Streetfilms®
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2021–2024
2:06 · 165K views · May 29, 2019
A short Streetfilms montage of Vredenburg in Utrecht, a car-free street carrying about 33,000 cyclists a day. It shows heavy bike traffic alongside pedestrians and buses.
Cited as a visual example of what bike-first infrastructure looks like, including how few helmets are worn.
4 comments from Hacker News
>Imagine how awesome scooters would be if a city had as many scooter parking spaces as it did car parking spaces, and as many scooter lanes as it did car lanes... Right, exactly. Parking would take up a fraction of the space of car parking, emissions would be lower, etc. (They don't necessarily need to be dedicated scooter lanes either; bikes are moving at similar speeds and with similar risk, so protected bike lanes would work well for both.) I could bike to just about anywhere I might want to go in the city I live in within about 35 minutes. I'm sure I'd be healthier, I'd be lowering my emissions vs. driving, and in many cases I'd get there faster than via public transport: the routes don't cover everything and bus/train service is infrequent enough that you often have to wait. I don't, because I don't feel safe enough on the streets here; they're designed with cars in mind, for high speeds. I wish we had infrastructure designed for bikes and scooters alongside the car infrastructure, because I would absolutely use them. EDIT: And if you want to see what the alternative could look like, take a look at this video and think about how many cars you would need to move all those people: this video
If you have to wear a helmet, the bicycling infrastructure isn't safe enough (yet). Traffic engineers can well and truly be proud of themselves when people simply don't bother to wear a helmet anymore (because it's not needed). See eg: * [LINK] Copenhagen: Few helmets * [LINK] Strassbourg: a bit more helmets (but not a lot) * this video Utrecht, the Netherlands. Very few helmets indeed.
Try to count the number of helmets you can spot: [LINK] this video In Amsterdam if we see adult cyclists with a helmet we'd guess it's probably a tourist or new expat. For children most parents only bother with helmets until they're six years or so.
That is a US perspective. We don't have "cyclists" everybody uses a bike from time to time, our infrastructure is build for it [0], and when you get your driver’s license your learn how to deal with it. [0] this video