Utrecht is a cycling-friendly city the population is 350,000 people. On a daily basis, there are
125,000 cyclists passing through downtown Utrecht
So that's quite a lot. I'm really fond of cycling because it has so many advantages. It's about the noise
It's about clean air, about climate but also about how friendly it is in a city
You really have the idea that people are the boss on the streets and not machines
It's all to get cars out of the city center, park at the edge of the city or go into it
And then pay the full price, but don't go through the city, that's the whole idea
Things that have changed radically in the last years so you can see what happens if you choose
the radical choice, get the car out and the bikes and the people in.
This is called Vredenbug,
it's one of the central locations in our city
It's dedicated only to do bus traffic and bicycle traffic and of course pedestrians
So regular cars are not permitted here
It's a very busy place because it's close to the Central Station and it's on route to the city center. It's actually the busiest
bicycle location of the Netherlands. Utrecht in a lot of ways is emblematic of an entire country that really made a very
resolute decision in the 1970s to not build their cities around the automobile and
Forty to fifty years later now, they are really reaping the rewards of those decisions. And so whether you go to
any number of hundreds of cities across the Netherland their city centers are reserved for
Commerce for community for social connection. You've got markets you've got shops. You've got social interactions.
You've got lots of bicycles, lots of people on foot.
On average in Utrecht 98% of households own one bike at least and
50% owns three or more.
For all the traffic to the city centre, only about 12 or 15 percent is by car
So the big majority of people coming, come by bicycle first but also public transport
When I went to school as a teenager things were very different
and a lot of Dutch people have forgotten about it. I'm amazed by all that transformation, especially here in Utrecht
Things are changing rapidly and I just adore that
We're standing now on the Croeselaan
Which is actually one of the first projects the city took up when they wanted to start changing the mobility system
So it used to be four lanes for cars, right where I'm standing actually,
and as you can see now it has completely changed. It's got lots of space for pedestrians
It's got lots of space for cyclists and there are no cars in this part of the street
On the map you can see the four-lane road and if you look at a modern map, there isn't even a road anymore
They don't want any through traffic here
Okay, we're still in Croeselaan. And as you can see, there's now a really wide bicycle path
Many years ago where the bicycle path is now used to be parked cars and a car lane, so did completely transformed it
Just 10 years ago this was a median of a four-lane road two lanes in that direction two lanes in that direction
Five years later the road was closed only buses could go through we had to go left or right, and now today
the trees are here
This area right here in Croeselaan is all new, it was not like this when I came here two years ago
and it's just an amazing improvement
So we are standing today in the street
that really is the entrance to the old city centre from the central railway station for pedestrians and
It used to look like this a parking lot with 75 cars parked here
and the City Council wanted this to be a nice entrance to the city center
So the City Council proposed to take away like 60
So 15 left and then the merchants here said
"No! We want them all gone because we're right off the pedestrianized zone where sales are better."
We are here on the first Dafne Schippersbrug, which is a very cool piece of infrastructure
And it was a really big fight to get it here
So they had a problem with space
Because they had a school that needed to stay here and the also wanted to have the bike infrastructure
So what they ended up doing was putting it together
So the bike infrastructure and the bridge they'll end up on the roof of the school
School Board is working with the architects working with the engineers and the transportation planners
to design a project that integrates so well into the community and so well into the urban fabric
And they redesign the whole area so it's now for children to play and it's also
Infrastructure and the building in one.
It wasn't until we started sharing renderings and photographs of this project
that I think the world stood up and said, hold on. What are the Dutch doing?
I think that speaks to how normal how ordinary how
Unremarkable cycling has become here in the Netherlands is they've actually started
Integrating it into their buildings at parking facilities of train stations now building cycle paths on those the roofs of schools
I mean, these are all things are pipe dreams in most other places in the world
This is a bike parking facility, which you can drive through on your bike
So this is the entrance on the north side and we have an entrance on the south side as well. And right now
We have place for about 8,000 bikes.
It's going to be enlarged next August then there will be room for 12,500 bikes
it's one of the parkings in this area which add up to capacity of 33,000 bicycles
And it's very important because it facilitates the combination between bicycling and using the Train
I work in Amsterdam. So I go every day from Utrecht to Amsterdam. As soon as you park
You're right under the Central Station so immediately you're in the Train
So I think it takes me 10 to 15 minutes from here and then I'm in the Train so it's very it's very fast. Very convenient
They have a number and a place a row number and a place number and the QR code you can use to find your bike
if you want to
Before it was just putting your bike somewhere on the streets. Hopefully it was still there
So it became easier and more convenient to go to the train station, check in with your card
You know bike around see if there's a spot and if you go early there is a lot of spots where you can park
Yeah, well, you've seen the big biking parking facility at that rental train station, but that's not all in the downtown area
We have lots of smaller parking facilities. This is the the biggest one
It's really well used especially for shopping
So in the weekends, these kind of parkings are really occupied
Right now we're building two more - one for one thousand places and one for eight hundred places
and that's still not enough, in the downtown area we need five or six thousand places extra.
As a city we provide also smaller facilities from say 15-20 bikes to 100 bikes
We are trying to make more roads suitable for bicycles so people have a choice
and we are rebuilding streets turning them into 30 kilometer per hour streets
closing them down one direction or both directions
So we make room for pedestrians and cyclists
So you have the sign of the bicycle streets is up there and it means that cars are guests on the streets
so cyclists are equal to cars. So you don't overtake, you just stay behind them until there's really clear that you can pass
So what you see there in the middle of the street is a rumble strip and it's used to naturally keep cars behind cyclists
Because if they will pass the rumble strip the car will go like that
You have a little noise in the car and people don't like it and they stay behind the cyclists
The speed limit on this will be 30 kilometres an hour.
Sometimes you have Fietsstraaten which are 15 kilometres an hour, but it's very low speed
The difference between car infrastructure and bike infrastructure is this is one of the main routes and listen how quiet it is
And you can hear people talking and you hear the sounds of the bicycles and yet thousands of people are riding here every day
Here in the back, you see the bicycle bridge. It's actually very old
But during the times that came by it was more and more dedicated for cyclists
So now it's car free. The car drivers have to ride around it. And that is one of the major arguments for the success of cycling:
make it fast, make it convenient and make it of course more convenient and faster than for cars
We invest a lot in noise free or low noise measures
for example
these stones cobblestones that are used they are specially selected on
The fact that they make not so much noise when you drive over them
We do also do that with the tarmac. The tarmac has to produce very low noise
We use red tarmac in the Netherlands
And the reason is it's official signal to car drivers that they are on an equal level with other traffic mostly pedestrians and cyclists
It's a special kind of tarmac. So it's got less friction
So you don't have to work so hard as a cyclist to get to go forward
I moved from Boston, Massachusetts to Utrecht in June of 2017
and everywhere that we want to go to on a bicycle even if it's to Ikea
there is a safe route even to the box stores we can go on bike infrastructure. It's just wonderful
This is another part of Utrecht in the bicycle network where you can see that the city gives
cyclists the upper hand to the cars in the system and you can only cross here as a cyclist and pedestrian and
When you turn that way, there's also only a route for cyclists
So the car driver has to go around and if you're on your bike, you can go straight
So for a mental feeling that's very important because when your bike you not only are faster, but you only feel faster
So, where we are standing right now used to be water since about the year
1000 to 1100 so almost 900 years ago
it has been water ever since but for 40 years that it was a motorway
and soon that motorway will only be a footnote in history
So here it says end of the 1960s. So this is the original city moat or canal as you want to say
with the original bridge and the original water
then in 1969 they started making that road
Drilling all these piles in there to support this road that they were building then they built a viaduct here
This is 1974. The viaduct is finished and it looks like a proper motorway
You could drive a hundred kilometers per hour here. That was total madness
2020 the magic year. This is when it all should happen
And you can see how inclusive it should be. So it is for everyone
For every car, we can put in 12 bikes for example
so twelve people and everybody driving a car, usually drive it by himself. They take a lot of space.
I hear a lot about the American cities and they will tell me we don't have space for bicycles
when here you see you can have a really good system
and still have space for cyclists, have space for pedestrians, and have space for cars
Gives our children the freedom to go to their sports to go to their friends all by their own I think
Internationally, that's quite exceptional. That's from a young age
on you can go about where you like without the help of your parents
So it really has a lot of advantages especially in urban circumstances
And that means so much for the residents who are able to live work and play in their city
without having their mobility and their livelihood and their happiness limited by cars