Traffic Calming is Everywhere in the Netherlands

What Hacker News said

Recommends superice · 2020-09 · on “Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?”

I understand your situation, but please also understand that per cycled kilometer, the Netherlands is a lot safer than any other country. There exists no country with as big of a modal share with bicycles, and our accident rates involving bicycles are still super low. I'd love to get my hands on statistics on accidents per million kilometers or so, but it doesn't seem to be tracked anywhere for bicycles. Point being is mostly that although a helmet helps if you get hit by a car, that itself is already a very rare occurrence in the Netherlands due to the way our infrastructure and roads are laid out. In addition to that, the average speed for our cyclists is lower, because 'sporty' cycling an

Recommends palijer · 2022-02 · on “Pedestrian deaths spike in U.S. as reckless driving surges”

And that still doesn't seem to stop reckless driving from killing pedestrians. The only thing that will slow drivers down is when they feel unsafe themselves, or have a risk to their vehicle. Adding signs or automatic fines doesn't do anything. You need narrower streets utilizing actual traffic calling techniques. It's such a sad sight to see signs with a "traffic calming zone" sign, but absolutely zero traffic calming done. It'll be a wide open street, we'll paved, no trees right against the road or bollards in the middle or speed bumps. Watching this video feels like an alternative reality that never happened and it seems great. [this video]

Recommends oblio · 2023-03 · on “US Pedestrian Death Rate Increased 9x Faster Than Population 2019 to 2022”

If I'm reading it right, the advice in your comment is basically "Bad Infrastructure Planning 101" in 2023. The right way to do it is what the Dutch do: [this video] It's called "traffic calming". Oh, and underground pedestrian walkways, skybridges, etc are absolutely horrible long term solutions. If you'd use one of them for extended periods of time, you'd know. They're generally under maintained over the decades, they tend to get dirty and attract homeless people as shelter (I don't want to get into the debate of why homeless people need to use them as shelter), they're for various reason a top target for muggings, they inconvenience the people you should be encouraging (pedestrians) by greatly

Recommends broguinn · 2025-05 · on “New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer”

The above comment is getting downvoted, and I suspect it's due to a misunderstanding of their intent. Yes, high speeds can make collisions (especially, as another commenter points out, to pedestrians and cyclists) more dangerous. However, just as human drivers subconsciously speed up when part of a group of cars, they are not often conscious of the environmental queues informing the speed at which they drive. Given the poster's allusion to 'stroads', I suspect that they're in favor of traffic engineering patterns that encourage speed reduction based on safe context queues without solely relying on an unenforced and often unobeyed traffic speed. Consider this video on Dutch traffic calming: [