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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

"Only 50% of the cycling routes in the Netherlands are separated from vehicular traffic."

Oh, ONLY 50%? Compare that to America, where, including protected bike lanes and bike trails, it's probably what, 5%, tops?

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It may be 50% in Amsterdam, but I seriously doubt it's anywhere close to that high in the rest of the country. I've ridden extensively around Eindhoven, a mid-size city in the middle of the Netherlands, and you spend extremely little time in the street with cars.

The other thing that the author glosses over is that pedestrians and bikes don't share space either, and that pedestrians are equally deferential to cyclists. If you walk in the bike lane, you'll get a good shouting at.

That's something that shows extremely poorly here in the USA by comparison, after you've grown accustomed to it. Anywhere in the US there's a separate "bike path", it's really a multi-use path for bikers, rollerbladers, walkers (usually two or three abreast), kids on Razor scooters, horseback riding, you name it. Dutch bike paths are for BIKING (Ok, and for 50cc motor scooters).

In "bike advocacy" circles it's common to hear people claim that bike lanes have to be separated from vehicular traffic all the time.

This is pointing out that view is wrong.

Neighborhood greenways and bike boulevards are becoming more and more common in the US and within professional bike advocacy circles.

The reason why these treatments aren't front and center is because people are being hurt and killed on high-speed arterials, where the best choice is protected bike lanes. Different tools for different problems.

I think most people believe that bike lanes have to be separated all the time from cars for arterials where traffic moves relatively quickly. The sort of shared road space the article talks about, with intensive traffic calming, isn't terribly common in the US. I think bike advocates here would be fine with that kind of thing, too, it just may not be on their radar as much.

Neighborhood greenways are a somewhat similar idea, although it looks like the level of calming is a lot higher in the Netherlands relative to its implementation in parts of the US like Portland.

I would argue that this proves exactly the opposite--unless you get a significant chunk of your bicycles isolated from cars it won't work.

And, actually, I agree with this. I really don't think bicycles and cars can share the road. It's simply too easy to do things like "door" a bicycle unintentionally.

I don't really understand how it proves the point. I find the article not really proving many points.

When bike lanes are not separated they are only not separated because of a cost or space issue in Amsterdam. Not by design. I spend most of my days in Amsterdam, others in The Hague, and when I cycle I prefer to cycle on a bike lane. Drivers still tend to push you aside when there are no specific lanes.

The article, and many foreigners find the dutch system amazingly impressive, but for me, dutch, I still see a lot of room for improvement. Cars inside the city still annoy, cycling lanes are still ignored by parking cars.

I think the author is trying to say that half is cycletrack and half is what we'd think of as sharrows. He's not saying 50% of roads have cycling facilities, but that of the roads that do have cycling facilities, there's an even split between integrated and separated variants.

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