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Comment by armada651 | Hacker News Reader

As a Dutch person who lived in the UK for a year, yes. Bicycle lanes are nearly non-existent outside of London and the boroughs seem to be hostile to the idea in general. The few bicycle lanes you do find often end as abruptly as they start, there's nothing connecting them and there are no bicycle crossings when you meet a road.

However if you get a mountain bike and stick to the dirt roads along the rivers and hills, it is a great place to enjoy cycling through the countryside. One of the best bike trips I've done is cycling for 30 miles along the Thames river.

So the UK is great for scenic cycling, terrible for a cycling commute. And yes, any Dutch expat you meet is silently judging your country on the safety of its cycling infrastructure.

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> Yes, any Dutch expat you meet is silently judging your country on the safety of its cycling infrastructure.

And so you should. The UK's cycling infrastructure is embarrassingly bad.

An example. Local to me, recently, the government spent over £100m on a new road junction, to replace an old one. One of the main reasons that they had to build a new junction was that they claimed they could not remove traffic lights from the roundabout to improve traffic because pedestrians and cyclists both crossed the junction at 'street level'. A local cycle organization submitted a proposal with modelling (I can't find the link atm.), that showed that the desired increase in capacity could be achieved by adding bridges for pedestrians and cyclists, removing traffic lights, and altering the road layout.

And save about £90m.

Needlessly to say, the junction was built. I have no idea whether their proposal was considered, or not, unless I submit a freedom of information request to the UK government.

Regardless, the bridges should have been built anyway, because the junction is between two suburbs.

The new junction did get a new cyclist/pedestrian bridge to replace the old one. Except it's about 1km further away from the suburbs that the previous junction, so adding 2km to bike journeys.

Actually, bicycle tunnels - with a limited slope of course, like all other bicycle infrastructure - are recommended over bicycle bridges. These are more comfortable for cyclists. Gravity helps one cycle down, and the kinetic energy gained helps cyclists on the way up in the second half of the tunnel.

Also they can be smaller and cheaper to build. Because they only carry bicycles and pedestrians, a height clearance of about 2.5 meters is enough, while a bridge needs around 5 meters to let cargo trucks pass underneath. This also results in much shorter ramps.

Agreed. In England, however, tunnels particularly in towns tend to attract anti-social behaviour, which is rather unfortunate.

A problem in the UK is that in general we are hostile to build roads and certainly wide roads.

So roads are as narrow as possible and congested, which in itself is not great for bikes but also makes bike lanes near impossible. And when a bike lane is built (i.e. painted on the road or pavement) it is usually also very narrow and interferes with traffic.

Obviously this is difficult to change for existing roads, but we could at least make sure that new roads are wide enough, but this is not the case.

Do you think the centre of Amsterdam has wide roads? It does not.

That's great but I fail to see the relation with my comment.

I'm not talking about very central roads that can be mostly restricted to pedestrians, or city areas with narrow streets but also little to no traffic. I'm talking about roads in general. Amsterdam has many roads that look hugely wide for British standards.

Example: hhttps://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.7524584,-1.2749531,3a,75y,...

This is one of the main roads into Oxford. Note the "cycle lane"... Still, that road is not too bad because it has an exceptionally wide pavement on one side.

It's usually more like this: (Henley on Thames, where Boris Johnson used to be MP, again one of the main accesses to the town) https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5375008,-0.8998416,3a,75y,...

1. Botley Road - there is plenty of space for a two-way cycle path in the photo you show. Just a couple of photos down, you can see the road fits three vehicles abreast: in other words, it would comfortably fit two road lanes and a double cycle lane, if only that had been or was constructed. There are much trickier problems solved in the Netherlands.

2. Henley Bridge - Overall, Henley could be ideal for cycling around. OK, one of the main routes into the town crosses a river. Yet, if this was in the Netherlands, they would simply have built a parallel cycle bridge at some point in the last 20 years. Or, if there still wasn't one, they'd build one now.

Here you go, Rijswijk swingbrug, opened 2014 (watch the video for relevant commentary): https://www.oozo.nl/video/rijswijk/84608/rijswijk-cycle-brid...

Or Delft's Gelatinebrug, scheduled to open in 2023: https://www.delft.nl/wonen/bouwen/bouwprojecten-de-stad/schi...

There are plenty of other examples.

Amsterdam's narrow roads have little to no traffic only because of political decisions that cars are not the only form of transport that need to be considered. You can see in archive footage that this wasn't always the case.

Not sure what you're trying to argue about at this point.

I'm stating facts here: UK roads tend to be very narrow to the point that it is difficult/impossible to just add cycle lanes, and even new roads or development do not include space for cycle lanes (when they should).

You show me examples in the Netherlands where they have built or are building new infrastructures where cycle lanes are accounted for. Well, yes exactly what I'm saying is not the case in the UK and often it is not even doable (it's not only a matter of building a new bridge if the access roads don't have the space, either...)

> You show me examples in the Netherlands where they have built or are building new infrastructures where cycle lanes are accounted for.

No, I'm showing you extremely old infrastructure (Delft: founded 1246, Rijswijk: pre-historic) that have invested in modern solutions for cycling.

The towns I have picked that are almost exact equivalents for Henley here, except that Henley has not bothered.

[For what it's worth, I agree there is no point in starting out by constructing a cycle lane from the middle of nowhere into a town with no cycle provision - but the UK is 5 decades behind in this aspect, and continuing to fall further behind]

Old/new it does not matter.

> I picked towns that are almost exact equivalents for Henley, except that Henley has not bothered.

Well, that's my point, isn't it? Glad we agree... The thing is that it is difficult to resolve when that has been the case for decades, if not centuries because it's like that everywhere and you cannot decide to re-do half the country's road network and to raze everything that's in the way, especially in the UK.

19th century Paris: They did raze a large part of the city to make way for new avenues. 17th century London: After the Great Fire they rebuilt following exactly the previous narrow roads because no-one wanted to lose an inch or pay for an inch, and it's still the way any new projects are welcomed...

>The thing is that it is difficult to resolve when that has been the case for decades, if not centuries because it's like that everywhere and you cannot decide to re-do half the country's road network and to raze everything that's in the way, especially in the UK.

My point is only that this is exactly what the Netherlands has already done, which shows that it is perfectly possible to resolve (and, in general, without any razing - the Dutch are at least as proud of their history as the British)

The fact that the Netherlands looks good now is because these exact same problems have been solved over time. The UK could even benefit from an easier time, since it gets to just copy the best-working solutions.

To respond to your edit.

19th century London: they razed whole neighbourhoods to construct the Underground.

21st century London: they propose to raze the St Pancras estate (with compulsory purchase orders) to build the HS2 railway.

But cycling doesn't require razing: the solutions I have given to your suggested problems don't raze a single thing.

You said:

> So roads are as narrow as possible and congested, which in itself is not great for bikes but also makes bike lanes near impossible.

They replied:

> Do you think the centre of Amsterdam has wide roads? It does not.

That is the relationship with your comment. The centre of Amsterdam does not tend to have wide roads (with a handful of exceptions) and yet has bikes. Indeed, it is possible to drive down most of those roads, however the city has put a lot of effort into discouraging it which reduces the congestion and makes biking nicer.

Now, newly built areas tend to have wider streets, but there are plenty of old city centres in the Netherlands that are bike friendly, despite their being as narrow as possible. Congestion can be dealt with much more easily.

One thing that is not often done, is to have bikes on a smaller parallel road. Often there is an attempt to cram everything on one big road, when there are perfectly fine residential roads next to the big road that just need connecting.

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