In Danish happiness: bicycle infrastructure I described the Danish system of road/curb/bike path/curb/sidewalk. What if a significant percentage of a society used bicycles for transportation, but nobody bothered to build infrastructure? That’s the Netherlands!
I recently visited a friend in Delft, a university town south of Amsterdam. There are no generally no curbs at all in the downtown area. The road is informally divided into car/bike/pedestrian, but these divisions can change depending on what exactly is sticking out from a house, possibly forcing pedestrians into the bike area, or whether a truck is trying to use the road.
The risk of injury has ballooned in the last few years due to the popularity of cargo bikes and electric bikes. Instead of getting hit by a 200 lb. person-bike combo going 8 mph you’ll get hit by a 400 lb. person-small person-groceries-bike combo going 15 mph. “Trouble in cyclists’ paradise: Amsterdam accused of favouring pedestrians” (Guardian 2021) describes the increasing conflict between walkers and bikers in Amsterdam.
There aren’t as many collisions as you’d imagine, but pedestrians are required to be constantly mindful. This works for the Dutch, but tourists are frequently wandering casually into near-collisions with cyclists. What the cyclists have gained is balanced by a loss of mental peace and capacity among pedestrians.
Here’s a narrow street designed for pedestrians in The Hague:
The bicycle is being used for transportation, not recreation, so it might be whipping by these pedestrians at 10-20 mph. Here are the two transportation modes interacting in Delft:
Maybe those white boxes are supposed to delineate between walking and biking? Or maybe there are two lanes for opposite directions? I didn’t figure it out.
Just a few of the bikes parked near the Amsterdam Zuid secondary station:
What if you choose “neither” but don’t have a car and/or don’t want to pay what my rich local friend said were insanely expensive parking fees? Take the tram!
My take-away: the Danes did it right.
I lived in Amsterdam for a year, and yes, cyclists pay no heed to pedestrians whatsoever.
The Dutch has this theory that by abolishing the separation between sidewalk and street, it will force car drivers to pay attention. They claim this has actually reduced accidents but I suspect cherry-picking data as is usually the case with urban planners and biking advocates.
It’s unfair to say they have no bike infrastructure, however. They have an entire network of highways for bikes only, parallel to and completely separate from the car highway system. The typical dutch person will think nothing of biking 30 miles or the distance between Amsterdam and The Hague as a regular commute.
Fazal: I’m not sure this purported “network of [bike] highways” exists other than for commuting in/out of Amsterdam. Google Maps never showed me anything like that when I played around with getting cycling directions to/from Delft.
Phil, we spent multiple weeks biking around the Netherlands (and Belgium, and France, but I digress), and I can absolutely confirm that there are separate bike “highways” almost everywhere in the Netherlands, including in and out of Delft. Google Maps is a bit deceiving because many of the bike paths are within a meter or two of a major roadway, separated by a grass strip, so at first glance it looks like Google is routing you down the road. But it’s not.
We became so accustomed to having our own separate bike “roads” through the Netherlands that when we got to Belgium, it almost felt insulting: “What? No bike roads? We have to share roads with CARS?”. Except, of course, the bicycle infrastructure in Belgium is still insanely good. Just not as insanely good as in the Netherlands.
“The typical dutch person will think nothing of biking 30 miles or the distance between Amsterdam and The Hague as a regular commute.” – How does it work in the rain? 30 miles on a bike means approximately 3 hour commute. And it could make for a soapy business meeting after and if you get there. No wonder economy of Netherlands’s performance trails economies of Austria and Germany and is not even close to Switzerland’s GDP per capita. Netherlands used to be one of the world’s top manufactures.
At least speed limits are lower for cars. Try that on a 50mph rural Fl*rida road.
“My take-away: the Danes did it right.” I am sure they did, but this post is not about them. As much as I love to bike and Dutch culture, I think that Dutch got it wrong on transportation.
bsd
Faizal “pay no heed” is generous. On the Upper West Side getting on a bike, any bike, turns you into an asshole who is not obligated to stop at red lights or slow down for babies being pushed in strollers. And this is across the board to include DoorDouche delivery ebikes going 25-35 mph in the “bike lanes” (disregarding direction arrows). Peace.