best protected bike lanes are on wide roads like Folsom/Howard, Fell/Oak, etc. where proximity isn’t generally an issue, but I’d expect intersections to be riskier due to higher car speeds. While cars passing on isn’t an issue on the Wiggle with a critical mass of riders, on neighborhood streets where sharing the road is obligated the drivers can be scariest, especially in the Sunset. In NYC, an abundance of one lane, one way streets make controlling an entire street easier.
The reality of city design at the moment is almost any bike route will require the sharing the road with cars at some point, usually at the start and end of a ride, because bike lane and “bike route” coverage is often poor in residential areas and business districts.
I live in a major city and the increased traffic from scooters almost feels like it could support a separate lane even if bikes didn't exist
There are people who attach a pool noodle to the back of their bike sticking out straight into the road less than proper passing distance.
They are highly visible and the idea is that drivers avoid them because they don’t know if they will damage their car or not.
In the case of a case of a close pass the pool noodle just bends out of the way.
The was also a laser product that projected a line onto the ground around the cyclist. I don’t think it worked very well though.
Dooring remains one of the greatest threats to bicyclist safety in many locations. Even places with great bike infrastructure often have streets with parking where cyclists must ride.
Safe bicycle routes need to be created by building inherently safe infrastructure: protected intersections and separate bicycle tracks.
The cost of bike lanes isn't too bad. Unlike a car road it doesn't require a lot of maintenance.
> Bike trails are a nightmare because inevitably you need to share them with pedestrians.
This is a political issue, here you have plenty of bike trails just for bikes.
My initial reaction is that an accelerometer might be a better data-point, or combining this with accelerometer data.
I'm working on the assumption that a smoother path means I am interacting less with traffic or other hazards.
Admittedly these streets aren't usually close together (either in time or space), but I've certainly biked on both.
Still, imperfect data can be better than no data.
Roadio has front and rear facing cameras with AI driven object detection to help keep cyclists and motor scooter riders safer.
Garmin (amongst others) has had a rear mounted radar (and bike light) system for a while. They also have one with a camera built in.
Interesting to see how these two would compare, but my first (light) glance points to velo.ai being further along…
But I haven't heard of any "official" programs.
