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Just the other day i was arguing in this very community that if bicyclists are riding on the sidewalk, it is usually because the bike infrastructure isn’t sufficient.
I like the idea of making the pedestrian / cycle path big enough that it can be shared while bikes are moving to/from cycle lanes
in my country (netherlands) the bike lane looks straighter than the bus lane
We all know and are jealous
lmao
I don’t understand what this image is really saying.
I am pretty sure, though, that it’s not loss.
At first we made as direct as possible routes for walking and riding.
Then we invented trains and bikes but the trains had to take very squiggly routes because it was difficult to make direct routes for them.
After 1900 riding ceased being relevant for most people, and cars started becoming a thing but they were distrusted and had to obey strict speed limits and give way to everything else.
And these days the only thing that matters is cars, cars literally get things bulldozed so they can go in a straight line, while everything else gets to eat shit and die and trains were replaced en-masse with shitty buses.Though it should be noted that bikes were invented quite a while after trains.
Think of it as a Google maps route
My town has a little shopping centre a ways outside of the town. It’s an American style shopping centre (I live in Sweden) so it has a huge parking lot, and a massive building stretching a long span with lots of shops and some fast food restaurants. My previous vet is located there.
To get there, you had to go on a small pedestrian road, without a dedicated bicycle lane, there was a exit ramp from the motorway, and the pedestrian path had no proper crossing. Then there was a bridge over the highway, and a really long swooping path you had to follow to get to the big centre so you could finally cross the perilous parking lot and whatever. There was thankfully a desire path you could take, since they have a tendency to crop up when actual infrastructure fails us.
Enjoy my rubbish illustration of this.
The black bit is the car road, the brown is the pedestrian path. It’s obviously simplified, but you get the idea. I’m coming from the roundabout in the bottom, the shopping centre is up the top to the left.
Some years ago my town announced that they’d redo this entire stretch of road. It’s a multiple year project. They’re adding more roundabouts, and they were going to improve the lane for pedestrians. This lead to pedestrians and cyclists not having direct access anymore, because the path took 1½ years to complete. You had to go around the entire thing.
Anyway, with this improvement, they announced that the pedestrian path would be wider, it’d be placed differently, and it’d go under the road. Hooray, we’ll be able to go directly to the centre rather than follow the ridiculously swoopy road. Right? Right?
Enter illustration two. The… purple-ish path is how I envisioned it’d go (imagine that it goes under the road). Instead we got basically the same path, but much wider, and where before it went over the motorway off-ramp, it now goes under it, does a god damn pirouette and resumes right next to the fucking road! They somehow fucking managed to make it longer!
It used to be about a two kilometre stretch. Not so bad, but felt awful to walk by. They’ve managed to add on an extra ~300 metres for no reason whatsoever. At the very least it is wider, you can comfortably have people walking and cycling on the road, and it is further from the road so it doesn’t feel like you’re walking among the cars anymore.
shit like this makes me so patriotic, all swedes have a god-given right to 5km of technically functional and “safe” (not actively lethal) pedestrian infrastructure to reach the retail area on the other side of the motorway!
We should change our flag to a 20cm wide sidewalk that was obviously put in 30 years ago and never maintained.Real talk though: this is why anything even vaguely rural is bleeding population like an open wound, the “big cities” are so hilariously much better in every single way.
We should change our flag to a 20cm wide sidewalk that was obviously put in 30 years ago and never maintained.
I think the funniest part is that this road is a main stretch of road that they continuously keep ripping up and replacing. Sure now they are doing some major restructuring, there is a pretty large project here related to Ostlänken, so I think that’s the incentive.
However, in the four years I’ve lived here, the stretch of this road that passes by the area my flat is has been ripped up and replanted like at least half a dozen times. The same stretch of road, making no changes to it. I’ve genuinely no idea why they keep doing it. It’s like someone at stadshuset has a kink for roadwork.
I think that kink is required to become a public official, same thing in my town.
They particularly love to remove random sections of asphalt, wait a couple weeks before they spray the warning paint so you see the massive fucking cliff that’ll kill anyone in a wheelchair, then it spends months or years completely untouched until it’s suddenly repaved again.I’m convinced it’s casual corruption to funnel money into construction companies.
I live in a city called Winnipeg. Winnipeg was never going to be anything but a podunk mudville and the nearby Selkirk was to rise, this as a result of rail lines running nearby and through.
Right around the late 1800’s Winnipeg signed a tax amnesty with the rail lines, granting them $1 taxation for 100 years. This attracted the private interests to relocate and build here, and the rest is history. Winnipeg is the main city, Selkirk is NowhereVille.
Fast forward to around 2000 when the amnesty was about to lapse. What does the city do? Instead of telling the rail lines to fuck right off, reclaiming the land for the necessary and imminent investment in Bus Rapid Transit, moving forward with pedestrian and bike friendly infrastructure…
They renew the amnesty for another 50 years.
Now. Our city has spent over $3 Billion dollars in the last few decades to build/rebuild/repair infrastructure that exists exclusively to circumvent rail lines. We just rebuilt a bridge 18 years ago to the tune of $400M (800M today) and the one adjacent is now being demolished and rebuilt. This is to go over stockyards. You know, a train parking lot. I wish so bad that I was kidding.
We have spent nearly a TRILLION DOLLARS (hyperbole) for the BRT infrastructure. Which also has to go up, over, and around rail lines that should have been launched the fuck out of this city 25 years ago. Dozen and dozens of new bridges and underpasses just for this. We could have repurposed the vital land squandered by largely inactive rail lines. Our bus service has become a complete travesty… there is no money left to operate busses now.
There were three major underpasses built in the last 5 years, EACH of which was $300M+
Virtually NOTHING is shipped by rail within the city. It is handled by our $?Bn CenterPort depot/infra where the trucks take over.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaarrgh!!!1
In some places the bus route in the bottom right should be cut up even more than the bike.
The 1920s we almost had it right. Cars and rail for longer connections only (I know cars weren’t since there weren’t interstates yet, but if…)
Also in time. Some layovers for bus routes are horrendous
Also why is there only one car lane in 1950-present? (j/k)
Those aren’t lanes, otherwise the 1800 and 1900 would be all tangled together. Traffic back then was… well, like some Asian countries are now.
They used to run surface level freight trains on 3rd Avenue, and in some other cities.
Engineering? Engineers solve practical problems. What you have here is an amalgamation of public policy crafted by lobbying and political inaction.
It’s quite unusual to come across a lemmy post blaming workers instead of big special interests.
Time to re-watch who framed Roger rabbit.
I agree with the sentiment and the implied solution.
I would also like to suggest the edit that this is not an entirely new phenomenon, though. In Pompeii, there are crosswalks made of stone blocks a little taller than average curb height today and spaced such that the wheels of chariots and wagons may pass between them. They’re there so that pedestrians can cross the street without stepping into it. The technical reasons are different, but I believe the driving force is the same: the arbitrary socioeconomic stratification of society to facilitate authoritarianism.
Cars are just the latest bastard tool in the escalating conflict. Horse-drawn carriages were very much a menace to pedestrians, albeit, not nearly as bad as cars. There was a brief period of time, around 1900 CE when public transportation reached its per capita peak. We’ve regressed from that rapidly, but I believe there will be a return to similar rates of public transportation utilization. I just hope I’m around to see it.
They’re there so that pedestrians can cross the street without stepping into it. The technical reasons are different, but I believe the driving force is the same: the arbitrary socioeconomic stratification of society to facilitate authoritarianism.
It’s because the street was also the sewer. I’m not sure I buy your socioeconomic stratification/authoritarianism argument, especially since I doubt that even equites were routinely riding around instead of walking within the city. In much the same way it isn’t worth riding a bike instead of walking for really short trips because of the hassle of unlocking and locking it, a horse – let alone one pulling a cart – wouldn’t be worth it for any but the most ostentatious because Pompeii simply isn’t that big. By the time a rider got the damn thing saddled or yoked, a walker could be across town.
I mean, to be sure, Roman society was authoritarian, but I don’t think the crosswalks were necessarily a symptom of it.
I don’t think straight paths was the norm until it was required by things like trains and highways.
Its not really a straight path, but a representation of a path that is connected and direct with no gaps or barriers.
Think kind of like taking a walk through a field, but then one day a fence appears, then the next day a road appears, and then another day a highway appears and blocks you off completely.
Is this loss?
Symbolically, yes it is.
no
This is over 10 years old. So many things changed the last 10 years. Something something politics is about priorities. Fuck cars.
