Munich Planning Highway System For Cyclists

An anonymous reader writes: The German city of Munich has been looking for solutions to its traffic problem. Rush hour traffic is a parking lot, and public transit is near capacity. They think their best bet is to encourage (and enable) more people to hop on their bikes. Munich is now planning a Radschnellverbindungen — a highway system just for cyclists. Long bike routes will connect the city with universities, employment centers, and other cities. The paths themselves would be as free from disruption as possible — avoiding intersections and traffic lights are key to a swift commute. They'll doubtless take lessons from Copenhagen's bike skyway: "Cykelslangen (pronounced soo-cool-klag-en) adds just 721 feet of length to the city's 220 miles of bicycle paths, but it relieves congestion by taking riders over instead of through a waterfront shopping area."

Comments

Re:Sounds great!

[WalksOnDirt]

As a highly-taxed driver (gas and registration), I'm getting rather tired of cyclists requesting more and more road upgrades despite them not paying even a small share of the costs for those upgrades.

I know! And what about all those leeching pedestrians? Sidewalks don't just appear! Plus pedestrians slow me down when I'm in a hurry! We should require registration to walk in the city! :-)

Re:It's coming. Watch for it..

[Penguinisto]

Pfft! We get that in Portland now...

A huge percentage are frickin' snowflakes demand to be given the same rights and berth as automobiles, then blatantly violate every traffic rule there is. Worst part is when they blow off such things as, oh I dunno, signaling, then get mad when you have to slam on the brakes to avoid turning them into road pizza - then they look at you like *you* did something wrong. Then there's the complete disregard for traffic lights (oh, the light's red? Well I'm a pedestrian now, so screw you and give way as I suddenly pull out of my lane and ride across the crosswalk without warning!)

Mind you, a good share of bicyclists here are perfectly fine with obeying traffic rules, are are easy to share the road with. It's the massive percentage which behave like jackasses and (for instance) demand to use the middle lane (at 10mph) in spite of the really fat bike paths on either side of the road... the urge to turn them into road pizza gets strong, but that only makes them martyrs, and good luck getting a fair trial in this town should you hit one.

Cykelslangen (pronounced soo-cool-klag-en)

[duckintheface]

No it's not. Try it on Google Translate https://translate.google.co/ by selecting Danish and clicking on the speaker symbol. Danish pronunciation is sometimes a bit odd but not as crazy as your example.