Thomas Schlijper
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2021–2026
9:04 · 429K views · May 10, 2018
Nine minutes of unedited footage of a very busy bicycle and car crossing at Korte Prinsengracht and Haarlemmerstraat in Amsterdam. Cyclists, pedestrians and cars flow through without traffic lights.
Cited in urbanism and self-driving threads as a vivid example of dense mixed traffic working through infrastructure and culture.
10 comments from Hacker News
The therapy that Juleiie needs begins by watching nine minutes of mixed car, bike, and pedestrian rush hour traffic at the intersection of Korte Prinsengracht and Haarlemmerstraat in Amsterdam. Unbelievably busy bicycle crossing in Amsterdam: this video Watching that video sooths my mind and warms my heart by proving how well a society of people who have not literally driven themselves mentally ill by viciously driving around in environmentally and economically destructive metal tanks can harmoniously and heathily get along together without fearing and murdering one another, by simply looking each other in the eyes and acknowledging that they all exist in the same shared space together. The famous Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman believed drivers become more alert and cautious when there’s more uncertainty on the road. Want fewer car accidents? Remove traffic signals and road signs: [LINK] >Hans Monderman believed that societies could make roads safer by making drivers more uncertain, and therefore alert. >“When you treat people like idiots, they’ll behave like idiots.” >That was the philosophy of Hans Monderman, the Dutch traffic engineer who became famous not for what he added to road design and urban planning, but for what he removed: curbs, traffic signals, signs. He believed drivers become more alert and cautious when there’s more uncertainty on the road. >“The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there’s a problem with a road, they always try to add something,”
To all the outlawed cyclists I'd like to say: show your fellow countrymen how it's done in the salvation state of the Netherlands. Cyclists own the roads here, see for yourself: this video
Hans Monderman was the world's most famous traffic engineer! ;) [LINK] >Hans Monderman (19 November 1945 – 7 January 2008) was a Dutch road traffic engineer and innovator. He was recognised for radically challenging the criteria used to evaluate engineering solutions for street design. His work compelled transportation planners and highway engineers to look afresh at the way people and technology relate to each other. [LINK] >de Kaden shared space.wmv: Shared space traffic intersection in Drachten, The Netherlands. Traffic signals removed in 2002. The junction handles around 17,000 vehicles per day. One of many projects led by the late Hans Monderman. [LINK] >Shared space intersection, Drachten - The Netherlands 3,824 views Apr 29, 2009 Drachten, Drift/De Kaden, shared-space-intersection. From the centre of expertise on bicycle policy: [LINK] . The intersection Drift and De Kaden is an example of shared space in the purest sense. Despite a quite high traffic volume hardly any measures have been taken to regulate traffic. this video >Unbelievably busy bicycle crossing in Amsterdam: The Netherlands, Amsterdam, May 8, 2018 Bicycle and car traffic at the crossing Korte Prinsengracht and Haarlemmerstraat. [LINK] >Hans Monderman: Rethinking the design of streets and public space. >An Urban Design London and Urban Design Group Lecture Hans Monderman has been one of the most significant influences on the current debate about the design of streets and spaces in the UK. A traffic engineer
> A bicycle is trash (fun to ride, not that useful). Entirely dependent on the infrastructure: this video > What are you going to carry on your bike? Five bags? Seems like a lot of groceries to buy at a time, but if you really want to: [LINK] > I don’t want to go 5 miles away, I want to go 200. You cover 200 miles every day? [LINK] Regardless, you can own a car for those longer journeys just fine and still make most trips by bicycle. > With bikes and walking, your world is small. Yeah, that's why public transport is important too. Cars as well, although deprioritized. > Electric cars powered by renewable energy get rid of most of the negative externalities. They get rid of some of the noise and almost all of the harmful exhaust. That's about it. They're still 2 ton+ massive steel cages that are incredibly dangerous to everyone else, take up a ridiculous amount of space, and require extremely expensive infrastructure. As for the rest, sure, I'm not really criticising your particular choices, it sounds like you live in a rural area where a car is necessary anyway. However, there's no way for everybody to be able to live like you do. There are just too many people. We need to live with long-term sustainability in mind.
> subtractive solutions and don’t “grow the GDP” like brand new EVs Maybe GDP is a bad metric. In any other field, a metric this naïve would be laughed out the door. If GDP is trying to capture net effective productivity, then let's stop using a metric that's 2 degrees of aggregated abstraction away from this metric of interest. Cars are middlemen. They allow labor to reach a location that performs a productive activity. They produce no productivity of their own. IE. Cars are network IO. Whichever transport method maximizes throughput and minimizes latency for the least cost is ideal. Any decent engineer knows that the key to better network IO is to: * improve locality - (keep things near each other) * batch things together - (buses and trains) * reduce size of individual packets - (cycles instead of huge cars) * no lossy transmission - (maintain worker productivity, stave off obesity) * avoid waits as much as possible, let actions happen async ( this video )