I was wondering how they avoided car doors on the passenger side being opened into the bike path, then I rechecked the photo and noted that the area next to the curb is reserved for streetlights (and probably other “street furniture” such as fire hydrants and trash containers). Moving down the hierarchy of street users, there doesn’t seem to be any barrier to prevent a cyclist from going “off track” and bowling over a pedestrian. How do they deal with this hazard? I can see a challenge in many cities: making the sidewalks wide enough to accommodate both walking and cycling as shown in the picture.

To provide an adequate area for both walking and bicycling, do what the Europeans do–take out car parking and/or lanes of motorized vehicle travel. It’s all about priorities and optimizing use of public space. Cars are big bulky things that don’t belong in large quantities in high density areas.

Exchanging car infrastructure for walking and bicycle infrastructure has numerous economic benefits. Fewer cars with their heavy mass damaging the roads mean far less street repairs and maintenance costs. More walking and bicycling means lower health care costs. (17% of US GDP goes to health care costs, higher than any other nation in the world. However, even with all the money we spend, we rank 72nd out of 191 nations in our overall level of health.) Lower levels of pollution from cars reduce asthma and cancer levels. Quieter streets improve neighborhoods and property values.

It’s nice the Dutch are coming over here and schooling our traffic engineers on bicycle promotion. We won’t figure it out quickly enough, however, and nor will the Chinese or the Indians, so soon I hope they come back and school our civil engineers on dykes to keep out the rising waters!

Less seriously, though, the fact is that sidewalks and streets in the Netherlands are not as thoroughly designed to prevent pedestrians and bikes from getting in each others’ way. I like to think of the cultural difference like this: ours is a right-of-way culture (the rules dictate whose turn it is, and who has the “rights” to a place, and that’s how you decide who’s at fault in a collision, for example) and theirs is a “give way” culture (in a crowded country there’s more shared space and less feeling of entitlement to a particular path or place, so people give way when they can).

^Bob was wondering how they avoided car doors on the passenger side being opened into the bike path?

The average occupancy of a motor vehicle being 1.2 passengers helps. Odds are there are no passengers getting into the car!

“They say we make it too cheap to drive. Getting a driver’s license is cheap. Gas is cheap. Parking is cheap. Excise taxes on car purchases: cheap.”

This seems like the most important point. And driver’s liability to those they injure: cheap.

I remember when I was in Berlin, I went to a club, and everyone got stupid drunk. My host blamed the club owners for making the beer too cheap. With the government subsidizing giant SUVs and foreign oil wars and parking it’s no surprise that drivers have overrun the streets, drunk on cars.

We got to meet with the Dutch planners and engineers in Miami on Thursday for an unofficial preparatory meeting to plan next year’s ThinkBike Miami that was supposed to have been this week. Herbert, a civil engineer from the Netherlands, showed us this video he made highlighting a lot of their local bicycle facilities http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBiYohzwSn4

Your caption isn’t a bit overgeneralized. Not all the facilities are separated from traffic. They have a number of good shared spaces as well, from bike boulevards to bike lanes. Their lower speed limits make these facilities better, of course.