I have just received my new membership card to the Dutch Cyclists’ Union, Fietsersbond (see picture) and in the attached letter it is great to read that bicycle use has been growing in the recent years. Which is spectacular, considering that in 2005 already 27% of all trips were by bike and that is more than double of any other country except Denmark (18%).
By the way, on my card, you can read the goals of the Fietsersbond: for safe, fast and fun cycling. I like the fast priority the most: it is certainly the role of a cycling organization to make sure infrastructure is safe, but talking too much about safety can backfire through perceived dangers. And don’t interpret fast cycling as embracing cycling as a sport only (“lycra”), here we talk about that pregnant woman and 80 year old gentleman getting to where they wish fairly quickly. That is “fast”.
In a historical view, these numbers should not be surprising, as between the World Wars, even Manchester had a similar share, while not only some Dutch cities but e.g. the German Hanover had a striking 80% of all trips by bike (page 13 here). But as you can see in the same graph, urban planning focusing almost exclusively on cars after WWII drastically reduced cycle use and few cities realized that this is against their higher priorities.
Widened bike lane in Copenhagen (photo: Daniel Sparing)
The letter from the Fietsersbond mentions related problems, too: even more cyclists mean more congestion on some bike lanes(!) (see a solution for that in the photo from Copenhagen: a “double-width” bike line) and it will be even harder to park your bikes at railway stations.
Think about this latter for a minute. There is already place for thousands of bikes at a regular Dutch railway station, e.g. in Haarlem a 5050 place bike parking has just opened and here is a Groningen one. Apparently this is not enough, there are tens of thousands of people every day in the big Dutch cities who, despite these difficulties, desperately want to cycle to their train station to take a train to another city (where they might have another bike or rent a shared bike).
What a wonderful problem to have.
“What a wonderful problem to have.”
That’s exactly what my boss told me when I started working at the Chicago Department of Transportation in 2007. Our job was to put new bike racks in the “right” places. And that a shortage of parking in a place was a “good problem to have” because it meant that many people were riding their bikes to that place.
When I was in Amsterdam last week, I remarked to a new friend there that I noticed there’s only one bicycle travel speed (aside from a passing speed), and it’s the “Amsterdam speed.” It’s quite fast!