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Comment by cassepipe | Hacker News Reader

Ok for LEDs and your general point but for the bike lane situation you are kind of shooting yourself in the foot : It's either non-standard compliant bike lane, which is a problem, or it is standard compliant and then it means that the standard is a broad, inflexible set of rules dictated from the top which is either too complicated for people in charge of the implementation or leaves them no room to adapt to a special case... or probably do not incentivize the implementers to think about what they are doing, all of which is a also a problem.

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Maybe they would rather not have bikers bombing onto the sidewalk at 20 mph when they are going to be sharing that space with pedestrians. A sharp turn is a good way to prevent that. I assume there are several "bike lane ends" signs here, though, which should be an indication to slow down.

Imagine if you were talking about a road doing this for no reason. The engineers care about how fast you can go in a car around town, not bikes. You can't argue bike lanes get the same amount of care/effort as roads.

Roads do this all the time "for no reason." Plenty of neighborhoods have very sharp curves to get drivers to slow down. This is one of many "traffic calming" techniques.

Also, I'm not sure where you got the idea that engineers don't care about the speeds of bikes (especially around pedestrians).

The example by the author is an unsafe one. You think putting unsafe sharp curves at the bottom of hills for cars is acceptable?

Your example is good, and the matching example of a bike lane is the opposite of what was shown in the article.

> You think putting unsafe sharp curves at the bottom of hills for cars is acceptable?

Yes, it is absolutely acceptable and it happens all the time in road design. It happens specifically because people (apparently in all vehicle types) will speed on the long straightaway down the hill into whatever comes next. Many, many suburban areas with hills will have sharp curves or T-intersections at the bottom of hills as a matter of course and it does work at slowing down the traffic going down the hill.

If you look at street view on the actual road, that is exactly this situation: a very straight road with a lot of visibility, leading toward a very long and complicated intersection where everyone needs to pay attention and go slowly. Nobody traveling a reasonable speed on a bike will be surprised by that turn since they can all see it coming for literally a mile.

I assume the alternatives to this specific merge are either:

* Merge the bikes into the car traffic and pray to god that they obey traffic signals at the upcoming intersection (we all know this isn't happening), while also accepting that they accelerate very slowly compared to cars.

* Set up a dedicated bike lane with dedicated signals (which is very expensive).

The engineers here clearly opted to instead merge the bike traffic with the pedestrian traffic through that intersection so that the existing pedestrian signals apply to them. You can see that the bike lane continues after this intersection, so they literally just did this to handle the intersection.

TFA on this point reads like "cyclist (or illegal moped user) doesn't want to be slowed down and doesn't care about anyone else."

> Yes, it is absolutely acceptable and it happens all the time in road design.

Aren't there usually signs indicating the maximum safe speed when that sort of thing happens? We don't have context here but I doubt there is a sign telling bikers that they should slow down. And aren't roads in general much larger and easier to see from far away, vs this tiny little ramp? You also haven't explained why the big curb is vertical instead of sloped, or why the street sign needs to be where it is. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this thing is designed as a fuck you to bikers who don't obey the rules. We simply don't design roads that way, where it's designed to make you crash if you deviate from the standard even a bit.

We absolutely do design roads for all kinds of people to make you crash if you do not follow them. In fact, on pretty much all roads, you will crash if you decide not to follow the road, and frequently you will crash into a tree or a building. Drivers generally see this kind of design and complain about it but slow the hell down. Cyclists seem to be the same.

There is a sign ahead of this ramp saying in very big letters "BIKE LANE ENDS." It's up to the bikers to decide how they want to use that information. The sign, the ramp, and the end of the bollards marking the bike lane are visible at quite a long distance.

As for the street sign, it's a street sign. It's where the street is. It also tells you exactly where to use Google street view to get full context.

If you look at the street view (https://maps.app.goo.gl/Li9FSf29kXJWJLxW8), you'll see that it's been redesigned since the picture in the post. The current street view picture is from Feb 2023; the picture in the blog post also appears to be from street view (given the translucent quadrilateral near the fence) but presumably from before 2023. So...it appears that the bike lane was redesigned in a way that reflects two of my biggest complaints that were based on the outdated picture. Doesn't that sort of vindicate what I was saying? Why did they change it if the original design was ok? Like why didn't they do it the right way in the first place?

The sharpness of the corner is the same, which is TFA's real biggest complaint. Yours may have been the sign.

The context is even worse than the bike ramp. The bike lane dumps directly onto a sidewalk, which is not really bikeable anyway with the impending complicated street crossings that require stopping to push a button to get a crosswalk against a very confusing intersection across right-turning traffic onto a motorway on-ramp. Or stay on the street and shoot directly into a lane of traffic, and hope to find a gap big enough to cut left across the lane before it turns into a highway on-ramp.

Bikes has a thing called breaks. You are not helpless on the bike and if you are, you are really behind the maintenance.

And yes, roads for cars are intentionally build in a ways that makes high speed obviously unsafe at places.

Fair enough.

On a side note, I would personally avoid sharing the sidewalk with pedestrians, keep my speed and remain on the road. I know it's legal in my country to bike on (not high-speed) road even if there is a bike lane available. I'd rather share space with the plentiful, the cars, and have them slow down a bit, which cost them nothing, than bothering pedestrians.

Yes, the less sharp angle of the described bike-lane would imply that biker can get into the sidewalk in high speed without issue and harm a pedestrian easier.

Yeah, that's why when pedestrians have to cross where cars are that there is always a stop sign to make sure their high speed won't harm a pedestrian /sarcasm.

…we do put stop lights at pedestrian crossings on high-speed streets. They look like this: http://www.pedbikesafe.org/PEDSAFE/cm_images/PedHyb1.png

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