I think we should force cars to be beholden to the same laws as everyone else on the road. In some places bikes aren’t allowed in the middle of the lane. I propose in such places we extend the same laws to cars. It’s not like cars deserve special privileges just for being bigger. Taking a whole lane to yourself is greedy and selfish. And if you can’t fit in half a lane, obviously you need to buy a smaller vehicle that can. Car drivers need to follow all the laws on the road.
I’m not sure if you are trying to be humorous or not. There are bike lanes where cars are not allowed to drive. However, bikes may occupy the main lanes of the road.
So here’s the thing – NotJustBikes makes this point frequently – you can’t trust that people are going to do the right thing. This is why painted bicycle gutters do not work. The way to combat drivers hitting people is to design the infrastructure in such a way that it’s difficult to do things the wrong and dangerous way. Grade-separated bike paths, level crossings for people not in cars, and lower speeds for cars (forced with narrower roads and traffic calming) are probably the 3 biggest things to contribute to this. From what I saw, Paris has, at the very least, curbs and flexi-posts separating bike lanes which are good starts. They also, admirably, took away some lanes for bikes instead which is GREAT.
When you introduce these, the danger goes down significantly and people feel a lot more comfortable taking their bike places they might normally take a car to. The reason for this is that motorists feel endangered if they drive faster or in a dangerous way. That’s what we want, because history and traffic studies have shown time and time again that the only time the majority of drivers change their behaviour is when they feel that doing differently will damage their car.
The final step to ensuring safety is making bike networks that are different from the car networks. Getting people on bikes to their destination faster than cars. Keeping them entirely separate from cars in a lot of their journey. Making cars go around the “long way”, which paradoxically decreases traffic and makes driving an all around nicer experience. Decreasing the conflicts between different types of traffic is ideal.
There’s lots more besides this, such as pedestrian/cyclist-leading cross signals, Dutch roundabouts which are built in a different way to make biking around them easier and safer, and varying road materials such as brick to make drivers once again feel uncomfortable going fast, there’s TONS of solutions that when combined make travelling safer for ALL.
Just asking people to follow laws will never be enough. Luckily, that’s not even close to the only option, although it might be hard to imagine for North Americans.
As long as everyone attempts to obey street laws and both cars and bikes respect each other. “Share the road” etc. signal, have lights at night, pass on the left.
Lol. Dutch people are just people. There’s already been changes in many North American cities. The Netherlands didn’t start out this way, it was just as car centric as every other major city in the 70s.
It’s improving but there are too many bicycle gutters (“share rows”) and our network has a lot of really risky exchanges that you have to cross to get back into protected paths.
Cyclists are regularly killed in the city by drivers.
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