Dutch love

I tend occasionally to be wistful about times past, and in particular, the year I spent living in the Netherlands. It is a country that often seems more sensible than our own, a land where the Prime Minister vacations in a trailer in a Portugal campground (you'll have to look for it; it's cited as an example of the culture's small 'power distance'). Some of that sense is reflected in that culture's enthusiastic embrace of the bicycle.

I was reminded of this reading an article in the June 2008 issue of The Walrus. I'd link to the article by Bill Reynolds, an excellent yet odd melange of art criticism, biography, autobiography and reporting about cycling safety and advocacy, but as a subscriber I'm so far ahead of the curve that the story isn't even online yet.

Update: Here's a link to the entire article: Geared Up (Walrus, June 2008)

So I've reproduced the relevant sections:

Along one-way cobblestone canal paths, on dedicated bicycle highways, and sharing the roadway with cars, there are tens of thousands of cyclists in Amsterdam. They get their very own traffic lights - with bicycle icns lighting up red or green - in the central core. Dutch city bikes tend to be clunky: hard to lift, uncomfortable to ride over long distances, and forcing riders to sit too far back. (No one in North America would dream of riding such a bike.) But they're solid, the tires are large, and they don't break down - in short, they're perfect for city riding. Couples lazily ride to dinner, formally dressed in suit and gown, he pedalling (usually) and she sitting on the baggage rack. Moms and dads transport kids the same way. No one wears a helmet. Down at Central Station, the confluence of lanes makes the Arc de Triomphe traffic circle in Paris look like the idyll of Manhattan's Central Park. Amsterdam is inner-city kinetic energy at its finest.

My 'just North of Amsterdam' bike. Compared to most city rides (including the one I rode in during my A-dam stint), this is a Cadillac. A used one sells for over €150 (over $225)

H-i-i-i-i-s-s-s-s-s...a middle-aged woman admonishes a walker for dallying on her bike highway. She's one of the ones who have taken up cycling later in life, the government's social engineering having successfully pushed bikes as a way for people, women in particular - Surinames émigrés and Dutch citizens alike - to become more independent and mobile. She's learned the rules of the Amsterdam system to the letter, and her message is, don't get in my way.

Bikes rule Amsterdam. If a car hits you, it's the driver's fault. Period. Down these crowded streets, walkers fight through designated traffic lanes - one for bikes, and one each for taxis, regular cars, and the tram. But nothing is perfect. When I tell Paul, our bed and breakfast host, about the supercilious, hissing woman and numerous speed-automaton men - like our slick cab driver from the airport - he says, "Yes, here in Amsterdam we have our cycle paths, and we have our psycopaths." The system, no matter how ingeniously regulated, is bursting at the seams. Car congestion has given way to a different anxiety: moving through public space that is on the verge of becoming a bike dystopia. I wonder if bikes here have become the new cars; if they are two-wheeled insects, they're sizable ones, like dragonflies. So what does that make walkers - mosquitoes? Maybe there is something in wheeled motion that induces aggressive behaviour.

This light isn't in Amsterdam, but it's close enough.

You'll have to forgive that insect bit at the end - it draws on an analogy from earlier in the article - but otherwise that description is pretty good. I think he goes overboard with the idea of a bike "dystopia". It seems like the kind of judgment one would make as a tourist trying to navigate the bustling city core, from the Stadshouderskade inward. And he does go on later to describe the derision he experienced riding a MacBike (MacBikes aren't the latest innovation in uber-cool from Apple, but rather the name of a city-wide bicycle rental firm dealing almost exclusively with tourists).

How much do they love Bikes? Let me count the ways:

At the beach


National park, free-to-ride, bikes

Further out, where most people live and work, the scene is more sensible. My 5km daily commute showed little evidence of bursting at the seams, with my most dangerous encounters being snowball related. (While Amsterdammers have much to teach us about cycling and bicycle infrastructure, they could sure learn a thing or two about winter etiquette, for those 3 or 4 days a year when they have to deal with the season). For parts of the city that aren't entirely overrun by slow-witted tourists, the cycling machinery operates quite smoothly. And the best part is that the infrastructure is in place basically across the whole country.

A rural bikepath somewhere in Gelderland.

Reynolds also complains about a near collision in Vondelpark, and those are pretty commonplace (actual collisions less so). He later adds:

Paul, our B&B owner, says some riders "try to find the absolute shortest way between two points and go as fast as they can. The only thing they respect is the tram because it is heavy and takes time to stop." In 1987, American satirist P.J. O'Rourke theorized that his nation was "afflicted with a plague of bicycles." Right theory, wrong country, perhaps? Then again, after two weeks any new rider will graduate from naiad to dragonfly and thrive in this cycling ecosystem.

That graduation is hard to describe, but you realize it the first time you passive-aggressively ring your bell at a pedestrian obstructing your way, or at a group of girls riding 3-wide across the entire bike path. And it's a far cry from here, where I earned a honk for swerving intoa few inches of the next lane (on Wellington Crescent, a winding residential street, I might add) to avoid a construction worker.

Suspended neon shoes add colour to a sometimes frustrating Wellington ride.

A news story today called to mind another example of Dutch common sense. It details a proposal by an analyst to improve Winnipeg's transit system. From the article:

Prentice envisions what he calls a "hub-and-spoke" transit system, which would include the usual city buses on major routes, as well as mini-buses or shuttle services picking up suburbanites at their homes — possibly when summoned by the rider — and ferrying them to transfer stations.

This calls to mind the excellent Treintaxi service, which for a fixed cost (roughly 5 euro) will take you to or from a train station. Knowledge of this might have been useful before a certain 40 euro cab I split with a friend of mine.

Whether or not this hub-spoke model would really work on a smaller scale (though Winnipeg's sprawl isn't that far off from Holland's postage stamp footprint) is a matter for debate, I suppose, but any way to get more people riding public transit, a service like Treintaxi included, is at least worth trying.

If my Dutch-love seems a bit unreasonable, and I'm ignoring significant social problems and ethnic tensions, you might be right. But they also invented tulips, or something like that, so back off.