Why Amsterdam Works So Well for Bikes
citylab.com
citylab.com
It is boggling. We can't even start to think about having nice things until we diagnose this particular social disorder affecting America.
Many people don't really believe that driving is wrong, or harmful. But supporting radical infrastructure changes to accommodate an alternative means admitting to that to a further extent that most people are comfortable with.
Car sharing. Taxi / Uber. Hybrids. Electric cars. Self driving cars.
The freedom to transport yourself is a powerful force for good, and socialized public transport and bikes are not a real solution in many / most places.
(am a biker, love biking, only commute by bike to work 3 months of the year)
Living somewhere where I commute by bike (or run!) every single workday, I'm curious as to what limits you to 3 months.
If you wish to explore how much, check out the good site: withouthotair.com chapter 3.
I feel like I could go on (road-related injuries, manufacturing sustainability, ...).
But jumping the shark with the personal automobile is certainly wrong and harmful.
From a social standpoint it manufactures inequality. Access to effective transportation is the single greatest factor in determining an individual's opportunity for upward economic mobility. And if you live in a world built for cars and can't drive, well, fuck you.
It's environmentally destructive. This one's easy, but it's important to note that it isn't just the emissions from the tailpipe, it's all the sprawl and infrastructure built to accomodate the car. Mankind has chalked up a lot of black marks in it's short history, but rendering the biosphere uninhabitable? That takes the cake. In the grand scheme of things, what the hell are we doing if we aren't at least making a nominal effort to leave the place in better condition than it was when we arrived?
Economically it's bad for us too. James Kunstler called the suburbs 'the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of western civilization'. When I first read that it struck me as a sensational and hyperbolic statement, but after having it knock around in my head for a few years, I don't think it is an outrageous claim to make.
One of the inherent contradictions of human nature is that we're surprisingly adaptable, yet stubbornly resistant to change. Nobody likes to be told they're doing it wrong, but what else is there to say? You're doing it wrong.
And better public infrastructure for biking here did came after a lobbying and money collection and what not from activists. They did not used the "you are all bad people unless we get what we want" nor "we are hollier then you" strategy. And yep, such strategy breeds more stubborn resistance - because while many people are with accepting bike trail and what not (it does not costs all that much in the grand scheme of things), once you insult them you pretty much lost before you even started.
In my suburban American town, there is one total bike lane on one single road in town and it's super, super annoying because it's rarely used and therefore an annoying distraction with very little positive impact. It doesn't really connect to anything or go anywhere useful.
I moved here from Munich where I rode my bike to work daily for 4 years and didn't own a car for much of the time.
I've also vacationed in Amsterdam a few times and loved renting the city bikes there. The volume of vehicle traffic there surprised me, however, and the stats in the article I think kind of downplay the feeling of the number of cars on the road there.
Point is, people's annoyance with how these things are implemented in the US is totally legitimate. They are usually half-assed bridges to nowhere kind of projects. And, yes, done that way they probably hold back real progress in implementing full-fledged viable bike/bus/rail projects. But that doesn't mean people criticizing their current form are not right.
Although, one of the interesting things about the US is that a lot of the population of cities lives outside the city jurisdiction, for a variety of reasons including tax avoidance. The people who actually need to be persuaded aren't the people who drive into the city from the suburbs every day, they are the people who live inside the actual city, and those people need to make a judgment whether the benefits outweigh the drawbacks of this kind of approach (the risk being that the suburbs will simply develop new centres and bypass the city).
Of course. Amsterdam and other cycling friendly cities didn't start out that way. They had to be redesigned as such.
You can find plenty of historical photos of a car dominant Amsterdam.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3052699/these-historical-photos-...
Americans seem unwilling to do that for some reason ..
Its a pity because there are so many wonderful aspects of transportation process in the American world - I'm looking at the "Jet/Air Parks" that have managed to survive, for example. The Dutch may have their bicycle advantage, but nobody does flight like America does.
So its really somehow quaint that Americans appear to be enslaved to their cars. Personally I blame designers of car interiors - these gilded thrones appear to have inflicted a mass neurosis on the customer.
Compare Washington, D.C., which is a smaller city: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Washington,+DC/@38.914686,.... The urban core is smaller, more like 2-3 miles in radius, but it's part of a large metro area with urban clusters connected by highways. The total population of the metro area is substantially more than double that of Amsterdam's.
If you work in Amsterdam, you probably live in Amsterdam. If you work in D.C., there is a good chance you're commuting in from some suburb. After spending more than an hour in traffic to get to the city, how do you feel about bikers whizzing around in a city with no separated bike lanes? How do you feel about losing traffic lanes to bikes in an already gridlocked city? How do you feel about spending billions on a train (much more than Europeans do on a per mile/per ride basis) that doesn't stop anywhere near your house, or run on time?
I don't think it's possible to redesign a city. It's like trying to rewrite software while its still running. Yeah, it's possible to do hot patches here and there, but you're not rewriting the guts.
> But they've also invested a lot in their train network and most people commute that way.
Most people in say D.C. don't commute by train not because D.C. hasn't invested enough in it, but because the suburbs "look different." D.C., for example, has invested a ton in its train network. As I mentioned above, despite being a smaller city, D.C.'s subway has four times as many miles of track as Amsterdam's. But most people still commute by car, because D.C., like most U.S. cities, is only a small portion of its larger metro area. Washington, D.C. has under 700,000 people, but is just one part of a metro area of 5 million people. Amsterdam has over 850,000 people, and dominates its urban area of 1.6 million people.
That urban/suburban mix drives people to car use. Jobs in the D.C. metro area are scattered all over. For example, most of the technology jobs "in D.C." are actually in Virginia, e.g. Google is mainly in Reston, which is 25 miles outside the city. If you draw a 25-mile ring around Amsterdam, you'll mostly hit farmland. Around D.C., you're actually hitting many of the major population and economic centers in Virginia and Maryland.
The dispersed nature of the jobs makes building transit very hard. Reston has a train station. Many people opposed it, however, not because of "social disorder," but because it was a $6-billion project that wasn't useful to them. You see, the train really only goes to D.C. But not that many people go between Reston and D.C. Aside from a handful of yuppies who might want to live in D.C. and commute to Reston, people who work in Reston drive in from Ashburn or Great Falls, or one of the other nearby suburbs. There is no rail network that connects these places, nor would it be practical to build one.
Building cities around cars didn't just result in people who are conditioned to drive rather than take transit. It created patterns of housing and employment that make it really hard to build transit after the fact. Fairfax County, a suburban county to the west of D.C., has more residents and almost as many jobs as D.C. itself. But the rail system is designed to get people from Fairfax County into D.C.--it does nothing to get people to all the jobs located in Fairfax County.
Loudon County, still further west from D.C., has almost half of D.C.'s population. There is no rail in Loudon. Nor would extending rail from D.C. be all that useful. Only 10,000 people from Loudon commute to D.C. (and almost nobody does the reverse commute). Meanwhile,65,000 commute to Fairfax County. Another 31,000 commute to another county within 20-40 miles. Try convincing people in Loudon to spend the money to build rail into D.C. when it would only benefit 10% of the commuters.
I think the solution is a combination of: 1) further uber-ification, 2) further bike/walking lane improvement, 3) further investment into trains, despite the problems you speak of now
1) I think more people should become Uber drivers (if not Uber, gov't should make an Uber-like app). Not necessarily for the money (although it is nice), but because of the ecological reasons. One of the great Uber-driver features is: you can set direction to go home, and have Uber-riders that are only going along this direction. I live in Boston suburbs, my roundtrip commute to work is about 3 hours. Picking up strangers along the way without losing a lot of time, I save the environment a little bit (less cars on the road) and make the roads less clogged. This is the technological benefit... an app that can intelligently connect riders going the same path (the olden days of finding car-sharing buddies in Craigslist et al was too difficult.. and going around posting flyers at workplace asking who here has somewhat the same commute is too much of a hassle both logistically and socially).
2) I used to park my car at a parking garage and then use a bike for last 10% of the commute (because the last 10% of the commute was actually the part that cost the most time... in Brookline where traffic was hell). I stopped doing that, even though I would save a lot of time because it's really terrifying, I swear I genuinely believe I would have been dead if I had kept doing it for 2 years more. My colleague got in an accident only last week (when he was walking home from work in Winthrop)... he broke BOTH of his legs. Too many people I know are dying or getting seriously injured when biking/walking.
3) You bring up good points about investment in train/bus infrastructure not being worth it in various part of US. But most of Boston and its suburbs are getting more and more crowded... it is starting to build UP (lots of highrises everywhere being recently built) and built across. What I'm getting at is, the US is growing (or rather, at least the big cities are starting to have more concentrated and more dense population hot spots), it does make sense to start investing NOW for infrastructure that will last us decades to come.
The DC area has already has a system for doing just this and there is no app involved. It's called "slugging". Because there are HOV restrictions on some major highways requiring you to have 2 or 3 people in the car to use them, an informal market developed between drivers and riders meeting at suburban parking lots. There's no cash changing hands because the payoff for the driver is the ability to use the HOV lanes (or the HOV-only highway in the case of I-66) for a much faster commute.
What you really see is that because so many people were using bicycles everywhere people just got fed up having cyclists criss-crossing between cars and pedestrians and finally gave them their own lanes - out of pure annoyance.
So every US citizen that wants to have those nice lanes simply needs to make sure enough people on bicycles annoy the shit out of everybody else in the streets and you will get your lanes. Be sure to ride like a real asshole and practice flashing vulgar gestures while riding. Pretend you're invulnerable. Learn sequences of insults with lots of hard sounds in them. Nothing beats swearing in Dutch though. Every tourist almost hit by a cyclist in Amsterdam knows exactly what I mean! ;)
50 years ago traffic in the Netherlands was not unlike the US now. Until in the 70s an action group called Stop de Kindermoord (“stop the child murder”) succeeded in getting the government to pay attention and make a turnaround. I remember this from my own childhood. Many kids died in traffic accidents.
The attention to the safety of children is still present today, more bike lanes are being bult, kids need to do a traffic exam (on bikes) in 7th grade, existing roads are being remodeled for safety.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...
Here in So. Cal, Metrolink trains are expensive and run very rarely. I have yet to go a week without a major delay or cancelled train. Bus and train schedules are essentially one way and leave early. Meaning I usually have to leave work around 3:30 to get home.
Not to mention that despite driving through some of the worst traffic in the state, trains and buses take two or three times as long to get me to my destination than my car. This is despite massive funding increases and bonds for public transit in our state.
It's mostly about density and culture IMO.
Cities with good biking infrastructure also have plow trucks to keep the roads and bike paths clean on snowy mornings.
You absolutely do not need to cuff up your pant leg. You just need an ankle band to keep your pant leg away from the chain: https://www.amazon.com/High-Visibility-Reflective-Ankle-Stra...
I'm still a bit shocked that my temporary factory job here in Norway provides safety shoes and launders the uniforms, let alone having showers on-site to use.
So you want to layer your clothing so you can take off layers as you warm up; or you can just adjust your pace to prevent sweating.
I'll take Austin's summers over Montreal's winters any day. Snow is cold, messy and frankly dangerous. 95% of bikers stop during the snow months, but Austin still had tons of bikers even at peak heat. You just bike slower.
Most of North America has bikable weather most of the time. It's not the primary reason why people don't bike.
Cold also comes with dark, which may factor into the equation.
For whatever reason, I'm blessed with a body that doesn't sweat very much. So I handle the extremes pretty well.
Disclosure: I'm a bike commuter in the upper Midwest.
I was in Amsterdam this summer and without much knowledge of the city, found it easy, safe and fun to get around by bike.
Went to Paris and Barcelona as well and didn't feel as comfortable on a bike in either of those cities.
Just a couple weeks ago I was heading down 101, 55mph with blind curves and came around the corner to a pack of bikes doing 5mph uphill.
I managed to slow down in time but the people behind me almost lost it. I don't know if they had a deathwish or what but I can't imagine why they thought biking on 101 was a good idea.
I could stop just fine, I'm worried about the idiots behind me.
Taking the moral highground doesn't help if you end up dead in the end. There's a ton of motorhomes, boats and equipment trailers on these roads. Even at 35mph they may not be able to stop in time when they are towing ~15-20k GVW.
There's a large difference between being rear ended in a car and rear ended on a bicycle. One is engineered to do everything to keep you alive, the other ends up with you plastered across someone's bumper.
The solution is to build these roads to be safe, however riding on them in their current state just makes the roads more dangerous for everyone.
I don't brake for small animals on these roads for similar reasons and I've lost count the number of times I've had to dive for the shoulder when someone overruns their stopping distance behind me(which is why you should always keep an eye on your rear mirror in a panic brake situation).
Intentionally biking on these roads put everyone at a higher risk of these types of situations happening and a bad outcome for all because of it.
People don't follow the speed limits. They optimize for a constant amount of risk. Depending on conditions that's 20-over or 15 under or anywhere between.
I see the point, but that's a different situation. A stalled vehicle is an accident. A group of cyclists going slowly uphill is a deliberate choice, on their part. I have a hard time laying blame completely on one party when both parties have made choices that increase the danger of a situation.
I don't know exactly what happened in the previous comment's story (conditions on the 101 may be different in other areas), but large groups of bicycles in my area tend to spill out of the marked bike lanes and into motor vehicle lanes, but bicycles aren't common enough that their presence is always expected. Anytime something less-than-expected happens, there's a higher risk of someone getting hurt.
The stretch of road in question has no bike lane and half of foot of pavement to the right of the lane at most.
The right solution is to put in a dedicated bike lane, in absence of that you're putting everyone else on the road in danger by choosing bike with a large delta of speed.
Is it legal to ride your bike on 101? Totally. In the same way that it's legal to go bombing down trails in a mountain bike.
Now is either of those things safe? I would argue not. The difference is that if you wipe out on the trail you just injure yourself, probably with some scrapes and the occasional broken bones.
Where I draw the line is when your actions put me or my family at risk. The chances of death or serious injury is much higher in a bike vs car(either for the cyclist, in another car crossing the double-yellow to "dodge" the cyclist or pile-up for someone following too close).
I understand the distinction that it is a risk to ride a bike on such a road. But I find placing blame on a cyclist for accepting this risk to their safety from reckless motorists absurd.
> But I find placing blame on a cyclist for accepting this risk to their safety from reckless motorists absurd.
I find knowingly riding a bicycle in unsafe conditions absurd. It's why my bike has sat in my garage for 5 years; I can't ride on the raised sidewalks, and I think it's suicidally stupid to ride in the bike lanes that are separated from motor vehicle traffic by a few feet and a white line. Frankly, I don't care who's to blame, if I wind up dead. It's not a risk that I'm willing to accept.
Yes, and I don't give two shakes about who's right or who's at fault of the result is sending another car across the double yellow and killing me or my family.
Listen, I get that it feels great to feel like you have the moral authority to tell us how cyclist aren't actively harming anyone but they are creating situations(large deltas in speed, cars having to pass) where there is a higher chance of a serious collision.
Unless you're telling me that there's no statistical difference of collisions when 5mph bicycles are on 55mph highways?
FWIW they're building a separate bike path along large sections of 101 by Port Angeles which is the right way to address this, and I fully support that. The idea that having a large delta in speed on a highway doesn't contribute to accidents however is absurd.
Simultaneously, the driver knows that they're controlling a heavy machine, and that they might need to stop suddenly for various reasons. They have a responsibility to operate it safely, according to reasonable expectations of the environment that they're driving in. "I was going too fast to stop in time" isn't defensible.
Which is a silly opinion for drivers to have IMO. The more people are biking the less cars that are in my way.
So while it is a silly opinion to have in some cases, in others there are actual reasons for it which have some solutions.
A lot of times on top of that, a single road will have dedicated bike dispersed through it. So one segment will have a bike lane, then cross an intersection and it doesn't have a bike lane anymore. A few more intersections later it starts having bike lanes again.
Cycling saw a big popularity explosion in North America as well in the 70s, but we quickly came to our senses and opted to triple the obesity rate instead.
This will never work in America because Americans are completely obsessed with three things: 1) Living in suburbs, 2) Owning cars, and 3) Not paying for realistic public transportation.
If Americans had to pay for realistic public transportation, it would be harder to afford a car, and they might not be able to live as far from their jobs as they often do now. It's not exactly a chicken-and-egg problem as much as an eat-my-cake-and-have-it-too problem.
If you live in the county seat of Hunterdon County, New Jersey, you're about 50 minutes drive to Trenton, 1hr to Newark, 1.2hrs to Philadelphia. There is no real public transit to get to a bigger city (one that might have jobs). There are, however, "shuffle routes", basically small shuttles that run four or five times a day inside the county, from which you can take more shuffle routes and eventually buses and trains to get to a major city. But this is more an exception than the rule: to get into and out of Hunterdon County, you must use private transit companies like greyhound and trans-bridge.
Large swaths of the country are like this, and it directly affects cities because people are coming to work in the cities in cars, or via trains and buses after they drive to them. Bikes are not really even remotely an option.
I can't imagine what other countries must be like if this is the pinnacle of cycling :P
Although I still avoid the very center, with all the oblivious tourists walking on bicycle lanes...
I had a fabulous ride out of the city to Monnickendam. That more than the city itself was amazing cycle infrastructure to me.
The states: Cars go first, and watch out. Norway (Trondheim): Pretty much walk where you will, others will stop. Amsterdam: Bicycles go first, and the others wait.
Source: Lived in Amsterdam when I was a student
Ideally, both trams and cars would be completely underground or above-ground, and have no possibility of collision with bicycles or pedestrians at all.
Source: lived in the city's center for 30 years.
despite the many bikes here, SF sucks for biking because of the hills
1. All streets are bike streets
This is already true for people who leave home on a bicycle expecting to handle all their daily business. Please consider that basically everyone who leaves home on a bike is forced to include some segments of "car" streets in their route. Planners like to imagine all of a city's cyclists moving around on the streets and paths they've specifically improved for bicyclists, like they've laid out a model train track and all the toy trains are running on it. If cyclists were restricted to traveling that way, it wouldn't be a practical means of transportation. Educate drivers and take cyclists into account in traffic engineering. Make cycling a little more tolerable now and you'll have more cyclists and more of a political mandate for infrastructure projects in the future.
2. Separated cycle tracks, not bike lanes
I hate the "not" here. I know the author is describing Amsterdam, but he calls his five points a "template," and "not bike lanes" doesn't belong on any city's template for becoming bike-friendly. Bike lanes are cheap and quick to install, so put them everywhere you can spare the space. I know they're not all that safe. I've been hit in one. At the same time you work on installing bike lanes, work on the grant and bond proposals that will let you build separated cycle tracks in the future. There's grass-roots interest in cycling right now in the United States. People want to bike, and they're trying, despite the lack of infrastructure. Focusing solely on expensive, high-profile improvements that are years out is a disservice to people who are taking to the roads right now, and it could leave a lot of them with a sour taste in their mouths as they struggle to safely navigate the streets near their work and wonder why there's so much excitement about projects that even if fully completed years from now will still leave them many blocks short of their work and other nonnegotiable destinations. Bike lanes might not have a place in the future, but none of us live in the future as of yet.
(I suspect planners and advocates feel pushed towards the most ambitious projects by career considerations, and I can sympathize with that. Everyone wants to be the most forward-looking. Everyone wants to have the highest hopes and standards. Everyone wants, when the future finally arrives in reality, to have been the first to get there in their heads. Everybody wants to be seen as valuing the least advantaged and most vulnerable people who will be the last (in perception, not necessarily in reality) to finally be brought onto the road by the most advanced evolution of infrastructure. Nobody wants to be associated with the suboptimal and downright dangerous compromises we will live with until then.)
To be honest, I think it's one of the coolest things that we take for granted. I can step outside, hop into my car right now, and drive literally anywhere in the US. I drive home from the Bay Area to LA all the time and I always find this very cool.
Do I think we need more public transportation? Absolutely. And more bike lines since I ride my bike to work too. While we're at it, better laws to protect cyclists and public facilities for bike storage and repair.
What I'm getting at is that we should embrace multiple forms of transporation and not take for granted what we do have.
Parking is one of many reasons why housing density is so low across the bay compared to many other cities in the world.
I don't think anybody disputes that the Interstate Highway system between cities is a modern marvel. It's what we did inside cities that's tragic.
Driving home from Bay Area to Bay Area can take 1.5 hours at a bad time of a day.
Where can't you do this? It's possible to drive from London to Beijing if you really want to.
Or if you do not care about climate change, a plane trip is still better than a car trip.
IIRC it's actually better than a car trip greater than a few hundred miles, especially if you're driving alone.