[“We live in a northern climate in Toronto and this climate is not Paris,
it is not Amsterdam.”] Whenever urbanists point to Dutch cycling infrastructure as a model to follow,
skeptics respond with a list of reasons why Dutch cities are just too different
to be relevant elsewhere, especially the U.S. and Canada. “This is all great if you live in a flat,
tiny, crowded country without a real winter.” Do they have a point?
The first common argument is density. The Netherlands is a densely-populated
country where things are close together and easy to bike to;
cycling just isn’t practical in spread-out, continent-sized countries like Canada, the U.S.,
and Australia. At least, so the argument goes. But we’re not interested in the density of the
country so much as the density of the cities, where most people live and travel around.
Dutch cities are denser than their North American counterparts but the differences aren’t as big as
you think and there are lots of places in Canada and the U.S. that easily reach Dutch density.
To compare densities, let’s look at how many people fit into a circle with a radius of five
kilometres. Overlaid onto the Hague or Amsterdam, the circle covers about 550,000 people. In North
America you can get similar or higher densities in central areas of Vancouver, San Francisco,
Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Philadelphia, Montreal, Boston, and of course New York.
But Amsterdam shouldn’t really be our benchmark because there are less dense Dutch cities that
are usually considered better for cycling, like Utrecht, where about 350,000 people fit in this
circle. You can find similar densities in Washington DC, central Baltimore, Newark,
and even many suburbs of Toronto or Los Angeles. And there are also lower density Dutch cities like
Groningnen and Nijmingen, where 200,000 people fit into this circle, which correspond to densities
found in central Atlanta, St. Louis, Edmonton, Ottawa, Sacramento, San Antonio, and Minneapolis.
To be clear, you can’t do this everywhere. There are lots of suburbs (for example,
outside the core in Atlanta or Minneapolis) where the density is distinctly lower than
anything that would be considered urban in the Netherlands. There are even some city centres,
like Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Fort Worth, Texas that don’t come close to Dutch densities either.
We don’t actually think cycling is doomed at lower densities, but setting that aside for this video,
North America has plenty of places that easily reach Dutch densities,
including the older neighbourhoods of most cities, and even many suburbs, especially in California,
the northeastern U.S., and Canada. The striking thing isn’t that Dutch cities
are unrecognizably high density, it’s that they have a density floor that they don’t really fall
under. Even on the edge, Dutch cities are almost always at least moderately dense.
The other striking thing is of course that Dutch cities are very close together from a North
American perspective, especially in the Randstad region in the west. This doesn’t matter much for
urban cycling but it probably makes rural cycling more practical from one town to another. North
America has places that are rural or remote in a way that doesn’t really exist in the Netherlands.
The Netherlands is an old country built before the car, which makes it particularly suited for
walking, cycling, and transit, according to critics. This feels intuitive from a North
American perspective, where the best places for cycling or transit are almost always older
neighbourhoods built before cars were common, and it fits into our perceptions of Europe as a series
of medieval town centres instead of a modern continent. But the Dutch had post-war growth.
Not as much as the U.S. or Canada, but the Dutch population has grown by 75% since 1950, and Dutch
post-war developments are, believe it or not, more bike-friendly than the historic centres. There’s
no law of the universe that newer areas built to consider cars will also exclude other modes.
It’s true that, after the invention of the car, North America was physically capable of building
low-density sprawl in a way that the Netherlands just wasn’t, with their limited land. But tens of
millions of people live in denser neighbourhoods built before World War II — can they have a
high-quality protected bike network? Also, the idea that we have plenty of land to sprawl doesn’t
apply everywhere. Calgary and Houston can expand in all directions, but Vancouver, San Francisco,
and Los Angeles are seriously limited by the ocean and mountains. Even Toronto and Chicago have major
land limitations from being directly on the Great Lakes. As a result, these metro areas
are all denser than average in North America. Toronto, LA, and Vancouver are consistently at
least as dense as a smaller Dutch city, even in most of their suburbs, and they’d be even denser
if not for all their laws limiting density. Can these places have bike infrastructure?
The Netherlands has a mild climate that doesn’t get that hot in the summer or too cold and snowy
in the winter and that makes cycling year-round practical in a way that it isn’t elsewhere,
according to critics. But many places in North America have similar climates,
like Vancouver, and many more actually have better weather, like San Francisco or Los Angeles.
It’s true that we also have places with more extreme weather, but the way people single out
weather as uniquely a problem for cycling really shows how much of a novelty bikes are for people.
New York and Philadelphia get hotter than Amsterdam in the summer — how could anyone
bike in that heat? Well, those are both walkable cities where people walk places in the summer.
If it’s a heat wave you might have to adapt — not staying out as long, avoiding mid-day,
maybe taking transit instead — but people don’t just stop walking places in the summer, let alone
year round. We know there are hotter cities out there like Phoenix but we live in Canada and we’ve
never even been to a place that hot in the summer so we have no real experience to talk about them.
[“A hundred and eleven degrees? Phoenix can’t really be that hot, can it?”]
We do have plenty of experience with the other extreme though. Montreal is tied with Minneapolis
for the harshest winters of any large metropolitan area on the continent, making Toronto feel mild
and New York feel tropical. How do you bike in the cold? Well, you bundle up and wear winter
clothing, just like with walking, except on a bike you’re probably more concerned with your
hands and face than your core. Anyone in a winter climate knows how to dress to walk,
skate, ski, or snowshoe in the winter, but for some reason the thought of biking in the cold
breaks people’s minds. As for snow and ice, you can get studded tires for your bike just like
you have winter tires to drive or winter boots to walk. But really it’s up to your city to plow and
maintain the bike lanes like they do the roads and sidewalks. Most cities just don’t do this,
which helps explain why so many people have never thought of biking in the winter. Montreal has been
getting better at bike lane snow removal recently but quality differences between different bike
routes are only amplified in the winter. The wide express bike corridors built with snow clearing
in mind are a joy; the older two-way bike lanes are functional but narrowed by leftover snow;
painted bike lanes often disappear; and routes where you have to share the road with cars
become even more treacherous in winter. People use winter as an argument against bike infrastructure
but when you actually try biking in the winter you want as much high-quality protected infrastructure
as you can possibly get. Winter is the time of year when you want the most separation
from car traffic. Ultimately, we think of cycling as a faster version of walking,
and if walkable cities can exist in different climates, so can bike-friendly cities.
The Netherlands is flat, and that’s another reason people commonly cite for why the country
is uniquely suitable for cycling. There is some truth here — the country is very flat
in a way that felt kind of surreal. What this misses though is that bikes have technology to
handle hills — gears work pretty well, and eBikes are even better. There probably is a limit to how
many hills a regular person wants to handle, but let’s face it, most North American cities just
aren’t that mountainous. Our city is built around a hill but unless you live at one of the peaks,
most of your cycling will be relatively flat, and the hills you do encounter here and there
probably won’t be a deal-breaker. Just like with winter, hills are much more stressful when you’re
sharing the lane with cars going fast. When you have space to go at your own pace, elevation isn’t
as stressful. This bike lane covering a hill is the third busiest bike route in Montreal,
counting over a million riders last year. This bridge to the suburbs is a big climb but it
saw more than 500,000 cyclists last year. This bike lane on a hill saw almost 300,000 riders
last year, despite being new and not even fully connected to the other bike route at the top yet.
Even cities built near large mountain ranges in western North America, like LA, Salt Lake City,
and Denver, are mainly built on relatively flat plains or valleys at the base of the
mountains, with at most some lower density residential areas on the actual mountains.
A handful of cities are legitimately very hilly, like San Francisco, and this argument deserves
at least more consideration there. But when we actually visited the Bay Area we were pleasantly
surprised at how useful cycling was. We didn’t bike up the Twin Peaks or into the Berkeley Hills
or anything, but lots of neighbourhoods were flat or only moderately inclined, and the bigger hills
we did encounter were less of a problem when we had our own lane. Being realistic, San Francisco
is hilly enough to be a barrier to some people cycling, but even in one of the hilliest major
cities on the continent, we never got the sense that bikes can just be written off. San Francisco
has some of the highest rates of bike commuting in the U.S., which we’ll cover in a future video.
The way we see it, the real difference between North America and the Netherlands isn’t density,
weather, or terrain as such. It’s more abstract: it’s consistency versus variation. The Netherlands
is a small country with similar weather, terrain, and density that is consistently pretty conducive
to cycling. In North America, we have lots of urban areas and even many suburbs and small towns
where the distances are perfect for bikes, but at the same time we also have a lot of lower-density
suburban and exurban sprawl where the distances, road network, and extreme car-centric design
make it hard for cycling to be competitive or even practical. Our cities are generally flat,
but many have neighbourhoods in the hills where cycling is less of an obvious choice.
We also have more extreme and varied weather, which doesn’t make cycling impossible any more
than it makes walking impossible, but it does add more friction to the process,
as cities have to learn to plow and maintain bike lanes like they do for roads and sidewalks.
The basic challenge is that while bikes are practical in lots of places in the
U.S. and Canada, they’re not as consistently practical everywhere,
even within a city. That makes it harder to build a national or even city-wide culture
and politics around supporting and encouraging cycling. It might not matter how much density
and bike-friendly distances you have in your pre-war central city if suburban voters veto
bike infrastructure for being not in their interests, rightly or wrongly, or store owners
oppose bike lanes because they drive in from far away and assume that their customers do too.
Your city might be mostly flat but people in wealthier, hillier areas often have
disproportionate political influence. It’s not just politics, it’s also culture and what people
are used to. Your small town might be compact and bikeable but if it’s surrounded by rural
areas where distances don’t work so well for bikes, lots of people who move to your town
won’t bring a bike with them or any expectations or experience with cycling for transportation.
Sometimes Dutch people tell us that they don’t have a “cycling culture”, but that feels like
fish who don’t realize they’re swimming in water. Sure, most Dutch people don’t follow the Tour de
France or spend their time reading resources for bike mechanics, but that’s not the kind of bike
culture we’re talking about. It’s about cycling being considered a normal way to get around,
not something quirky that you have to justify or explain. It’s about almost everyone owning a
bike. It’s about places knowing that they have to provide good bike parking to appeal to customers.
It’s about drivers also being cyclists themselves. It’s about transportation professionals having
experience with bike infrastructure, and politicians being willing to prioritize it.
None of this sprung out of thin air in the Netherlands either, they had their own fights,
but we’d argue that it’s easier to develop this kind of national bike culture when cycling is
practical in 90% of your country than when it’s practical in, let’s say, 40 or 50%.
We’re not quite sure if we’re more optimistic or pessimistic since coming back from the
Netherlands. On one hand, the problem facing bike infrastructure in much of North America is not
the fundamentals — density, hills, weather, or anything else. Cycling is practical, bike
infrastructure can be relevant. On the other hand, this leaves culture, politics, and the momentum
of car-centric design as the obstacles, and those are big. Ultimately, change is happening, but it’s
happening unevenly. [“These are live images from chopper 24 of Olivia Chow, about to take off on
her flower-adorned bike.”] Toronto thoroughly rejected two anti-bike candidates for mayor
recently, but Ottawa with its more suburban city borders picked a mayor who would bravely stand up
to the “war on cars”. [“My transportation strategy doesn’t declare war on cars.”]
There is a real dilemma when it comes to using the Netherlands to argue for bike infrastructure
in other places though. On one hand, it really is the most exciting and compelling example to use.
People often have no idea what a bike-friendly city even looks like, thinking it means cars
are banned and that tradespeople, ambulances, and deliveries don’t exist or something. [“They want
you to walk or ride a bike no matter where you live, no matter where you’re going, no matter
what month of the year.”] Being able to point to this one country where bikes are everywhere that
is still in fact a functioning society is really powerful. On the other hand, if cycling advocates
focus too much on the Netherlands, if it’s always the example that gets brought up, regular people
and cycling critics will understandably get a little suspicious and assume that cycling
is just a quirk of one unique country. People arguing for bike infrastructure need to be able
to talk about other places: London, New York, Vancouver, Bogota, Tokyo, and so on. That’s
what we’re trying to do with Montreal. It might not be as consistent or refined as Dutch cities,
but it’s a clear success story that tends to feel more familiar and relevant to people,
especially because it has hills and harsh winters — people can’t use those arguments to dismiss it.
We also need to be careful to not obsess over copying every single aspect of Dutch cycling
culture, because that can give the impression that cycling is just a quirk of the Netherlands.
Differences in culture, weather, density,
or terrain might not make cycling impossible elsewhere, but they can influence how we do it.
We’ve seen some people scoff at the idea of bike commuters showering at work because cycling is
supposed to be “casual, not athletic”, but if you live in a place that’s hillier or
warmer or you’re covering longer distances than in the Netherlands, sweat is real.
Dutch-style upright bikes are pretty cool (we love the built-in double locks), but the weight
and riding position aren’t as appealing for people covering hills or longer distances. The Dutch are
also famous for never wearing helmets for normal city riding, citing their modest speeds, and
that’s fine, but people in cities with hills or more than one snowfall per year might reasonably
choose to wear a helmet more often. Another difference is that the new wave of micromobility
like eScooters and one-wheels seem to be much more common in North America. Maybe part of arguing for
building bike infrastructure here is designing and presenting bike lanes as “micromobility lanes”.
When people dismiss Dutch cycling successes as not relevant for them (“we’re not Amsterdam!”),
sometimes they really do live in an exceptionally sprawling, remote, or hilly area where bikes
aren’t practical, but much of the time they live in a regular place where bikes
can easily work and they’re reflexively reacting to something they’ve never tried or really even
considered (16:16). Often they’re judging how unappealing the cycling experience currently is
without processing that Dutch-style infrastructure would make it much more practical and pleasant.
Things like hills or winter weather can be challenges but they’re much easier to tackle
with protected bike infrastructure. Ultimately the solution is to keep learning from world-class
cycling countries while also talking about more local cycling success stories that feel more
familiar and relevant to people. We also need to stress that bikes are not exotic machines
that are only practical in unique circumstances. Cycling is a faster version of walking, and it
should be relevant in most of the same contexts. More contexts, arguably, because it's easier for
a distance to be bikeable than walkable. In Canada and the U.S., five times more people walk to work
than bike to work. What explains that — is it distances, weather, or hills? No, it’s the fact
that most roads have sidewalks for walking but not protected bike lanes or pathways for cycling.
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