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- Thread starter IanO
- Start date
ntt1
Active Member
Some more bike parking photos from Europe, the first one in Gent (it was under a bridge near one of the city squares) and the second one in Paris, which looks to take up a street parking spot.
TAS
Senior Member
TAS
Senior Member
Here is one interesting thing about Gent - the city boasts a modal share of 34% for cyclists. And the amazing thing - Gent isn't like the Netherlands where there is a lot of seperated bike infrastructure. It wasn't designed for the bike. But in 2012 they repurposed a lot of their streets to accomodate bikes. A lot of the bike lanes are painted and mix with traffic. Big mode share for bikes so people obviously feel safe - but there's also a lot fewer cars and low speeds of 30km/h.
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ntt1
Active Member
This is a good video I had saved on this topic! Unfortunately, I was only there for 2 days and didn't get a chance to ride, but I saw people of all ages with all kinds of bikes around. Their streetcar is also very well integrated.
I did ride in Paris for about a month last year - that was definitely some different cycling than what I'm used to here haha. Their improvements to cycling infrastructure over the last 5 years are remarkable.
ChazYEG
Senior Member
One thing that I feel doesn't get talked about enough (if at all) when comparing the feelings of safety for cyclists in Europe vs North America is the average size of cars. I get it that if you're hit at high speeds by a car of any size you're probably gonna get seriously injured or killed, but at lower speeds, smaller cars are significantly less dangerous, they're more nimble and their lines of sight are generally better, which means taking evasive action to avoid a cyclist is also a lot easier. Not to mention that they take a lot less space which allows more space to be dedicated to other things on the road.
Just imagine your typical Suburbitank 1500 in any European city and how much it would look out of place there, and how prevalent they are here. North America got to a point in which vehicles which are considered mid-sized or even large pretty much anywhere else in the world are sometimes called "compact" here, and even in cities like Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto, where more people tend to have smaller vehicles than in Edmonton or Calgary, for example, they're still quite large.
Seeing those photos and thinking about your comment that despite a lot of bike lanes being painted or mixed in traffic made me think of how much better it'd be if we had smaller cars (better for the environment, better for the pocket and better for the cities, as a whole). It could be a somewhat realistic way to start improving and changing things around here, while still dealing with being extremely car-centric.
constance_chlore
Active Member
I previously posted about one of my favorite streets in Leipzig, Karl-Liebknecht Straße, which is beautiful and certainly one of the more popular streets for students to hang out in the city (along with the quieter Karl-Heine Straße). But walking around Queen Mary Park the other day also reminded me of some of the other parts of Leipzig that nobody would consider the most picturesque, but which I find strangely charming with their oddly colored and ornamented mid-rises. (Unfortunately there are some stroads here, but only because it's just east of the nearly car-free center city.)
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