BicycleDutch
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2018–2024
5:00 · 135K views · Jun 5, 2017
A short BicycleDutch episode showing Vredenburg in Utrecht, the busiest cycle path in the Netherlands, with about 37,000 cyclists passing on a working day.
HN uses it as visual evidence that cycling can move huge numbers of commuters in little space.
3 comments from Hacker News
>Truly - what % of people could actually commute using these things? It's very small. Of those, who would actually do it? In winter? Up and down hills? Are they a little bit too old for this, or maybe not so open minded? this video Potentially: Everyone, winter to summer (look up his other videos), up and down hills (they're electric, hills don't matter), regardless of age. America is not the only country in the world, but even the US has cities far denser than the spread out, gridlocked hell of LA like San Francisco or NYC.
On the other hand, the reduction in cars due to people switching to cycling makes the infrastructure incredibly cheap . Look at the video in [0]: how much space would you need if every single cyclist was driving a large SUV? Look how smooth the traffic flows through the intersection, how many flyovers would you need to achieve this with cars? Yes, cycle infrastructure does indeed take up a nonzero amount of space. But it easily pays for itself by reducing the need for far more space-consuming car infrastructure. [0]: this video
I think an easy way to answer this question is to look at major commuting thoroughfares where the people are not in cars to begin with, like busy sidewalks and cyclepaths. this video