Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Dave Thomas on August 8, 2013 at 4:43pm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBFFrsvgu1Y

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Reboot Oxnard on August 8, 2013 at 9:48pm

• It's really flat. No hills, easy-peasy.
• The weather is ideal. Cool summers, warm winters, all things in moderation.
• It's never far to anything. The cities tend to be population dense yet decentralized.
• The car never really took over. The Netherlands didn't have the money to invest in cars and the infrastructure needed to support them until relatively recently and when they did they found they didn't much like them. Not much in the way of buses for public transit, either: those are just really scary cars.

Bottom line: they have the ideal environment for biking and the culture to support it. Biking is cheaper, faster and often more convenient than a car and they like it that way.

Bicycle Dutch!

There are big differences between biking in the Netherlands and in the US. Fancy bikes and new bikes are looked down on as pretentious, a beat up old single speed bike with reverse pedal brakes and rattling fenders is considered normal and cool. Riding upright and comfortable is the norm. Helmets are very rare and looked down upon as expensive, uncomfortable, unnecessary and dangerous. Lycra is viewed as fetishwear and an affectation. Likewise, toe-clips, carbon fiber and barbs for seats will get you stared at - in an uncomfortable way. Instead of being an expensive hobby for children of the privileged, biking is every day transportation for the masses. There are more bikes than people and the infrastructure to support that. Most cities have 'Divvy-esque' bike programs and they are usually free. Need a bike? Take a bike. Oh, yeah, if you chain your bike to a light pole or anything other than a bike rack, the police will cut it free, confiscate it and you'll pay a hefty fine to get it back. There are rules of the road for bikes and they are enforced. Hard.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Adam Herstein on August 9, 2013 at 3:05am

The Dutch are known for being very practical, and the bicycle is no exception. Surely the miles of safe cycle tracks contributed to the popularity of cycling in the Netherlands.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Tricolor on August 9, 2013 at 10:51am

Tell that to DAF, which still has plenty of assembly in the Netherlands for cars (now owned by Volvo) and trucks (under the PACCAR consortium still using the DAF name).  DAF introduced the variomatic transmission in the 50s, the first (relatively) practical CVT.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Tricolor on August 9, 2013 at 2:31pm

Having your own independent manufacturer to me is pretty significant, particularly in a smaller country and with a record of innovation and survival from the interwar period to the 70s.  So the industry isn't a factor in bicycle use.  There are plenty of particular (to avoid the touchy word 'exceptional') circumstances that affect development in the US and Canada, but car making isn't one of them.

Belgium has a huge small arms industry and they don't shoot one another with the regularity you see in other big producers like the US...

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by SlowCoachOnTheRoad on August 10, 2013 at 1:35am

I think h'1.0 has it pretty much right other than the question of Netherlands' car industry.  Rather, it is a question of the car CULTURE.  I come, as you can tell from my accent, from a European country (UK).  I would say that in general all the countries I have been in in Europe have just that tad less autocentricity than the United States, even though most people very much celebrate ownership of the "family car" (and Europe prides itself on the kind of cool car design that the States had in the 1950s).  There is this sense of pride in auto ownership that one finds all over Europe, and pretty much all over the Third World too, BUT as a type of luxury first, and for some (as here), a necessity.  Some cities have really crazy traffic too - I think of London as a particular example (that is where I am from), Paris as well, and perhaps Italy is an extreme (in Italy motor bike culture is extreme - most days going to work even in the country are like a Milwaukee Harley rider's definition of heaven - and in Italy the motor bikes take the right or left of a long car line and so don't have to suffer the traffic as much - and ironically this came from motor bikers "seizing the road" just as we bikers try to do when we see long lines of cars, so in Italy motor biking is literally faster and more efficient than car driving).  Big European cities make parking as cumbersome and expensive as possible to turn AWAY the traffic.  London, Paris and Rome (and dozens of other European cities) are examples of destinations tourists from Asia and the United States (and Europe) want to visit the most - they have the most historical artifacts reminiscent of the "Old World" and so they attract tourism like nobody's business, and with that, industry and clouds of automotive exhaust.  But they also have more advanced rail systems that can take you anywhere in the country, the more advanced hosteling culture that allows you to walk from town to town through the country and have a cheap clean bed each night, less money to spend on transportation per capita, more effective bus systems in the big cities, and I would venture a slower culture in which walking to shopping rather than taking the "family car" will make it more fun and relaxing - when food is fresh, you are more likely to buy it several times a week at the shops you pass walking from A to B so you'll need your legs, but when it is less fresh, you are more likely to buy it in bulk once a week which means you'll need the car.  Surely Whole Foods exists to capitalize on that reality of an absence of food freshness and so seems so novel a concept over here (and forget inner cities which are food deserts).  Historically, peasants walked to the cities at the dawn of industrialization, the working class walked AND BICYCLED to their factory jobs for survival (no matter how far), and the bourgeoisie walked (AND BICYCLED) through their newly  minted parks on the weekends for recreation.  There is a sense in Europe of having transplanted the modern OVER the existing, cherished, OLD WORLD, and hence a suspicion of technological modernity.   There is a valorization in the States of technological modernity as a means of overcoming the harshness of nature and ITS "Old World" that was first encountered half a millenium ago (the American Revolution meant another symbolic break from Old World culture) - a sort of Borg mentality, but of course this fostered extreme inventiveness in all things technological, cultural, social and political - so there have been huge benefits too (which Europeans want to emulate).  Urban planning ideas pick up on these cultural trends.  Old cities are wary of how cars will destroy their culture and economy, whereas new cities need cars to expand.  But expansion of the frontier has seen its day and everyone knows it.  I think Chicago as a centerpoint of modern architecture and as a big city will breed bike-friendly ideas, as it has already.  You can't have civic pride in a city of belching smoke, so biking becomes more attractive to us the citizens and the City - and ironically enough the City knows that from the example of Victorian factory towns of the 19th Century!  

• ▶ Reply