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I Bet They Don’t Have A Bike To Work Day …

News   May 21, 2010 at 4:55 pm Josh Cohen

This video of rush hour in Utrecht, Netherlands has been making the rounds on bike blogs. It’s basically the collective wet dream of American bicycle advocates captured on video.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-AbPav5E5M[/youtube]

Roughly 33 percent of all trips in Utrecht are made by bicycle. The Bicycle Master Plan is supposed to bring Seattle’s bicycling percentage up to around 10 percent. Just another two BMP’s and an additional $400 or $500 million in funding, and we’ll be well on our way to a Euro-style bicycle utopia right here at home.




  • mornings

    What about the part where they stop at lights?

  • fount

    so beautiful, but…

    …why doesn't anyone have a helmet on?

  • alexbroner

    My understanding is that it's not mandatory there and that people choose not to.

  • bikesnotcars

    It no secret why Utrecht has such a great surface for biking — check out the tunnel it's building to get the cars and trucks out of cyclist's way: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovengrondse_tunne…

  • Chad

    And nary a flourescent yellow vest in sight…

  • giffy

    Eh, I would rather we spend that kind of money on transit. With our climate, geography, and culture I don't see 33% of people biking around here. Thats great some people like to and we should support that, but its certainly not for me nor the vast majority of people.

  • yes I lived in Europe

    if you want Euro style city, you'd have to do the following:

    1. have real density not 75 percent single family homes. this brings homes closer to downtown and shops allowing lots of mini bike trips …when you live 8 miles from downtown, it's pretty hard to bike to and from work…
    2. change housing codes many buildings in Euroland don't have parking and they allow walkups…my place in paris didn't even have a real kitchen really….we overbuild lots of urban dwelling units.
    3. build a freaking monster system of trains, intercity, in city, below and above ground. in holland they have about 6 layers of trains. we were sitting in delft by the train station at a cafe and we missed the train as that one was so quiet you didn't even hear it. all these trains allow all those people with bikes to…get places you can't get to ona bike thus they don't need cars and the car ownership is about half what it is here.
    5. note that they still have cars all over and don't seem to feel the need to preach against cars.
    6. look at the picture. this right of way is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay broader than ours are, so it allows bike lanes. Seattle has totally skinny rights of way. All traffic is constricted because of that and whereas in Europe they have lots of big avenues and plazas and squares making the density work…as there's lots of open space…if we just fill up every block here with breadloafs is going to rather suck.

  • Rodh

    I don't suppose it's worth noting that Utrecht, like all of Holland, is almost perfectly flat. No peddling up a hill a 3mph then down at 30 like we do here. Some problems are easier to solve, just by virtue of the geography, let alone the massive transportation infrastructure that Europeans have invested in their cities via enormous taxes on energy.

  • LWC

    “don't seem to feel the need to preach against cars”
    You're missing the big difference here: Europe doesn't have the glut of government spending for auto infrastructure, at the expense of all other alternatives. Of course we need to “preach” against cars – our country is run by oil billionaires! (slightly cynical, but mostly true!)

  • datajunkie

    Despite no one wearing helmets, the Netherlands is the safest country in the world to ride a bike. They have the lowest rate of bicycle injuries/fatalities and the highest rate of people who ride bicycles. It has been shown in many studies that the more cyclists there are on the road the lower the rate of bicycle related injuries. Introducing helmet laws can greatly reduce the number of riders at first, though the long term effect on ridership seems debatable.

    If you are unfamiliar with The Great Helmet Debate, here are some links:
    http://www.cyclehelmets.org/
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmet

  • doug in seattle

    It's because helmets have nothing to do with bike safety.

  • http://spifflines.blogspot.com/ John Bailo

    You can keep your sardine can “Euro-style” Utopia…in fact, move there if you like.

    Here's my low-density “Ameri-style” Bike Utopia:

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/47446064@N00/46111…

  • bill b

    hmmm – that was a dedicated bike corridor! i bet they would not have that high of ridership if they had sharrows and narrow bike lanes….

    i would like SDOT to promote not only stats for miles of bike lanes added each year, but miles of sharrows converted to dedicated bike lanes.

    more importantly, we should be aiming for X miles of dedicated bike corridors each year.

  • http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/ Pete

    Look, all white people too. Seattle's liberal wet dream.

    http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/

  • facts are a bitch

    bike master plan touted by mcginn and the bike folks calls for an additional ten miles of bike lanes in the next year.