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Comment by cr1895 | Hacker News Reader

It wasn’t always this way.

There’s an interesting clip from a documentary in 1972 about the neighborhood De Pijp in Amsterdam, when it was still very much a car-centric city. At the time children in the area protested how dangerous the streets had become and how they lacked safe areas to play.

https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/amsterdam-chil...

Compared to the situation now, it’s vastly improved. Fortunately the car did not win and the city did not destroy itself with a highway through the middle.

Edit

Here’s another (recent) documentary you might find interesting:

https://vimeo.com/123480693

View on HN

It was the same with Denmark. And especially Copenhagen. They went from a very car-centric society to a remarkably bike-centric one. Despite bad weather. All due to the Oil Crisis. Unlike other governments in the rest of EU, it seems that both the Dutch and the Danes understood a change was needed.

I've read urbanism brochures from the 1960s, when the Technical University was getting moved from central Copenhagen to a suburb (Lyngby), and it's remarkable how car-centric the design was. An old airport, where the runway was converted into a huge parking lot, and commuting by car was carefully considered to weight all decisions.

I bet they're fitter too (so, lower health care costs).

Copenhagen's history with bikes goes far back, here's some newsreels from the 20s and 30s: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2014/05/-/9014/

Also, here is a set of photos that show how Amsterdam changed http://sustainableamsterdam.com/2015/12/livable-cities-campa...

I wonder if the fact they didn't have a significant car industry helped with this.

There was DAF, though. But it went out of car business and now makes trucks only.

Actually, in 1972 the Netherlands did have a rapidly growing car industry on their own soil. Three years later it sold a majority stake to Volví after growth dropped off, but up until 1973 it was growing at a rapid pace. It was a significant source of jobs in the south, where it was based. They employed >80k people and were building a new factory.

I used to live in housing designed for factory workers of DAF. The company didn’t succeed because of other issues. But it is typically Dutch that they chose to design their cities for people instead of giving away what amounts to a subsidy paid for by lower quality of life.

Also, NEDCAR/VDL still has quite a large factory in the south of the netherlands, although it is only used for final assembly and mainly producing for different manufacturers. (also, it does some parts manufacturing for car factories in the ruhr area).

> It wasn’t always this way.

I'm curious how you though the article failed to cover this issue? In fact, that's the first example that the article covers, that car-centric planning in Rotterdam post-WWII was changed to be bike-friendly in the 1970s.

Did the article get rewritten after you commented?

>I'm curious how you though the article failed to cover this issue?

I'm curious why you interpreted my comment that way. I just added additional context.

Rotterdam is still very car-centric if you ask me.

Amsterdam is ~1000 years old. Parts of it are very unfriendly to cars simply because they were never built to be accessible.

In contrast, Rotterdam was mostly rebuilt after WWII. This gave them the opportunity to make the city more accessible for cars. Still you can get around Rotterdam by metro quite easily, and you are a first class citizen on a bike or on foot. i know lots of people living in Rotterdam who don’t own a car.

Everytime friends from outside Rotterdam cycle here, I warn them that it's not like te rest of the country. In Amsterdam it's not really frowned uppon if you go through a dormant red trafficlight, I wouldn't recommend that in Rotterdam. A lot of children in Rotterdam (in South) don't grow up with a bike, which is very much in contrast with the article imho. I'm just pointing that out that it's not a total idyllic bike-paradise here imo.

>In Amsterdam it's not really frowned uppon if you go through a dormant red trafficlight, I wouldn't recommend that in Rotterdam.

This really isn't limited to Amsterdam. Even at the zebra crossings where bikes are technically obliged to stop for pedestrians...they (and to be honest, I) most often don't.

The people who make these unreasonable regulations in the first place must know that they won't be complied with, which makes me wonder if their purpose was simply revenue generation all along.

For that to be true, these minor transgressions would need to actually be ticketed and enforced. By and large they are not.

Most people here use it as a test of whether you are from Amsterdam. You can tell the locals because they're the ones weaving their bike through the crowd at zebra crossings. I am definitely guilty of this but I use my discretion - because I know the area I have a good idea of how busy it is at which times at which lights. That's why locals do it but tourists shouldn't.

Bicycle Dutch, the blog you posted, also has a great YouTube channel detailing Dutch bike infrastructure and some of its history: https://www.youtube.com/bicycledutch

How would a highway in the middle have destroyed it?

Why did the kids want to play on the streets instead of parks or something?

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