u/AndryCake — reddlx

I was playing around with (re)designing bike infrastructure around Budapest, and I am curious about your thoughts on this arrangement on this street (Villányi út). Currently, the bike lane is on the right side, between the car lane and parked cars, which leaves it a bit "exposed" and vulnerable to being hit by doors opening. I was thinking that placing the bike lane on the left side, near the tram track, could be better, as it would avoid the aforementioned "dooring" issue and would only have cars on one side of it.

Turning right or accessing buildings on the right shouldn't be a huge issue since there isn't that much traffic on this road, and, with some additional traffic calming, switching into the car lane to turn right should be fine.

The advantage compared to moving the bike lane between the parked cars and the sidewalk, is that this allows the bike lane to be wider, since in that case there would need to be a buffer between the parking and the bike lane to prevent bikes from being hit by opening door.

My only concern is that in the opposite direction (3rd picture), there is not that much space between the tram track and the bike lane, but that would probably be fine if adding a fence, or this treatment could only be applied on one side of the road.

P.S.: please don't judge my "mock-up" too hard, I made it in 10 minutes on my iPad by annotating the picture :D

So I've thought about this for a bit and I think that this is a hill I'm at least willing to get injured on. Also I will be refering to the District Line as well, but these, along with the other subsurface lines (Hammersmith & City and Circle lines) are tightly interconnected and historically built by two companies (the Metropolitan Railway and the Metropolitan District Railway) for combined operations.

The Metropolitan line is usually called the first metro in the world, but, if we look at how the line operates, and especially how it operated then, I disagree.

Edit: Is this discussion pointless? Yes. Will I still be defending my point? Also yes.

Edit 2: Also, I'm sure u/StuffWePlay will have an opinion about this.

The line "famously" ran from Paddington to Farringdon, with the purpose to carry trains from other railways into central London. They didn't even own their own rolling stock initially. This is the literally concept of center-city rail tunnels, at the core of S-Bahn/RER/whatever you want to call them systems around the world.

Of course, the line then expanded, forming a circle together with the District Railway and these lines built their own lines into the suburbs. Still, these mostly run above the ground, in their own right-of-ways, and some even still share tracks with mainline services, unlike some S-Bahns that we actually call S-Bahns. I don't think the Metropolitan line to Amersham and the Chiltren Railways continuation to Aylesbury is very much unlike some German S-Bahn systems, where the S-Bahn stops, but there are RE services that continue onwards, make limited stops on the shared section and don't go through the city centre tunnel. Would it be totally unfair to call the District line to Upminster dedicated suburban rail tracks along a mainline?

Yes, these lines are more frequent than most S-Bahn systems, but not by that much, and AFAIK this didn't come until later. Some sections are also more infrequent than you might think, such as the Metropolitan Line spur to Chesham, which runs every 30 minutes.

~~So, Glaswegians, your one subway line has been designated by me as the real first metro system in the world.~~

Edit 3: the City & South London railway, now part of the Northern line, opened in 1890, 6 years before Glasgow's and Budapest's systems. I had misread their opening dates as 1886 instead of 1896.