[w3news]

Emission zone shouldnt be the issue, it is about the amount of cars and road safety for every user. Check e.g. the Dutch road design, where many kids ride bikes. This is already for decades, and has nothing to do with emission zones. But another road design can also help reducing emissions. It is about how many people can travel safe, and with big cities, you have to reduce cars to increase the amount of people that can travel safe, like bikes, walking, and public transport. Road and city design is very important for a livable city.

[microtonal]

This. Though it doesn’t stop at road design. You also have to change the regulations so that car drivers are (partially) legally responsible for accidents, even when a cyclist or pedestrian made the error. Pedestrians and cyclists are orders of magnitude more vulnerable. Putting much more of the legal burden on car drivers makes them more careful.

The hard part is that you also need to build a cycling culture. Most car drivers in NL are more mindful of cyclists, because they are cyclists themselves as well.

Circling back to road design. In our mid-sized Dutch city, it’s often faster to go from A to B than by bike than by car because of the excellent biking infrastructure and car-free city center. Everything is designed around cycling, some traffic lights will even give bikes a green light more often when it’s raining.

[magicalhippo]

> car drivers are (partially) legally responsible for accidents, even when a cyclist or pedestrian made the error

Here in Norway the traffic law states[1] that everyone should be considerate, heedful and careful to avoid harm, and this stands above everything else.

So you can indeed get (partial) blame even if the rest of the rules and regulations say you did nothing wrong.

For example you can't just ram a cyclist or a pedestrian if you have the right of way, but you saw them, or should have seen them, in time to take avoiding action.

Having a quick look at the NYS traffic rules[2] as a semi-random point of comparison, I'm assuming most states have something similar, it does say at the start that "no person shall operate a vehicle in a manner that will endanger any person or property".

This seems to be similar in spirit but not quite the same. I guess I could see the NY courts could find in favor of the driver where the Norwegian courts would not, depending on how they draw the line of endangering.

[1]: https://lovdata.no/lov/1965-06-18-4/§3

[2]: https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/trafrule.pdf

[seanmcdirmid]

You can’t really do that without investing heavily in cycling infrastructure like the Dutch do. Not just designing but redesigning roads when accidents happen. A city like Seattle attempts to put the burden on drivers in theory, but crappy road designs (including lots of occluding on street parking) with little to no change when accidents occur often move incident sentiment firmly into the “not much the driver could have done” accident category.

[richardw]

I wonder if the flatness of the country plays a part? I live on a hill and am surrounded by hills. A 3km ride in any direction and back is hard work. Lots of e-bikes here, and lots of mountain biking. But when I suggested getting a bike to my SO for her to get to the closest bus stop faster, the hills were the reason why she’d rather walk.

[dncornholio]

> The hard part is that you also need to build a cycling culture.

> You also have to change the regulations so that car drivers are (partially) legally responsible for accidents

This is all easy to create. It all starts with infrastructure. If you have infrastructure that is safe for bikes, you will create culture. You will also open up extra legal safeguards, but it has to start with infrastructure.

[hansvm]

> even when a cyclist or a pedestrian made the error

Surely this depends on how bad the error is?

Suppose you have a cyclist and driver traveling opposite (180 degrees) directions on the same road toward a 4-way stop. The driver stops, looks all ways, notes the cyclist approaching the intersection soon, and enters the intersection. The cyclist then does not stop, does not signal, and turns left (from their perspective) in front of the car which was already in the intersection.

Most of the time, you'd probably need one more failure for that to result in a collision (manufacturer's defect in the accelerator, cyclist slips and falls, ...), but suppose the car did hit the cyclist and none of those other failures were the driver's fault either. In your model, how much legal blame should the driver have?

[short_sells_poo]

This also requires said vulnerable participants to stop having a deathwish. I'm scared to hell from cyclists in London, because they are inconsiderate and extremely unpredictable. Try rolling up to a major 4 lane intersection, and you are going to have cyclists materializing out of thin air on both sides.

Furthermore, visibility on UK roads is very poor. You often have very tall hedges lining streets, which means you can't see more than a few meters until the very last moment.

You'd need to basically rip up the entire city and rebuild it from scratch, and then replace all the inhabitants with rational actors. It's simply not going to happen otherwise.

[arghwhat]

Yes, but until the ICE is gone, emissions and car flow is linked.

An ultra-low emission-zone limits car flow by only allowing a smaller subset of cars to pass. A restriction on car flow reduces emission by allowing fewer emitters.

A low-emission zone can be a way to gradually reduce car traffic, and at the end it may be low enough that you can limit car traffic to residents only, or even no one at all.

[p0w3n3d]

Sorry but it's simply to put the rich in power to drive their new EV SUVs while limiting people with less money from driving their own car. People who have 4 kids: "sorry your Citroen is not enough. Buy yourself an ID Buzz we don't care."

[INTPenis]

Being from Sweden that is how I measured safety for a large part of my adult life. How safe I felt in a new area directly depended on how far I could walk with my dog without crossing car traffic.

In Malmö for example I could walk for 2 hours and only cross 2 roads. Because the bicycle network is so developed they have underpasses for bikes that us pedestrians can use.

Then I lived in the balkans and saw the stark contrast.

But there's no point in shoving this down American's throats because their whole country is far too vast for European design. They need to fill it up with people for a few hundred years like Europe before they will be forced to implement good street design.

[ninalanyon]

> their whole country is far too vast for European design.

That's not really true though. There is no particular reason to think of the vast almost empty spaces when thinking about urban and suburban spaces. There are plenty of walkable towns in the US, the problem is that there are vastly more towns that are not. I spent quite a lot of time in Raleigh NC and the surroundings in the 1990s and early 2000s and walked and cycled everywhere. There were a lot more roads to cross than in Malmö of course but it was still quite reasonable.

One need not be forced to implement good urban design, one merely needs to want it.

And I would also say that most towns in Sweden are not really very typical of European towns, even Norway next (where I live) is different. Sweden has a lot more space available than most European countries and in fact has an average population density (25/km2) lower than that of the US (33/km2).

[ginko]

>Because the bicycle network is so developed they have underpasses for bikes that us pedestrians can use.

Underpasses are usually a detour for pedestrians. IMO they're hostile car-centric design.

[elric]

It is worth noting that London has ~80% of the population of the Netherlands but is some 5 times smaller. That's very much apples to oranges.

Stricter low-emission zones result in fewer cars in the short term (because some subset of the existing cars no longer enter). In the longer term they might result in fewer cars because the initial car reduction brings other benefits (such as safer cycling/playing/whatevering and reduced congestion which benefits public transport).

[pif]

> It is about how many people can travel safe

This is not false, but it isn't either completely true!

Those pesky car commuters keep driving because they have yet to be offered a solution that decreases the only metric every commuter is interested in: clock time from door to door.

[underdeserver]

Clock time is not one metric. The metric I care about more, as a users of a car, bike, rental scooter, bus, and subway, is the variance in door-to-door time.

If it takes less 80% of the time but 20% of the time I'm 20 minutes late, I won't use public transport. (I'm not talking about rare occurrences, I'm talking about once a week on a random day being late.)

I also live in a very hot city with 5 months of summer a year, so walking distances and A/C are also a critical factor.

[Cclayt1123]

Given the challenges of enforcing strict regulations on emissions, could a market-based approach like a carbon tax be a more effective deterrent for high-emission vehicles and corporate practices?

[systems_glitch]

It's certainly a limiting factor in our small "city" of around 6500, vs. air pollution.

[space_oddity]

Yet the importance of thoughtful urban planning is often underestimated

[Vinnl]

Obligatory link to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A?cbr...

Channel detailing Dutch (and other places') infrastructure design.

[mdrzn]

This comment is a great example on how to "lie" with statistics. Saying they are in the "top 10 of highest co2 emissions in Europe" (they are 9th) is such bad faith without explaining that they are also the 9th most populated country in Europe.

[eporomaa]

>If anything, the dutch have a cycling problem.

I disagree, I don't see how less cycling or more cars would be better?

> ...ALSO have the highest road density in Europe for cars

It is the densest non-micro state in the world, would that not explain the road density?

You cannot protect a cyclist in a car collision using a helmet, the solution is separate infra?

Other than that you have positive outcomes of increased general health.

[Vinnl]

Your source for helmets making up lots of deaths is talking about a recent increase in deaths, even though the lack of helmets has been a thing for decades.

It's not the lack of helmets by itself that's a problem; it's the combination with high-speed electric bicycles, and their primarily being used by the elderly, that is causing deaths.

Yes, old people falling and sustaining heavy injuries that they wouldn't have had with a helmet is a problem, but not one that (I think) can be solved by street design.

If you see that in 2018, the Netherlands had 4.7 deaths per billion vehicle kms, vs. the US's 6.9, and then consider that it's a very densely populated country where lots of traffic intersects, then I would count that as a big success.