Trucks and sport utility vehicles with hood heights greater than 40 inches are about 45% more likely to cause fatalities in pedestrian crashes than shorter vehicles with sloped hoods, according to new research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
The Netherlands is so bike-friendly right now because of a wave of backlash in the 70s to the harms of their post WW2 car-centric design. The protests were literally called ‘Stop de Kindermoord’, which is Dutch for ‘stop the child-murder’.
Well good for them.
At 1/240th the size of the USA, twice the population of California’s Bay Area, and one of the highest road densities in the world, it sounds like a trifecta of wins.
As long as you don’t need to leave. I have to travel for work Monday longer than the entirety of the Netherlands and half again; I won’t even leave the same state. Bikeing won’t cut it.
Size is entirely a red herring.
Most people work in the same city or metro that they live in. It doesn’t matter how far Boston is from Springfield; 99% of trips a Bostonian makes are to other places in the Boston area. What matters is the design of both cities.
The average commute in the US is under 30 minutes. And the average person doesn’t drive an hour and a half for groceries, to pick up a pizza, or to daycare.
Biking doesn’t cut it in the Netherlands, either. Instead, they have bike parking lots at their train and subway stations, so a multimodal trip to the office is easier. People mostly don’t cycle from one side of Amsterdam to the other; they bike a couple min down the street to the cafe or to get groceries.
Additionally, their road design doesn’t push driving as much. For one thing, you can typically bike a more direct path than you can drive due to better modal separation. For another thing, the roads are less pedestrian hostile. Instead of a wide American-style stroads, you might have a narrow 2-way service street for pedestrians, cyclists and cars with a 15 mph speed limit, and an adjacent high-speed road with no driveways. They don’t try to have people do a left turn from a suicide lane across 2 55-mph lanes and a sidewalk to get tacos.