I'm not sure how common this type of intersection is. I live and bike daily in Amsterdam and it took me about a minute to fully understand what's going on here. The picture seems to show a special case where the intersecting road is bike only, and instead of the normal painted arrows that show where bikes should queue up when making a left, there's an open area off to the left where one would wait behind the "shark teeth".
FYI if you are ever biking here in NL, the thing to remember is that if the "haaientanden" point at you, watch out!, as that means you do not have the right of way.
Edit: The side roads are for cars as well, which means you have a strange turning lane in the middle of the intersection where traffic might back up. A simple roundabout seems like a much better solution here unless the goal is to keep cars moving quickly and the turn lane is rarely used.
Can someone explain this, the italicized part below, in more detail?
>> When you approach from the side street, as a driver, the order of dealing with other traffic is different, but the priority is similar. First you will notice a speed bump. The complete intersection is on a raised table. Pedestrians would not have priority if the street was level, but now that it isn’t the “exit construction” rule could apply and in that case a crossing pedestrian would have priority. But for that rule to apply the footway should be continuous, and that is not the case here.
This is a part of the national design language of the roads in The Netherlands.
Almost universally the following two rules hold: pedestrians walk on a raised pavement next to the road, and through roads have priority.
To compliment those existing rules, exits from side streets where pedestrians on the through road have priority include a raised hump that brings motorists up to pavement level. That emphasizes that it is the motorist who is crossing into a pedestrian area, where pedestrians have priority. The pedestrian footpath is continuous, while the car road is interrupted.
And an obvious added benefit is that motorists will slow down for the speed bump.
The author phrases this a bit awkwardly without really making a point. But what I think they are saying is that because the footpath isn't continuous despite the raised bump this is not a typical exit construction, and pedestrians on the through road don't have priority. Even though most motorists would yield to them anyway because of the shark's teeth on the cycle path.
I think it's debatable if the pavement is continuous or not, I would say "kinda". But either way the intersection in the article is not a "typical" example of the exit construction.
The linked photo actually shows a really bad example. For the 'exit construction' to be valid, the footway must continue uninterrupted with the same surface. In this example, different pavers where used, making the situation ambiguous.
The first two examples are how it should be done. The third is similar to your link, and is ambiguous.
I've had a cyclist curse me to hell and back for taking priority on one of those raised tables as a pedestrian because the paving didn't match the sidewalk. :)
Is there priority for the pedestrian if they are already crossing the side street when a car driving down the side street approaches the intersection, or can the pedestrian be run over by the car without consequence to the driver?
An entrance or exit construction is a place on a road where you aren't just turning onto the road but exiting the road entirely. The most common example from any country would be a private driveway. Pedestrians, cyclists and cars going along the sidewalk, bike path or road have priority against anyone turning into the driveway or turning onto the road from the driveway.
The Netherlands generalizes this concept to some low-priority side streets. If there is a continuous sidewalk (i.e., the cars go up a bump to the level of the sidewalk as opposed to the pedestrians stepping down from the sidewalk to the level of the street). This is not the case in this specific intersection.
And yet the photo in the article shows piano teeth markings before the shark teeth, which indicates a level change for the car. In that case I would assume that cars are required to yield to pedestrians crossing the side street even though the sidewalk surface is not continuous.
That's some word salad but let me make things clear,
All intersections have signs indicating priority.
All intersections have road markings indicating right of way.
All intersections have a level change indicating priority.
Either you bump up to pedestrians, which also reduces your speed. Or pedestrians step down to asphalt.
All intersections have/dont have color change to indicate right of way.
All intersections have/dont have pavement type indicating right of way (usually bricks for street or pedestrians, black asphalt for roads, red asphalt for cyclists.)
Although you could probaly find some rulebreakers in there, its universally accepted as such.
I haven't read the entire article, but this is a very common situation: main road with two cycle paths crosses a minor road (or has two side roads at the same place). All roads are also for cars. I'm not sure why the article makes such a difference between the two side roads: they seem quite similar apart from the one-car waiting space before the cycle path.
These types of interactions are pretty much everywhere outside of historical city centers and the like where you don't have space for it. You might not find them in the old town of Ams, but as soon as you head out a bit, you see them everywhere. Same in Delft and pretty much anywhere else with historic architecture.
Yeah there is not really space for these eleborate intersections in central Amsterdam. Most are signal controlled or pure spaghetti with trams coming from four directions with almost absolute priority, like this one https://www.google.com/maps/place/52%C2%B021'49.1%22N+4%C2%B...
In general, separate bike lines are nothing special in the Netherlands, even in Amsterdam. However, it's an old, compact city with narrow streets, so you're unlikely to see these types of intersections in those streets. Same is true for other old city centers with compact layouts.
You're more likely to see this if you go to places with more space, such as suburbs built in the last century (which basically means going to another town or city that Amsterdam grew into, because in the Netherlands city distribution is also compact). As you can see from the picture this street is in such a neighborhood.
Also, the general concept of having a distance of one car between crossing and bike lane is universal whenever there is space. I can give you a personal anecdote (at the cost of doxxing myself). I grew up in Oldeberkoop, a tiny village with around 1500 people in it that somehow has its own wikipedia page[0].
Just outside of the village is a crossing with an N-road, which is Dutch for "provincial national road but not quite highway". In the early nineties it was still a simple crossing, no separate bike lanes, and I recall traffic accidents happening once or twice every year. For context, nowadays the speed limit on provincial roads is 100 km/h[2], although in the early nineties it was still 80 km/h. That didn't matter though: everyone was speeding as if they were on a highway and going 120 to 140 km/h.
In mid nineties the crossing was changed to a roundabout, solving the speeding problem, and separate bike lanes were added (this also reduced traffic noise a lot). In the early 2000s the roundabout was changed to the safer design described in the article: more space between corner and bike lane, and a bigger island in the middle of the road for pedestrians[3]. I haven't heard of any incidents in the years since.
Recall: this is a village of 1500 people. When the article says:
> I would like to emphasise that this intersection is not special in any way. You can find many similar examples all over the country. That is because the design features stem from the design manuals which are used throughout the country.
... it is not exaggerating. This is the norm with any new intersection that is being built, or any existing one that is due for its two-decade maintenance.
The intuition here that helped me understand this is that, if you know the search strategy of another player in advance, your best best is to "front run" where they will look as much as possible. So in the ideal case, look in the very next box they are going to look in each round. This guarantees that unless they guess right on the first round, you will get to the gift first.
The rows and columns thing is just a less perfect, but still useful, way for Andrew to front run Barbara's choices more often than the reverse happens.
It’s good intuition and explanation. I hadn’t heard of the problem before and looked at your comment before the article and the problem seemed trivial.
Andrew will open boxes in second and third row before the other player, so in the case of the illustration he will open 2/3rds of the boxes first. If the columns are longer than the rows, Andrew would start to lose.
In this definition an "observer" is anything whose path depends on some perceived outcome (as in state of the universe), correct? So that could be human or a rock tumbling down a hill.
I think there's a case to be made that, if the simulation hypothesis is correct, we are god's dice[1]. We exist as agents to introduce randomness in the form of free will or enough chaos to ensure non-determinism, at least from the perspective of whatever force built this place.
The use of "some" here in the headline seems dishonest and diminishing of what was done. Like, "some people were effected by the car crash".
Technically true, but effectively more narrative than journalism, especially since among that censored "some" was a lot of true information and experiences.
There is an advantage of using pie charts when you have lots of categories, especially when some are tiny slivers. It's that you can see which items are negligible in terms of their relative contributions. A world GDP pie chart gives a good representation of how international GDP is distributed, and which countries represent only a sliver of the total.
A bar chart is better at showing each individual value independently (and perhaps in relation to its neighbors) but is worse at showing each value as a proportion of an overall aggregation.
It's worth being very careful about these constructions.
"no evidence of a difference" is fine so long as it's proceeded with "This study found", which when studies are translated to press reports often gets dropped, especially in headlines.
On this particular issue, even the original studies often screw things up unfortunately. Frequentist statistics works very differently from people's natural intuition, and the attraction of a binary decision tool (NHST) has led to a lot of lazy thinking and sloppy science.
> Meaning that if you go from 4 priorities to 3, you can get, say, 10 percent more done; but if you go from 4 to 1, you get 400 percent more done.
But unless you can afford a butler or work at a company that gives you a very high level of institutional support, mono-focus seems impossible in our current world. I'd love to completely deprioritize the following roles, but they don't seem to want to detach themselves from me: tech support geek for wifi and computer issues, bookkeeper and tax preparer working hand-in-hand with my accountant, occasionally car expert for buying and maintaining vehicles, real estate expert for evaluating house purchases based on market conditions and my families needs, health care plan decider, and on and on and on. Each one of these areas if filled with multi-armed bandit problems (How much research should you put into evaluating a new home purchase where you live, or looking for a better city to live in?). It's a lot.
For a 'mono-focus' lifestyle or even a very pared down focus, you don't need to eschew everything else, in my opinion, where all you know is breathing and fine dining. You can still do those things and the author says as much as well.
You can, in my opinion, pick the reasonably best option because the payoff of squeezing another 2 - 5% out of the decision isn't worth the multiple weeks or worse you will spend. Could you get the absolutely best house for the best price? Yeah. Is it worth the trade-off of your other focus? Probably not.
There's no need for you to be a master mechanic, you just need to be good enough. So rather than trying to be "pretty good" at 10 things, you should strive to be world class / "extraordinarily good" at 1 or maybe 2 things and leave the rest between "not a clue" and "passable".
The author's call isn't to cloister yourself away but to choose not to pursue things at length that aren't what you want to focus on. You can learn to fix a specific problem, you just shouldn't spend your time going down the rabbit hole learning how to fix every problem of every car unless that is your chosen focus.
I have felt very much like this in the past, but no so much any more. .. my thinking is:
Some things are just part of the responsibility of being a grown up. Home maintenance, driver for children, doing taxes, etc. These are your baseline priorities that you don't get to choose.
Some of these sound like they occupy a rotating priority slot. House and car purchases do take a big commitment and require prioritization (especially if you build) but they are temporarily a priority. It is usually your choice to make these a priority, and they are rare.
Keeping a smaller priority list means saying 'no' to more things too, like being 'tech support geek for wifi and computer issues' or vehicle maintenance. These priorities are fully under your control.
Not to mention that some of these things get easier once you have the skills for them. E.g. I've been buying my own health insurance on the open market since I was 22 - now in my early 40s, it takes me maybe an hour or two to fully compare a handful of policies and choose the best one for me and my family (even doing calculations, etc). This is vs having to immerse myself in it for a whole evening (4-5 hrs) and then agonize about it for the next week or so like I used to do back in the day (and only for myself)
There's also the risk management aspect if the projects are likely to fail. Aka "don't put all your eggs in one basket". Or, at least, consider the risks carefully.
This is most certainly true when it comes to investments. Yes, you could put 100% of your savings in an index fund and forget about it, but that seems extreme, and also you have to live somewhere, so instead of paying rent and living in a non-ideal place you can't customize, you might as well buy a home that's a better fit for your family and has upside potential (and yes, no matter what people say, buying a house is most certainly an investment, a large one and potentially a bad one, but an investment nonetheless).
So now you have at least two big investment baskets that you really should watch carefully, on top of your job, and all those other life things that, as mentioned by another commenter, do get easier once you've done them a few times (like picking a health plan or knowing the basics about car maintenance), but each one has a learning curve and change with technology or policy. And it's a very long list.
Agreed that emails aren't a good permanent identifier. Though using phone numbers as any part of identification is even worse. I've had the same email for almost two decades (through my own domain name), but I've gone through nearly a dozen phone numbers in the same time period, and regularly find that a website has opted me in to 2fa with an old number, or I've forgotten they had an old phone number to begin with.
I am currently paying a ~$150 per month "tax" to AT&T to keep my US number while living abroad just so I can get login codes for websites that still have that number, and out of fear that if I dump it I'll lose access to some occasionally vital service that I've forgotten to update, or I can't because you need to have a US number.
> I am currently paying a ~$150 per month "tax" to AT&T to keep my US number while living abroad just so I can get login codes for websites that still have that number
Port it to a VoIP company like DIDww, spend $2.50/month, and received SMS can end up in your inbox if you wish.
If you ever want the number on a mobile account again, port it back out to your choice of carrier.
You don't need to pay that much to keep a US number for use abroad. Convert any 2fa you can to use an app like Google Authenticator, then convert your number to Google voice. You can get text messages for free using your old number that way. If you don't want Google involved at all, there are many other time-based authentication apps and you can use www.tossabledigits.com for texts.
The problem with your idea is there are lots of services that blacklist VoIP #'s like Google Voice from being used for 2FA. They also don't have modern 2FA options like TOTP.
Agree with poweroffuet, to try to convert to VoIP. I was lucky on one house move, where my personal office phone number was not acceptable to new area, but I was able to transfer to a VoIP account. At the time internet was slow so after awhile, I quit using the Ethernet phone adapter, and just used that number for receiving calls. Voice and fax calls are all sent to me by emails. It's been over 20 years now.
Works great. (Since I don't have a device to connect, my yearly fee is fairly low.)
I assume that at some point I could always hook up telephone, and take advantage of the modern internet. Although, I really like this system, and it isn't connected to any particular location.
Which is why you buy a domain for $10/yr and use the "custom domains" feature of your email
host.
Like it sucks that getting a permanent identifier is an annoying technical process but DNS is the closest thing to a universal global identifier you can own in a meaningful sense.
FYI if you are ever biking here in NL, the thing to remember is that if the "haaientanden" point at you, watch out!, as that means you do not have the right of way.
Edit: The side roads are for cars as well, which means you have a strange turning lane in the middle of the intersection where traffic might back up. A simple roundabout seems like a much better solution here unless the goal is to keep cars moving quickly and the turn lane is rarely used.