What I like is that the bike lane and the driving lane are separated by the parked cars, which reduces the risk that moving cars and bicycles will collide.
When I'm riding my bike on streets, I'm generally more concerned with being doored than being hit by a car. This appears to address that issue.
I actually don't think I'd like this, because it puts pedestrians and bicycles right next to one another, which is extremely dangerous. It probably works in inner-city Belgium where cyclists are going < 10 MPH, but when I'm going through a town I'm generally doing 20 to 25 MPH. Having bicycles riding at 25 MPH right next to pedestrians with no physical barrier would be really dangerous.
I'd actually be more concerned with getting in an accident with a pedestrian on those streets than I am with a car on the streets we have. Sidewalk riding is way more dangerous than street riding, and this is pretty much sidewalk riding.
This is an in-town street. The cars have a speed limit of something like 30 kph. (Note the up-coming speed bump. They have those every block.) On roads where 25 mph/40 kph is legal, the set-up is wider, usually with another set of foliage between the cyclists and the pedestrians. Also note that the bicycles are supposed to go in the direction of the road traffic; to go the other way more than half a block, cyclists are supposed to go to the corner and cross to the other side.
Perhaps there, pedestrians would look out for cyclists, and cyclists would be going closer to walking speed.
In the US, pedestrians are individually wider and they usually walk 4 abreast across both the sidewalk and the bike lane even when there's a curb between them, and are oblivious to anything short of an air horn blast. And if you can finally get them to move out of the bike path, they're indignant that a bicycle wants to use the bicycle path.
Whimper! I loved riding those streets. It took more practice than you would think though to stay in those red strips. If you stray out of them people will yell at you and point back to the strip. At least the mail carriers on the mopeds yelled at us in The Netherlands as we were trying to navigate through The Hague.
We'll get there. We just have to keep slogging. We at least got a three foot passing law in Louisiana and bike lanes in New Orleans.
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I actually don't think I'd like this, because it puts pedestrians and bicycles right next to one another, which is extremely dangerous. It probably works in inner-city Belgium where cyclists are going < 10 MPH, but when I'm going through a town I'm generally doing 20 to 25 MPH. Having bicycles riding at 25 MPH right next to pedestrians with no physical barrier would be really dangerous.
I'd actually be more concerned with getting in an accident with a pedestrian on those streets than I am with a car on the streets we have. Sidewalk riding is way more dangerous than street riding, and this is pretty much sidewalk riding.
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In the US, pedestrians are individually wider and they usually walk 4 abreast across both the sidewalk and the bike lane even when there's a curb between them, and are oblivious to anything short of an air horn blast. And if you can finally get them to move out of the bike path, they're indignant that a bicycle wants to use the bicycle path.
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We'll get there. We just have to keep slogging. We at least got a three foot passing law in Louisiana and bike lanes in New Orleans.
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