Monday, 19 September 2011

Connecting a roundabout with cycle paths to a road without them



My correspondent asked for examples. Between the explanation in this blog post and my next blog post also written for this planner (showing all the roundabouts in Assen), it should be possible to gain a reasonable idea of how Dutch roundabouts work, though obviously not as good an impression as would be gained from coming here to take a look.










Update November 2014





Please also read about other real Dutch roundabout designs



Neil said...

That very neatly echo's a realisation I had just come to.




David Hembrow said...






Neil said...




MattP said...



Instead I'm flamed with 'cycle lobbyist nutter' etc.


Multiparty Democracy Today said...

Looking at this from a teenager's perspective, it is little wonder that many point out so often the hypocrisy of adults. Do these adults seriously think that they could command respect when they do foolish plots when they themselves pride themselves on being well educated and over the age of 25 (which not coincidentally is usually the age at which one may rent a car).

If these planners want to set a good example, they must pay attention to the input of people who actually know a lot about the topic they talk about. You David, you Mark Treasure, etc. We need to get beyond hype. A law prohibiting advertising government plans based on false or twisted or out of context imagery or using things like "longest X in X place" or something similar, would hopefully make hype less of a factor, though people will always try. Experiments like the rain sensor in Groningen you talked about before could be re purposed to give more and more green time to cyclists, and it has been proven now that the hype is not needed, as the traffic hasn't been delayed when rain comes down in buckets.

I'd like to see "Going Dutch" be a trademarked phrase that only a group of traffic experts with as much or more experience as you David, could allow the use of the phrase if it really would be a thing that the Dutch would encounter on an everyday basis and uses the correct context, taking into account the failures and successes of various schemes in the Netherlands. I wish it didn't need to be trademarked, but I guess with how Britain and other places in the EEA/EU have used it, it needs to be protected or it risks downplaying everything the Dutch have done right.

Good blog post about the transitions. The transitions I usually see from sidepaths to roads are like wheelchair ramps, not designed for cyclists in mind, often with an upstand to go over a couple centimetres high. Bike lanes going into normal lanes of traffic are clearly not being used in the right places or using the right designs. In the Netherlands they would only be used on low volume 30 and 60 km/h roads (urban and rural respectively) after turning the corner, if the gateway design is not used. The road traffic here is often at 50 km/h, sometimes 60, if you're lucky, 40, and in high volumes (relatively speaking, still low volume enough to be a single lane/direction distributor, but too high for safe mixing even if the speed was low). The transition provides no obvious reason for why there should be such a transition, and there is no taper. It just ends, literally that is what it says on the sign and asphalt markings. Nothing to slow the cars or make them understand that the cycle lane is ending. They couldn't care more than the guy who invented a literal flying f"@k.