How Utrecht Became a Paradise for Cyclists
citylab.com
citylab.com
Ps: here’s the short film the article talks about. Shows the fantastic transformation of Utrecht. https://youtu.be/Boi0XEm9-4E
It's a reasonable argument that the city is now trying to address by making free parking on the city border plus a free bus into town.
For a bike it takes about 1 minute or more to stop, detach/unlock your lock from the frame and lock your bike to a bike stand, then take off your helmet. You reverse this when you get back on the bike. The variance is also not that high on this number.
For a car, the mean time varies greatly from location to location and the variance is much higher. You might get stuck several minutes searching or waiting for a parking spot or you might get a spot immediately and be walking to the shop in under 15 seconds.
These differences have some effect on how much people want to bike/drive. I think one way of encouraging biking more would be to work on lock designs and bike stand design so it takes less time to park your bike.
I like bicycles, but actually going to a store with a bike is an annoying experience. One that I wish could be improved.
Like you have to understand that a city designed from scratch for cars and one designed for walking/biking look very very different. Biking in one is hard and driving in the other is just as hard.
Yes bicycle parking is important, but it's relatively cheap, mostly because it does not need that much infrastructure.
The real hard thing is that Google & Co don't mark every street as reachable by car or truck and you also need to drive over a bus / taxi lane to get there. So people that are used to just set up Google Maps and drive will never get there as the roads are not accessible according to the map they use. Which is a huge pain in the ass anything larger than a parcel needs to be delivered to my house.
I recently read a nice article laying out some of the misconceptions: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2019/jul/0...
The only thing I hope they will change in the future is removing motorised vehicles from the bicycle lanes, scooters/e-bikes are just too fast and break the whole flow of traffic. Seeing that scooters are already banned from the cycling lanes in Amsterdam I think it will happen soon in Utrecht.
I find the electric assist is not so much about going faster as making transportation into a non-event and avoiding exertion.
Here in the Netherlands the bike paths are almost entirely occupied by people old and young biking on cheap bikes as a form of transportation, unlike in America where biking is dominated by 30-55 year old men on $1000+ bikes wearing criminally tight pants, sunglasses, and aerodynamic helmets. Nearly nobody is going 32km/hr on the bike path in the Netherlands, yes. 25km/hr, sure, there are a few (pizza delivery guys on e-bikes and scooters) but most people are not going this fast.
On the bike path inside cities you'll mostly see people going 16-10 km/h. You won't see a helmet on anyone except a confused tourist or the police. You'll also see grandmas, children, and just about everyone on a bike. Many of these bikes would horrify an American bike enthusiast with their copious rust and "deferred maintenance" to put it lightly, but they serve millions of people just fine with few accidents.
I’m a pretty serious mountain biker and that is the main reason ebikes are being banned on a lot of trails.
They do have to be bike-like though, if you take a scooter slap some pedals on it and fill it to the brim with batteries and try to use that on a bike line then there are likely going to be problems, luckily this doesn't seem to have happened yet.
As somebody who likes walkable, bikeable areas; I find that a lot of "cities for people" folks are, ideologically, a couple hops away from culling the disabled to make way for their utopia. I'm only half-joking.
Compared to my commute in London now, 45 minutes on a cramped, hot, loud tube.
I also love the fact that in most parts you could still take your car. But most people don't, as taking the bike is the faster and more convenient option.
The fact that a traffic jam of bicycles is perceived as exceptional really tells how we have moved past the acceptance phase of the cancer that is automobile congestion.
> I also love the fact that in most parts you could still take your car.
This is an excellent rebuttal to the opinion 'but what happens when I need to move furnitures/go camping/<do some other activities that really requires a car>': these activities are not a part of people’s daily routine. If people stop unnecessary driving such as sending their children to schools ten minutes of walk away in an SUV, then it actually makes it easier for everyone else who does need to drive.
The cycling culture that developed subsequently was hard fought for by activist groups throughout the late 60s and 70s, before being implemented across the country by various city councils in the 1980s and then developed further with national level infrastructural improvements in the 1990s.
There's lots of good documentaries on YouTube about the change, highly recommended if you're interested in urban planning or in the possibilities for introducing cycling infrastructure.
In Utrecht one can see many roads which have multiple cycle lanes and pedestrianised parks along the middle. These roads were originally developed as 4 lane highways for automobiles before modernisation.
We got the bicycle amenities not because we wanted to stimulate people using them but because too many people (especially kids) died riding them.
Is was only in the 70s and 80s when there was a revolution in the introduction of cycling infrastructure.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2011...
There is also a behavioural solution which should be exported everywhere: https://www.dutchreach.org/
Please stop propagating this excuse and just start paying attention when in traffic.
Dutch driving instructors teach 'the Dutch reach'. You get into the habit of opening the car door with your left hand, so you'll automatically look for cyclists that may be passing by.
Mind you, I can't remember the last time I was in a car, so I could be getting it wrong.
«I can't remember the last time I was in a car» ← the real benefit of living in a city made for humans!
The intent is that it forces you to twist your body to see what’s coming behind you before you open.
I started cycle commuting again about a year ago (Boris Bikes) and guess what we have dedicated "cycle superhighways"
And the problem it turns out is us cyclists
There is always a traffic jam on the dedicated pathway - the blue cycle lane. And so some (usually but not always male) cyclists jump on and off the lane and engage in dangerous overtaking manoeuvres.
Worst, is that the blue lane runs along normal roads and so has traffic lights at the same positions - and that I guess 25% of cyclists ignore completely a red light and plough through - and twice I have seen these idiots hit pedestrians and two weeks ago came across the fire brigade washing the blood away
We campaigned and rode to be taken as real roads users - and when we got real roads with real traffic light we ignore the real rules of the road
Cyclists need to have number plates and fines for breaching traffic laws.
sorry.
There's also a very interesting phenomena where right now in London the people who bike are "Cyclists" where they're much more likely to be enthusiasts, people who want to really go fast, people who have Bicycling as part of their identity. In the Netherlands, it's just a way of getting around and not an ideology.
The other contributing factor could be size. London is so much bigger than most Dutch cities. If you're commuting across London, speed probably matters much more to you.
There is an sad/interesting gender gap too because many of the cycle commuters are male. There should be a real push by companies to make cycling more female friendly. That means having easy changing rooms/showers at work and giving women a little more time to get ready in the morning.
I love biking in London, going fast to the Aldi and carrying my groceries back on the special bike lanes, but there are still issues to resolve.
Cycling is all about sharing the space in a nice way. It would be much better if these tourists took their anger home and advocated for better cycling infrastructure in their own countries.
I currently work in Utrecht. Walking around the city center, even in pedestrian zones, I need to be careful not to run into a bike. Passive-aggressive close passes are the norm. Last week I saw someone clean glass shards off a bike path. Nice gesture, right? Guess what happened next... a middle-aged lady whizzed by over that path, swearing "get off the bike lane you *#($@!!"
I suspect a lot of people (younger and fitter) don't see it as such.
And I get that. A long long time ago when I would cycle in car traffic, I upgraded my bike from an old cheap MTB to a nicer road bike. On the flat I saw a 5 mph increase in my top speed the very next day. And my commute time did not change a bit.
It was not how fast I was capable of travelling but how many risks I was prepared to take that decided if I could shave more time off the commute.
And this is it - it takes a certain amount of time to cycle a mile on the flat open road. In traffic it takes more time, and only by dialling up the risk-o-meter to 11 can you get it back down to "open flat" time. And that risk-o-meter means other people's blood so it's not acceptable.
If I want my exercise then it's running on the pavement and press ups in the park.
we all do this for cars in london. we just need to for cycles
It will cost millions to organise, will the DVLA take on this new responsibility? Do scooters count? Roller blades? A 5 year old rolling around their neighbourhood?
It will push more people back into their cars resulting in a more unhealthy population running over more pedestrians, and to top it off, motorists have to be registered and that doesn't seem to discourage breaking traffic rules en masse.
So basically, costs a lot of money and result in more deaths - for what benefit?
Seriously I drive and I cycle. I have in twenty years never seen one person jump a queue and take a red light past a line of other stopped cars. I see it daily on a bike.
The degree of rule breaking is orders of magnitude greater.
And no I don't think it's a waste - although I do think it will take deaths before the impetus grows. I mean I had a valid number plate made in two minutes by a caravan sales person today, the ANPR cameras not only exist but actually are in place on the junctions, and if you really want you can start crowd sourcing it on the most dangerous sections.
PS Scooters clearly should not count - they should just be banned and anyone over the age of 30 on one simply jailed for twenty years till they grow up ;-)
And cyclists already get fined for breaching traffic laws (and for endangering themselves or others).
What you are describing is a result of a mix of 'militant cyclists' and others that see cycling as a way to set themselves apart from the rest of the crowd as well as an incomplete separation of traffic flows. It has nothing to do with regular cyclists, and chances are that if cycling becomes normalized that the hipsters will move on to skateboards or some other way in which they can differentiate themselves enough to be noticed.
The way such behaviour was eradicated in car driving was decades long campaigns to make such behaviour socially unacceptable plus the stick of fines and traffic enforcement.
Yes it would be great if cycling becomes normalised and better infrastructure is laid down - but in my view if we waved a magic wand and we had 10x more cyclists tomorrow, then we would have 10x more people behaving as recklessly - there may be some social pressure applied but it's hard to see how whizzing past at 12 mph.
Ps I did see someone take this into their own hands and I wish I had got his name - he was cycling along with a megaphone in his hand - and when a pair of idiots whizzed through the lights he was stationary at he raised the megaphone and in the middle of London's rush hour bellowed out "Yes, I'm colour blind too, let's all run red lights!"
Now if everyone did that we would have no need for license plates.
This also means we need to be treated like all other road users as well. And so fines are likely to modify behaviour.
I would say that plates and fines would be part of a wider campaign to reduce the worst behaviour but I still argue it would be a huge positive to treat cycles like other dangerous fast moving transports.
I've also biked in lots of other places besides here locally. License plates for vehicles serve the dual purpose of identification of the owner and taxation. And it makes some sense because the damage a vehicle can do is substantially higher than the damage that a cyclist can do. I draw the line at scooters, they are twice as fast as cyclists; weigh three to five times as much and are typically driven by people who really don't care who lives or dies on the road and are a major cause of injury and death for other unprotected users of the road, such as cyclists and pedestrians. Accidents between pedestrians and cyclists, especially in the city are very rare and usually do not result in grave injury, on top of that the need to ID the rider is absent because likely the cyclist will fall to the ground in any accident where there is risk of injury to others.
Finally, cyclists do not carry mandatory insurance, as is the case with scooters, e-bikes, mopeds, motorcycles and cars. The speeds and masses are higher that the legislator has recognized the potential for damage to property and other participants to an extent that normal liability insurance no longer is sufficient. License plates for cyclists is a solution in search of a problem.
I would hope that as the infrastructure improves, so too would the outlook of cyclists regarding the rules.
There's a huge change in the energy of a crash as you start going faster. A 15 mi/hr biker has 2.25x the energy of a 10mi/hr biker and so if you crash it's so much worse.
At 9mi/hr, you're pretty much always walking away from the crash.
One of the most common injuries for cyclists is the ubiquitous broken collar bone. This often happens to folks when they're coming to a stop, or even when they're motionless, and they lose balance and tip over. The unavoidable reaction is to put one's arm out to mitigate the fall. If the arm doesn't bend at the elbow, energy gets transmitted straight to the collarbone and may cause a fracture.
Another common injury is concussion. These are, of course, worse at higher speeds because they usually occur when the cyclist goes over the handlebars. This can happen so fast that there is no time to protect the face-- hence the term "face plant". But a head injury can also happen when tipping over at zero speed.
Not totally disagreeing about the speed aspect, just the usage of the kinetic energy factor to imply how much worse the accident "could be". Velodrome cyclists regularly wipe out at 40+ mph. Serious injuries and death can occur, but that is highly dependent on the specifics of the crash. The overwhelming majority of the time, higher speed means nastier road-rash.
The electric bike craze for elderly people isn't helping as they now travel about twice as fast as they used to.
Agreed on the electric bike craze, I get passed on my trusty old twelve speed with some regularity by 70 year olds doing 30+ kph (which suggests at least some of these have their limiters removed). Falling at that speed at that age is certain to end bad.
One of the things I love about Amsterdam is how the city changes in the evening. It gets quieter because there are less cars. People can go to pubs without driving (cycling under the influence is illegal but tolerated). And almost the entire city is accessible within 20 minutes.
The u stands for uut (old Dutch), meaning downstream. Although I am not 100% sure if U doesn't simply stand for uit, which means 'from'.
I always try and think about designs for a "ski lift" for bikes, just as a thought exercise. Is anything like that being actually made?
Nowadays it's easier to just mount an electric motor on your bike.
But there is a city with that name, that clearly must court cyclists more ardently than the most devoted retailer of paints and brushes.