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Comment by landemva | Hacker News Reader

There are still crosswalks which are distributed around the circle. Rarely there are pedestrian tunnels to get inside the doughnut, like in Paris to visit the arch.

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Those crosswalks tend to be -in my experience - some of the most stressful to interact with. If they're controlled then you've just made the whole thing even worse than they were before. If they're not then you've got a much harder time as a pedestrian to figure out when it's safe to cross (because of the curve) and the traffic all wants to free flow.

I dunno. Maybe I just haven't experienced the right ones, but my experience is that the most pedestrian friendly urban spaces have mostly (roughly) straight lines and right angles and lots of natural or man made barriers to free flow of cars to prevent them from going too fast. I don't know how you can square that circle.

In Arnhem they did the reverse: Vehicular traffic is raised to a higher level and pedestrians and bikes take the lower (inner) level.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Airborneplein,+6828+KP+Arn...

It's extremely efficient.

That's really awesome, but you need a tremendous amount of land to make that possible.

Most roundabouts of that type I know have replaced similarly sized all asphalt intersections. Now there is more green. When planned ahead there really isn’t that much extra real estate required if you are willing to have steeper grades for pedestrians only for example.

Oh wow, years ago I randomly came across that place upon once when I was in Arnhem and was very confused about it, interesting to see it here!

I definitely like the idea of this but it seems like the tendency is always the opposite because it's much cheaper to build a pedestrian overpass than a car one, even though they're also an accessibility nightmare and usually kind of a terrible experience and aesthetic blight in their own right.

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