Urban Planet is a daily roundup of blogs from around the world dealing specifically with urban environments. We’ll be on the lookout for websites outside the country that approach themes related to urban experiences and issues.
What makes the safest intersection for all road users? It’s a question planners, designers and engineers have been tackling for years. In the Netherlands, experiments with a bike lane/turn lane yielded poor visibility for cyclists and too many conflicts. As this video via Momentum Magazine explains, Dutch standard junctions create safe passage for cyclists and pedestrians by carving out corner curbs to keep cyclists separated from both vehicles and pedestrians when turning or crossing an intersection.
For more stories from around the planet, check out Spacing on Facebook and Twitter. Do you have an Urban Planet worthy article you’d like to share? Send the link to urbanplanet@spacing.ca
19 comments
Hillary is hereby sentenced to write 100 times “Bicycles are vehicles.”
Kidding about the sentence… but someone posting on Spacing’s blog really should know better.
“Bicycles are vehicles” in the literal sense. But when making road policies that’s simply lazy thinking, lumping everything with wheels into one category for convenience.
I saw similar design in Chinese cities too, and indeed it is very nice for cyclists. They can easily handle much larger bike traffic there (both Dutch and Chinese) than we have here in Toronto.
That design seems to limit bicycles’ speed through the intersection. It may be fine for slow cruisers, but I can’t see going through safely at any more than 20 km/h, certainly if there are other cyclists in the lane.
Also, I am not sure how that design will fit in the older city, where the available sidewalk space is much less than shown in the picture. A nicely-curved radius will go through the corners of buildings at places like Yonge and King.
Finally, how well will the design work in intersections with significant pedestrian volume? The pedestrians will spill over into the bike lanes, both due to crowding and due to that being a shorter line. Now, add a cyclist following the weaving cycle lane, which aims them straight at the crossing pedestrians….
I’ve seen lots of “here’s how the Dutch do it” videos and diagrams and such, but the built environment where I’ve seen these miracles of engineering is much more like the nice part of Mississauga Road north of the QEW, than it is of Bloor or College.
That design seems to limit bicycles’ speed through the intersection. It may be fine for slow cruisers, but I can’t see going through safely at any more than 20 km/h, certainly if there are other cyclists in the lane.
Also, I am not sure how that design will fit in the older city, where the available sidewalk space is much less than shown in the picture. A nicely-curved radius will go through the corners of buildings at places like Yonge and King.
Finally, how well will the design work in intersections with significant pedestrian volume? The pedestrians will spill over into the bike lanes, both due to crowding and due to that being a shorter line. Now, add a cyclist following the weaving cycle lane, which aims them straight at the crossing pedestrians….
I’ve seen lots of “here’s how the Dutch do it” videos and diagrams and such, but the built environment where I’ve seen these miracles of engineering is much more like the nice part of Mississauga Road north of the QEW, than it is of Bloor or College.
A comment that was pointed out to me: The place where cyclists are anticipated to stop seems to block cyclists traveling in the opposite direction.
Ed,
I’ve cycled in The Netherlands and can attest from personal experience that the safe intersections shown do not limit speed in any way.
Also, as pointed out in the video, the safe intersection takes up no more extra room. The Dutch approach to Bloor and College streets downtown would be to include them in the downtown car-free zone. Or else in the peripheral zone where roads are not through routes for cars. In other words, car drivers can only go there and park, not drive through.
Take a look at this example in Utrecht:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=i9JkkPwxvRo
Ed, it is probably true that this design is more suitable for intersections of wider streets, like Univ. & College, rather than Yonge and King. The examples I saw in China tend to be on intersections even bigger, the volume of peds, bicycles and cars are all huge.
BTW, 20km is not slow cruiser on city street. We are not talking about a race course here.
Just spend two weeks cycling around the Netherlands, and their road designs are far superior to ours, not only for cyclists, but also for pedestrians, cars, trams, buses, trains and everyone.
But it’s a whole culture that’s different, and it’s not just the junctions, whole cities and neighborhoods have been redesigned since the 70s (when cars dominated, and their streets looked very much like ours).
Their designs would work here, but it takes more than junction redesign. For example on a street like king or queen, the streetcar would get it’s own lanes (with boarding islands), bikes would have lanes, and cars would have only one lane in one direction. Small streets would have their entrances narrowed where they meet major streets and the sidewalk and bike path would be raised level through the intersections, many stop signs would be removed in favor of yield signs (did not see any stop signs in the Netherlands), roundabouts would be used extensively. Tram and train services would be increased to make up for the car space reductions.
The whole system is different in the Netherlands and has continued to evolve in the last 40 years. Toronto needs to start this evolution. Our streets are not too narrow, we just have to start changing our transportation priorities. I would love to see a new development (perhaps the port lands) built to Dutch standards to showcase how superior their system is. But it would take a whole new neighborhood, not just a few separated bike lanes for a few kilometers on one street to start convincing people.
My default speed in the city is around 28 km/h, and I routinely accelerate to that in half a block. I’ll speed up further, to 35km/h or more, to make a light. Those “safe” weaves wouldnt’ be very safe for my cycling speeds. I guess I’ll have to find an “unsafe” road.
By the way, it’s not a “race course”, but I would like to get where I’m going in some reasonable time. There’s a reason that higher-speed routes were built for cars. We’d need the same for bicycles.
I also wonder if this design can permit left-turning cars at all. “I thought the cyclist was turning right, but then he zipped into my path” would be an easy excuse for the left-turning driver. And the pedestrians are out of sight, out of mind, way around the corner.
The only way this design will fit into existing intersections would be to widen the sidewalks a lot. There’s not room for that unless you do make Bloor and Yonge and Queen car-free zones. Good luck with that! And the circly-cicly business will still require pretty sharp turns. (Which I didn’t notice in the Utrecht video.)
And the whole trip into Utrecht would map to a nice ride into Meadowvale Town Centre on a Sunday morning. There’s no part of the ride that looked anything like College and Bathurst or Bay and Front at rush hour. There were hardly any cars and hardly any pedestrians. The Martin Goodman trail is busier on a weekday evening that what I saw in the video.
Ed> When you suggest you want to get where you’re going at the speed that’s right for you — and maybe that speed is fast — you’ll be called reckless by some bike advocates who want everybody to ride slow in a separated bike lane.
Calvin,
Looks like you believe that the members of Ontario’s Legislative Assembly are a bunch of lazy, shirking good-for-nothing bone-idle goldbrickers when they put into Ontario’s Highway Traffic Act that bicycles are vehicles.
Shawn, I am not sure that’s entirely fair that I’d be called ‘reckless’.
However, I’ve certainly heard the opinion that, since ‘fit young male riders’ make up so many riders — and especially ‘vehicular’ riders who ride fast — then their cycling infrastructure needs are already met. In this view, cycling infrastructure should be oriented to slower and more timid riders who are afraid to be out on the streets.
The whole ‘8-80’ slogan seems to result in proposals for infrastructure that would, in fact, suit eight-year-olds and eighty-year-olds, but does not consider the desires or needs of the stronger riders who are out riding a lot more often than these eight- or eighty-yeare olds.
I desire to ride fast, pretty much as fast as my 50+ age will let me, but at the same time I need to complete my 20 km commute (each way) in a reasonable length of time. Otherwise I might as well ride the Queen car (from Long Branch to Yonge).
Having commuted almost 2500km this year, I certainly don’t think that the cycling infrastructure is any good for *anyone*. I can see putting some priority getting non-cyclists riding, but to when I hear that the present riders have all the infrastructure they need, or hear hat present quick riders should slow right down to the speed of slow occasional/non-cyclists, well I get irked.
For cars, we have nice 20km/h park roads where one can go for a pleasant, stress-free, safe drive. On the other hand, if you have to get somewhere, you choose an arterial road or expressway. Bicycle infrastructure should have the same hierarchy. A 30 km/h limit I can understand, but 20 km/h is impractically slow.
I am also leery that so much of the time I hear that bike infrastructure should make new cyclists and those currently-very-occasional cyclists ‘feel safe’. That’s all fine and dandy, but my experience tells me that it’s very likely that there will still be plenty of dangers, despite the separated bike lanes or other gizmos. Inexperienced cyclists who are feeling ‘safe’ are going to ride right into these dangers.
Finally, from a spacing perspective, it would be good to have a more rigorious analysis of what cycling infrastructure will actually fit into Toronto’s built environment. Much of the Dutch infrastructure would fit fine into Meadowvale, but not so much into the Annex.
It seems to me that implementing good cycling infrastructure for *all* riders will mean taking a whole *lot* of space away from cars. I am not sure how feasible this is in the short term, or even medium term.
Some ‘cycling advocates’ seem to assume that this is easily done, like I said, good luck with that. Other advocates actually target transit (‘get rid of those dangerous streetcars’), presumably because cycling infrastructure will take away the need for them and buses. Good luck with that, too.
Ed> Am making reference mostly to the hyperbole around separated bike lanes and reasonable objections to them like yours.
Ed,
I think it is entirely within your right to ride as fast as you can safely do on the street (presumably still within the posted speed limit). However, to reject an safer intersection design only for forcing the maybe the fastest cyclists to slow down to 20km does not seem to be a valid reason. Shawn, I don’t think this is the same thing as the narrow bike lane, which will limit the speed of of ALL cyclists to the slowest you encounter.
I think I generally cruise at around 20 or maybe a bit over. I don’t really know, no equipment to measure. But once a policeman was using his radar and I asked him, he said I was at 22. Of course you will blow past me like a wind, but from my daily experience I am faster than 80-90% of other cyclists on the road.
Ed, bike lanes are not meant for people such as yourself. You can continue to play in the traffic with the couriers, spandex wearers, fixie riders and other assorted type A heros. Bike lanes are designed with the average rider in mind and provide a safer area where the elderly, children and non Lance Armstrongs can happily ride to and fro.
Not to worry though. Toronto will continue to study, argue, flip flop for at least another decade and in the end, maybe a few more painted lines and a couple of separated lanes may or may not appear. They may or may not be connected to each other. A half-assed bike lane network to go with a half-assed BIXI deployment and a half assed subway system and half-assed pedestrian streets and half-assed street furniture and half-assed public spaces and…
Aaron, as predicted, calls people who might find a separated bike lane constricting A Hero Lance Armstrong types. As predicted.
Yu;
I disagree that “making you slow down” is not a safety issue. If a feature is added that makes you slow down, you’re slowing down because the situation is less safe. Bollards and P-gates are examples of items which “slow us down for our safety”. I’ve argued against this mindset in the past.
I find it interesting that the Dutch video puts a big red X through the design where the bike lane crosses to the left of the right-turn lane. In my experience, this arrangement works quite well, and I can think of reasons why it may be safer than the weave-at-the-intersection design (better visibility being a big one).
Note that this is from experience: there’s exactly this arrangement on westbound Queens Quay approaching Bathurst, which I have ridden through hundreds of times, without issues or concerns. In fact, that crossover causes me less concern than many other parts of Queens Quay.
In case I have been deluded, I checked accident statistics on OpenFile’s Open Road: http://www.openfile.ca/openroad. This confirms that there are no particular issues with the crossover.
Finally, I think the Dutch design is bad for pedestrians. Not only does it make pedestrians zig considerably at each interesection (the diagram shows sidewalks much wider than anything we have in Toronto), it’s also less safe, since pedestrians will be out of sight of right-turning cars (and right-turning bicycles for that matter).
Aaron;
I guess we should build roads for people who don’t really drive much and don’t much like driving quickly. And we should set up our transit system for people who don’t particularly need to get somewhere, but just would like to sit on a bus for a bit?
As for pedestrian infrastructure, who cares about people who actually need to walk somewhere, what we need is infrastructure for dog-walkers out on a meander!