The Best-Kept Secret of Dutch Biking: The Dutch Hardly Bike at All (2018) | Hacker News Reader

The Best-Kept Secret of Dutch Biking: The Dutch Hardly Bike at All (2018)

peopleforbikes.org

37 pointsTomte10 comments

Sort of clickbaity. Article seems to say: The dutch bike all the time, usually short distances.

The key point is that places they want to go are close by because of their (IMO very sensible) approach to urban planning:

> This level of urban development isn’t just unusual in almost all of the United States. It’s illegal. Utrecht, the city in the first photo above, has approximately the same metro-area population as Wichita. But because most of its central city was built before the passage of laws that required minimum lot sizes, maximum numbers of homes per lot and lots of on-site car storage everywhere, everything in Utrecht is much closer to everything else than anything is in Wichita.

The main shtick is that we can walk/cycle to most destinations.

If you can walk there, there's a big chance you an cycle there as well. In that case, why not bike to your location and save 10-15 mins?

Most kids here bike to school, its kind of assumed when we grow up

Yup, the distance to the nearest primary school is 0.6km (0.38mi), to the nearest secondary school 2.3km (1.43mi). Most kids can manage that on their own after age 8 or so.

https://longreads.cbs.nl/nederland-in-cijfers-2022/hoe-ver-i...

I recently started walking to work, because by bike it is only 11 minutes and I felt I did not get enough exersize. Walking takes up about 33 minutes for the same distance. With my precious job, it took me abou 25 minutes biking to work. I think that the travel time is an important factor in the selected mode of transportation.

They left out one important travel method: walking.

In Utrecht, if you don't bike, you walk usually.

The last chart did show the percentage and distance for walking compared to cars, bikes and transit.

Many things have happened since 2016 or 2018. It is much more busy on cyclepaths since corona. There don't seems to be data that is easily accessible. If someone can read CBS Statline, please tell more.

https://opendata.cbs.nl/statline/#/CBS/nl/navigatieScherm/th...

Most cities in North America built in the XX century were deliberately built with the car in mind. The suburb doesn't make sense without cars, unless of course you have a very good local train network (which in the USA is almost close to impossible to find nowadays). You can see the opposite issue in Europe, too: very old cities are a nightmare to travel in a car, my city has existed for >2000 years and because of that the city centre has a lot of roads that only make sense if you expect most people to walk or at most ride a horse

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