The 1979 Delft Cycle Plan | Hacker News Reader

The 1979 Delft Cycle Plan

bicycledutch.wordpress.com

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Looking back, growing up in/near Delft was probably one of the best experiences in my life. Being able to get anywhere in our smallish (100k population) city within 10 minutes (and usually less) by bicycle had some great advantages when I was in my teens. Without the infrastructure, I arguably wouldn't have had the same level of independence that lead to some of the best experiences in my early life. Like biking to school independently, frequent games of DnD with friends across town and other social activities, going to library daily to play with computers, drinking alcohol for the first time and being able to (safely) get home, etc.

In contrast bringing up my own kids in car-centric California seems quite more limiting. I like to brag to my American friends how I would bike to school by myself at age 9 and how it would be completely impossible here. Now, I don't think we should necessarily try to compare or convert every place to one like Delft but experiencing this increased/free mobility early on in life definitely changes ones perspective and arguably stimulates greater independence.

> Now, I don't think we should necessarily try to compare or convert every place to one like Delft

Why not? I think we absolutely should.

"""People were visited at home and they weren’t just asked how they travelled where, they were specifically asked for their constraints, the reasons why they didn’t cycle to supermarket X for instance. The answers were very concrete: “because intersection Y doesn’t feel safe”, or “because canal Z forces me to make a detour of that many metres”."""

Just teach this as at civil engineering courses the world over - read this paragraph once a day for three months and you get a semesters credit.

The world would change

I don't understand why this is so poorly understood. It UX 101 and should be part of any design or engineering curriculum.

The examples of frustrating traffic patterns in my neighborhood are too many to list. Just what I run into on my 1 mile walk to the office... - Sidewalk skips back/forth across 4 lane road without crosswalks. So, I walk down the bike lane. - Crosswalk at one intersection timed so I'm crossing at the same time as turning traffic (that will run into me). - Another intersection only has crosswalks on 3 sides, so if you need to get from NE corner to NW corner, you have to cross three times instead of once. - No sidewalk through massive commercial parking area, so part of the walk is down an access road.

It still beats driving, but this stuff would be so obvious if the traffic engineers were just made to walk around a bit.

I am not an expert in surveying but my gut feeling tells me that visiting people at home and having a personal conversation delivers high quality data, albeit being expensive. I fear we might loose that quality in the age of social media and big data.

We only lose the expensive stuff when we no longer are willing to pay for the expensive stuff.

And compared tonbuilding roads in places no one wants its cheap.

What is needed is better accountability to the "public" for such civil engineering decisions - which means generally better more engaged local politics (this being a virtuous circle since more local people will get engaged when they realise they have influence over such decisions

If part of the decision making process was a documentary on youtube of whommakes the local decisions, what the impact of crossing X would be then I could see more people getting involved

one called call it the nightly news

Some cities are having success lately with implementing large networks of cycle tracks, all at once, rather than one or two at a time.

Calgary: http://www.calgary.ca/Transportation/TP/Pages/Cycling/Cyclin...

Seville: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/28/seville-cycli...

These cycle tracks need to be part of a network to work.

Small story: I worked at a large in-city University Campus with a lot of green field spaces surrounding, leading to the carparks and bus stops. People continually walked on the grass the way they wanted. The university did not like the grass being mud, so laid paths. They laid the paths in regular shapes, to achieve formalisms they liked. People did not want to walk on these directing lines, continued to walk and drove the grass into mud again the paths which led to the axes they wanted to get to, and radiate from.

Lesson: leave the paths to be set by the feet, sometimes. All they had to do was photograph the dominant trails and then make paths of them.

That's known as a desire path or desire line: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path

TIL. This should be taught to all transport designers, landscape and other architects.

Not that these desire-paths are always optimal or appropriate, but it feels like an awful lot of times in open public spaces, they could be respected or at least understood.

IIRC, these are taught. But it's a bit like a CS ethics course; you can bring a horse to water but you can't make it drink. And even if you believe in it, that goes out the window if your clients want that context-ignoring modern architecture. Developers and local power brokers are often more interested in showing off their ability to afford Zaha Hadid or Calatrava than they are in providing useful assets to the community.

Reminds me of when I'm at a packed party and people tend to form "paths" where they can circulate among the crowd. It always fascinates me how this happens so naturally and people seem to just so easily identify those paths. Also amuses me that I'm thinking about this when I'm at a party.

There are a lot of schools with stories of properly paving their desire paths, see the comments on this Reddit thread for the "my school too!" links https://www.reddit.com/r/DesirePath/comments/5shk81/this_col...

This is an often under-appreciated part of planning: ask people what frustrates them, and they will tell you.

So many things are dropped in from a birds' eye view without actually asking people what their problems are, and then people are shocked when it doesn't solve anything.

The BicycleDutch YouTube channel is great: https://www.youtube.com/user/markenlei

He covers lots of bicycle-oriented infrastructure projects and history throughout the Netherlands.

The YouTube channel is an offspring from the blog (https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com), which adds text, thematic groups (https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/index-by-theme/), etc.

They were made in conjunction with each other, but the blog posts contain a bit more information. I find the videos to be a bit easier to consume, though, and if I want to know more I follow the blog link in the video description.

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