Cycling in the Netherlands was an eye-opening experience that made us at the same time more
hopeful and more pessimistic about the future of our cities back home in North
America. Experiencing the obvious success of the Dutch cycling model in person made
it all the more clear that bike-friendly cities are really nice places to live
and that there’s no big mystery about how to make urban cycling safe, convenient,
and enjoyable. At the same time, it’s hard not to feel disillusioned and frustrated by
the fact that these straightforward solutions for better cities are stubbornly controversial
in North America. [Anthony Furey: “They’ve been held captive by a radical bike lobby.”]
With even the most basic bike infrastructure getting caught up in culture wars and being
treated as an existential threat to the rights and dignity of drivers. [Mark Saunders: “We have
downtown politicians ramming these bike lanes onto streets that don’t make sense to the community.”]
In this video we’re going to cover what impressed us most about infrastructure and cycling in the
Netherlands on our recent two-week trip covering six cities. But before we get to the good parts,
there were actually a few things that surprisingly didn’t impress
us about the Dutch cycling experience. The first is gas-powered mopeds or scooters,
called “snorfietsen” in Dutch, which are allowed to use most bike lanes in the country,
outside of central Amsterdam. They’re very common and many sound and smell kind of like lawnmowers!
Getting passed by one of these can take away from an otherwise blissful cycling
experience. Back in Canada we don’t really have gas-powered vehicles in bike lanes.
Another less than positive surprise was the Dutch public bike share system,
which seemed less flexible and more expensive than other systems,
including our beloved BIXI in Montreal, but that topic probably deserves its own dedicated video.
This might also come as a surprise but the dedicated bike lanes and pathways that we saw
and used on our trip were very nice but actually lower on the list of what impressed us most. They
were on average wider and more likely to be separated from traffic than dedicated bike
infrastructure back home, but the basic designs were actually pretty familiar from cities like
Montreal and Vancouver. The Dutch have one-way cycle tracks, two-way cycle tracks, multi-use
pathways in more suburban or rural areas, and yes, they even have painted bike lanes. The one design
we encountered that feels the most novel from North America is having separate two-way bike
paths on both sides of a larger arterial road, which makes it easy to bike in either direction
without having to cross the road. There are lots of places back home where this would be
great to have. But overall the magic of the Dutch cycling experience is not that they have any super
secret or unique bike path design. It’s the rock solid network where everything works together.
Part of this feeling of a complete system is that protection for cyclists doesn’t
stop at intersections. The Dutch have a model for intersection design that keeps cyclists visible,
separated, and predictable no matter what direction they’re going in. While most
major cities in North America have at least a few examples of good separated bike lanes or pathways,
Dutch-style protected intersections are pretty rare, and most cyclists over here have probably
never seen one. Our old city of Ottawa is one of the few places actually building these,
and watching them in action in the Netherlands gave us a new
appreciation for Ottawa’s efforts. With a little practice, these intersections
feel natural and intuitive and going back to a city without them feels like a major omission.
A surprising amount of the Dutch bike network isn’t actually dedicated lanes or pathways but
shared streets like the “fietsstraat” or “bicycle street” model, a smaller road intended for bikes
that cars are allowed to use as guests, meaning that they drive slowly and don’t necessarily
expect to pass. Bollards and other traffic filters limit cars from using these as through routes,
so you’re probably only driving here if your destination is nearby. These were very
comfortable rides specifically because the idea of cars as guests wasn’t just a sign on the road,
it was a numerical reality, with cyclists actually outnumbering cars to a pretty wide degree.
We actually have some similar bicycle streets in North America too and they can work well but they
usually don’t feel as coherent or intentional. We used to live near Echo Drive in Ottawa, which had
a really good system of traffic barriers. Anyone, from kids to seniors, could comfortably bike or
even walk on the street because cars were so infrequent and slow. But it was also more of an ad
hoc arrangement that you knew about if you lived nearby rather than an intentional and visible part
of a bigger bike network. One reason bicycle streets in the Netherlands feel integrated
into a bigger system is that they use the same red colouring as bike lanes, which sends a signal that
this space is for bikes. The use of red pavement or road tiling in the Netherlands was actually
less consistent than we expected (red isn’t used on all bike lanes, and it’s also used on
some sidewalks, medians, parking spaces, and first class seats on the train) but overall the colour
coding does a pretty good job of identifying routes and setting expectations, and the fact
that they bother to go the extra mile here shows how seriously they take cycling in this country.
The volume of cyclists that we saw in the Netherlands was impressive, especially in Utrecht,
but we’ve seen big crowds on main bike routes in Montreal or Vancouver before too so that
wasn’t entirely novel to us. What did really stand out as unique though was the number of
children and teenagers riding bikes, especially together without their parents. It’s really cool
to happen across a school at the right time and find a long string of students arriving by bike,
or to bike through a suburb and see groups of kids and teenagers just biking around
together. This used to be more common in North America but we’ve seen a really sharp decline in
children cycling over the past few decades as our roads have filled up with bigger,
faster, and heavier traffic. You can still find full bike racks in front of
many schools in Montreal but cycling isn’t the overwhelming choice like it seems to be
in the Netherlands. Another major difference in volume compared to back home was bike parking,
which is on a whole other level in the Netherlands, sometimes literally so,
and especially at train stations. With that said, in cities outside the Netherlands with
regular bike share systems, bike parking is also handled through these bike share stations that
are dotted around everywhere that don’t really seem to have an equivalent in the Netherlands.
Finally, the ultimate success of the Dutch cycling experience — the thing that every
aspiring bike-friendly city really needs to dedicate itself to — is the coverage, reach,
and consistency of the bike network. Cycling in the Netherlands was an absolute breath of fresh
air because bike infrastructure goes everywhere. Basically every single arterial road had an
adjacent bike lane or pathway and basically every neighbourhood had safe local streets through it.
It’s not just a (quote-unquote) “downtown” thing, either; the bike network goes to residential
suburbs, the beach, the airport, metal fabrication factories, highways, small towns, fields full of
goats — everywhere. We did a day trip from the Hague to Rotterdam through Delft one day and it
was absolutely freeing knowing that we didn’t have to follow any exact route, we could just
generally know the direction we had to go in and make our way there. This isn’t to say the quality
of bike infrastructure was perfectly consistent in the country; some countryside routes weren’t
quite as nice, and biking in central Amsterdam was worse than the suburbs or smaller cities.
There were even a few areas where bike lanes disappeared, just like back home.
But the consistency and experience didn’t vary nearly as wildly as it does back home. We’ve done
lots of bike trips in the Montreal region; some routes are very nice but others are profoundly
bad in a way that makes it very important to plan your trip and follow the right route,
even if it means taking the long way to get where you’re going.
And even in the overall pretty bike-friendly neighbourhoods of central Montreal there are
still many gaps and routes you just don’t want to use if you value your safety or comfort.
It’s one thing to hear about Dutch cycling culture and infrastructure from Bicycle Dutch,
Streetfilms, or the Bruntletts, but experiencing it in real life gave us a more nuanced and vivid
understanding of what makes it work. Coming home to Montreal, we’re more thankful than
ever to have what is honestly a pretty good cycling experience where we live,
but we also see more clearly just how limited our city’s bike network is, with pretty good coverage
in central neighbourhoods but falling apart pretty quickly outside of that.