Bicycle riding is healthy, low cost, low energy consumption, way to travel around. Bicyclists get exercise, outdoors time, and have more fun in their travels than do car drivers. Unfortunately many countries have forgotten the joy of cycling, and design their cities to give preference to cars.
Last week California’s Transportation Agency, Caltrans, issued a Design Guidance document describing implementation of protected bikeways in California. The document should make it easier for California cities to design/redesign their cities to provide a better balance between all street system users. The picture shown above is one of the…
This former street had been closed to cars, and was a decrepit disused road. The city of Hertogenbosch repurposed it as a bicycle route.
The Netherlands has about 17 million people, the vast majority of which are bicycling regularly and own one or more bicycles. They bicycle for pretty much any human activity, starting with the morning commute to office, university or school. They bicycle to go shopping, to come home at lunch time,…
The extensive network of dedicated bicycle lanes in the Netherlands may seem like an inefficient use of space just for cyclists. The lanes actually provide great benefit, because they encourage bicycling which by itself has a lot of benefits for everyone. But these lanes benefit other people besides the bicyclists. Pedestrians…
The Hovenring is a “roundabout” meant for bicyclists situated above a major highway intersection. The construction allows easy bicycle access from any direction to go any other direction while allowing the bicyclists to avoid dangerous interactions with the street below. The structure also serves to hold lighting for the intersection.…
Intersections in Utrecht, Netherlands, were suboptimal for bicyclists. There was no protected cycleway and instead cyclists had to ride along the side of the road to get to the intersection. The new design has a protected path for cyclists up to the intersection, and a shorter distance to cross at the…
A huge multidirectional multidimensional intersection in Hertogenbosch, Netherlands, was built in 1965 when city planners thought cycling was dead, and the car would rule. The intersection was extremely complex, and wasted a lot of space. It had been built at one end of an island, and had to serve traffic flows from/through…
In Zwolle (Netherlands), a particularly problematic segment of a particular road required a novel approach. The Dutch have a “roundabout” design that already serves the needs of car drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists in an ingenuous and efficient way. This particular intersection, though, required a non-standard roundabout. In typical roundabouts, cars can…
This corner of Utrecht was designed in the 1960’s when the paradigm was cars, cars and more cars. The roads had a 50 km/hr speed limit and weren’t exactly friendly to pedestrians or cyclists. The city redesigned (“modernized”) the area by blocking access to a few streets, narrowing the streets,…
Snelbinder takes you over the river Waal in Nijmegen and it has a total length of 2 kilometres (almost 1 1/4 mile) with a main span of 235 metres (771 ft). The bridge was attached to the railway bridge that had already been there since 1879. In Dutch its name…
In the Netherlands, roundabouts are common and they’re carefully designed to support not only car traffic, but bicyclist and pedestrian safety. These videos show how nice are the roundabouts in Amsterdam. Biyclists are in a separated and dedicated lane that’s situated so that car stopped for cyclists do not block…
The Netherlands is famous for its cycling culture. According to this video that culture goes to the top of society. The newly crowned King Willem-Alexander is a life-long cyclist as has his ancestors for five generations.
Today the Netherlands is a country where bicycling is a major factor of life. This is a fun video showing the bicycling culture of the 1950’s in the Netherlands.
There’s enough bicycling activity in the Netherlands that they build what amounts to bicycle parking garages. To help bicyclists in Utrecht know which of the many parking facilities has free spaces, the city recently unveiled new electronic signs showing the number of free spaces in real time. In most places…
