Students at my university in Berlin need to cross a busy road to travel between campus areas, which meant jaywalking or a long trip to a crossing with traffic lights down the road. A steady stream of students late to their next class sprinting across a six lane road is not great.
At some point students started painting their own crosswalk, which would be removed again and again by authorities, until the city eventually got the hint and installed a permanent crosswalk with a traffic light and a pedestrian island.
Sometimes the way to get something is fixed is by demonstrating the fix.
It reminds me of The Guerrilla Artist Who Fixed L.A.'s Worst Freeway Sign
https://thelandmag.com/richard-ankrom-guerrilla-public-servi...
https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-an-artist-helped-millions-...
> And then…nothing. Caltrans didn’t notice. Passing motorists were thrilled but figured the improvement had taken place at the direction of Caltrans. It wasn’t until Ankrom leaked his actions to the press that the true story was known.
> The original sign with Ankrom’s artwork remained until 2009 when the whole thing was replaced by Caltrans. The paint had faded, but the message remained with a lasting impact. The replacement sign erected by the Department of Transportation proudly sports the 5 North placard exactly where Ankrom had put it nearly a decade prior, and it remains there to this day to help motorists that would otherwise be just as confused as he was.
And an update from 2023:
> In 2001, artist Richard Ankrom posted a "5 North" sign on the 110 N. in DTLA to alert drivers to get in the left lane for the 5 turnoff. His work was so impeccable (and helpful), Caltrans at first didn't notice, then allowed it to stay. "5 North" is now part of permanent signage.
I’ve been a semi autonomous employee at a number of places and I wonder how much that was “Caltrans” and how much it was George the sign maker just making a sign to replace the old one with all the same information as the current sign.
Sometimes you just do things and dare the bosses to say something about it. If they had their way they might have changed it back. But it’s already made and it’s not worth the grief to do anything about it. Too many people like or need George.
Boss: Next on the list is the I5 overpass sign at mile marker {something}.
George: The info in the book doesn't match what's shown in the asset management photograph.
Boss: Update the book to whatever is on the road and go from there.
Selective enforcement goes both ways and effective employees know this.
You didn’t tell me to do that, so I am not doing it.
You didn’t tell me not to do this, so it’s done.
It just highlighted how slow government works:
This guy took a few days and a few dollars to put up a sign.
Caltrans took 8 years, undoubtedly thousands of dollars, stack and stack of paperwork, and a bunch of workers to do the same.
He likely spent a few hundred dollars on the sign - sourcing the proper metal of that size, the reflectors, the masks, and so on.
As to the time investment:
> He spent more than three months preparing, researching the color and shape of the signs, mixing his own custom paint to get the colors just right, and applying a bit of faux patina to finish it off. Ankrom even spent time tracking down the button-shaped reflectors used on other legitimate signs and convincing the supplier to give him some. Once he was satisfied that it looked authentic, he came up with a plan to install it.
---
Caltrans has 15,000 miles of state highways that they have signage for. A single sign may only get reviewed once a decade because of that.
Doing single things in isolation is "easy" without going through the required public comments and such. Maintaining it for the entire state is much more challenging.
The short film he and his friends made about the process is definitely worth a watch: https://youtu.be/Clgl63CWOkM
In Geneva, activists painted bike lanes in three streets in 2023, causing about 2000 swiss francs in damages (or improvements, depending on your view).
The Swiss police under prosecutor Walther Cimino proceeded to investigate as if they were a crime syndicate, gathering forensics but also identifying 96 sympathizers and putting them under heavy surveillance, which included requesting total records from their banks, employers, phone companies, email providers (Google through the US DoJ), and even CCTV and purchases from their local supermarket.
I'm afraid of the possibility that what used to be "grassroots civil disobedience" will now be labeled "eco-terrorism" and prosecuted accordingly.
Someone's eco-terrorist is someone else's eco-freedom fighter
You can remove eco.
well yes, that's the original quote.
This is an intractable problem with normal sidewalk/streets. Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between. This is why both drivers and pedestrians hate bikers.
Ideally we have entirely separate paths for bikes. Of course this is infeasible for most established cities. Doesn't mean they are't inherently a problem in these cases though.
Entirely separate paths for bikes are absolutely feasible in established cities (see New York which has huge protected bike lanes running north and south up and down manhattan) with little cost to car infra
You misread me.
>Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between.
The NYC bike lanes are inherently problematic. These are the "in between" that I'm talking about. They are not entirely separate paths in the way that I mean. They are a new lane within the existing path. What I mean by a separate path is something that is above, below, or in an entirely different location than the road/sidewalk.
Normally, if you’re turning right you’re in the rightmost lane, so nobody to your right is going straight. And likewise for left. A bike lane puts straight-through traffic to the right of turning cars so they come in from your blind spot. A "yield to bikes" rule doesn’t help much when you can’t see who you’re yielding to. And car traffic presents the same problem for bikes. They have to deal with this by merging all the way across traffic or cross and become a pedestrian. The fact that they may have to become a pedestrian is a major flag that they inherently dont fit.
Parking and buses have the same problem. The sidewalk and the road were designed to touch. When you put a bike lane between them, every trip from curb to car, bus, etc. has to cross it.
It’s essentially splitting 1 road into 2 with separate rules. It's inherently problematic. You can't introduce bikes without increasing the rule complexity and worsening the experience for everyone else.
There is plenty of basic intuition here.
- Pairs. Each pair of modes (car,bike,pedestrian) needs its own set of rules. Two modes is one pair. Three modes is three pairs, so adding one mode triples the relationships.
- Introducing a "middle": Every segment of one street crosses every segment of the other. Adding a middle lane on both sides takes an intersection from 9 overlap zones to 25, and from 4 where different modes meet to 16.
- Fixed width: The street doesn’t get wider. Any space dedicated to bikes costs car lanes, parking, or sidewalk.
When you turn off a road, you need to look for pedestrians and motorbikes. Why is a bicycle so different?
For busy cycle routes, specific infrastructure to deal with this is installed like separate lights and banned turns to de-conflict the road.
Since bikes/scooters are much faster than pedestrians, it causes problems like this when they use pedestrian infra. For an example, I was driving up to a yield-to-peds xwalk a while ago, and on the sidewalk there was a scooter going at full clip. I slowed down because I had a hunch he would do this, but he took a hard 90 deg turn at the xwalk and went straight through at speed. If I hadn't done that, I might have run him over. A pedestrian could never have done that.
Something similar to this dynamic happens anywhere you would "look both ways" as a driver but don't have far enough visibility to extrapolate a safe window of passage relative to the speed of oncoming traffic. It can happen when parked cars block your view of oncoming traffic, or when parked cars block view of the bike lane, or when parked cars, trees, hedges, fences etc block view of the sidewalk that a non-pedestrian is using.
I think this reasoning is like “you can be right and dead”. If you’re cycling at 20km/hr, some bike lanes are arranged so that it’s very hard for a driver to see you whether you have the right of way or not. You can’t legally mandate someone to see what they physically cannot see.
Yes I'd rather ride in traffic then be seperate, when I used to commute in Vancouver cars have a convoluted sign saying they are to yeald to bikes on right turn, or no right turn at all and I would get 'right hooked' at least once a week, I always had my eye out and would stop before getting pasted, but yelling at a driver who's in the wrong probably isn't helping them be aware of what they're doing wrong, I'm just 'yet another angry cyclist' since I'm upset they broke the rules and tried to kill me with their 4000lb+ metal brick!
> A bike lane puts straight-through traffic to the right of turning cars, coming up from behind in your blind spot.
Bike lanes making riders less safe has been known for decades. John Forrester’s book “Effective Cycling” [1] catalogues a lot of these dangers and warns cyclists to not assume that bike lanes are safer.
[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516945/effective-cycling/
As I understand it, in those days cyclists in the U.S. were largely given two bad options:
Option A: A separate, safe bike lane through the park, not useful for actual transit but nice for leisure.
Option B: A line of white paint at the side of the travel lane that will guide you into the “door zone”, along the right side of cars turning right (and right into you), and other dangerous situations.
Note that there was hardly ever Option C, actual bike infrastructure that was both safe and useful for transit. So this idea that one single cyclist “killed” good bike infrastructure is ignoring that it was never an option to begin with.
So here's the thing. Seattle drank all the urbanistic Kool-Aid and started doing all the road sabotage with bike lanes, bulbouts, road diets, and so on with the goal to eliminate pedestrian and bike deaths.
What was the result?
A stunning INCREASE in pedestrian deaths and no significant effect on bike deaths: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/as-...
Edit: my personal theory is that these "improvements" on average do nothing whatsoever. They "worked" in some places in Europe because they made traffic so shitty that more people were forced to use bikes. In turn, this provided driver education, by showing them how badly average drivers behave.
John Forrester spewed completely disproven garbage and harmed cycling for decades by this influence on policy.
the beltline on Atlanta comes to mind
Yeah I think atlanta only got this as a freebie due to it being built on top of their abandoned rail road.
In europe there's also a great culture of bike /walking dirt only pathways too, but I agree its not very practical solution for cities
Have you been to NYC recently? 2 years ago it was utter chaos with delivery folks and crazies in rental bikes gunning at full throttle. It was quite scary compared to something like Paris or Munich.
I’ll take a full lane here in Miami. Screw these thin bike lanes next to the curb with F-150s and Cybertrucks. I’ve seen too many bike falls. Pass me safely and that’s that.
> This is why both drivers and pedestrians hate bikers
Drivers and pedestrians hate each other too. Everyone gripes about any minor impediment to their own travel, particularly other modalities, but also their own. I mean, drivers universally complain about being "stuck in traffic", but they are traffic.
Sorry I'm late, I was being traffic. Toot toot.
Cars turn people into psychopaths. They're the only mode of transport that essentially wishes other people simply didn't exist.
I consider myself a pretty chill, calm person. I couldn't believe how angry and annoyed sitting in my car would make me. Cars really do something weird to your brain, in no time at all.
I'm very glad I'm in a city with superb public transportation.
In Seattle, local residential streets are often designated as "stay healthy" streets, where bikes and pedestrians have right-of-way. You can drive a car there, but it will be slow (intersections are narrowed to discourage fast driving). Cars take parallel streets if they're going more than a block or two.
I haven't checked the statistics but it seems to work. There's one near me that's packed with bikes during coomute hours, and I think the cost to the city was negligible.
I wouldn't paint Seattle as a picture of success when it comes to bikes. We've spent untold millions on bike lanes, reduced vehicle capacity with road diets, reduced parking and access to small businesses and made life more difficult for delivery drivers and ADA access.
After all that, the mode share of biking has actually gone down in Seattle over the last decade, to under 3%. It turns out if your city has hills, rain and darkness much of the year, there is no amount of money that will convince people to ride a bike. We've effectively subsidized a recreational interest for a very small population, a group so small that the top profession of the ~12k who do cycle is "college professor". And as a pedestrian who has to share with cyclists almost every day, it's been a net negative. In my own neighborhood they've made sidewalks unusable for pedestrians in the quest to encourage more cyclists.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-bike-...
Your stats are nearly a decade old. Cycling popularity has increased, not decreased, even surpassing the pre-pandemoc levels: https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2026/08/17/july-bike-counts-...
The Fremont bridge isn't downtown.
Stockholm is colder, further north, (though admittedly less hilly).
I can't argue that the bike infra improvements in Seattle haven't made a huge difference, but I'm not at all convinced this is because it is intrinsically unlikeable.
For what it's worth, the environmentally incredibly bikeable SD/LA has such bad infra that they have both fewer bikers and far more deaths.
"After all that, the mode share of biking has actually gone down in Seattle over the last decade, to under 3%" <-- your article is from 2018 and that is like 8 years old, an eternity ago.
There is significantly more bike infrastructure now then in 2018. Plus the lime scooters and bikes have radically shifted the balance of bikes vs cars to the point where I'd say that bikes now rule the street in most of the dense parts of Seattle.
I would imagine there are at least 10x more people using those lanes than there was before affordable e-bikes and "bike shares" showed up. You've got people who would never, ever ride in a million years be caught dead on a bike using those bike lanes to run errands, go to visit people, commute to work, etc. Just sit down anywhere in the dense parts of the city and you'l see them go by constantly!
I doubt the people who put those bike lanes in back in 2018 and before ever could have imagined how popular they are now thanks to lime bikes, electric scooters and such. Its honestly pretty remarkable and thank god somebody had the thought to build up that stuff back then!
You might imagine that there are 10x the amount of people riding bikes, but the numbers just don't support it.
This is more in the direction of what I'm talking about. I think it's a pretty good model and affirms not contradticts what I'm saying because you do have to sacrifice drivability (unless you can just add streets like this - but I assume not).
It's pretty easy to do in most cities, you just have to eliminate a lane of traffic and/or parking spots. It's quite rare for a modern city to have streets too narrow to do that.
Bike lanes don't just compete against car lanes. They also compete against sidewalks and bus/tram lanes.
There is also the question of what you are going to do with your bike once you are at your destination, where are you going to park it?
For those who went to Amsterdam as a pedestrian, I don't know how it felt, but to me, it was not great. Lots of narrow sidewalks littered with stuff, the stuff in question is often bikes, so you have to step onto the adjacent bike lane, where you are usually greeted by an angry cyclist, because for some reason, parking your bike on the sidewalk is fine but stepping on the bike lane is not.
So, as a pedestrian, I wished Amsterdam converted its car lanes into trams and sidewalks rather than bike lanes. And yes, I hated bikes for as long as I stayed in Amsterdam, and so did everyone in my group.
The cars vs bikes debate tend to get a lot of attention, but the bikes vs pedestrians and public transit aspect matters too.
Note that bikes + buses can be a particularly dangerous combination. Buses are long and can block off the path of a careless cyclist as they turn, who may fall right under the wheels of the bus.
To provide a different anecdote, Amsterdam is the best city I've ever had the pleasure of exploring as a pedestrian.
There were well-maintained sidewalks everywhere I needed to go. The reduced amount of automobile traffic made it easier to cross smaller roads and intersections without risking my life. At larger intersections, I often received a crossing signal almost immediately upon requesting one, instead of waiting multiple minutes.
Negotiating interactions with cyclists was trivial, because I could always make eye contact with them. Unlike drivers, who barely pay attention to those outside of cars, have their heads buried in their phone, or are obscured behind tinted glass.
It was also the quietest major city I've ever visited, which I largely attribute to the prevalence of bikes instead of automobiles. Some of the semi-tractors / HGVs I saw making deliveries were even electric, which is a great reduction in noise and other forms of pollution.
If I ever have the pleasure of visiting Amsterdam again, I intend to rent a bike. I hope to explore more of the city via the obviously superior mode of transportation, as demonstrated by so many locals.
> Bike lanes don't just compete against car lanes. They also compete against sidewalks and bus/tram lanes.
Tram lanes are a travesty, but bus lanes make pretty decent bike lanes. I biked through Seattle to work for a year or so in 2018/2019 where bikes are allowed in bus lanes, and it's a good compromise. There's a couple of streets where the bus lanes are always full of busses, but most of the bus lanes are a nice place to ride; unless they've got rails, of course.
Seattle has put in a lot more separated bike lanes since I've been there, but on routes I wouldn't have used anyway, so I dunno. There was one on my route that was terrible, but I don't think they used that pattern very often; they put a separated bike lane between parking and the side walk, and parking ended close to an intersection where many cars wanted to turn right; limited visibility and limited space made it hard to get to the center or left of the lane to avoid conflicts with vehicles turning right.
IMHO, there's a conflict between bike infrastructure appropriate for beginner / slow bicyclists and infrastructure appropriate for experienced / faster bicyclists. Separated lanes can be nice, but they make it harder to mix with motor vehicles when that's appropriate and desirable. If separated bike infrastructure makes me take a longer path or wait for a signal change to turn left, but lack of infrastructure (and the traffic situation) would have let me mix with motor vehicles and take a permissive left without waiting for a signal change, that's a negative for me --- but the extra wait isn't an issue for someone who wouldn't have mixed with traffic for that left turn anyway.
> eliminate a lane of traffic and/or parking spots
It's out of the question in most places, it slows car traffic down and makes it harder for people to park in places where parking is already scarce. Then residents and customers of local businesses have nowhere to park.
>It's out of the question in most places, it slows car traffic down
If you actually make a sufficiently high-quality bike network to convince people to bike that would otherwise drive, I would expect this to speed car traffic up by taking a lot of cars off the road.
I bike 9 to 10 months out of the year in southern Wisconsin. It would do people well to get outside and spend less time on their screens in the Winter.
Scandinavia, The Netherlands, London, Paris. Great for cycling, shit weather.
Buy a coat and some gloves.
Have you ever heard of Oulu, Finland?
Denmark has excellent bike infrastructure and terrible weather.
for me prosperity implies not spending a big chunk of my day trapped in a metal box with no way to get out. are you really saying that everyone except a couple freaks like me would rather fight traffic and sit on your ass than take nice walk? to the degree that we shouldn't even be allowed to have little pockets where driving isn't the only modality?
the US is huge, and its all car all the time. you have thousands of options of where to live like that - I have like 5. and you think I shouldn't even have that.
The effect is a lot less pronounced that you might expect. See, for example, this video talking about Oulu, Finland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
Are these conditions that typically can't be found in the Netherlands?
I guess heavy snow isn't too common there, maybe if we plowed the bike paths? Ok, now I'm getting distracted imagining a bike-path-plow, it would presumably be mounted on a powered bike of some sort, or maybe on those little parking enforcement trikes.
Buy a coat and a pair of gloves. You're not made of sugar.
There should be more friction added to car travel. More walkable neighborhoods with local business around the corner would pop up right where people are if the norm wasn't "everyone make endless individual trips to Walmart."
So stupid all the suburbanites blocking my driveway to come eat at nice restaurants because all they have out there is fast food; such a huge waste of resources
It's a self-fulfilling situation. It's that way only because those places have designed their infrastructure to be car dependent.
The opposite is also true: If you take a place where people primarily walk and bike, and take out the sidewalks and bike lanes to widen the road, people will also be pissed.
All you're pointing out is that humans are resistant to change. We already know that is true. The question is not whether people don't like change, the question is: which is better urban planning? What is a better environment to live in?
Eliminating parking on a single street is hardly a death sentence for nearby businesses.
And the whole idea is to encourage biking, ergo less parking is a good thing.
It's absolutely impossible everywhere except where it has been tried and works great. Car centric design is a poor match for dense urban development and reverting the city to be more transit and pedestrian focused almost always improves the situation, bringing more people to shops and restaurants and revitalizing previously moribund downtown districts.
Cool. Leave your car somewhere else.
Insulating bicycles from other vehicles is not the only path to road safety. When forced to interact with bikes more often, car drivers drive more safely and conservatively. Not sure that works everywhere or depends on better driver education and general empathy.
https://time.com/archive/6683576/signal-failure/
https://bikecity.amsterdam.nl/en/experiment-traffic-lights-d...
http://dutchcycling.nl/get-inspired/sarphatistraat-amsterdam...
> Of course this is infeasible for most established cities.
It simply is not. The problem is sacrificing an unreasonable amount of space to drivers. There is a ton of space for human-scale vehicles.
Natives might have a different take, but I was recently in Berlin (which you might consider an 'established city'), and this seemed like a solved problem there. Bike lanes are at sidewalk grade, above the curb, with rumble strip or other tactile indicator for the boundary. You do NOT walk in the bike lane, it's just like walking in the car lane.
Considering the rise of additional micromobility vehicles, this is such an obvious solution when you see it in practice.
Can't recall which European city it was (not AMS) where it was impossible to ride bikes on footpath but easy for padestrians. Very interesting hurdles were added. I wish I was more enthusiastic about taking photos. I had seen it on a very small stretch though. Somehwere in Belgium? I can't recall. In fact some of those hurdles/obstacles looked very artsy :)
And also there were dedicated bike lanes which should be a must in any self-respecting place.
Trampolines!
Motorbikes in the US are the same problem, 30 years behind.
We have decades of bicyclists clamoring for infrastructure, and they've been starting to get it.
Meanwhile, e-bikes and delivery apps have caused a recent explosion in the number of motorbikes on the road. Cars think they're too slow. Cyclists think they're too fast. They're nimble and vulnerable like bicycles, but can be regulated like cars. Like taxis, they're often piloted by people who come from places with chaotic road cultures, and who have a financial incentive to bend the rules to get there faster.
Ideally, we'd be like the Dutch and have different outlets for different classes of transportation (mass + speed + amount of protection). Instead, everyone just gets pissed at everyone who moves differently than they do, and the road network fails to keep up with anyone's needs.
Copenhagen does this quite well: https://ramblershighway.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/201...
Have you heard of "The Copenhagen left"?
It's a method for a cyclist turning left at an intersection. Turning left from the bike lane on the right is of course impossible, because the land is on the right, despite being a basic function of biking somewhere.
So the cyclist wants to turn left. They go through the intersection and move off to the side, near any pedestrians waiting to cross. When the light turns they and the pedestrians can cross.
Otherwise the biker must leave the bike lane and merge across traffic.
In either case the bike lane is inherently problematic.
Your unexamined premise is that the car lanes are natural and good, while the bike lane is a problematic imposition on them.
"Turning left from the bike lane on the right is of course impossible"... if there is a lane of fast-moving automotive traffic directly on the cyclist's left. From the cyclist's perspective, the car lane is the "inherently problematic" one.
I don't think it's fair to say either is inherently problematic, just that there is inherent conflict with different mode types. Then, imho, you ought to look at the overall social cost/benefit of each mode type and prioritize accordingly.
They do have good urban cycling design, but I think a big part of it is merely the expectancy of both drivers and pedestrians that bikes are everywhere.
Bikes can totally belong on the same streets as cars if said cars can't go fast thanks to traffic calming infrastructure.
Vancouver in Canada did a really good job with bike routes. Instead of putting bikes in a lane on a main road, they turned side roads into a kind of bicycle highway. It’s the best cycling infrastructure I’ve ever seen.
Tho Onion should have also had “'Infeasible,' Says Only Nation Where This Does Not Happen” to link to.
Minneapolis is very successfully demonstrating that this is not infeasible.
In the Piers Anthony novel "On a Pale Horse", the protagonist is taught a lesson about empathy and perspective by being forced to experience the same scenario as a pedestrian, a bicyclist, and a driver.
Reading your comment and many others makes me think that the most "intractable" problem with shared transportation infrastructure isn't making it physically safe, it's getting people to treat other road users as human. Even a car-only road still has this problem.
I think about that scene a lot, both when riding and when driving. What feels like a safe speed and safe distance while driving feels like neither when outside the car.
The same person is a driver, biker or pedestrial at different times of the same day.
Toxic entitled drivers hate bikers. Some bikers are toxic on sidewalks. Most sane people are actually able to exist with all three.
> Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between.
Bikes belong both on road and in between. Childrens bikes belong on side walk. Bikes moving in small speed can be on sidewalks too.
It's not really infeasible, we have this in Holland everywhere and our cities are a lot narrower than the US ones.
>It's not really infeasible, we have this in Holland everywhere and our cities are a lot narrower than the US ones.
I said it is inherently problematic, not exactly that it's infeasible.
The Netherlands is excellent support for my claim because of what you just said. The cities support less car traffic and slower driving speeds. Something has to give and in that case its drivability. In fact there are a lot more streets where cars can't go at all, or are just mostly bikes correct?
And the 3 modes/lanes in one place is still not even solved while minimizing cars. Cyclist are more than 1/3rd of Dutch road deaths and the Fietsersbond has even argued that the middle lane. https://swov.nl/sites/default/files/bestanden/downloads/FS%2...
Less car traffic is great for liveable cities though. In my city they have pedestrianised major roads recently and it's been really amazing. People sitting on benches, enjoying the sun, where before it was hard to talk because of all the traffic noise. Unfortunately those streets have gone up in price a lot too because it's much better to live there now.
And yes but those road deaths are caused by cars. There's just more victims on bikes because there's so many bikes around.
Chicago is putting these in everywhere to varying degrees of robustness based on traffic flows and it's fabulous.
Cars are the least suited to cities of these.
It is not at all infeasible. Many cities do this successfully.
usually at the expense of one or the other, usually cars.
FWIW I think that is a fine trade-off. I think people don’t truly realise how poorly cars scale until they take a really large step back and take a holistic view on infrastructure- which is inherently difficult for most people as they are so close and bought-in that they can’t even conceive of life being different than what they’re used to.
And they reach for exceptions to prove the requirement, when less cars in cities frees up the roads for those that truly need it (LGV and disabled access, but slow thus disincentivised unless actually required and thus less likely to cause accidents).
It's not necessarily at the expense of cars; the people riding bicycles on the bike lane are no longer driving cars blocking the way ahead of you, and parking their car in your favourite spot. Since bicycles use space more efficiently than cars, this can actually be a win for both the cyclists and the remaining drivers (who now have one less lane, but even less traffic). However this only happens if cycling adoption is high enough, which is why the bike routes have to be well connected.
Sometimes it doesn't even require sacrificing a lane, because many North American cities have lanes that are wildly larger than necessary or even appropriate given the posted speed limits. The lanes can simply be narrowed, and then this also causes the drivers to naturally drive at safer speeds, reducing traffic accidents, speeding tickets, and the unplanned delays that those both cause.
In Chicago, more people ride the Ashland bus than drive down Ashland every day. We still couldn’t take a lane for bus rapid transit.
People are already stupid, put them in a car and their brains start leaking out of their ears.
The bit you are missing is the space efficiency. Cars take up the most space by a large margin and getting people into more dense forms of transit (anything else) frees up space to be more efficiently used. Space is the most precious commodity in a city as many people are competing for every square meter.
This is also why suburbs and rural areas are a better fit for cars. Space is much more available and you can afford to be wasteful with it.
> The bike lane space has to come from somewhere
> though more people in bikes and out of cars free’s up so much infrastructure that it can make less space work even better for cars
Yes, you've reiterated my point...
And how many do it thoroughly, not just in small parts?
I see the problem more that motorised traffic tends to take all available space (due to their size and congestion concerns) and cyclists and pedestrians get to fight over the scraps left over.
Ultimately, motorised traffic tends to disrupt other forms of transport as people get used to travelling longer distances to get to shops, work etc. This then results in out-of-town hypermarkets which pretty much require people to use cars to get to them. The resultant traffic inevitably results in congestion, so more space is assigned to building roads and facilities get built further apart which of course just exacerbates the whole congestion issue.
> Ideally we have entirely separate paths for bikes. Of course this is infeasible for most established cities
Maybe in the US which has gone all in on providing space for cars and their parking, but it's quite feasible in old European cities that are much older. Often it relies on reducing the space available for cars. There's good examples of how some European cities were able to change drastically.
The Netherlands is a great example as during the 1970s, it was heavily biased towards motorised vehicles. The "Stop de Kindermoord" (approximately "Stop the child killing") campaign was key to changing attitudes and nowadays, cities such as Amsterdam are held up as examples of designing for multi-mode transport.
https://www.dutchreach.org/car-child-murder-protests-safer-n...
Cars don't belong in dense city centers. Bikes are not the problem.
The cars are the problem, not the bikes or pedestrians.
Great, then you agree with me that its problematic to have all three in the same place.
Bikes do pretty well on roads, especially in cities or quiet roads outside. We will all live in peace once we have self-driving cars instead of careless and violent human drivers. This already works pretty well in many cities in for example Spain.
Maybe not so well on roads, but streets are a good place for bikes. Especially E-Bikes that can keep up with city traffic.
Or we could just fund public transit.
I’m a driver and a pedestrian and I don’t hate cyclists because I’m not a psychopath.
I find drivers mostly hate themselves, but do occasionally take time out to hate other road users as well.
"Ideally we have entirely separate paths for bikes. Of course this is infeasible for most established cities."
Not a problem, we just reduce lanes for cars. Bikes use way less space, do not contribute to bad air, keep their riders healthy - well, except when car drivers kill them.
The logical escalation of desire paths - https://99percentinvisible.org/article/least-resistance-desi...
More public spending will eventually lead those byciclers out of the state
Some DOTs have given official support to Tactical Urbanism, with methods for communities to propose and implement small projects themselves on accelerated timelines like bike lanes or pedestrian crosswalks.
It’s effectively crowdsourcing urban planning, I’m in support.
I honestly think if we invited this type of empowerment/interaction in the physical world a bit more it would probably be good for spurring creativity in society (I think we do a pretty good job of it in software). It’s just a nice reminder that everything is just made up by someone else, likely no smarter than you.
Also I can’t believe this was 10 years ago, I remember being super involved in SPUR in SF (and getting coffee there almost every day) and going to talks about this kind of thing
It's admittedly appealing because it feels far closer to ordinary citizens having an influence, but I can't help feel like this is a failure on the part of the professionals whose responsibility the planning and implementation of this is.
Have we really gotten to the point where we can't trust public infrastructure to be properly implemented, and so the only solution is to take it into our own hands? What are the tax dollars paying for then?
I think in many places we have gotten to the point where the planning, processes, and public approval process for some of these simple projects is more costly in time and money than just building it as a temporary experiment and revisiting it in a year or two to measure the outcome.
Not that there shouldn't still be some kind of standards and community approval, but I think we can afford to set that at a lower bar for certain categories of easily reversible projects.
And hopefully incorporating more of these ideas can teach us to be more efficient on transit infrastructure projects in general, where the US often significantly trails other countries on cost and implementation time.
Changes are stymied by bureaucracy put in place due to fear of litigation. The primary reason that things are studied, studied again, given community input, and checked for environmental impact is that if a city or municipality gets sued due to a road change, the onus is on them to demonstrate that they didn't create an unsafe condition. For example in cases where cars crash and are liable for property damage, car owners try to sue the city to claim that the area was unsafe. Pointing to a massive paper trail like this removes liability from a set of city or municipal concerns.
> Nah, that's just the bullshit they tell you.
I mean, this is the "bullshit" that our DOT told us when talking about guerilla urbanism at a real city meeting. I agree that it's frustrating, but it is what we were told. I don't know how to "disprove" a defensive posture. And yes, our city goverment has been sued in cases on the grounds of poor street design (though they've only had to pay out once in 20 years.)
> The bureaucracy is put in place because none of the people putting it in place are paying for it, headcount is power, control over resources is power, etc, etc, and all the other perverse incentives you see in government workplaces. And of course once the gravy train is running all these parties have an incentive to keep it running.
Do you have any real experience in city or local government?
We kind of have reached that point. You can look at the cost overruns and public consultation before every new project as failures of the system to deliver what people want.
> a failure on the part of the professionals whose responsibility the planning and implementation of this is.
Don't forget the short-sighted NIMBYism.
In my region of the world this exists and every year residents can vote for projects in their immediate vicinity.
I use a 5km stretch of bike lane daily going to work and back which was built this way. It runs along a railway line, so while it was navigable previously, off-season (so now) it would be covered in mud.
The initiative was spearheaded by just one lady who had an idea and a concrete proposal how to implement it.
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if youve never listened to it, the podcast episode linked in the article about guerrilla public service is a really nice listen. Their episodes are pleasant, half scripted half chatty. Recommend!
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/guerrilla-public-serv...
Similar grassroots (heh, quite literally) activism is the idea of guerrilla gardening. Around here, a local nonprofit Villi vyöhyke (Wild Zone) [1] started as a small group of guerrillas but is now advocating, consulting and involved in many major rewilding projects initiated by municipalities and private companies.
I still think the better way to go is to find lawyers who will aggressively seek civil suits against the idiots who hit cyclists.
Two of the prominent members of our club were hit by a drunk driver outside a small town. Nobody died but bikes destroyed, nasty bruises, cracked ribs and vertebrae.
The driver shouldn’t have still had his license based on previous offenses. But his dad was a politician. Mayor I believe, and had been bailing that piece of shit out of trouble for who knows how long. I bet daddy would stop protecting him if he was on the hook for a couple million in damages. And/or corruption charges.
One of the victims was in fact a lawyer but I think he was property law not criminal.
Title needs (2016) appending
110 comments
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Guerrilla Public Service Redux (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23325319 - May 2020 (110 comments)
Guerrilla Bike Lanes: San Francisco Makes Illicit Infrastructure Permanent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12953150 - Nov 2016 (137 comments)
Guerrilla Bike Lanes in San Francisco - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12333604 - Aug 2016 (266 comments)
Reminds me of https://translate.kagi.com/www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-366...
The lesson from residents who built a bridge for less than 2% of the budget projected by the city governmentIt's very easy to save money when you don't pay workers and aren't worried about safety or accessibility. They'd made and were using several wooden bridges before this one, but all of them failed and were washed away. Maybe they get lucky and this one will stay up for a long time, and be continuously maintained by volunteers, but I'm very glad that the bridges in my city are more expensive because they were built by engineers who have to get designs approved and their work inspected and maintained regularly.
Actually it's easy to inflate prices when politicians are corrupt, also https://translate.kagi.com/globoplay.globo.com/v/3474112
Overpass collapses in Belo Horizonte, killing two
The bottom line is when there is political interest, even guerrilla infra might work, but nothing survives corruption and neglect. The case of the makeshift bridge is only a matter of making the required tests and adaptations to make it legal or condemning the structure and building a new one.
There's another side of stuff like this. People living up in the hills above LA near trail heads will put up fake no parking zones in front of their houses. People have gotten real tickets in fake zones.
a counterexample of good tactical urbanism in Los Angeles People's Vision Zero, a group painting crosswalks where the city itself won't budge on safety demands (motonormativity is the rule)
https://www.reddit.com/r/BikeLA/comments/1pl8guj/i_started_a...
>painting crosswalks where the city itself won't budge
So, political vandals?
direct action gets the goods.
If you haven't noticed this entire thread is about illicit infrastructure. There could be a moral argument to be had (which you are not making) but no one is denying the vandalism aspect.
Thats such a wild assumption. Your saying the government always folows the will of the public? Theres nothing people want that governments are giving them?
unless the city governance is in the pocket of the wealthiest members of the city's population, and those members don't want the goods. I witnessed this first hand in Los Angeles when I lived there.
Crosswalks are popular. The issue is more complicated than you think.
Huh? Are cities near you known for quick and easy-to-navigate bureaucratic processes?
[citation needed]
This is great! They saw a problem, found a solution, and just fixed it. Better than complaining about it for 5-10 years waiting for someone else to do something
This is similar to The Oval at Ohio State University. Instead of planning walkways across a field of grass, they looked where students actually walked and then paved those routes.
I think this applies to so many things. Centrally planned things rarely work exactly as planned, especially if the people doing the planning are separate from those executing the plan.
Much of the time, it's better to observe what's working in practice (even if in a messy way) and systemize it rather than have a perfect concept that disintegrates upon contact with reality.
if you want it done right, you often have to do it yourself
I like guerrilla housing. City does not build enough flats, so you occupy unused parking lot or sidewalk, and build house there!
The return of Civil Disobedience as a tool for inspiring social change.
Maybe not as profound or important as the Civil Rights movement. But important nonetheless for public safety. (Assuming the guerrilla bike lanes themselves are safe and well thought out.)
what an absurd the hipster population taking over spaces of deadly, noisy and polluting vehicles and having the state collaborating with them /j
One such report (in German): https://www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2025/10/zebrastreifen-e... in Eberswalde; apparently firefighters were called in to remove the paint but were unsuccessful in their attempts to wash away the white stripes, and police launched an investigation into suspected interference with road traffic.
And another in Dresden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQUpQZAeA3w https://www.diesachsen.de/en/politics/a-zebra-crossing-in-dr... "In the summer of 2025, unknown individuals painted a crosswalk on the roadway along the busy street in Neustadt to provide safe access to the Heinrich Schütz Conservatory. The city promptly blocked off the crossing with warning cones [...] stating that unauthorized crosswalks constitute not only property damage but also a dangerous interference with traffic. Furthermore, traffic signs installed without authorization constitute an administrative offense under the Road Traffic Code."
In Los Angeles https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-10-16/risking-... "Risking arrest, he paints illicit crosswalks across L.A. ‘We can’t wait any longer’" (initially repainting faded crosswalks, rather than creating new ones)
And an example in Saskatoon, visible only in the 2015 street view image https://maps.app.goo.gl/3zWAkjtSEATswcWm8
Haha, Dresden.
Just next street, 6 years ago, some guys painted a Zebrastreifen, and got charged for Serious interference with road traffic: https://www.dnn.de/lokales/dresden/falscher-zebrastreifen-in...
(do note that "serious" or "schwer" (lit. heavy) is a qualifier in german law, that increases the charges significantly. The serious part here is that it isn't some alteration that can be immediately removed (e.g. a traffic cone))
Update on that other situation in the district of Neustadt that you mentioned: The city actually just completed a legal crosswalk there, just last week. Here's the article by our public broadcast: https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/sachsen/dresden/dresden-radeb...
"dangerous interference with traffic"
Indeed, it could lead to cars slowing down and who could want that in Autoland germany.
That's essentially a desire path, in crosswalk form:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path
Actively painting the desire path is next level though ':)
There's a cool project where desire paths were intentionally planned and paved later: https://popupcity.net/radar/elephant-paths-paving-the-way-fo...
It's not the first time I run into this idea, it's indeed probably a great way to design paths!
Dangerous game. In Romania at least, even fixing a pothole would get you a fine, possible jail time and requirement to unfix it.
[0] https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/actualitate/comuna-unde-fostul...
[1] https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/actualitate/situatie-absurda-i...
[2] https://www.antena3.ro/actualitate/locale/satul-sa-astepte-d...
Guerrilla urbanism is pretty much illegal to do everywhere, including in the article's subject city of San Francisco. The goal is to not get caught by authorities while doing it
Of course it's formally illegal. My point is that, while in SF authorities accepted and formalised an intervention, in other parts of the world there's a real threat of criminal proceedings, and not for modifying traffic infrastructure significantly, but for FILLING A POTHOLE.
Other interventions haven't been met so kindly. For example, last year after California passed a state-wide law banning street parking within 15 feet of an intersection (to improve visibility of pedestrians), some people tried to paint curbs (red curbs mark prohibited parking), frustrated the city was acting too slowly to repaint curbs everywhere. I don't remember if they were ever caught, but presumably they would have received a fine as it caused alot of headaches--it cast doubt on the validity of many parking fines issued after the law took effect as the parking enforcers couldn't know which curbs had been officially repainted, yet.
As for the guerilla bike lane on JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park, that entire 1-mile section of JFK was later closed off to cars entirely. It required a city-wide ballot initiative, IIRC, and was very contentious. But the city government was in favor of it, which may have something to do with why they were so accommodating earlier with the bike lane.
You're onto something. Of course, the cases I linked were pretty different and there's a mix of institutional rigidity in there, but that's how I'd interpret the Romanian attitude as well.
Besides completely missing the fact that I'm pointing out different attitudes and what happens if you get caught, how does "just don't get caught" not apply equally to something like murder?
Nor California!
Society is relatively lenient towards college students being mischievous.
It helps that colleges have their own police forces with a standing directive to not be too harsh on students.
Although maybe that’s a US thing? We are a weird country.
The college police force is a US thing.
Oxford University had its own police until quite recently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_University_Police
Unfortunately that’s also how the Seven got away with it like generations before them. I’ve been wondering lately if the private force is a net negative on society.
Could be a US thing, but that's very cool to hear that!
Here in the UK, it seems the best way to get potholes fixed is to paint a penis around it: https://themanc.com/art-and-culture/manchester-graffiti-arti...
There is no such thing as 'jaywalking' in Germany.
Buenos Aires has much better solution: pedestrians carry crosswalk lines in their imagination, and they can apply them anywhere it's needed, at zero cost to the municipality.
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stvo_2013/__25.html "(3) Pedestrians must cross roadways quickly and by taking the shortest route perpendicular to the direction of travel, taking care to avoid vehicular traffic. If traffic density, speed, visibility, or traffic flow so requires, a roadway may only be crossed at intersections or junctions, at traffic lights within markings, at pedestrian crossing aids, or at pedestrian crossings (sign 293). When crossing the roadway at intersections or junctions, pedestrian crossings or markings at traffic lights must always be used."
Maybe there's no penalty, but a 6 lane road probably has traffic density/speed/flow enough to get to the "may only be crossed at intersections or junctions"
You'd never know that from the way that Germans and Austrians will stand at a red crossing signal on a completely clear road
Crossing a street at a red traffic light as a pedestrian can get you a fine. Crossing a road far enough from a traffic light won't.
The word "jaywalking" is often used colloquially to refer to crossing the street anywhere that isn't a controlled crossing; it's not always strictly referring to the law.
The term itself was made up by the US auto industry in the 1920s in an attempt to shift blame of traffic fatalities towards pedestrians. And it worked. Before that, streets (which are built by the state) belonged to everyone and drivers were almost always held responsible for accidents.
They made up the term jaywalking by combining "walking" with the term "jay" which was a slang term for a country bumpkin or idiot from out of town. They hired actors to spread the slur to refer to those out of towners that don't know how to "properly" behave around streets in a modern city. They even paid Boy Scouts to hand out warning cards and staged mock funerals
Yes, I know. But few people are aware of this history; it doesn't change what I said.
“Jaywalking” is partially a psyop by the burgeoning automobile industry to blame the victims instead of the drivers.
I suppose it didn’t work that well because as a rule a car or bike hitting a pedestrian is still almost always at fault.
They also killed mass transit so let’s call it a draw.
Downvoted, but true. If there is no crosswalk, you can cross. But, it might be dangerous or impossible as cars have right of way.
In Germany! That's a dangerous place to be breaking the law. I hope they knew what they were doing.
Did they ever actually try and do things the proper way (e.g. file a request, show up to a town hall)? Because that may have actually been easier.
As somebody who did try to get a crosswalk near my home, I can say with some degree of certainty that calling the local DOT is generally a lost cause.
A bit of backstory... My little cluster of townhomes sits beside a 35mph, wide (was 4 lanes, reduced to 2+bike lanes), busy suburban road. Cars regularly go 50mph because the road is wide and smooth and 50 feels right. People have died crossing the road (2 in the 7 years I've lived here). There's a bus stop on both sides of the intersection, housing on both sides, a park on one side down a block, and a golf course on the other side, also one block down.
The response from VDOT was essentially "there's currently no proof of pedestrian need" This despite bus stops, parks, and housing existing. And pedestrian deaths. And frequently seeing with my own eyes people dashing across the road, trying not to get squished,
It's complete idiocy from the various traffic planning orgs. It's 100% car-first, consequences be damned. Bike lanes are added reluctantly, and usually as a requirement to get federal funding; little attention paid to utility... did I mention the bike lanes on the road above go "nowhere"? They literally end several blocks on either side of the local school complex, start again, then stop before the local shopping center. So you can't actually use them to get anywhere you'd want to go.
"there's currently no proof of pedestrian need"
Well of course. Just how there's no proof of "train need" before tacks get built. Why do we ever build tracks if there is no preexisting train traffic to justify the need?!
Getting transient college students to engage with the slow process of government is difficult.
The college students also generally don’t vote in that location lowering the desire of public government to engage with them as much. Again transient. You’re right to ask but I’m guessing this was the primary issue.
Given the expertise of the faculty, fair chance that happened - and possibly that was what really prompted the city to eventually build a crosswalk. Plus many former students likely ended up in exactly the positions that would make these decisions.
Doesn't make for a good story though. What I relayed above has become university lore. Its accuracy is hard to judge decades later.
Easier than everyone just doing nothing and jaywalking until magically a crosswalk appear? Doesn't sound like it to me, law of least effort and all that.
The origin story for the Union Jack-inspired sidewalks on my university’s quad was the president looking out his window on a snowy day and seeing all of the footprints in the snow and asking the facilities to put diagonals in.
Guess some schools have wiser faculty than others.
The city and the school are different management structures. The issue is the mayor of the city isn’t focused solely on the school nor should he be. But this means change takes longer.