Same in Austria, we simply grew accustomed to bikes sharing the road with cars, busses and trams which I'm sure would be terrifying to someone from NL.
The problem is, after the post war boom, the cities were planned for cars and now there's simply no space left for cycling lanes unless we ban cars which as much as I wish for will never happen in my lifetime.
Don't be too pessimistic. London has seen big improvements in the last few years [1]. It's still early -- many journeys won't join up, so they're less appealing for many people -- but I was surprised at the improvements last time I visited.
They've removed car lanes on some fairly major roads, and successfully ignored protests from taxi drivers etc.
I live in Graz and I'm hard of hearing. Hearing aids make locating where some kinds of sounds come from difficult, so I miss a lot of acoustic cues that pedestrians use to navigate their way through busy places.
I've been run down once by a bicyclist and once by a skateboarder while I was walking on mixed use pathways. The skateboarder took a harder fall than I did, still helped me up, and sincerely apologized. I fractured my wrist in my fall when the bicyclist hit me and not only did they not stop, they yelled at me as they cycled away.
Anyway, I too would support limiting the use of cars as well as on street parking in city centres and other similar zones.
Bikes shouldn't share the lane with pedestrians any more than they should share it with cars. In an ideal world they would look more like Danish ones, with all 3 separated by at least a small kerb. This helps pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers alike. Cycling in Denmark was the best cycling experience I ever had relative to the way bike lanes are designed (definitely not related to the cyclists that were sometimes falling like bowling pins when the huge crowd was starting to move at a green light).
Getting used to some bad compromise hardly makes it good.
Bikes can certainly share pedestrian areas, they just need to ride slower, the walkways need to be wide, and the walkways should be easy to enter and exit in the case you need to ride around groups of people (shallow curbs you ride up and down). Look at Osaka, you have almost free reign on a bicycle there. Bikes are slow, cars are slow, but it all flows. Bikes even join foot traffic in shopping precints. But when it's too busy people are no longer on their bikes anyway, because the whole place is walkable.
It takes a level of empathy and cooperation I think doesn't exist in the bike versus car debate, because it has become an "us versus them" debate and everyone is trying to win not collaborate.
For some types of bike riding, sure. But not for commuting or general getting around. Then the whole point of using a bike is to go at a much higher speed than walking.
Cars can certainly share cycle paths, they just need to ride slower, the paths need to be wide, and they should be easy to enter and exit in the case you need to ride around groups of cyclists.
Pedestrian areas, yes - people usually don't commute through there. Sidewalks vs. cycle paths vs. car lanes - not a good idea.
When people propose path sharing among pedestrians and cyclists, they often mean cyclists slowing down to speeds (e.g. 10km/h, or even 5-7km/h), which they would find unacceptable for cars, even if multiplied x3 (try telling drivers to go 30km/h so they share with cyclists going 15-30 km/h).
> try telling drivers to go 30km/h so they share with cyclists going 15-30 km/h
It's certainly possible for traffic moving at different speeds to share the road since there's a set of rules drivers of vehicle follow. On multi-lane highways/motorways, faster traffic passes/overtakes slower traffic by moving closer to the center of the road. The same principle works when faster traffic wants to pass/overtake a cyclist.
On the other hand, this won't work when a cyclist is riding amongst pedestrians because pedestrians do not follow the rules of the road while walking.
It's not good, the priority just isn't there to make it better. Overall I think mixing pedestrians an cyclists works, as long as people respect one another, but as you say mixing in commuters really is a bad idea.
I want to be clear, I'm talking about the city metro areas. Not commuting from suburbia. We should have fully separated bike paths for longer distance commute bike traffic, because mixed speed traffic with cars just doesn't work when cars are going faster, and unprotected bike lanes are just a bandaid solution to that problem.
But once you're in the metro area, everyone should slow right down. The dominant traffic in the city is foot traffic.
Cars go at 50km/h through my city, meaning they need to be separated really strictly. Slow them down to 20km/h with narrower roads, and you can reclaim the area for mixed pedestrian traffic, allowing more free movement for everyone in the city. Something as simple as crossing the road shouldn't take 10 minutes for 200 people just so five cars can cross the road.
With narrower streets and slower traffic, you can reasonably cross the road anywhere you want. That also allows bikes to move reasonably along the road but slowly on the footpaths, you open the whole area up for the people using the city.
It's all a balance, not everywhere in a city should be like that. I'm just advocating to move away from the heavy car-oriented lean many places currently have for their city centers.
There is no difference between city centers and suburbia in much of Europe. Apart from that, the Netherlands has a few bike highways now to cater to faster intercity transport.
What you want to do is enable fast biking everywhere (so a bike first infra) and seperate modalities for safety and comfort. Any urban transport research will show that bikes in foot traffic is a Very Bad Idea(tm).
> because mixed speed traffic with cars just doesn't work when cars are going faster
Why doesn't it work? I frequently commute by bicycle by traveling at speeds ranging from 10 to 40 km/h (averaging around 18 to 20 km/h) amongst motorized traffic moving at 25 to 80 km/h without any issues. I do something very similar on interstate highways (motorways) where I drive 110 to 130 km/h amongst tractor-trailers moving at 60 to 100 km/h.
> unprotected bike lanes are just a bandaid solution to that problem.
Bike lanes don't solve anything and they cause problems for cyclists at intersections because they direct cyclists to pass traffic on the wrong side when traffic plans to turn.
Former discussion was about sidewalks, so I wanted to be explicit that having a 40km/h speed limit for cars while sending cyclists to a shared cyclepath/sidewak at 10km/h is not a solution.
I fully agree with displacing cars. If a street has 20km/h limit for cars, I would not mind if it applied for bicycles as well (even though they are safer at the same speed).
Yes, foot traffic should be a priority. For longer distances you need something faster - mass transit, bikes, those e-scooters, maybe longboards, or even segways (there are nice 1-wheel versions), but you don't need fast paths on every street. Cars take too much space to go in significant numbers even near city centers.
> Bikes can certainly share pedestrian areas, they just need to ride slower
That significantly reduces the utility of the bicycle in terms of transportation. If one can't ride at a pace that much faster than walking, then using a bicycle provides no advantage in terms of time. It's also more awkward to control a bicycle at slower speeds and you're more likely to fall and injure yourself compared to hist Ealing at the same speed.
I didn't make it clear, but I'm talking about metro areas. Longer distance commuting would be better catered for with separated bike paths. My city is almost there, with separated bike paths for commuting, but then it reverts to car-dominant in the city, which doesn't make any sense.
But you can totally ride faster than walking on footpaths provided they're big enough, and it's easy enough to get on and off the path when needed. Not commute speed, but fast enough for inner-city commutes.
> But you can totally ride faster than walking on footpaths provided they're big enough,
That really depends on how many pedestrians are using the foot path. Plus, why use the footpath when I can use the road and ride at commute speed? Similarly, when I drive my car, I prefer taking the highway/motorway since I can drive faster than I can using surface streets.
> Bikes shouldn't share the lane with pedestrians any more than they should share it with cars.
Bicycles are vehicles with wheels just like motorcycles and cars. Drivers are supposed to follow the same rules of the road regardless of what type of vehicle they use. That is, stay on the correct side of the road, signal intention to change lanes or turn. Make left turns while keeping to the left of same direction traffic and make right turns while keeping to the right of same direction traffic. Faster traffic passes/overtakes slower traffic on the side closer to the center of the road which allows for traffic moving at different speeds.
In the other hand, none of these requirements apply to pedestrians, so they cannot mix with traffic other than at designated crossing points. These crossing points work for pedestrians moving at pedestrian like speeds (3 to 5 mph -- 5 to 8 km/h). Faster speeds leads to the problem where drivers have insufficient time to see the pedestrian and yield).
As a cyclist this "bikes are cars" myth leads to a very unsafe experience for cyclists. I know it's what the current laws say, but I can't comprehend how folks don't see how false it is. A bike is much closer to a really big person running down a sidewalk than a car or motorcycle. You basically take the person add twenty pounds to them and 12 mph. Versus a car you take a person and add 2000lbs to them and 40+ mph.
I'm not advocating for bikes on sidewalks, but it seems less ludicrous to me than bikes on streets with cars. I'm for the standard line of though that bikes and friends belong in a 3rd flow of traffic like the Dutch do it.
I'd just like to point out that we've known that mixing classes of traffic in the same space is bad for safety since the industrial revolution brought heavy rolling objects to the workplace. This stuff is well known. It's a politics and resources problem.
If you bother to build the cycling lane then differentiating it a bit more obviously from the sidewalk is not such a big expenditure. Loot at this [0] setup (just outside of Copenhagen). Simply having a few centimeters of difference in height between the 3 lanes (pedestrians, bikes, cars) makes them very obvious and a lot harder to accidentally cross them. It also allows treating the cycling lane as another traffic lane with its own road markings and everything. [1]
It doesn't feel like the extra kerb is a matter of cost as much as of "sharing" the environment. So the expectation is "there won't be too many bikes so pedestrians can just use the entire sidewalk when needed". This just leads to more cyclists trying their luck on the street with the cars which are more predictable than pedestrians.
Delivery drivers park half-in-half-out of these lanes in the city sometimes.
Otherwise, they're respected. I don't think I've ever seen someone driving in one. It seems a strange question. Do American drivers not respect the sidewalk? It's the same construction.
I think the police would come down very heavily on anyone they caught driving in the cycle lane without a very good reason. The only good reason I can think of would be to move slowly aside to allow an emergency vehicle to pass -- and the same reason would justify pulling onto the sidewalk -- although either action is still illegal.
There's (literally) one street in a nearby city that, during a redesign a few years back, basically embedded a bike lane in the sidewalk. It's sort of a hazard. It's moderately busy for both pedestrians and bikes and, given that this is an extremely atypical configuration, pedestrians are simply not used to looking out for bikes zipping down this bike lane (sometimes even in the direction that they're supposed to be traveling on a given side and maybe with lights on at night). I'm there often enough that I'm careful but I've still come closer to being hit a couple of times as a pedestrian than I'd like.
The Rue de la Loi is Brussels is notorious for this. They removed a lane of traffic a few years ago and added a bike lane at the same level as the sidewalk. Incredibly dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists.
I also live in Graz now and as much as it loves to advertise itself as a bike friendly city, outside of the inner city center and student quarters biking here is very dangerous due to poor infrastructure cyclists have to share with pedestrians, cars or trams and cyclists not respecting any rules (crossing on red lights, never hand signaling a turn or a stop, etc.).
Compared to the Netherlands or Denmark, biking culture and infrastructure in Austria is a national embarrassment.
You've reminded me that there's a five-way intersection next to Uni Graz. Some years ago they basically removed all traffic signals and most signs, basically ceding the whole area to priority for pedestrians. When I first came across it the apparent chaos was a little concerning but after walking through that place on more than one occasion I was surprised how well it worked. I've not actually been to that part of town in some time, so now I wonder if it's still like that.
I'm not sure that would work in many, much less every intersection but it really made me stop and question what sort of unrecognised assumptions I had about traffic safety. This stuff is important and I think there's way to many rules and practices that are in place because of assumptions that got made back in the dawn of time... it's likely that they're not correct now but it's even possible that they were never really correct. We need evidence based policies and not so-called common wisdom.
Yes, the intersection is alive and well without traffic signals. That's my favorite intersection in Graz, the five-way intersection of Zinzendorfgasse, Halbärthgasse, Schubertstrasse, Leechgasse, and Beethovenstrasse. The Google Maps street view has a nice view of pedestrians, bikes, and cars sharing the intersection. Buses also use the intersection, but I couldn't find any in the Google Maps view.
My second favorite intersection is on the left side of Erzherzog-Johann-Brücke, where pedestrians, bikes, trams, and cars intersect with only one traffic sign (northwards on Neutorgasse).
That intersection[1] works so well without signs by accident not by design, since it's in the most central and densest part of the city with lots of cafes that's crawling with students and cyclists coming from every direction so drivers have no choice but to drive slowly and carefully.
They can't replicate this in other parts outside the city center where cars pick up speed.
In most cities it would be enough to ban roadside parking on larger roads to get enough space for safe bike lanes. That's very different from banning cars.
Vienna has a few roads recently been closed off to cars, and there are more coming. I'd say the cities of Austria appear to be paying attention to the advantages of this approach, generally a little more these days ..
I'm a Dutchie who's also spent time in Salzburg and the percentage of people riding bikes is different. If Salzburg had to support the scale of bicycles that Utrecht does it would require a radical redesign of the roads in Salzburg.
Can't speak for other Austrian cities other than Salzburg, though.
I was in Brussels a few weeks ago. And, while the work is still in progress, my reaction was that the area near the Bourse was much more inviting than in times past. I've actually been sort of negative on Brussels previously and I didn't feel that to the same degree this year.
Car-focused infrastructure planning was intense in NL too -- separate bike lanes were a very late addition (after the famous "stop murdering our children" campaign against pedestrian deaths)
The problem is, after the post war boom, the cities were planned for cars and now there's simply no space left for cycling lanes unless we ban cars which as much as I wish for will never happen in my lifetime.