this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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My experience driving through Europe from Sweden has always been that the closer you get to the Netherlands the better the roads get. Middle Sweden is usually single lane highways with overtaking every xx km, southern Sweden has multi-lane highways, when you hit Denmark you get even wider highways and some truly spectacular bridges, then you hit Germany and your number of lanes increases again as does the speed limit, and then when you get to the Neterlands the roads are just as wide as the German ones but they look like they were built less than a week ago. It would be truly great to drive if the speed limits weren't such a massive step back from just coming out of Germany, or consistent to begin with. I never really knew what speed you were supposed to go because it feels like the Dutch arbitrarily change the speed limit every 10km. But yeah, road quality is absolutely insane.
I used to live in Belgium while biking to school in the Netherlands. Aside from the road conditions themselves, it was always very noticeable in terms of safety how much better the Dutch roads were. The second I'd cross the border, I'd go from badly maintained pavement with a roughly drawn on bike path to a dedicated biking road that runs alongside the main road with a ditch and trees in between.
I now live in Canada and while the road conditions here are definitely not as good, the thing I miss even more from Dutch roads is the traffic lights; they're all connected! You almost never run into a red light twice on the same road in the Netherlands. In Canada (and probably most other places) it seems almost guaranteed that if you hit one red light you're gonna hit them all..
And don't get me started on pedestrian traffic lights... :p
Funny that. I moved to Canada too. While I live remote enough to not see many traffic lights on the regular, I do agree with you that they're horribly timed in most cities. And while we're on stuff that makes no damn sense over here: right on red is the stupidest thing anyone ever came up with in terms of traffic laws. It alone is responsible for (iirc) 30% of fatal accidents in North America. Whoever thought it'd be a good idea to have pedestrians cross at the same time as allowing cars to take a corner into them is an absolute madman. It's almost as if they want to encourage pedestrian/cyclist crashes with motorvehicles. I mean, left on red (BC and some other places) for as stupid as it sounds even makes (a very little bit) more sense than right on red. At least you're encouraging crashes between motorvehicles with that one instead of promoting running over squishy human bodies with a metal death box.
Even without right on red it’s kinda insane. You can have a green light to turn right while pedestrians have a green light to cross that very same street.
I kinda like the way they compromised in Quebec, where pedestrians just get a green light for the entire intersection and all cars have to wait.
Good point. It's almost as if turning a corner is a foreign concept in most of North America ;-). Jokes aside, it's frankly baffeling that only Quebec had some sense to look at this and go "Hold up, this makes no sense".