Crap Groningen Cycling Infrastructure #2 – Noorderhaven

Here’s another piece of recently installed crap. It’s the north side of Noorderhaven, which forms part of Groningen’s bizarre inner ring road.

As you can see, there’s plenty of space here – two rows of parked cars! – but no safe space for cycling.

Instead, people cycling are expected to ride between parked and moving motor vehicles, in an advisory painted cycle lane which offers no protection whatsoever.

In a city which claims a 60% modal share for cycling, doesn’t it seem strange that the transport department prioritises the storage of static metal boxes over the safety and convenience of the people using the city’s most popular transport mode?

So there’s space for two lanes of parked cars, but only a narrow painted advisory strip for cycling? This is UK-quality infrastructure in what claims to be one of the world’s top cycling cities. Also, the usable width of the footway is very narrow due to the cars parked on it.

Would you feel happy for your children or your grandparents to cycle here, between the parked cars and the moving traffic?

Nobody should have to cycle this close to large vans, protected only by a white line – especially where there is ample space for a cycleway.

Could there be a good reason for such poor and dangerous infrastructure where there is clearly space for much better?

I just don’t understand why Groningen seems to be building for the 1970s rather than building for the future – or even for the present day.

 

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For those of you interested in such things, this road was reconfigured in August 2015. Previously there were two lanes for motor traffic and nothing at all for cycling. The footways have been widened, but they’re full of parked cars, so there isn’t actually any more space to walk in. The council has essentially created an extra row of parking spaces – strange decision for a “fietsstad”, no?

 

Groningen does not have a 60% modal share for cycling

I’m not sure why, but it annoys me that a 60%+ modal share for Groningen keeps being quoted. Perhaps it’s because I prefer facts to hype?

This figure seems to have been arrived at by conveniently removing walking from the statistics, which means that every other mode’s number can be increased by about 30%.

If you read that whole Twitter thread, you’ll note that the local government mouthpiece (whose mission is to praise everything that the council does around cycling, whether it be good, bad, irrelevant or an insult to our intelligence) doesn’t even know the modal share for walking – although they’re happy to make a guess at “1 or 2 percent”, which is laughably low for a city like Groningen, which has a city centre filled with residences, and lots of local shopping areas in the suburbs.

I couldn’t find any modal share stats for walking in Groningen, but a recent Dutch government report gives a 25% utility (i.e. not recreation) walking share for Utrecht, and a 30% share for Rotterdam, Den Haag and Amsterdam (PDF here, see page 20). Why would Groningen’s walking share (and it’s a very walkable city) be so much lower than other Dutch cities? At “1 or 2 percent” the walking share in Groningen would be lower than Detroit.

This trick of erasing walking is the same one that the Fietsersbond used a few years ago to inflate the cycling figures for Amsterdam.

The other, more common sleight of hand which city cheerleaders use in order to quote an impressive-sounding number is to present the commuting share as the overall share. (The modal share for cycling at rush hour is usually much higher – more on this here and here.) Interestingly enough, the same Dutch government report that I linked to above gives Groningen a 60% commuting share for cycling – which is believable, and possibly also a source of misinterpreted figures, but is not the same thing as the overall share.

Anyway, most statistics I’ve seen which do include walking as part of the transport mix put cycling in Groningen at nearer 40% (see the spreadsheet linked from here and this PDF, for example). This is still a hefty mode share, and a number which most cities around the world can currently only dream of achieving.

Measuring transport is very complicated, of course – do we measure by distance, or by time, or by trips? What if a journey involves multiple modes? How do we collect and measure this data? As you can imagine, it’s pretty involved, and it can be tricky to compare stats between cities which may be using different methods. But choosing to leave out walking – or to only give the commuting figures – doesn’t give an honest representation of the truth, and only makes the figures harder to compare between cities.

I’m not trying to do Groningen down here (I moved here, after all!) and it does indeed have a large amount of cycling. But the local authorities seem to have been resting on their laurels for many years now, with cycling numbers clearly boosted by the huge student population, and it feels like PR has been chosen over investment in infrastructure. While there is some good new infra, there are some downright dangerous designs too, and it seems strange that even a city which claims such an amazingly high cycling share often finds it difficult to prioritise this key transport mode, or even to maintain its existing infrastructure.

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That last link, by the way, points to Mark Wagenbuur’s 2016 post about Groningen, which I’ve just re-read, and have realised that it’s basically a perfect summary of everything I wanted to write about Groningen (although I’m rather fond of the simultaneous green, but I agree with Mark that the signal phasing isn’t always done well here).

Good Groningen Cycling Infrastructure #1 – Sontweg

Well it wouldn’t really be fair to tell you about the bad bits of Groningen cycling infra without mentioning some of the good bits, would it?

And there really are plenty of good bits. I love living here – in comparison to Berlin and London, Groningen is a dream to cycle in.

As a fairly new arrival here, I find that using the history feature on Google’s mapping software provides an interesting glimpse into the city’s recent past. It’s possible to see how things change over time – some for the better, and some for the worse.

Mostly, however, it’s for the better – the general trajectory in the Netherlands seems to be upwards.

And that’s certainly the case on Sontweg, a fairly large road that heads east out of the city (or west into the city), running past one of those trading parks full of big-box stores like Ikea.

Over the past decade, Sontweg has been through some major changes. Once it was a fairly minor route around the edge of a peninsula, but in the past decade two new bridges have been built*, joining Sontweg up with roads to the north and the east.

Now, we could talk about the wisdom (or lack thereof) of creating new routes for motoring, but one thing I can’t complain about is the cycling infrastructure that’s been built as part of these road upgrades.

Here’s Sontweg just three years ago, in May 2014:

Of course, the unprotected cycle lane is blocked. (Source: Google Maps)

Pretty gruesome, eh? Despite all that space, nothing but cruddy old unprotected cycle lanes, despite this being a route for industrial traffic and also the main route into town for the fire brigade’s emergency vehicles.

Anyway, let’s look at the same scene in July 2016:

Ah, look at those beautiful ribbons of red asphalt! (Source: Google Maps)

So as you can see, there’s been quite an upgrade.

The main road widening has added a bus lane on each side, and there’s also an intermittent turning lane / crossing island in the middle.

But for me the most important addition is the cycleways, one on each side, surfaced with smooth red asphalt, and set back from the road.

This is how I roll… to Ikea, anyway.

And this is how I roll back again afterwards. It’s an exciting life.

It’s a fine piece of cycling infrastructure. Top marks to whoever was behind this scheme.

My only criticisms (I can’t even go one post, can I?) are that some of the junction mouths on the south-western side should be tightened up, and that the cycleway could be wider. It’s comfortable, but when you’re riding side-by-side with someone, and a third person wants to overtake, it can be a little tight. And there’s plenty of space for a wider cycleway too – it’s strange that it’s not wider, considering Groningen’s claimed modal share you’d expect them to be building for the future.

First world problems, eh! Anyway, I think that a cycling campaigner’s default position should be to always want more space. After years of being squeezed to the sides, cycling needs people who demand more space.

So, there we are – good progress, from bad infrastructure to excellent.

 

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* One of those two new bridges is the one which helped Groningen to lose out on the Cycle City award in 2011, though of course in the UK it would be winning prizes left right and centre. See David Hembrow’s blog posts about it here and here.

For more photos of good cycling infrastructure, I can recommend the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain’s Good Cycling Facility of the Week.

Crap Groningen Cycling Infrastructure #1 – Damsterplein

Wow, it’s been quite a while since my last post, hasn’t it? Sorry about that. I’ve missed you too.

In my defence, I’ve been busy adjusting to life in Groningen in the Netherlands – yes, I’ve moved to one of those places which people like to go on and on about because it’s great for cycling.

And Groningen really is great for cycling – mostly.

While the city and surrounding areas are generally very good or even excellent for cycling, there are many baffling gaps, neglected corners, and dangerous designs.

So after spending years praising many good bits of infrastructure in this country, I think I’ve earned the right to complain about some of the bad bits, the exceptions to the cycling wonderland that is the Netherlands.

So let’s start with Damsterplein, shall we?

Damsterplein: I think that’s Dutch for “disappointment”

I first experienced Damsterplein completely by accident, riding around the city when we first arrived, in the spirit of happy exploration. I was stunned to find such a large, busy road without any good cycling infrastructure – only intermittent, legal-to-drive-in “advisory” cycle lanes, which disappear at bus stops so that buses can pull in.

Since that first visit I’ve avoided using the road as much as possible. I cycled through there recently, to take photos for this blog post, now in the spirit of brave investigation. And yet although I’ve only ridden here maybe half a dozen times, I’ve had an unpleasant experience every single time, usually caused by having to pull out into a stream of moving motor traffic in order to overtake a bus legitimately waiting at a bus stop, or a car parked in the cycle lane.

Every. Single. Time. Now you can see why I avoid riding there.

So here’s a few pictures, some which I took myself, and some from Google Streetview to prove that I’m not cherry-picking rare situations. Avid cycling blog readers may recognise Damsterplein, as David Hembrow has mentioned it in a couple of blog posts.

Luckily for this guy, the Streetview car was hanging back (Source: Google Maps)

Does this look like an “8 to 80, all-abilities” cycling environment to you? (Source: Google Maps)

It’ll be fine, he’s just nipping in to the shop for a few minutes. Don’t worry about the bus that’s about to overtake you. (Source: Google Maps)

Motor vehicles parked three-wide, one lane of moving motor vehicles, and no actual space for cycling here on the southern side of Damsterplein.

After I took this photo, the driver of the car behind me decided to overtake as I was passing this parked car. I will not cycle here again.

And if you thought the cycling “infrastructure” here looked crap, then the footways aren’t much better. All the cars in the photos above which appear to be parked on the footway are in fact parked legally. Here’s an unusually car-free section:

The dark line marks the official edge of the parking space, leaving just a metre or so for walking – and that’s assuming that the vehicle is parked perfectly within the space. (Source: Google Maps)

This arrangement is pretty crap for walking. It’s not much fun finding a van mounting the kerb toward you, and as a recent case in the UK tragically showed, having motor vehicles mounting the footway can have lethal consequences. Could a young child be expected to know that the black line denotes a parking space into which a motor vehicle may be driven?

This footway parking design also means that cars and vans must be driven across the cycle lane in order to access the parking spaces, which creates delay and danger for people cycling – and this also means that the cycle lane is now in the door zone.

I also worry that this kind of design for parking essentially legitimises use of the footway for other things (rather like the “shared footway” designs in the UK legitimise pavement cycling). It conditions people into parking on the footway, not just here but in general. It says “don’t worry if there’s no parking space, just stick the van on the footway, it’ll be reet for a bit.”

And all this motor-centric (and anti-cycling and anti-walking) design exists despite there being acres of space here in which to get things right. See how much room for manoeuvre the driver of this car has within the single humongous traffic lane:

Narrow, medieval streets?

A sea of asphalt, about three cars wide, and yet there’s no space for proper cycling infrastructure? I’m calling bullshit on that one.

(Also, how about those tyre marks? Do they suggest safe and careful driving? What you can’t see on this cropped photo are the motor vehicle tyre marks along the cycle lane…)

Cycling backwards through time

Anyway, I was going to end my post there – these “Crap of the Week” posts are meant to be brief – but while looking at old Streetview and aerial photos, I learned a little bit of recent history about the place, and my distaste for the current layout grew deeper: it’s brand new.

Well, almost – the current layout was built between 2008 and 2010 as far as I can tell. Here’s how the street looked 10 years ago:

Here’s the western end (closest to the city centre) in 2007. None of the current square exists, but there is a cycleway on one side of the road. (Source: Google Earth)

And here’s the eastern end. Note that a single-lane road becomes four lanes at the junction. (Source: Google Earth)

So heading west into the city, it’s always been pretty crap – the cycleway suddenly ends at the junction with Oostersingel, and people were (and still are) expected to cycle around a jumble of parked cars and stopped buses. That hasn’t changed.

But heading east, out of the city, the cycling experience has become so much poorer. In 2007, after crossing the bridge over the canal, a protected cycleway begun almost straight away and took you safely all the way to the huge junction to the east. That’s now gone.

Overall, however, the square that is now Damsterplein looked like a pretty dismal place, essentially a large car park. So the city decided to spruce things up by creating a new public square (a fine idea!) underneath which would be a massive multi-storey subterranean car park.

(Now this car park is interesting in itself. It’s often said that for a city to be cycling-friendly, it must be hostile to driving. And yet Damsterplein isn’t the only brand-new underground car park in Groningen. The city must be spending millions of Euros on these things, which doesn’t seem like the actions of a body that wishes to discourage people from driving into the city.)

So, the whole area – the entire massive space between the buildings – was being redeveloped. Every centimetre would be dug up and replaced. This was a blank canvas, on which millions of Euros would be spent.

Damsterplein in 2008. All of this ground was about to be torn up and replaced. (Source: Google Maps)

Surely with such a large-scale project, the citizens of Groningen could expect some top-notch cycling infrastructure for their money?

For at least two years all vehicle access had been severed – enough time for people to adjust their travel patterns and become accustomed to the idea that Damsterplein wasn’t a through-route for motors. Surely a golden opportunity to introduce a pleasant, motor-free square on the edge of the city centre.

Here’s the same view today:

Damsterplein today. Seven lanes of motor traffic – beautiful. (Source: Google Maps)

Now the seven lanes of motor traffic you see here aren’t as bad as they look, as at this end of Damsterplein there are proper separated cycleways – but the size of this junction suggests that the amount of motor traffic circulating around Damsterplein itself is too large for cycling to be mixed in with it.

Instead of the peaceful motor-free or very-low-traffic square that was surely possible, Damsterplein is instead surrounded by rumbling engines on all sides.

I’m staggered that with all the changes that have gone on here (and since completion there have been retrofitted tweaks for buses and for car park traffic) the designers decided not only to rebuild the old unprotected cycle lane on the city-bound side of Damsterplein, but also to copy that dangerous design across to the outbound side too.

This is a city which claims a 60% modal share for cycling (which isn’t actually true, but we’ll come to that another time) and yet even here, cycling infrastructure is chipped away at and downgraded in favour of motor vehicles.

I could forgive crap infrastructure a little bit when it’s old and in need of replacement. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day. But when something is just a few years old – designed and built with wilful ignorance of all that we know about good cycling infrastructure, and the dangers of mixing heavy motor traffic with cycling – it’s completely unforgivable.

German cycleways and the right to the road

This article was originally published on my German blog, but it may well be of interest to my English readers, so here it is.

It concerns the obsession that many German cycle campaigners have with the law which makes many cycleways mandatory to use. It’s known in German as ‘Benutzungspflicht’ – don’t try to pronounce it – but I’ll refer to it as the ‘Pflicht’ in this English version, because “usage obligation” sounds rather cumbersome.

There’s a lot of noise made about the Pflicht here, a bit like how liability legislation or the effectiveness of vehicular cycling is hyped up out of all proportion in the UK. Campaigners would achieve far better results if they focussed instead on what actually works.

Unfortunately the comments on the German post are largely divided into people who believe the Pflicht is a terrible thing for cycling which must be removed immediately, and people who believe the Pflicht is the only thing which is keeping the German cycleways from being ripped out altogether. Few seem to agree with my suggestion that it’s largely irrelevant and that we should concentrate on demanding great cycling infrastructure.

By the way, I’ve got permission to translate lots of great English-language blog posts, so if you know German (no need to be perfect, we can clean it up before publishing) and have the time and inclination to do some translating, then please do get in touch.

 

The Pflicht (German law making most cycleways mandatory to use) is not what holds back cycling in Germany. Bad cycling infrastructure is the cause of Germany’s lacklustre cycling rate.

Firstly, let me say that I understand why so many hate the Pflicht, and why many also oppose the concept of cycleways. Most cycleways in my city of Berlin are awful, truly dire – narrow, bumpy strips squeezed onto the edge of the footway. That’s not a cycleway, it’s an insult, and it’s unreasonable to compel people to use such rubbish.

But the oft-suggested solution to this problem – to demand an end to cycleways and to gain the right to ride on the carriageway – isn’t really a solution at all. It merely swaps one set of problems for another.

Even for fast, confident cyclists, removing the Pflicht will not suddenly make drivers behave nicely, just as plenty of other rules are ignored by people using any mode of transport. Taking down that round blue sign won’t change attitudes towards cyclists on the road, and it’s not a step towards safer cycling for all.

It’s also very exclusionary: there are huge numbers of people for whom cycling amongst motor vehicles simply can’t work. Children, seniors, people with disabilities – they all have the right to fast, efficient transport too. On-road cycling is clearly not a mass transport solution.

Lifting the compulsory use regulation will not change this busy road into a comfortable or safe cycling environment.

Could the Pflicht even be a good thing?

The two most successful cycling countries on the planet have a Pflicht. That’s right: our neighbours the Netherlands and Denmark both have compulsory-use cycleways.

And nobody in those countries questions it. Why would you want to cycle on the road amongst dangerous, pollution-spewing cars and vans, when you can use smooth, wide cycleways instead? (The key point here being that they’re good quality.)

Conversely, my home country of Great Britain has no Pflicht at all. It never has done.

That’s right, it’s a dream come true for German cycling activists – British cyclists have the legal right to use the road, just as the driver of a car does. Surely Britain must be a cycling paradise! Surely cars are outnumbered by bikes even more than in Dutch towns!

Well the answer is no, not even close.

Cycling in the UK is almost without exception awful. It’s considered to be stressful and dangerous, something that only a fit, healthy and slightly eccentric few actually bother doing. The very concept of cycling has been reduced to an extreme sport that only enthusiasts bother with, and it’s generally spoken of in derisive terms. It’s hard to express how low the status of cycling is in the UK. Cycling for practical reasons almost doesn’t exist in most of the country.

The Netherlands is clearly the success story, and the UK isn’t. So why would we want to copy what the UK has done?

The graph above is based on this graph which showed more countries, but I’ve simplified it to show only the countries I’m familiar with.

The Pflicht clearly correlates with a higher cycling rate and lower death rate. Of course other factors also play a role, but it could be argued that the Pflicht actually increases the cycling rate, and makes cycling safer. That’s not my contention, however the Pflicht clearly doesn’t harm cycling rates.

What the graph definitely does show is that the Pflicht is, at worst, an irrelevance with regards to more and safer cycling. The two lead nations for cycling both have a Pflicht, but as they also have good cycling infrastructure, it’s not an issue. You’ll search long and hard to find many Dutch or Danish cycle campaigners demanding the right to cycle on the road. (They do campaign for improvements to cycleways, however.)

The UK, conversely, has no real cycling infrastructure to speak of, except for painted cycle lanes on the road, which are ubiquitous. The right to cycle on the road hasn’t aided cycling in the UK one bit. Quite the opposite, in fact: once cycling on the road is the design goal, traffic engineers can effectively ignore cycling altogether. It becomes obsolete, a historic footnote.

Yes, everyone – children, the elderly, and everyone in between – has the right to cycle here. Funny, that so few people choose to exercise that right.

And that’s exactly what will happen here too, if Germany’s cycle campaigns get their wish and cycling on the carriageway becomes the norm. Most people who use a bike for transport simply don’t want to cycle amongst motor traffic (most Germans choose to use even very poor quality cycleways rather than ride amongst motor traffic).

Cycling is never made more pleasant, safer or more convenient by the addition of motor vehicles. If the only option is to mix with motor traffic, then people will vote with their feet and abandon cycling, as happened in Britain.

The oil and motor industries must be rubbing their hands with glee when they see how so many cycle campaigners are asking for the very thing that will kill cycling off.

Cycling is too good for the carriageway

Cycling is a great mode of transport, especially in cities. It’s clean and fast, it goes directly from starting point to destination, takes just seconds to set off and to park. It’s egalitarian, suitable for people of all types, ages and abilities. It presents very little danger to the user, and compared to motoring it presents very little danger to others.

Cycling is far too important a mode of transport to be mixed in with motoring. Motor vehicles are polluting and dangerous, their queues hold everyone up, and they take ages to manoeuvre and park. How does cycling benefit from being mixed up with all that? Cycling has inherently positive qualities, which are negated by both poor-quality cycleways and by on-road cycling.

Cycling deserves much better than to be mixed up with motor traffic. The queues which are an inherent problem of motor vehicles do nothing to benefit cycling.

Cycling shouldn’t merely be provided for. It solves or alleviates so many problems in cities that it deserves to be prioritised and favoured, to play to its strengths, and to make it the most convenient and obvious choice for those journeys to which it is suited. It needs be treated as a distinct mode of transport, important enough for its own place in the street – not something to be squeezed on to the footway, nor thrown in amongst the motor vehicles.

More cycling benefits everyone (except the oil companies) so journeys by bike should be a top transport priority for the authorities responsible for transport. Even people not cycling benefit from increased cycling, as there’s fewer traffic jams, cleaner air, fewer fatal crashes and less crowding on public transport. Conversely, more driving harms everyone – more pollution, more queues, more crashes, injuries and deaths.

The only proven way to genuinely promote cycling is to campaign for real space for cycling. This means real cycleways – call them cycle-roads if you want – along main roads. Back streets should all be mode-filtered to prevent them being used as through-routes by motor vehicle (bollards and/or one-way restrictions achieve this). This needs network-level planning, not disjointed bits and pieces.

Cycling must be treated as a real, important, and distinct mode of transport. It mustn’t be treated merely as fast walking or slow driving.

Cycling should be a key part of public transport policy. Merely asking for it to be treated like driving – awkwardly thrown into sharing space with cumbersome, dangerous machinery – will only lead to less cycling, as the UK has so clearly demonstrated.

We must follow the leader, look to the Netherlands for the best examples (and keep a critical eye on the poorer stuff). We should talk about cycling like the great mode of transport it really is, and demand that it be treated with the priority it deserves.

If cycling advocates won’t demand the best, who will?

When cycling is treated properly, then all sections of society have access to this fast, healthy and cheap form of transportation.

Infrastructure vs Helmets

Dieser Artikel wurde auch auf Deutsch veröffentlicht, hier.

This article was originally published here on my new German-language blog. It was written in response to the German government’s hateful helmet promotion campaign, but still contains points relevant elsewhere.

The safest country in the world for cycling is the Netherlands. There you’ll also find the widest spectrum of people cycling: from young children (the average age at which children begin to cycle independently is about 8 years old) to elderly people (those over 65 cycle for over 25% of journeys).

So, the Netherlands is the safest country for cycling at any age, yet helmet use is only 0.5% – and it’s likely that the 1-in-200 helmet-wearing cyclists are riding for sport. Cycling safety is clearly something more than wearing a styrofoam hat – and yet the German government’s ministry for transport is gung-ho for helmets.

All ages and physical abilities, cycling without helmets – yet the safest in the world.

Helmets are no answer to dangers on the street. In the UK wearing a helmet when cycling is common, yet cycling there is six times more dangerous than in the Netherlands (and that figure ignores the fact that hardly any children or elderly people cycle in the UK).

If we genuinely want to make cycling safer, more helmets aren’t the solution. They are really a good indicator that the streets aren’t safe. When people don’t feel safe when cycling, they will wear a helmet – and hi-vis vest – with or without advertising.

Cyclists in London, where helmets and hi-vis are the norm, not because of advertising but because people don’t feel that cycling is safe.

Higher helmet use shouldn’t be a goal, it should be seen as a failure of policy, an embarrassing statistic. An increase in helmets is a sign that the government has failed miserably in their duty to provide safe streets.

The real solution is better infrastructure. The government must invest in cycling infrastructure, so that everyone can feel safe and comfortable cycling at any time, without difficulty fear. Helmet promotion campaigns are a way for the government to avoid their responsibilities.

On main roads we need wide, smooth cycleways, with good visibility at junctions, optimised for safety (not the narrow, bumpy cycleways with dangerously-planned junctions which are usual in Germany).

Smooth, wide, clearly-defined: a Dutch cycleway. Well-proven safety.

In residential streets we need filtering, so that driving through those streets as a rat-run is impossible, but residents and visitors still have access.

Filtering turns a rat-run into a quiet street. (Photo: CEoGB)

Long-term planning goals should be to unravel routes (1, 2, 3), to separate cycles and motor vehicles as much as possible. Cycling infrastructure should be a high priority for transport planners and local councils. Because when the conditions are right, cycling will be the easiest and most obvious way for people to travel through the city.

Helmet promotion is just an easy way for the government to absolve themselves of any responsibility for safety, by pushing it onto the people themselves. They’re saying “if you get hurt, you’ve only yourself to blame” – rather than accepting responsibility for their poorly-designed roads.

Cycling in the Netherlands picture post #5: Older people

People who ride bikes in the UK are mostly fit, confident young and middle-aged men. Sure there are outliers of course (such as retired tricyclist blogger Zandranna) but these are exceptions to the rule and do not make up numbers of significance. Cycling in the UK does not offer equal opportunities for all.

These picture posts aim to show how good quality infrastructure means that people of all ages and abilities choose to use a bike for transport and leisure, unlike the UK style of riding on the road with cars and vans, which will mainly appeal to those fit, confident men aged 20-50.

So here I present photos of older people riding bikes. These are scenes which are rare in the UK but are commonplace and unexceptional in the Netherlands. As with my previous picture post, my brief trips to the Netherlands yielded so many photos that I had a hard time selecting which ones to use. I dare say you could hang around for a month in most British towns and never find any scenes like these.

The first photo shows a group of people out for a ride together. Note the friend in a mobility scooter further ahead. In the Netherlands, cycle infrastructure is designed to also be suitable for people with disabilities, which means that everyone has very high levels of independence and freedom.

Let’s see your Bikeability achieve that, Franklin fans!

And finally, an old favourite! I like this one a lot because it really does demonstrate how the Dutch infrastructure allows people of all ages and abilities to get around safely and easily. Can you imagine this man having the freedom to ride a bike around your town or village, or in the British countryside?

You can find all the picture posts here.

Cycling in the Netherlands picture post #4: Children

I thought this would be one of the easiest picture posts to choose the photos for, but it turned out that I had so many photos of children riding bikes that it was hard to choose which ones to show.

It’s often said that children are the pit-canaries of our society, and if this is the case then the UK has got a problem. Our pit canary lost its feathers years ago and is now gasping for air.

One of my aims with these Netherlands photo posts is to challenge those who insist that we can achieve mass cycling without infrastructure, by showing scenes that simply wouldn’t exist if the cycle paths weren’t there. I really can’t imagine any of these scenes happening on the UK’s roads!

And of course there’s this old favourite too.

 

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As this post is meant to be uplifting I recommend you ignore the following link, but if you really want to see the UK government’s equivalent vision of children cycling then click here. Just make sure you have a nearby wall handy to bang your head against.

 

Cycling in the Netherlands picture post #3: Animals

Or ‘dogs’ to be more precise. (Although I did see people with cats in cat baskets being taken to the vet, I got no photos of them.)

In the Netherlands, it’s quite common for people to take their dogs with them when riding their bike. Either in a basket, a trailer, or scampering along beside, I’ve never seen such happy dogs as I saw in the Netherlands.

Note that Super-Dad here also has his son in the child seat!

Even the family dog can take part in the school run!

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You can find all the picture posts here.

 

Cycling in the Netherlands picture post #2: Shopping

Time for another picture post! This one shows people going shopping. A rather dull, every day activity really, but one which most people would never dream of using a bike for in the UK. In addition to the general fear of cycling on the roads, sensible bikes with storage aren’t the norm here, there is often no cycle parking, and shopping centres are usually designed with only cars in mind.

Most Dutch people would think this a very boring blog post, as in the Netherlands it’s a common sight to see old women filling panniers with their shopping and riding off, for example. But that’s something you’d never see in the UK, and it shows that shopping by bike is perfectly feasible for people of all ages when you have the right infrastructure.

It’s interesting to see that at supermarkets in the Netherlands the cycle parking area is right beside the entrance, as opposed to the standard UK provision of a few wheel-bender bike racks shamefully hidden round the corner by the bins.

 

I don’t know why the only supermarket in these photos is Albert Heijn — other supermarkets are available in the Netherlands and people cycle to those too! Maybe I should mention Jumbo, C1000 and Plus, just to even out the balance a bit.

 

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You can find all the picture posts here.