Just back from a week working in Amsterdam (no, not that kind of working! Giving a presentation at an international conference on research into increasing physical activity 🙂 )

As expected, loads of cycling in Amsterdam (we were all given a bike at the conference to use to get around – fab!). But a few things really struck me about how different it was from the UK. All ‘users’ have their own, properly separated routes – paths for pedestrians, cycle tracks for bikes, roads for cars and trams. So walkers, cyclists and cars don’t mix. All the bikes are ‘utility’ cycles – designed to carry loads front and back (and perfect for giving people backies home from the pub!), everyone just wears normal clothes and no helmets (literally everyone, I saw no cycling kit at all), there’s not many cycle shops – things like panniers are just sold in normal bag shops, and cyclists have priority at all junctions over cars, and even pedestrians.

So in the end, all normal life is conducted by bike – work, shopping, nights out. Great for health (the dutch levels of physical activity are twice as high as in the UK), noticable lack of air and noise pollution, and remarkably easy and efficient. But it did make me realise that you couldn’t have that many cyclists wizzing around if they shared routes with either pedestrians or cars, and that you really need bikes which are designed for functional utility.

Would the same ever be achieved in the UK?

no

Will the UK ever be like this?

It’s worth noting that not all Dutch cycle facilities are segregated (29,000 km of separate paths and 7,000km of on-road cycle lanes) but cyclists are still treated with respect on the shared routes.

[video]http://vimeo.com/29401217[/video]

Would the same ever be achieved in the UK?

It would be great but it will never happen. The car is king.

I doubt it unfortunately. I live in the south of the Nederlands and it is fantastic to ride here, however as soon as you cross the border into Germany it is like being back in the UK, cyclists seem to be fair game. It would take a massive change of culture/mindset for all Brits to embrace and I just don’t think it would happen.

Last time I was in Amsterdam I was amazed at the the multi-storey bikepark I saw, it must have have had tens of thousands of bikes in it.

The drugs policy could be extended to the UK too. Now THAT would be a revelation.

kcr – oops, sorry, didn’t realise we’d covered this a couple of weeks ago 😳

I guess having experienced it ‘in person’ and for work rather than a holiday, I can’t see why changing to a cycling rather than a car culture could be construed as ‘giving something up’. It was far easier, quicker, and more enjoyable than car travel (even in the rain – most impressed by the Dutch ability to cycle whilst holding an umbrella over their heads!)

I don’t think that the change came overnight, I think it took decades to get to this stage so it’s not inconceivable for the same thing to happen in the UK, just don’t expect it to happen overnight.

I think one thing that should be allowed is to ride on the pavements. In Norway this is allowed with no conflict (or at least none I have seen) between cyclists and pedestrians. Obviously the cycling is generally done at not much more than walking pace but this is more than enough for most journeys in the city. Anyone wanting to cycle faster rides on the roads.

The difference is that in the UK those who choose not to drive everywhere are considered to be second class citizens. Just remember that our Saint from Grantham said that “any man in his 30s still travelling on public transport is a failure”, its very hard to get away from that kind of belief system.

Cycles are not segregated everywhere in Amsterdam – but they do have priority over cars everywhere

You’re not going too badly, the Uk is about 10 years ahead of where we are in Australia. Car most definitely is king and especially so if you drive V8 Monaro

5% of all journeys in Edinburgh by bike now – rapidly growing

Given the current state of the economy, I can’t see a government making the kind of level of investment in infrastructure changes to allow the UK to get anywhere close to the Netherlands model.

I live near Darlington where the council have done loads to promote cycling as a primary means of transport with new off road cycle routes, marked cycle lanes etc but the locals by and large seem disinterested.

The September ‘Critical Mass’ ride in Darlington attracted 8 riders which is pretty funny (and no I wasn’t one of them as I see the whole critical mass thing as an irritation that just gets the public’s back up).

5% of all journeys in Edinburgh by bike now – rapidly growing

Yep, whenever I go into one of the nice* cities theres a lot more bikes.

*Insert adjective that differentiates between London, Reading, Edinbrough, and leaves out Middlesborugh.

I love the 3 spellings of burgh in one statement.

Amsterdam is inspirational when it comes to public transport and bikes, it would be very difficult to convert a huge city like london into a similar system but id support any movement!

Will we ever get this ? I hope so, but I doubt it. 🙁

As much as I’d love it to happen here, it never will, no matter the advocacy of Copenhagen Cycle Chic and the like.

Not just because of an impossible shift in cultural attitudes among drivers but also the scales involved – London, Birmingham, Manchester are far bigger, faster, busier, uglier cities than Amsterdam and Copenhagen and will never have a comparable infrastructure. I’m sure there are also differences in where people live and work in those cities – I suspect a greater proportion of workers live within the city centre and can cycle to work. Not so in London.

And there’d also have to be a cultural shift among cyclists. Here it seems to be an excuse to Buy More Stuff, whether that’s Special Clothing for cycle-commuting or Special Equipment for riding off-road. We seem to be more materialistic here – cycling has an element of showing off status or at least identity. I very rarely see people riding anonymous utility bikes, despite their practicality. For the Dutch and Danes living standards are is about having a cleaner city, more time with friends and family, for us it’s a bigger car or flashier bike.

We seem to be more materialistic here

Another thing to blame Thatcher for 😉

I would love to see the UK like that but it’ll never happen in my lifetime, the level of change required is just too great, it needs to be implemented at a planning level and politicians will never do anything that would make the car loving UK public vote against them.

The way we get around is just completely broken. I don’t usually commute by car but had to drive a hire car back from a conference last week into the centre of Edinburgh at evening rush hour. It took me one hour to travel a few miles, and I was going the less busy way. It occured to me that the thousands of cars going the other way must do this every day, and sit for hours in traffic every week, one person in a car, going nowhere slowly. Something is completely wrong with the world when this is ‘normal’.

I’m always pleased when I visit Oxford and this is the first thing you see outside the station:

The way we get around is just completely broken. I don’t usually commute by car but had to drive a hire car back from a conference last week into the centre of Edinburgh at evening rush hour. It took me one hour to travel a few miles, and I was going the less busy way. It occured to me that the thousands of cars going the other way must do this every day, and sit for hours in traffic every week, one person in a car, going nowhere slowly. Something is completely wrong with the world when this is ‘normal’.

Yup it’s mental isn’t it. It’s no wonder lots of people seem to be generally a bit stressed and angry when the average person spends an hour or two each day doing that.

I dont think it will ever happen. I am dutch and have been living in the uk since 1997. In holland the bike is transport, everyone has one. No special clothes and everyone poodles about. Here cycling id too complicated and involves getting too much ‘stuff’. Only “sport” cyclists wear helmets and special clothes in Holland.

Most bikes are old and have suffered years of abuse, creaking and wobbling all over the place. We used to go swimming in primary school and the whole class used their bike 8O….I dont think it would pass risk assessment here somehow.

it is a different attitude, and many, many cycle paths. My friends 90 year old grandad still gets around on his bike!

And the dutch carry just about everything on their bikes, shopping on handle bars, unbrella in one hand, mate on the back.

Feeling home sich now… 😉

Apart from all the bike thefts there, its a pain! the amount of times i’d come back looking for my bike and ended up having to walk…

Cycle campaigner David Hembrow’s blog has some really interesting background on how the Dutch model of cycling came into being. He points out that a lot of the infrastructure over there is relatively new, and was built after changes to transport policy, which resulted from a populist campaign aimed at reducing the number of child deaths on roads.

http://hembrow.blogspot.com/2011/01/stop-child-murder.html

He’s got some good points in answer to those who say “it’s too expensive” as well:

http://hembrow.blogspot.com/2010/06/cycle-paths-are-too-expensive.html

As to why we’re not doing it in the UK: it seems to be a mix of car-centric planning (most recently highlighted by the Blackfriars Bridge saga), people assuming they can’t influence policy, general negativity towards cycle paths (a lot of them are next to useless, but only due to poor planning and investment), and campaigners setting their sights fairly low, or concentrating on stuff like “vehicular cycling” (which is fine up to a point, but unlikely to increase the numbers of cyclists significantly).

Could it change? We’ve just had the Cycling City project in Bristol, which despite being widely criticised did increase the number of people travelling by bike significantly. It cost about £20 million, which is 2/3 mile of new motorway.

Imagine if there was a requirement that every new or resurfaced road had to have a segregated cycle lane incorporated into the design. It would cost virtually nothing extra and within 20 years we’d be where the Dutch are now.

It cost about £20 million, which is 2/3 mile of new motorway.

This brings it home really doesn’t it! The cost is nothing compared to building roads.

here in Edinburgh we do have a small development on the way which is good: http://www.scotsman.com/edinburgh-evening-news/edinburgh/major_new_500_000_cycle_route_to_be_wheeled_out_through_city_1_1852897

Feeling home sich now…

Still, at least we have some hills over here. 😛

Are people sure that it isn’t also something to do with car insurance in Holland – someone told me that in an accident with a cycle is is automatically x% the cars fault, where x might be a number somewhere around 50.

I did a sponsored bike ride round Holland and cars would slow right down for you to cross when you were actually quite a way away from the cycle path junction with the road. It was actually over the top in my opinion.

Turnerguy, you mean Strict Liability.

http://www.copenhagenize.com/2010/02/strict-liability.html

I was told they have something similar in France where in an accident between a car and a cyclist or pedestrian the car is automatically considered to be at fault unless they can prove otherwise. Can you imagine how popular any MP would be who tabled that motion!

The way we get around is just completely broken. I don’t usually commute by car but had to drive a hire car back from a conference last week into the centre of Edinburgh at evening rush hour. It took me one hour to travel a few miles, and I was going the less busy way. It occured to me that the thousands of cars going the other way must do this every day, and sit for hours in traffic every week, one person in a car, going nowhere slowly. Something is completely wrong with the world when this is ‘normal’.

Totally, but it depends whose eyes you’re seeing it through.

Seen through the eyes of the people who profit from this situation (people with fuel to sell for example), its a terrific state of affairs, made all the better by the the fact legislation and so much of popular culture wants to remove obstacles to prolonging it. Witness the howls of outrage at how expensive insurance companies make it for young people to begin a ‘drive everywhere’ habit, as if it were a human right.

Until now, the cheap wholesale price and rising production level of crude oil have combined to make most people feel more or less OK about the situation – oil companies have made profits, drivers have benefited from cheap petrol and urban areas have been developed with the needs of the driver placed above all others.

When you look at what we have (certainly compared to what the Dutch enjoy) its pretty depressing, but the optimist in me is hopeful that with cycling enjoying a boom in popularity – walking my son to school yesterday morning, I noted that we were seeing quite a few more people getting about by bike on a morning that was less than perfect weather-wise – and fuel getting pretty rapidly more expensive, perhaps we’re on the verge of things changing.

The pessimist in me knows that in the UK it’ll probably be an unsustainable financial burden on the average motorist that tips the balance rather than any kind of enlightened approach to urban planning, but I’ll take anything!

bigjim – trouble is that 1/2 million is being wasted. On road cycle lanes that are just a bit of paint, no reengineering of junctions, cars still allowed to park in the cycle lanes and so on. Greenwash I’m afraid

Can you imagine how popular any MP would be who tabled that motion!

http://www.parliament.uk/edm/2010-12/1393

Surprise surprise not a single Tory on the list of supporters. And our new transport minister is ending the ‘war on motorists’. Marvellous.

2tyred – I agree with you there. I do think that people will continue to drive as much as they do irrespective of fuel price, it has become so ingrained in people, but I would like to be proven wrong. I also get frustrated with people buying economical cars and seeing this as a reason to keep driving around Edinburgh, emissions is one thing, getting cars off the road is another.

jeremy – I got the impression these works were more than the orange cycle lane of death (aka car parks) which are currently on that route and there was going to be more than painting going on.

I had a look at the more detailed plans online and it was the same old same old really from what I saw. There isn’t room to put decent cycle facility on there unless you take away a lane of cars. Its tinkering around the edges.

gorra linky jeremery?

Knew you would say that – I’ll see if I can find it.

I did see more detailed stuff – but this is the outline

http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/downloads/file/2699/consultation_leaflet

Here wwe go

http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/downloads/download/1013/quality_bike_corridor_consultation_drawings

Already plans in place for a similar approach in Bordon based on German and Dutch models

In Holland, everyone cycles, at least some of the time. Old, young, fat, thin, fit, unfit, rich, poor. And that makes a big difference in provision for cycling, and in driver’s expectation/behaviour.

It is, there, simply a way of travelling medium distances. Almost all bikes used are ‘rubbish’ in a sporting sense, but perfect for getting around and leaving somewhere while you are in the shops/bars/work.

But it is a cultural thing and that will not happen here in my lifetime.

I grew up in Holland. It was ace!

I was told they have something similar in France where in an accident between a car and a cyclist or pedestrian the car is automatically considered to be at fault unless they can prove otherwise. Can you imagine how popular any MP would be who tabled that motion!

Nope the car is at fault full stop. It means it’s insurance pays the bill and is no claim bonus goes tit’s up. However, if pedestrian wasn’t where it was meant to there is little he/she can do compensation wise.

Cheers jeremy, doesn’t look as amazing as I had anticipated, more of a fresh coat of paint on whats there perhaps. Just found a google map of serious cycling related accidents in Edinburgh in 2010, (I am one of them, fame at last…) but a lot do seem to be down that area of town and a guy at work has saw 2 cyclists run over in one week near his house there.