Couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of drivers, either.
[laughs in Miami]
Oh shit, sorry Atlantians. New king in town.
Somewhere in Germany, there is an inner city street corner. It has a pedestrian way, and a largish rock at the corner, that protects the pedestrians space. And regularly, cars drive into it.
Oh, found it, it is this one - it is the “Umfahrstein” in Holzminden, Johannisstrasse (pics). Apparently, it was involved in well over 20 collisions. It even has entries on tripadvisor and such, getting good ratings and comments like “works for all car brands” and “local repair service options included”.
I was trying to find my favourite example of car and bike lane bullshit on street view but it turns out I don’t actually know where it is and google might be giving me a different route from my old work commute. Maybe it’s been overhauled but thats probably wishful thinking
It was a stone wall just tall enough that you could jump off of it onto a semi trailer, maybe 900m or so long and it was separated from the road by a bike lane and a shoulder almost wide enough to be another lane, then the noisy grooved pavemment next to the paint line. There’s a ditch on the other side based on before and after the wall, but I’ve never looked at what is behind the wall. For some god awful reason the concrete separator blocks only go up to just before the wall and the bike lane is fully exposed from the wall to the next real intersection where the bike lane ends. Many of those blocks are pushed as far as half way into the bike line. The road is straight for a long stretch before and after. Yet for some reason the wall has traded paint with so many cars that its really colourful. I swear people have an instinctive need to crash their cars and I would be surprised if none of the ones that left paint there blame cyclists somehow.
Roads should just be entirely separated from pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure and no amount of design fuckery will stop drivers from finding a way to crash.
They should fix this by painting it yellow.
The heart of the matter
Painted bike lanes offer absolutely no physical protection for cyclists if a distracted driver drifts over the white line. While a car climbing a concrete divider looks like an infrastructure failure, it is actually the barrier successfully absorbing an impact that otherwise would have struck whoever was riding in the bike lane.
As Wagner pointed out to reporters after witnessing one of the crashes firsthand, if that barrier hadn’t been there, the distracted driver “could have killed somebody” because the car was right in the designated cycle lane.
This is a driver failure of paying attention, not a failure of design. People would complain about freaking guard rails and concrete posts in front of stores if someone hits it.
There will always be a problem with people not paying attention though. You only need to be distracted for a second to kill a pedestrian or a person on a bike.
But the design doesn’t need to be this invasive. Copenhagen which is a top-tier bike city does three levels of “roads”: cars lowest, bikes 10 cm (3 inches) up, and pedestrians at the top level a further 10 cm up. That’s more than enough to catch even the most distracted drivers, and it keeps pedestrians clear of the bikes so they can go full speed too.
That would be effective against most commuter cars in in the USA. But then there’s the trucks they make now where anyone directly in front of it is invisible. Those 6 inches would do nothing with the asshats that drive those distracted.
Yeah you’re right, those trucks are stupidly big. I’ve seen a few of the smaller variants in Sweden recently (and they enrage me to the point of plotting murder), but they’re nowhere near an F-150.
I’m six foot and I have to literally climb up into them now. It’s obscene, where as my 1988 truck did the same job for like 1/3 the height.
I saw someone drive into one of the large red concrete spheres at a Target once. Stopped their car quite effectively.
If you hit that thing you shouldn’t be driving anyways. So this is a pure win.
Totally. As a driver, you need to see that barrier. And even if you do not see that barrier, you should also not be driving into the opposite lane. If you hit that, you are dangerous and can count yourself lucky that you only hit that barrier and not another car or people around you
It’s like the people who complained when they ran their car onto the big boulders in parking lots. The rocks aren’t in the road… how did you manage to do something so dumb and yet blame the inanimate object that no one else seems to be hitting?
You can’t park there, mate.
Infrastructure leading to accidents is bad infrastructure. A car flipping over can easily crash into other cars, cyclists or pedestrians.
Looking at the video it’s obvious why this is happening, the barrier is juste there for 20m, before and after that it’s just a painted, worse, it’s right next to parked cars so cyclist can get doored.
Really here the city is to blame, they don’t know how to build cycling infrastructure.
About that: If you take a look at the barrier:
It has reflectors on the front and it seems to have a big plastic reflector-pole-thingy on each side. The one in front was destroyed by the car running over it. It has reflectors on the side. It is also a low speed inner city road and that barrier is not coming from out of nowhere. You have to see that as a driver
is also a low speed inner city road
I don’t have an exact way to measure but the road is almost as large as some highways where I live (France, not USA).
Yes any driver that hits it is at fault, but everybody would be safer if the road was designed thinner so cars would naturally slow down, having the bike lane behind the parked cars not in front to reduce the odds of being doored etc…
If the infrastructure treats people like they’re robots that will perfectly respect speed limits because there is a sign, it will not work and just be dangerous. The infrastructure should be designed so that the most natural speed and the intuitive path is the right one.
FYI: I have a driving license, but I don’t own a car and bike almost everywhere. I really don’t like car, I also don’t like infrastructure making cars more dangerous than they need to be.
Yeah but that’s not gonna happen in the USA. They do their god damn corn fields in grids - so roads are for sure going to be straight and wide.
Painted bike lanes offer absolutely no physical protection for cyclists
Just another cheap-ass city council avoiding payment to the Guild of Wizards. If they had paid the guild the magicks they would have cast on the lines would have superseded the need for inelegant concrete walls while protecting car owners from inconvenience. For shame!
I would love to have some magical walls on the bike lane here but the weather is so bad we can’t find any newts teeths and they refuse to do the ritual without them!
The primary complaint from the community is visibility. Because the concrete barriers sit extremely low to the ground
If they weren’t low to the ground you would smash into them and die instead of climbing over them so, you’re welcome.
If a driver can’t see those, they can’t see a child. If they can’t see a child, their car is unsafe and should not be road-legal
Exactly what I thought. These things are the height of a kid, you shouldn’t be driving if you can’t see it. Also someone else pointed out that road lines are on the ground and don’t stick up and if you can’t see the barrier then you can’t see road lines and you absolutely shouldn’t be on the road.
A taller barrier isn’t the solution in the same way taller fire hydrants weren’t; you just put some taller markers throughout and the problem is solved
Yeah, my first thought not having read the article yet is that the visibility probably depends on whether your driving a sedan or a much larger SUV/truck.
What visibility is needed? Stay within your lines.
You don’t actually need to see the barrier, you need to see the white line marking the right limit of the lane, which you are not allowed to cross while driving a vehicle. That’s lower to the ground and anyone should and can see it.
I think smartphone use is more of a culprit than obese vehicles in this case (but then: “I need a truck so that if I run into a barrier, I just hop on it without even noticing!” That seems to be the raison d’être of most SUVs and crossovers in Europe: climbing up curbs)
It’s actually completely legal to cross single white lines. Only double white lines and solid yellow lines are illegal to cross.
@artyom @Etnaphele Depends on your jurisdiction. In mine, it’s illegal to do a turn over a single white line.
It’s never legal to pull into the shoulder?
Depends what the shoulder is? The traffic rules for all EU countries still lack a bit of harmonization, but the general idea is that:
Our edge lines (used on smaller motorways) are usually spaced out, so you are able to drive over it. But it’s still usually better you pull off somewhere instead if possible.
If you’re driving on a large motorway that doesn’t have an acceptable amount of space to pull over to the shoulder, it’s usually a solid line with rumble strips. It’s unacceptable to stand on the shoulder of a road with 110+ km/h limit.
And yes, solid line - even a single solid line - may never be crossed.
Many years ago I failed my license test only because of that: I merged off from the acceleration lane before it became a dotted line.
It isn’t.
You can cross them if you have a valid reason to do that, my argument would stand also with a broken line: it delimits the driving lane you are to drive on. Randomly deviating from it is of course not allowed, only while passing or having another valid reason to do that, while making sure you don’t endanger anyone.
I need more places to realize that painted lines do absolutely nothing to protect bike lanes.
Yes, I will absolutely ride on the sidewalk (if there even is one) rather than on a painted bike lane. Because there are idiots on their phone, drunk, half-asleep, etc, and a painted line will not stop them. (And that’s not even counting the assholes out there who will hit bicycles on purpose.)
Thing is, painted lines do actually work though. That is, of course, if you have properly trained drivers and enforced rules.
In a town near me (in Germany), they started pioneering a system (that is already being used successfully in some other European countries like the Netherlands) where there is a painted on bike lane on each side of the road and the space in between only large enough for one vehicle. Traffic flows normally when it’s only in one way and when there’s oncoming traffic, the cars can go on the bike lanes, as long as they stay behind the bicycles.
The system works. Surprisingly well, actually. There’s less cars, less bikes on sidewalks and more bikes overall.
There also haven’t been any accidents where a human got injured and people were generally driving more defensively and keeping safe distances to bikers when passing them, much more.So the problem aren’t the painted on bike lanes, it’s bad and egoistic drivers and an overly car centric mentality.
If you consult the CROW manual for bicycle traffic, which is what the Netherlands uses as a guide for road design (and is where the design you’re talking about came from), you will see that there are certain constraints on when various designs should be used:
The street’s speed limit and motor vehicle traffic volume have to be low enough, and it matters what category the road has been classified as in both the motor vehicle traffic network and the bicycle traffic network. Since instead of just thinking about roads individually, their place in the larger system is considered:
(This is the bicycle network of Amsterdam)
The width of the throughway and whether there is enough room to fit the infrastructure for a given combination of network links within it is also important. That’s another reason why it’s best to plan the networks holistically, to make the best use of all available space on multiple adjacent roadways.
Of course if you decrease car traffic volumes and speeds to a low enough level (by making other transit modes more attractive, making more of the urban area mixed use, etc) you can start using the higher categories in the above chart more. But the standards in the Netherlands are not so simple as “just put some paint down anywhere and it’ll work so long as the drivers are educated”. And that’s without even getting into how they design roads to enforce their own limits on speed and traffic volumes, using things like chicanes and modal filters. So, some amount of effort goes into creating the conditions that make such a design safe, rather than the drivers just deciding to do it themselves.
That is, of course, if you have properly trained drivers and enforced rules.
We don’t and will not in our life time. So for practical purposes, they do not work.
Painted bike lanes have other problems: maintenance and grip when wet.
Germany is one of the few countries where people bother to drive properly, with eyes on the road and respecting rules and weaker traffic (sadly the situation is changing for the worse…). In Italy - where a proper bicycling culture exists and one could expect a lot more acceptance - it’s a disaster, with many young cyclists being murdered by idiots in their cars.
In many countries, there really is a need to properly shield cyclists from irresponsible drivers, particularly in a world where caring for others looks like a long lost virtue.
Ah yes. I cycled from Italy into France last weekend and rode on one of those for a bit. There was not really enough traffic to know how well it works.
That’s kind of the reason those are used, don’t need to invest much for streets that aren’t used that much.
Riding on the sidewalk is illegal in most places.
Dont endanger pedestrians. Bicycles are vehicles and belong on the road.
Riding on the sidewalk is illegal in most places.
Fuck the law, and fuck any pig who wants to enforce it.
Dont endanger pedestrians.
What pedestrians? I live in the US. Nobody walks anywhere here. It’s extremely rare for me to even see a pedestrian.
I find neither of these to be compelling arguments to put my own life at high risk.
I mean, bikes don’t belong in a road where they are unprotected from cars. It’s dangerous.
But it is true that riding a bike on a sidewalk is dangerous to pedestrians too, and pedestrians shouldn’t need to share the sidewalk with more dangerous vehicles. Bikes can be heavy (especially ebikes), and they can ride quite fast. This is why we need protected bike infrastructure, to both keep cyclists and pedestrians safe.
Now I picture a concrete snake lashing out and hitting unsuspecting cars driving by… typical car-rotten-brain title. It should read: “idiots driving in a residential area cannot let their phones down and park their cars on concrete divider protecting the bike lane”
The bizarre crashes have left residents scratching their heads. Holly Wagner, a Grant Park local, told WSB-TV that she heard a loud scraping noise and looked up to find a vehicle with two wheels on the ground and two wheels in the air, actively driving down the length of the barrier.
TF these drivers think they are? The Dukes of Hazard?!?
(Yes, I’m old - scram, kid! And stay off my lawn!)
Haha get fucked, bad drivers.
Flipping the cars does seem like a dangerous risk that should be addressed, but the cars getting stuck ontop is great.
If the wall were doing the flipping I’d agree, sadly I believe the article is pretty clear that the cars are doing all the work to flip themselves.
