How the Dutch got their cycling infrastructure (2011)
bicycledutch.wordpress.com
bicycledutch.wordpress.com
"Road building traditions go back a long way and they are influenced by many factors. But the way Dutch streets and roads are built today is largely the result of deliberate political decisions in the 1970s to turn away from the car centric policies of the prosperous post war era. Changed ideas about mobility, safer and more livable cities and about the environment led to a new type of streets in the Netherlands."
Here in the US, most people I talk to seem to think the car-based, suburban, strip malls, business parks, and commercial city center approach is the only way to do things.
You can see this approach disastrously over-applied here in Hawaii, especially on O'ahu and around Honolulu.
It's refreshing to see this well thought out reminder that humans are clever creatures and really can optimize systems for other outcomes.
http://www.spur.org/events/2011-01-13/going-dutch-creating-b...
But yes, when I tell people outside of SF that I haven't owned a car in years they often look at me as if I had two heads. As the great Vizzini would say, it's just inconceivable.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fietsflat
edit: grammar
And this is a pretty common European feature really, virtually all our cities are built in the age of transport by foot or horse and are structured much differently, coupled with higher rates of population density in the Europe (vs say the US, or worse, Australia).
That wouldn't work as much in say Australian cities, some of which are known for their terrible urban sprawl. The notion of building transportation lanes that average 10 miles per hour when typical citizens work, shop or go to school say 10 miles or more away from home, doesn't make as much sense. Australia after all has seen the majority of its cities founded in the past 150 years and saw 2/3rd of its population growth in the past 50 years or so in the era of ubiquitous cars.
Now of course existing Dutch cities today are expanded with minimizing any urban sprawl in mind, and cycling is both an instrument to solve issues as well as drive city design to prevent issues. And new cities are entirely built with this in mind. But in terms of reinventing existing cities, it was much easier to do in the Netherlands than it'd be in say the US.
So while I'm Dutch and yes, 40 years ago we were heavily motorised, and had lots of traffic deaths, and had poor cycling infrastructure, and were able to reinvent ourselves, and while yes this can apply to all cities worldwide to a large extent, it's also fair to point out that some cities would really need radical changes to decrease travel distance and create more density. e.g. by creating many small city centres where residents can do everything (most of their shopping, work, entertainment and education within miles of their home). Such radical changes require very significant leadership and an effort that dwarfs what the Dutch had to do to get where they are today.
That having been said I've also visited lots of American cities where cycling infrastructure would seem like a perfect fit. You mentioned Honolulu, I totally agree, it's a no-brainer to build cycling infrastructure there, requiring nothing more than what the Dutch did.
Lastly another difference isn't technical, economical or social or relating to geography or anything like that, but purely political. The Netherlands has always had an automotive industry but it's always been relatively small. Virtually all cars are imported. Of the top 10 brands, 3 are German, 3 are French, 1 American/Swedish/Korean/Japanese. It's pretty well known that the car industry helped dismantle public transportation in the US, such forces haven't been as big a factor in the Netherlands (despite the fact Dutch Royal Shell's oil industry was the largest company by revenue of any company worldwide in 2013, 2nd in 2014 and 3rd in 2015, revenues equivalent to about 85% of the country's GDP (!), but it's pretty much entirely focused outside of the Dutch market anyway).
Although I do recall very recently Shell funding helmets for kids which I thought was pretty funny. In 2010 only 2 kids died in traffic in the Netherlands, and it's pretty well known that cycling is reduced when cyclists are forced to wear helmets here and that cycling's popularity has done a lot for safety. You could take that as a clever anti-cycling measure wrapped in 'safe the kids' rhetoric from Shell, but perhaps that's paranoid.
Fun fact, Dutch support for Israel in the 70s may have helped the cycling culture get a tiny boost. OPEC boycotted oil sales to the Netherlands for its arms sales to Israel who was embroiled in the 73 war with various OPEC members. Dutch PM responded with car-free sundays due to oil scarcity. Of course soon after OPEC expanded the list of countries beyond the Netherlands, we started getting oil from South America and Africa instead and it didn't last very long either (ironically there was even a bit of an oil glut in Dutch harbours because one of the biggest refineries in the world was in Rotterdam so whenever it supplied e.g. France or Germany it could circumvent the boycott), and driving less on sunday led to driving more on saturday, so it wasn't extremely significant but I thought it probably helped a tiny bit :)
Essentially, many places are spending massive amounts of money and looking to do big changes already. It's just these projects almost universally are focused on being an continuation of the existing car-based infrastructure – just with more lanes to fit more cars.
Urban sprawl with existing infrastructure can be a tough one to solve. I hope to see more communities make more innovative choices in the future.
This Sunday I participated in marathon/half marathon and it was great to see the streets empty except for runners, occasional cyclists taking advantage of the closed streets and lots of pedestrians watching the crowd but also filling the cafes everywhere.
You specifically mentioned Australia - while Melbourne is flat and cool, both Sydney and Brisbane are hilly and hot for half the year. The country also has insane helmet laws, so that even the bike-sharing programs are essentially unused simply because you have to wear a helmet or face a fine. So the bikes sit in the sun and rain and virtually never get used.
Removing the helmet laws for adults would go a long way to higher adoption in the dutch model. But 'safety' laws are hard to ratchet back, given all the effort that went into telling people they couldn't be trusted with their own judgement in the first place.
Some combination of boats, mass transit, bikes, walking, so-called neighborhood electric vehicles, and the occasional jeep seems like it would be much more practical. The money and space spent on parking, wide streets, and car ownership would go quite a long way if diverted to transit.
And a good part of it is Koʻolau and Waianae which most people probably don't cross daily.
And a huge number of people also cross the mountains from Kaneohe, Kailua or Waimanalo, using either Likelike or Pali Hwy, both of which have a staggering amount of elevation change.
also helps when your country is dead flat. old people can cycle on flat roads. SF style hills ... not so much.
In Germany, otoh, cycle infrastructure is everywhere (even in placed where law doesn't actually allow it) but suffers a lot from a tradition of building cycle infrastructure for the benefit of cars, dating back to you-know-whom. Instead of picking the type of infrastructure by how well it matches the specific needs of the place where it is built, this decision is mostly driven by one size fits all best practice ideas that change like fashion. The result is a dangerous, inconsistent mess that makes some cyclists envy American "cyclists share the road" signs.
Unfortunately, Swiss cities don't have the modal split numbers required to be internationally recognized as a template to copy (even Basel! Maybe statistical methods are to blame?). I think a full copy of Swiss infrastructure would be much more useful than an incomplete imitation of the Netherlands or Copenhagen in places that lack the dedication necessary to do the latter.
Most parts of most cities are flat. A couple of hills doesn't mean you can't cycle in the rest of the city.
After the flooding near New York a few years back Dutch consultants were brought in to see what could be improved, one of the hard things was that in the US they had to work with small local governments everywhere whereas in the Netherlands flood prevention is mostly a national issue solved by national infrastructure projects.
There are certain cities that "get" cycling e.g. Cambridge ( https://vimeo.com/133736570) but persuading the general public that it is worth spending money on cycling is extremely hard. We have recently taken the approach to educate people that attend the Police Community Liaison meetings where they can spend 50%+ of the time discussing illegal pavement cycling, as to why it happens. http://cyclebath.org.uk/2015/08/24/how-to-solve-pavement-cyc...
I truly believe that the transport policy of your local authority defines the health and wellbeing of your residents. I think the fact the cost of healthcare in the UK is "hidden" as it is "free" has subtlety enabled a car centric culture to persist. My father who lives in Florida stated that people are demanding cycle tracks. They want to keep fit and keep their healthcare insurance low.
In the UK obesity in boys is around 16%, in the Netherlands it's around 1.6%.
The other problem with cycle infrastructure is that if it's not good for a 7 year old to ride on, it's not going to work for the general public. Segregation is key and definitely do not allow your local authority to create shared space where pedestrians and cyclists mix "happily".
Then you have the biggest issue. Cycle infrastructure is only as good as the weakest link. So local residents can massively impact the quality of the network and thus the ability for people 5 miles away to make a decision to choose to cycle. So you get a piece-meal approach to cycle network development in the hope that it will join up eventually :(
As an aside, I noted somebody felt 10miles was too far on a bike. I would suggest investigating e-bikes. They are rather good these days and can happily tank along at 15.5mph (Europe), even faster in some countries.
Not to detract much from your larger point, but this is much more likely due to diet than cycling. If the UK is picking up eating habits similar to the US, the ~200 calories a day you might burn from a leisurely bike commute (can't be vigorous enough to cause sweating) isn't going to be enough to offset the big caloric imbalances that lead to obesity.
I'm trying to look at Cambridge obesity rates vs other cities to see if there is some correlation.
I've looked at obesity studies in the UK and the child focused ones look at the location of fast food restaurants close to schools. I've never seen a study that looks at obesity rates and examines the Local Authorities transport policies. Cambridge, Bristol and some parts of London are possibly good control groups. I know Bath has better health than the UK average, but 27% of people walk to work.
The parents who pedal their kids around in a bakfiets [1] (the Dutch equivalent of an SUV) have every incentive to raise their children to be slim, and the parents get a lot of exercise themselves.
[1] http://bicyclebelleboston.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Bak...
But cycling can be significant. 200 calories per day is probably pretty accurate, I'd say it's more like 250 though. We're talking then about 1750 calories per week. Now if you were at caloric break even point, added an exercise that lost 1750 calories per week, ceteris paribus, that's about half a pound of weight loss per week. Over the course of a year that's 25 pounds. Or in other words, if you were at a caloric surplus (of 250 kcal per day) such that you'd gain 25 pounds every year during school, adding this exercise would totally negate that slow path to obesity. It's hugely significant.
Not just that but even if it prevents a small weight increases of say 10 in that year, and improves endurance and cardiovascular health due to daily exercise, kids will feel better and are more prone to trying out sports than if they'd already start to be overweight (or even obese) and have poor condition. (not because they don't need it, but because so many people start to identify them as a non-sports person, and many obese people start to self-identify with this, too). And that has compounding longer term effects.
Beyond that, I fully agree with the notion that you can't exercise away a bad diet, it's trivially easy to eat quantities of food that take massive exercise effort to counterbalance. But for kids in the Netherlands I do think cycling is pretty significant.
What makes you think that?
I could make a claim for a high degree of americanisation based on a bunch of anecdotal evidence and references to e.g. France being distinctly French, like Spain or say Italy, but Dutch culture & media being very US dominated. (which isn't anything new, last century we were as impressionable by french, german and British culture), but at most I could say it's pretty americanised, not necessarily the most.
Either way, it doesn't really extend to kid's staple diets all that much anyway. Nobody eats hagelslag on bread haha.
We Dutch are social democrats, and (nearly) any politician from the USA would be considered extreme-right here. Our healthcare, education and justice systems are way different.
Our media is nothing like the american media in terms of shock and entertainment value. Most newspapers and news stations stick to reporting the news, and do not sensationalize.
Work and living culture is very different as well. Here, people do not hail 'the american dream' and overachievers. People strive to be happy, and work only as much as necessary to achieve that. 80% is the norm here, not full time.
The only thing that I can think of as being americanised is pop music.
And while we're pretty good at standing our ground, we tend to flirt with a lot of American concepts. For example mandatory sentences, a staple of the American justice system, has been numerously put forward by some Dutch politicians, despite fierce resistance from judges and attorneys. Private schools, honours programmes, the removal of study finance during a slow rise of private funding by scholarships. In healthcare we've seen a very slow but noticeable trend to drop fundamental aspects of healthcare from mandatory collective basic insurance towards 'additional' insurance packages, from 'de pill' (not insured for 21 and older) to the majority of dental work. Some years ago we flirted with flexible pricing in dental work, fortunately when it turned out to be a disaster the government didn't double down but sensibly shut it down. And in the rest of society we saw a period of deregulation (since the crisis the trend partially reversed) and privatisation.
You can find these influences all over Europe of course, but the degree of pervasiveness of American influence in say France or Germany isn't quite as large. France has Hollywood, sure, but mixed with French cinema, and often dubbed.
Let's not forget for example that France actually has specific anti-foreign policies. It's not often discussed but France has had screen quotas for decades, i.e. cinemas aren't allowed to show foreign movies for substantial parts of the year. 40% of TV must be exclusively French and another 20% European, leaving American influence a minority. Stuff like that is intentional, to have France remain French, in the Netherlands it's contrary to our international diplomatic and business model which is to be an open economy, which is susceptible to influences from abroad, and naturally in particular from the world's hegemony. In France it's called cultural exceptionalism, mostly practiced in cinema and literature. As a proxy of its success in sustaining a vibrant French cinema industry you could point to a study (pretty old now) in the late 90s about the number of cinema festivals France held compared to other European countries here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/fr/timeline/13255a67e...
But I do agree with you we've been able to do things a 'Dutch way' quite well, and sensible Dutch policy is pretty much the only source of nationalism or pride for the country I have. (I'm normally not much of a chauvinist)
Bikes are children's toys, that's so... Saudi Arabia?
I really consider this a terrible design principle, because nobody likes to be treated like a seven year old and doing so could be a serious disincentive against cycling for anyone but the most irrationally fearsome. Design for competent cyclists, everyone can eventually become one. If the result happens to good for the seven year old, fine, it'd not that unlikely if money and space permits it at all. If not, treat children like pedestrians and grant the appropriate exceptions in law for supervising adults. They are surely not the kind of cyclist who causes havoc on the sidewalk today (this won't work in exceptionally walked places like most of Manhattan, but there, nothing less than a complete network of elevated bikeways could be made even remotely child-proof while providing real transport and not just some recreational riding in a park).
The idea of making a cycle route "child proof" is not to appeal to current cyclists, but to persuade people that want to cycle but feel the roads are just to dangerous to share them with buses, to get on a bike.
Taking Bath, UK as an example, the river to the west of Bath has a shared use traffic free child friendly path that connects that area to the heart of the city with 12% of people cycling to work. A similar area without that connection on the east side is about 5% http://datashine.org.uk/#table=QS701EW&col=QS701EW0010&ramp=...
This is all about persuading parents that it is safe to let their kids cycle to school as the roads are designed to accommodate that should a child fall off his bike they won't be killed by a car running them over. With that type of infrastructure in place you get a massive uptake.
Flipping lanes around is all fun and games until you need to have some kind of intersection (or, even worse: tiny access roads to private properties. This is where wrong-sided bike lanes kill)
The political action is a fail in the case of Paris, because they did it only to say let's see, we did something for you, but they didn't reply understood the things that are explained in this video. They don't want to take the risk of loosing pro-cars electors and it is a pity.
They are available here should you want to use them ;) http://cyclebath.org.uk/resources/
We've had a few schemes where 3-4 multiple designs were submitted and the final chosen design was poor for cycling and walking. Having a cycling and walking audit scores against each design would have given a stronger case for other designs. http://cyclebath.org.uk/2015/05/23/london-road-an-example-of...
I also had to explain to him that cars do not have to give way to cyclists at junctions so watch out. He thought that was crazy. ;)
It works fine because the most roads dont have cycling paths next to them, if they do it is divided so cars cant easily get on the bike path and viceversa.
Not that you made this claim but I just want to add that this wasn't what made cycling popular or safe if anyone is wondering. It was a relative afterthought that surely must have helped, although how significant it has been to improve safety is hard to say. Cycling deaths dropped by about 20% - 25% since then, but that was a relatively minimal drop compared to say car deaths (80%) or even pedestrians.
It's important also to know what this liability refers to, it's not criminal (i.e. you go to jail because you're in an accident that kills someone and you're in the car, thus presumed liable. It's not like that at all. You might go to jail but only for the right reasons, it's not presumed.). The liability refers to financial liability to the insurer of the car (and such insurance is mandatory by law in the Netherlands and virtually everyone sticks by that). Apart from a possible increase in insurance premiums because the accident puts you in a 'higher risk' category, there aren't any consequences for the driver.
Which means that a lot of people in the Netherlands aren't even aware of this rule. In fact most of the time they aren't even aware after an accident, because it's mostly a thing insurance companies deal with behind the scenes. Not likely to affect driving, then.
0. This happened to me. It taught me to drive extremely defensively. You will not believe the number of times i have had (for example) a green traffic light, and have had to stop for oncoming traffic turning left in front of me. I have right of way, but 1000kg of steel trumps right of way Every Time. If i sound a little ranty, it's because i'm rather bitter about the state of affairs here.
There are actually more bicycles in Holland than there are people!
Seriously, their bicycle tracks are amazing. Physically detached from pedestrians and cars and ciclysts have separate traffic lights.
It's no wonder that the Netherlands has a larger number of sold bicycles than it has citizens.
It's definitely true that most dutch people have at least one bike and quite possibly more than one. But we also have a huge bike theft problem and a good chunk of the new bicycles sold are to replace stolen ones.
Or it could be because it has a larger number of stolen bicycles than it has citizens, at least I have a vague memory of seeing a news report to that effect, might have been an exaggeration of course :-)
Many people in NL have two bikes per person if a daily commute's too long to be comfortably done by cycling alone:
- one bicycle at home to cycle to the train station near the place of residence;
- second bicycle parked overnight (and over weekend) near the train station of the city one work in, to continue the trip to the office.
...and in the afternoon - same exercise in reverse.
This practice is so widespread in fact that a year or so ago, it was a matter of public debate - who is due to pay for those huge bicycle parking places next to the train station: Municipalities (because those bike parking places are on municipal ground), or NS, the Dutch train operator (because it is NS' customers who make use of those bike parking).
But sometimes it's difficult to see what this means. Building roads for cars isn't bad because it's helping humans to travel. But when car roads overtake the pleasure of being outside something went wrong.
The bike saves a ton of emissions, helps in the reduction of traffic jams thus saving a lot of polution and cycling is healthy. But even in the Netherlands the politicians don't always get it, this year the tax rebate for bikes bought for home-work trips has been canceled.. Too expensive, I really can't see how, but hey.
I think that it is a question of lifestyle. Instead of choosing hot and moist U-bahn, you have a refreshing ride on the bicycle. Especially when the distances are short. Well, this is just a hypothesis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R160_(New_York_City_Subway_car...