#street design

[steampunktendencies]

Manhole cover in Wiesbaden, Germany

[diocletiansbikelane]

Inaugural post, I’d like everybody to internalize that the Netherlands did not rise out of the primordial soup as a cycling paradise.

In fact in the 1950s and 60s we were pretty busy making plans to roll highways through cities, looking at cars as the ✨ future ✨ and trying to follow America’s lead - including hiring American planners, some of whom advocated flattening entire historic neighborhoods to do so (like plan Joniken). In the 1970s Amsterdam was deciding whether to rebuild a historic neighborhood that had been partially demolished to build the new subway or build a four lane road there, and the road plan was defeated by just one vote (crucially the wife of one of the councilmembers who voted to restore the old street layout was about to have her baby, but he stuck around long enough for the vote).

In the 1970s many Dutch streets were what I’d graciously term car gutters, cluttered end to end with traffic, and the number of traffic deaths kept rising, peaking in the early 1970s with about 3300 deaths - 400 of whom were children. There was a growing “damn we can’t keep living like this” realization

Amsterdam traffic in the 70s

People began protesting and advocating for change, including the admirably bluntly named “stop de kindermoord” (‘stop the childmurder’) campaign, among many others. These campaigns did stuff like block streets and hold dinner parties there, holding demonstrations and illegally painting lanes on the road at night, but also by identifying traffic bottlenecks and producing a huge report with practical solutions. It was a constant struggle and they had to fight for every street, but they got results and their progress is reflected in the official standards that all streets have to meet, which over the course of a few decades of regular street maintenance and redesigns meant the entire country steadily became bike friendly. The effects can be seen in the statistics (below are traffic deaths per year, divided by type of vehicle, red is cars, light blue is bikes, dark blue pedestrians). The proportion of young children who died in traffic also fell sharply. Don’t let yourself be fooled into thinking the Netherlands just emerged as a place with a cycling culture out of nowhere - people fought tooth and nail to get the cars to fuck off

[atlurbanist]

Good news: according to the data, carving some space for bikes from our road width does not cause a long-term congestion of car trips as many people fear.

The supply-demand relationship with road width is complex, but here's a good video on the basics...

[mecanicaletra]

[better-practices]

"This video compares the street designs of New York City and Amsterdam. We'll briefly look into both cities' traffic planning history and then explore NYC’s 3rd Avenue and Amsterdam’s Overtoom. See how different design choices at the city and street level create drastically different urban environments."

[mysimsworldd]

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@ my.simsworld

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[thembow]

poster from beirut

[atlantathecity]

Turn Edgewood Ave & Auburn Ave into east-west pairs (with Edgewood's traffic going east and Auburn's going west) so that we can take away a car lane on each & use the room to expand sidewalks & plant trees for shade.

It's another item for my "when I'm Atlanta's emperor" list.