It seems to me that in such cases the US tends to choose to expand into a stroad instead. Belgium also has quite a few stroad-like roads, but at least those tend to have usable sidewalks and fairly often even bicycle paths.

There's a picture of one here, and the main road is a single lane in both directions. Which is as far from Queens Boulevard as you can get.

The 2 lanes to be crossed makes crossing safer. Further, the side roads are differentiated to make it clear that they are primarily for biking/walking (they are a different color, and are tiled).

Also:

> Service roads are purposely constructed to be discontinuous sections of road, meaning that through traffic cannot use it to get from one main street to another. Since the only traffic on it will be cars accessing the houses or shops along the service road, traffic is substantially lower that on the main roads, and speeds are kept down due to the short segments of roadway

Queens boulevard is a highway masquerading as a road.

The first time I went to the Netherlands I walked from Schiphol airport to the center of Amsterdam and it was an easy but amazing experience. Walking from JFK to Manhattan is a completely possible walk in terms of distance (I usually do better than a 20 minute pace on the flats so it takes only half a day) but when I think of the battle with the infrastructure you'd have to do it's like an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

Edit: Although generally once you get out of the very centre there are arterial "stroads" which have 30mph limits, but side-streets are usually still 20mph.

I propose a different protocol: Slow down, and follow the cyclist until the situation allows to safely overtake the cyclist at a nice distance without speeding up too much. You will still travel faster than the cyclist, and you have actively contributed to the safety of the cyclist.

The other wrinkle to this is that, outside of cities, cycling in America is a luxury sport. The people who partake in it are most in the position to force changes to infrastructure that supports safer cycling. NJB and other similar commentators make it clear that infrastructure improvement, not changes to driver behavior, is the most efficacious way to imrpove cyclist safety.

To be fair, this behaviour isn't one-sided. Often bicycles, e-bikes and motorcycles squeeze through small gaps between cars moving slow'ish in packed traffic.

Now, of course car drivers should remain vigilant and continually check their mirrors, but nobody is infallible, and I'm sure there are plenty of drivers that do not take proper care.

This is conflating two different activities: when a bicyclist or motorcyclist is moving in space between cars, they're using space which is already open and it doesn't impose a risk to the driver of the vehicle or require the cars to move. That's distinct from people trying to illegally pass, which creates new demands for space and frequently endangers other road users and often obstruct oncoming traffic.

The underlying issue here is that cars are the least efficient use of space by a significant margin. That means that drivers see other people taking advantage of space which they are unable to use and feel like they're losing in some way, which often leads to attempts to prevent it. When I lived in California, even though lane-splitting was legal I used to regularly see drivers move their vehicles to the edge of a lane or a few times even open their car door(!) to block motorcyclists. This was clearly because they perceived it as unfair that someone else wasn't jammed the same way they were, but misattributed the problem to the motorcylist rather than the drawbacks of their personal vehicle choices.

But you're on a bike, so you deserve special treatment. An award for sacrificing comfort and safety in the name of efficiency! You demand deference when drivers see you, for them to slow down and fall behind as you sit up proudly on your bicycle in defiance of modern technology. You shout to the heavens, "I don't need infrastructure! I have yours already! I'll ride wherever I want!" The thought makes you chuckle at the plebs still riding in comfort and safety in their automobiles, capable of carrying a drunken friend, an elderly parent, or a new piece of furniture. What a bunch of fools. Don't they see how efficient they could be?

The speed is the issue. A collision at low speeds is much less likely to be fatal [0]. Being closely overtaken by a car when you're going at 20-25mph on a bicycle is 1) a scary experience and 2) unnecessarily dangerous for the cyclist (and not at all for the driver).

[0] https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...

* https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/05/31/3-graphs-that-explain...

Remember from physics class that kinetic energy is generated proportional to the square of velocity. Doubling speed quadruples energy.

speed increases the severity of an accident (e.g., more fatalities vs. injuries), but doesn’t generally cause the accident. distractedness and impairment are overwhelmingly the primary causes of auto accidents. it’s important for policy decisions that we keep this very clear, and why we have ineffective, revenue-oriented programs like speed enforcement rather than attention-oriented policies.

Also, it was not my intention (and I honestly don't see it in my words as hard as I look) to suggest there was any kind of "tit for tat".

Which is kind of the point of the human-scale roads movement. If you design roads that feel fast, people will drive fast.

Maybe we could add a few zeroes each few years? So in some decades they'll be driving ultra fast at 25000 meters per hour? ;)

Doylestown PA: succesfully petitioned and built TWO of these. A 611 and 202 bypass leaving historic doylestown beautiful.

The problem is, for those suburbs that never had strong town centers, there was little objection and so as you go down 611, it's a 4 lane major travel route that passes right through a bunch of other suburbs leaving them without a downtown and a place thats not comfortable to travel.

of course, Doylestown was surrounded by farmland when this was build making it much easier to do... Good luck building a bypass through other towns

Typical example: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9997356,-0.9166437,14.25z?...

More complex example: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.1101752,-0.1713974,7297m/d... . Note the M23 on one side, Crawley Avenue on the other, and Peglar Way right in the middle. All of them serve to route traffic around the town centre instead of through it.

In many cases you can see how the original through-road (sometimes dating back to Roman times) had the bypass patched on; without the bypass the "High Street" would have been a stroad.

(Fans of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy may recall Arthur Dent's cottage being demolished to make way for a bypass. This was an issue: the nature of bypasses meant that building them often required the demolition of nice little cottages on the outskirts of small towns.)

Both have in common that they suck for pedestrians.