Відео

Pronounced "Het Spaaaaaarrrn". 🤣 Not to be pedantic, but please don't forget about the word "fewer", it's vanishing from our vocab.

Traffic calming in UK really means preventing fast, frequent traffic that makes the environment hostile for pedestrians, cyclists, horses, etc. Our streets can become "rat runs" used by through traffic to avoid congestion. Traffic calming makes it less convenient to do so, keeping more traffic on the main routes.

'Roundabouts involve slower speeds forcing drivers to slow donw' *the British, with our obsession with building horrible high-speed roundabouts you can fly through at 50mph, have entered the chat*

Who would have thought that roundabouts are a good idea

Round abouts allow a steady flow of traffic way more energy efficent then waiting at an intersection. More cars can use the intersection at the same time.

Loved the scenery shown of bike lanes, greenery with few bikes. Even through residential areas bike and pedestrian paths appear to take precedence over the road as if it was designed that way. Unfortunately in many parts of the world developers rule and every saleable square millimetre is another dollar it their pocket so roads are accommodated but just to meet regulations. Consequently we have traffic gutters that can be 5 lanes wide with more lanes being added every few years which adds more traffic which requires more lanes. Clever stuff.

Great take! Never thought about it in that way!

Well more lanes allow more traffic to get through an intersection in a cycle, and in cities intersections are often close enough that it's not worth removing those lanes just to bring them back less than half a mile later, as you suggested. Not to mention that all that merging would increase the potential for collisions. However I do think we can do a lot better with intersection designs. Basically, build more roundabouts.

It really depends, the traffic volume can be increased or decreased by a roundabout. If a roundabout replaces a traffic light it might increase traffic by being more efficient. If a roundabout replaces a four way stop it might decrease traffic by being an extra obstacle.

One of them fun parts of your videos is trying to figure out where you are ;)

0:45 Dutch fatalities going slightly up recently is no surprise. No matter how safe your infrastructure, if people don't follow its rules, you might as well be traversing Americans roads.

I was thinking a good solution may be what we have in my neighborhood at Diamanthorst Den Haag. There are unprotected bike lanes at both sides of the street. These are 2 meters wide, but there's parked cars directly to the right so they "feel" a bit narrower. Then the car/bus lane is 3.5 meters wide. Note this is a two-way street that's not very busy, but it does have busses. I'm pretty sure the idea is that the cars and busses use the middle lane under normal circumstances, but they get to enter the bike lanes when passing cars/busses from the other direction. I feel perfectly safe riding my bike there. But when I stopped to study traffic a bit, it looks like cars and even many busses actually drive right of the imaginary dividing line, intruding on the bike lane quite a bit. But of course if there's cyclists they'll give them space. So this is more the normal behavior of cars in two-way streets without bike lanes. It's a good thing here that nobody seems to realize this is not a 30 km/h zone, so you could drive 50 there. That wouldn't be good. But I think this solution could work well for the Jansweg in Haarlem, as I understand that in the relevant part there's only professional drivers that know the city so it shouldn't be too hard to get them to adjust to the desired driving behavior. And not so many cyclists that two busses in opposite directions would have to wait forever to be able to take up some space on the bike lanes. Ok actually in the tunnel under the train tracks this would have to work slightly differently as the main road is two lanes adding up to just under 7 meters. That's good enough. The problem is the other two lanes, which are elevated and separated from the main lanes by columns. The eastern one is a bike lane, but the western one is for pedestrians. Why not make both dual use? The amount of both pedestrian and cycling traffic doesn't seem to be enormous in your video. Most pedestrians would simply enter the station from the side they're on rather than take this tunnel anyway.

Sometimes road widening is a visual or political undertaking. Ministries of transportation can advertise that they are "doing something" by widening roads or putting limits on frivolous bicycle lanes. They're listening to tax payers, hooray! And the tax payers respond by re-electing them.

Gringo talking about infrastructure. Oh the irony. delete your channel and GTFO before you embarrass yourself further

The new electric VW Bus is already out and about there, apparently!

Roundabouts and traffic calming are two separate issues. Both make traffic safer, but within their own ways. Like a railroad crossing, are lights calming traffic or just there so that trains do not T-bone cars?

Building the lanes is not enough. I think you've also pointed this out in previous videos. POLITICS AND IDEOLOGY. If we could just get rid of those. There are people who are actually making the future. Elon Musk and his teams are one. There are others. I am 66 years old and I NEVER thought I'd see change happen. I gave up. Until now. I think you need to gain some altitude for the bigger picture. Love your videos.

Thanks so much for addressing this issue, Steffen! I've never heard of traffic calming, but we've been getting a TON of roundabouts in the last 10 years. Older and cranky people complain about them, and I know change is hard to adapt to but eventually I think it will turn out well.

I always thought traffic calming was specifically referencing speed of vehicles. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it used to mean less cars, just slower. I just watch UA-cam vids so idk.

So the Dutch Manual on Uniform Traffic Designs (or whatever it is called) isn't "legally binding..." but a Dutch court will cite non-conformance with it as a basis for imposing massive tort liabilities on road owners. Where I come from, we call that a distinction without a difference. It is in effect a legally binding design manual, by the back door.

What is the traffic intensity of a pedestrian zone? Is it zero, since there are no cars, or is it a gazillion since pedestrians count as traffic?

Very interesting. 10:32 Same can be said for public transportation. It always amaze me to see the numberfs of peoples it calculates in buses. Took it enough to know that when you hit the number of peoples equal to the numbers of seats, the comfort exponetially degrade. I work in the domain and I always use the numbers of seats as the theorical numbers a bus can carry.

One could replace all the 6+3 lane signalized intersections in Roseville with 2-lane unsignalized roundabouts (i.e. 2+2 lanes on each side of the intersection) and see a significant increase in intersection capacity and traffic throughput - and a corresponding reduction in journey times. Your next vacation needs to be a driving tour of Milton Keynes in England.

I think the author is really over-complicating this. Keizer Karen Plein is a killer because……all “Dutch-style” roundabouts are killers. Sorry, I know the Dutch people here will protest, but they just are, that’s what the statistics say. It’s a question of expectations. I investigated this because our U.K. Council foolishly implemented one near where I live, and this roundabout style started to mangle cyclists and motorists, increasing the accident rate by 5x. So I thought I would find out why, by comparing against Dutch roundabouts in Netherlands. The answer is: the Cambridge roundabout performs identically to the normal Netherlands ones. It’s just *compared to U.K. norms*, that’s 5x higher fatality rate than we are used to. And that’s just normal for Netherlands because their accident statistics are already appalling (per mile travelled) compared to U.K. Netherlands just don’t notice, things have always been that bad for them, they think it’s good and tell everybody else how good it is! Back to Keizer-Karel Plein. It kills lots of people because…..its big and carries “lots” of traffic. It’s near a train station, and other major infrastructure. That’s really it. And *for the Netherlands*, that’s heavy traffic. In the U.K., an interchange like that would be considered (very) quiet town backwater. We rarely see roads that carry road traffic as light as that. Using UK standard road layouts, we wouldn’t even see one death per decade on such a lightly-travelled route. So Keizer-Karel Plein, and indeed *all* Dutch roundabouts, are trivial to fix. Just import U.K. standard roundabouts. Netherlands has *always* been able to divide it’s road fatality rate by a factor of 5, because the traffic is so light there’s really no reason for any collisions to occur. But because of its national obsession, it chooses the high-fatality design out of national pride.

I am a Nor Cal guy myself and lived in the Netherlands for more than 5 years. I miss California for the physical geography and the Netherlands for the social geography.

Been saying this for years. Flow is more important than capacity. Especially when my city council was hell bent on building 6 lane monstrosities that stretched only 600m to the next intersection and then narrowed back down.

I have noticed in a lot of Dutch cities (also outside cities but to a lesser extent) the following scenario: I am stood at a red traffic light. The light turns green and I drive speed limit towards the next light. Just before I get to the next light, it will turn from green to red, forcing me to stop rather than allowing for continuous driving. In some cases, the light will then even turn green again within a second or two. I have noticed this quite a lot in the city you mentioned, Haarlem. This seems extremely frustrating and wasteful to me because it forces unnecessary stopping and starting which causes extra brake wear and fuel usage. I understand that many Dutch traffic lights have proximity sensors in the road so that the lights turn red when there are no cars coming but still the way this is often timed is a bit frustrating. I was wondering if this is just poorly timed lights or whether there is indeed a good reason for this. My suspicion is that the intention is to slow down cars going through the city to make traffic safer for cyclists and pedestrians but I'd love to hear some genuine insight on this.

So you build just a single lane in each direction and you are happy. You really must be a lucky country, if no car ever breaks, nobody hits anybody and nobody needs to wait for police to come and investigate it.

As an avid driver and car lover, I would LOVE for more public transit and better alternatives to driving. Cause people who don't like to drive tend to suck at it. Giving them an alternative would get them off the road and out of my way. My road rage goes away, and everyone is happy. Yay.

I have a question tho: in the Netherlands, 50% of people commute by car, and in the US, closer to 70-80% do. Doesn't the smaller lane size only work because there are already fewer cars? It's hard for me to imagine my city of Chicago, which gridlocked streets and highways, benefiting from fewer lanes unless more people stopped driving first

So as I see it your video offers one improvement that can be put into place in busier cities (ie. reduce arterial roads to one or 2 lanes) to move more people on arterial roads. The elephant in the room is still, public transit moves way more people, and better city planning that brings destinations closer requires fewer movements. Not to mention, that we pay sooo much tax & only get asphalt. For my $$$ I expect to have a 400kph trains taking me from one coast to the other, subway lines & LRT all over the city, even if I decide to use my car. Not only does PT offer an alternative to driving & creates more space on the roads, it has a positive impact on tourism.

I'm sorry but this is nonsense. Of course urban road capacity is based on intersection capacity, but this does not mean that there can be a simple road between the intersections, because ideally its capacity would be sufficient. This is not an ideal case. This means that the capacity of intersections must be increased, all larger and main streets should have grade-separated intersections. Furthermore, ZIP with real drivers doesn't work as well as everyone imagines, but we have nothing but real selfish and impatient drivers who can't merge into one lane like a machine. I live in Prague CZ, and we have activist destroying streets for 20 years and implementing the Dutch bull shit. It isnt working. The traffic is denver the drives are angrier, and ambulances and fire engines have nowhere to go because they covered the tram tracks with grass instead of the previous concrete, every major street has a bottleneck every few hundred meters.

It’s actually quite easy to dodge the Keizer Karelplein without (much) delay.

Man, I thought this was about the freedom convoy of 2022 that gridlocked Ottawa for 3 weeks

The concept of 'traffic flow' is lost to many people. Car drivers will want to emulate a laminar flow, but instead it's like water droplets trying to overtake and crash over one another. The latter is the definition of a turbulent flow. Psychology plays a major factor in traffic. To a severely underestimated degree.

"If there's one thing the Dutch hate, it's having to pay for something that provides no benefit." Laughs in tulip

Great detail! By “Long through movement” you mean transient traffic or people not from the area?

How much road expansion is the engineer versus the politicians who are doing their constituents' bidding?