Tiffany B. Brown

a mish-mosh of stuff

What the U.S. could learn from The Netherlands

The Netherlands resembles the United States as a prosperous, technologically advanced nation where a huge share of the population owns automobiles. They simply don’t drive them each and every time they leave home, thanks to common sense transportation policies where biking and transit are promoted as an attractive alternative to the car. Indeed, millions of Dutch commuters combine bike and train trips, which offers the point-to-point convenience of the automobile and the speed of transit.

A quote pulled from Jay Walljasper’s Guernica piece Bicycling as a Way of Life

http://swirlspice.com Erica M

Minneapolis debuted a bike share program called NiceRide this year. It’s modeled after a similar program in Montreal. I’ve seen a call for placing NiceRide kiosks at light rail train stations as an obvious next step (perhaps after expanding to currently un-/underserved neighborhoods).

A dichotomy that I find interesting is the philosophical difference between separating bike traffic from car traffic vs integrating them. I think there’s merit in both as long as there is *something* there for bike traffic. Especially since redoing an existing street to accommodate bikes is usually easier (and hence, cheaper) than building out a new path. But there’s a lot of research to show that people in general and women in particular are much more likely to bike when they feel safe, and by “safe” we mean “protected from car traffic.” So that’s an argument in favor of separate rights of way.
Anonymous

Yes. I remember seeing an article suggesting that cyclists are actually safer when they’re mixed with traffic, instead of relegated to a bike lane. But I wonder how much of that has to do with the design of bike lanes in much of the U.S. I would think a system of bike-only roads, or bike lanes with curb or some kind of other buffer would be safer, and encourage more people to ride.