Not Just Bikes video on Bicycling in Switzerland

4 comments

1. It’s a couple of years old. And also Switzerland infrastrucutre is really city dependant and he was only is a couple of places.

   Since, Geneva got sued out of establishing a 30km/h limit in most of the city and Fribourg implemented it properly.

2. As someone else mentioned, it’s really dependent to the city and I can only talk about Geneva, even though Not Just Bikes did not mention it. I used to bike a lot in Geneva and the infrastructure within the city border is quite poor. Even though they have created “visual” bike paths by just painting yellow lines on the asphalt, there is nothing there to protect you from drivers. It’s half measures that don’t really benefit cyclists in any way. Bikes need to have separate paths in order to be really safe.

   By the way Not Just Bikes also recently uploaded a short video giving credits to Zurich for the new underground tunnel

3. I cycle daily in Zurich and except for the very welcomed Stadttunnel, there is basically no cycling infrastructure in the city. You get a line on the road sometimes but that is it. The city is trying to improve the situation though. They are actually forced to since there was a vote a few years ago with 74% of the population approving a large network of safe bike paths.

   Nothing is getting built though because the Kanton (or the SVP, FDP there) use the argument that any benefit to the people living in the city is an attack on the people from outside who want to drive here. They even blocked the plan to reduce the speed of many streets to 30 km/h.

   To me this is insane. We are putting the life and health of tens of thousands of people on the line only because a minority of people feel like 30 km/h is too slow. This is purely a populist move and is not benefiting anyone. To add insult to injury, they restricted heavily the critical mass so protesting this situation is not an option anymore.

   The only hope I can see is that people here are motivated but the kantonal authorities don’t represent the people from the cities anymore

4. about Bern, it was about the most lazily, clickbaity video ever. He literally went to the worst spot (Ostring) and made it out as sensationally bad…. when it was basically a construction site for one of the big highway ramps, that you could also bike through (but no one did, because there’s much quieter parallel streets). Here’s my three year old rant:

   ———–

   So I think your analysis of Bern is pretty bad and could have profited from you talking to some local experts on why Bern ends up like this.

   First of all, you’ll notice that Bern is relatively small and a big part of it is under UNESCO protection and other stakeholder needs. Which means that

   a) cars need to go somewhere (no-one in Bern goes to work by car, but you’ll get some company cars and shoppers from the suburbs) so you’ll have a few – but only few – very busy streets in front of the train station and out by the highway, like you showed. But the train station one for example is due to a vote a decade or two ago (which wanted to ban cars from that road) failing. The one out east by the highway is that way cuase it’s one of I wanna say five or six major highway entries and exits, so there’s one big road and a lot of quiet streets around. Might be interesting for you to analyse a bit more.

   b) The city is also tight and the entire old town, where much of public life is happening, is car free (except for the not so often used road around it). That means that you filmed the one street around there that gets heavy traffic, but only tangentially showed the much less busy roads where cycling is prioritized.

   c) due to the smallness you’ll find some hard spots for cycling, like the one with all the buses and trams. all the trams go through the same main road, but that means that the two side roads are pretty great for cycling.

   d) given the smallness of BErn, you can do SO MUCH of your daily shopping on foot or out in the districts because there’s grocery stores everywhere. I never bike to the store becuase it’s faster to walk.

   I’d also have loved for you to go look and maybe talk about the plans for an even better cycling infrastructure. There’s two ciclying garages in Bern looking the same as in Zurich, and there will be a third one AFAIK soon. THere’s now a “bike highway” for commuters where the traffic lights are adapted to cyclists rather than cars, which is very nice.

   Finally…. you may not realize this but Basel is a city of 200’000, but that’s just the core city – the suburbs in Switzerland, Germany and France add at least 200’000 more, many of which commute to Basel. Same for Bern, actually. The city proper has 130’000 inhabitants but 190’000 workplaces! These people gotta commute, hence a lot of public transit.

   One thing to talk about could have also been whether and how direct democracy hinders cycling infrastructure. As I mentioned, Bern had a ban on cars at the train station plaza effectively vetoed by voters a few years ago. You’ll find that in a city like Amsterdam, that would not have happened. Might be something interesting to talk about.

   Oh and one thing to add about Winterthur: Many live there and commute to Zurich, so all the trains to Zurich make a lot of sense. Just something to think about.

   Edit and very last thing: NO, fines don’t scale with income for traffic violations. Fine for grave violations like speeding A LOT scale; fines for crossing a red light for example or not stopping at a pedestrian passing don’t.

   [This is an edit from 2025 me] the parking spots in the inner city – they are a nuisance but there’s already democratically accepted new rules that will ban them. unfortunately, some dickheads went to court over it, so that plan is currently blocked.

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