Part of an event called Sternfahrt where cyclists protest for policy changes by taking over the city on 20 routes covering 2000 km of public roads.
some infos in german: https://berlin.adfc.de/pressemitteilung/adfc-sternfahrt-medienkit
translation to english: https://berlin-adfc-de.translate.goog/pressemitteilung/adfc-sternfahrt-medienkit?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
Some very normal person is gonna comment on this somewhere openly fantasizing about running all of them over for “taking up the roadway” and a bunch of other very normal people are gonna concur without any pushback.
Autobahn? More like Auto Ban!
highest throughput that highway has ever seen
Looks to be an average of 2 ppl per lane with 3m ahead & behind. An average biking speed for commuters is 18-29kph, so let’s do the calculus for 20, 25, & 30. This gives a throughput of 2x3x(20 or 25 or 30)/(3.6x6) ≈ (5.5 or 7 or 8.3) ppl/second
Car occupancy is ~1.5ppl/car in the EU. Given that this is a german highway Average distance between cars ~3 lengths meaning 4x4.5m=18m/car. For a long time these roads had “no speed limit”, but the recommendation was ~130kph. Let’s conservatively use 120 & 100kph. This gives 1.5x3x(100 or 120)/(3.6x18) ≈ (7 or 8.3) ppl/second.
Various things fudge the numbers in either direction, but that’s actually shockingly close between the two.
You don’t enter or exit at 120kph so throughput is cut by the bottle neck of exiting/entering (also the reason why there’s traffic no matter the number of lanes, bottleneck is the throughput of entry exit creates the traffic stall
I gotta take issue with those numbers. A car moving at 130kph covers 18 meters in about half a second. According to the numbers I found online, experts estimate the perception-reaction time for braking at 1.5 seconds, which is up from the value of 0.75 seconds that they used to use. Thirteen and a half meters is an unrealistically-close following distance, even for German super-humans.
I have not driven on the Autobahn, but the videos I can find show scenes much more consistent with a ~55 meter (1.5 seconds) gap between cars, or much-slower traffic speeds. That drops the estimated human-throughput way, way down.
You assume people are driving safely - in my experience, during rush-hour at 90-100kph (Stockholm) someone will file in ahead of you if you leave more than 2 car lengths of space.
Is it safe? No.
Is it reality? Yes.
Furthermore, this is an estimate of a feasible max throughput that may have occurred.
Here is some data to get more accurate numbers:
- max speed on that highway for cars is 80km/h
- the bicycles had an average speed of ~18km/h
The speed limit used to be higher though, originally it was nonexistent. Point was to estimate what the highest throughput of people in cars that highway has ever seen.
Ok, but still healthier for all.
And you can savely take half of car throughput on average. Or far less in congestion.
Can we please get a comparison pic of 32,000 cars on the autobahn?
Wouldn’t it be better to compare 32,000 people in vehicles? Doing really rough math, someone else who doesn’t suck at math should run through it lol. But hand jamming some numbers gives me a bit over 20 miles (32.5 Km) of flowing, 3 lane, 4 person cars to get to 32,000 people. It’s like 9 miles (14.5 Km) with bumper to bumper LA stopped traffic. 50 person buses, bumper to bumper is 1.8 miles (2.9 Km).
Wouldn’t it be better to compare 32,000 people in vehicles? Doing really rough math, someone else who doesn’t suck at math should run through it lol.
32000 people in cars ≈ 32000 cars
(Source)
spoiler
Okay, okay, so it’s not literally 1 person per car and is actually more like 1.2 in Germany (see fig. 3) – but it rounds down!
Yeah, probably. But way too many cars are single occupant at any given time.
And one rollerblader
