> because my seat is higher it easier for me to see from "above" somebody been between cars ahead and running out, compared to somebody who sits in reno clio on the ground and seeing nothing till last moment
You can fit 9 kids in a row in front of an SUV without seeing them:
Also they can be smaller and cheaper to build. Because they only carry bicycles and pedestrians, a height clearance of about 2.5 meters is enough, while a bridge needs around 5 meters to let cargo trucks pass underneath. This also results in much shorter ramps.
Drivers in the US are trained to yield to traffic before entering an intersection. They don't typically yield to traffic when exiting one. For pedestrians moving at walking pace, it's possible for them to see the pedestrian about to cross and yield since the pedestrian will be very close to the intersection.
A cyclist 20 to 30 feet away will not be in view of the motorist who is in the process of accelerating as they exit the intersection.
Making intersecton navigation more complex makes it more likely that someone will make a mistake.
There's usually no need to yield, traffic signals regulate that. The idea here is to create a more forgiving environment where making mistakes is less likely and less harmful. Thousands of these intersections have been build, here's some examples and some US context and research:
> There's usually no need to yield, traffic signals regulate that
Yet, the one example of a protected intersection I'm aware of in the US in Salt Lake City Utah[1] doesn't have bicycle specific traffic signals that regulate turning movements. They rely on motorists yielding to cyclists, or cyclists yielding to motorists. This causes problems when cyclists believe they have pedestrian style right-of-way when there's no law supporting that notion and it's not possible to see a cyclist moving at 20 to 30 feet per second in time to yield to them as they're about to cross the path of the motorist.
> American bike infra design and culture has been a failure on nearly every level
In what way? I live in a town with a major university and there are plenty of cyclists on the roads leading to and from campus as well as on campus itself. This is the case at many universities I've been to.
Also, as far as I'm aware, there are no protected bike lane installations anywhere around campus or in town, but we do have a nice rail trail.
NACTO standards for protected intersections provide insufficient visibility for the cyclist and motorist on approach to the intersection [1]. For example they claim that for 25 mph traffic, the total clear sight distance should be 50 feet for a cyclist approaching the intersection where the turning car is ahead of the cyclist.
They're making several assumptions:
1. The cyclist will be looking to their left for traffic to the front rather than paying attention to what's directly in front of them
2. The cyclist assumes that the motorist cannot see them and will not yield
For the first item, there may be slower traffic in front of them they need to watch out for, taking their attention away from the street beside them. Same thing for surface hazards. For the second item, the cyclist may believe that since they can see the motorist, the motorist can see them and they can go ahead and proceed through the intersection.
From the motorist point of view, they're assuming that the motorist is lookinat the bikeway rather than at the road (checking the color of the traffic light, verifying that a car making a left turn is going to yield, pedestrians, etc). A motorist traveling between 15 to 25 mph is going to cover the clear sight distance of 50 feet in a second or two, meaning they don't have much time at all to assess the situation on the bikeway.
The second thing they claim [2] is that a bikeway setback increases visibility. Yet the pictures they use at the bottom of the page are the same picture cropped differently. One would think that they would have tried to use an actual example of this in their guide, but they did not. The other fundamental problem is that cyclists move between 15 to 30 feet per second. That means that a car driver needs to be able to see 30 to 60 feet down the bikeway in order to see an approaching cyclist in order to have enough time to yield to them. And they need to do this while moving through the turn at 10 to 15 feet per second.
Frankly, the article doesn’t make that case very well. €65 million on a population of about half a million is about €130 per head. Over a 5 year period, that is €26 per year. I wouldn’t call that massive.
https://fietsberaad.nl/Tour-de-Force-English/Home aims for “an increase of 20 percent in the amount of bicycle kilometres in 2027, compared to 2017”. They don’t mention costs, but I would think that’s quite a bit more expensive.
