Commentary: The Dutch Call Dangerous Designs Evil. They’re Right.
4:15 PM PDT on September 16, 2022
Redwood Road, where a motorist slammed into people *inside* this Trader Joe’s. Yet cyclists are given a bike lane that crosses slip turns, along a six lane stroad in this grotesque example of how not to make people safe. Image: Google Maps
Dutch planners and engineers visited San Francisco last week. One of the things I find so refreshing about meeting with the Dutch, is they have a plain-speaking culture. And when they see clearly dangerous road designs that prioritize automobile speeds over safety, they use the word "evil" to describe it.
By evil, of course, they mean it in the banal, Hannah Arendt'ian sense; it's not that American traffic engineers and planners twirl their mustaches and laugh as they build deadly intersections. No, it's that they simply go through the motions of their jobs without any real thinking or self-examination at all--which, when you're doing a job that involves life and death, is evil.
The lead image of a ridiculous, paint-only-bike lane and turnout on Redwood Road in Castro Valley is a perfect illustration. Anyone even remotely studied in, well, anything, can see that bike lane is a death trap. Nobody would use a bike lane like that unless they truly had no alternative in how to get around, which is probably why a disproportionate number of dead cyclists and pedestrians are poor and Black. And yet the traffic "engineers" and planners in Castro Valley no doubt took equity pledges, did studies, built the road and striped the bike lanes, collected their paychecks, and went home to play video games, see their families, make dinner, all the while knowing people will die because of what they built.
Concrete, on the other hand, definitely works. This is what's happening in New York as they finally, at long last, start to take safety seriously, by putting in real protection for cyclists and pedestrians:
From Streetsblog NYC. A concrete barrier protecting cyclists and pedestrians on Flushing Avenue just west of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. This is what you build if you're not evil. Photo: Dmitry Gudkov
But, of course, there has to be some parking loss to make room for real, protective infrastructure as seen above.
The Dutch would never tolerate a striped bike lane on a street as wide and trafficked as Redwood Road in Castro Valley. They would not build a five-lane surface level freeway going right by an elementary school like on Franklin in San Francisco. They wouldn't build Telegraph with long stretches with no bike-lane protection. And they would call out planners and engineers who allow such deadly designs.
One of the Dutch engineers I spoke with remarked that it's not that Americans don't know how to make things safe. It's that they don't care enough to change how they do things. Those who do care, with rare exceptions, don't care enough to challenge the politicians and fellow planners who are getting people killed.
That's a moral problem, not an engineering issue. And that, unfortunately, is the part even the Dutch can't help with.
With fatal crashes on Valencia in San Francisco, Lakeshore and International in Oakland (five in the past week on various streets Oakland), it seems like time to highlight some good news in the midst of the despair