this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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Hopefully some of the people sitting in parliament will read this. In many cities we still have to fight for bicycle infrastructure. Car centric city designs should really start going out of fashion
The worst is when they install bike infrastructure that will just randomly end and dump you onto a busy street, and then complain no one is using the fancy new bike lanes...
Have some of these here. Absolutely wild, that the bike lane ends where it would become useful: Before a traffic light, so that you have to take part in the traffic jam of cars.
But what am I even talking about. Traffic lights per se are an anti-pattern of city design.
Itβs a pro and a con. Cars waiting is a good thing. Car drivers chose cars for convenience so anything that makes them inconvenient is a positive factor to getting them out of cars. Iβm in a place where bicycles can turn right on red but cars cannot. And there are cycle paths through woods and fields and niche trafficlight-free places cars cannot go.
I love traffic jams because cyclists are immune to them and car drivers can only sit in frustration as they get passed by cyclists.
A couple intersections are still fucked up though, where cyclists might have to wait for ~2-3 differently timed lights to cross an intersection. Luckly red light running is not generally enforced against cyclists.
That's the wrong way. Bike should be made more convenient. But artificial worsening is no good thing.
I agree on everything, but the conclusion that they are a pro and a con.
Under the constraint, that the same rules apply to bicycles and cars and they are enforced, then traffic lights are definitely an anti-pattern.
Under the assumption, that the alternative would be that pedestrians and cyclicsts would have always the right of way over cars in an urban environment, they would be neutral.
But are they ever a good thing? I see where you are coming from with this: Traffic lights make cars wait. But they are installed to optimise car-flow, in the first place. So, if they were not there, cars would wait longer, because they are inherently inefficient vehicles that would clogg up intersections immediatly and consequentially bring car-flow to a total halt. Hence, every traffic not participating in car-flow would drastically accelerate if traffic lights were abolished.