
How Utrecht Became a Paradise for Cyclists - lnguyen
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/07/bicycle-friendly-city-utrecht-streetfilms-bike-lanes/593320/?
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l4u532
Having lived in Copenhagen I can only attest the surge in living quality when
a city adopts a no-compromise bicycle strategy. Back in car-loving Munich I
feel set back a century. With city council members putting forward arguments
like that bike lanes will “destroy retail businesses”. It’s frustrating.

Ps: here’s the short film the article talks about. Shows the fantastic
transformation of Utrecht.
[https://youtu.be/Boi0XEm9-4E](https://youtu.be/Boi0XEm9-4E)

~~~
IshKebab
Yeah the business destruction argument is the most perplexing. It's like shop
owners thing that people prefer shopping on noisy dirty streets to quiet
pedestrian areas. I don't know how you can come to that conclusion.

~~~
Tijdreiziger
Besides, on a bicycle it's easier to stop and park your bike if you see an
interesting shop. When driving there is much more friction as you need to find
a parking spot and park there first.

~~~
abdullahkhalids
The difference between bikes and cars is in the mean/variance of time to park.

For a bike it takes about 1 minute or more to stop, detach/unlock your lock
from the frame and lock your bike to a bike stand, then take off your helmet.
You reverse this when you get back on the bike. The variance is also not that
high on this number.

For a car, the mean time varies greatly from location to location and the
variance is much higher. You might get stuck several minutes searching or
waiting for a parking spot or you might get a spot immediately and be walking
to the shop in under 15 seconds.

These differences have some effect on how much people want to bike/drive. I
think one way of encouraging biking more would be to work on lock designs and
bike stand design so it takes less time to park your bike.

~~~
wh0knows
It sounds like you're describing a much different biking culture than is the
one in the Netherlands. For a minor stop here it will take less than 10
seconds to park a bike. Usually there's bike parking or a stand on the street
right in front of the shop, no need to look for anything, nobody wears helmets
when biking in the Netherlands, and if you're not parking for a long time you
just lock the back wheel by pulling out the key- no chain involved at all. So
what this looks like in practice is hopping off your bike right in front of
the shop/cafe/bar/restaurant and pulling out the key- that's it.

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klaaz0r
Living in Utrecht I can say: it's amazing, going to work? 10 minutes, going to
the station? 10 minutes. Basically anything is within maximum 20 minutes
cycling distance. In the rare occasion I do take the car, the city is still
surprisingly accessible.

The only thing I hope they will change in the future is removing motorised
vehicles from the bicycle lanes, scooters/e-bikes are just too fast and break
the whole flow of traffic. Seeing that scooters are already banned from the
cycling lanes in Amsterdam I think it will happen soon in Utrecht.

~~~
closeparen
I ride my e-bike at 15-20mph. The assist stops at 20 and I only ever exceed it
downhill. Are there really not a ton of athletic cyclists going faster than
this under their own power? Around here, serious riders would find that
laughably slow.

I find the electric assist is not so much about going faster as making
transportation into a non-event and avoiding exertion.

~~~
owenversteeg
Ah, I found the American...

Here in the Netherlands the bike paths are almost entirely occupied by people
old and young biking on cheap bikes as a form of transportation, unlike in
America where biking is dominated by 30-55 year old men on $1000+ bikes
wearing criminally tight pants, sunglasses, and aerodynamic helmets. Nearly
nobody is going 32km/hr on the bike path in the Netherlands, yes. 25km/hr,
sure, there are a few (pizza delivery guys on e-bikes and scooters) but most
people are not going this fast.

On the bike path inside cities you'll mostly see people going 16-10 km/h. You
won't see a helmet on anyone except a confused tourist or the police. You'll
also see grandmas, children, and just about everyone on a bike. Many of these
bikes would horrify an American bike enthusiast with their copious rust and
"deferred maintenance" to put it lightly, but they serve millions of people
just fine with few accidents.

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A_No_Name_Mouse
I live in Utrecht. During peak hours there are so many bikes on the street
that small traffic jams form near traffic lights. I cannot imagine the
disaster if all these people would have taken their car instead. It simply
wouldn't fit.

I also love the fact that in most parts you could still take your car. But
most people don't, as taking the bike is the faster and more convenient
option.

~~~
KeAShizuku
Dutch cities were not made for cars. Cars are the guests. Thats the difference
between the US and the Netherlands: by the time Dutch people started to buy
cars in the 1960s cycling had been a popular means of transportation for half
a century.

~~~
AlecSchueler
That's actually not accurate. The Dutch were as car mad as anywhere between
1950 and the 1970s.

The cycling culture that developed subsequently was hard fought for by
activist groups throughout the late 60s and 70s, before being implemented
across the country by various city councils in the 1980s and then developed
further with national level infrastructural improvements in the 1990s.

There's lots of good documentaries on YouTube about the change, highly
recommended if you're interested in urban planning or in the possibilities for
introducing cycling infrastructure.

In Utrecht one can see many roads which have multiple cycle lanes and
pedestrianised parks along the middle. These roads were originally developed
as 4 lane highways for automobiles before modernisation.

~~~
dep_b
It's still true people were using a lot of bicycles even when there were a lot
of cars in city centers. They were just more prone to get an accident with a
car as cars were allowed to drive faster and basically could come everywhere.

We got the bicycle amenities not because we wanted to stimulate people using
them but because too many people (especially kids) died riding them.

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kbouck
I've commuted by bike in both San Francisco and Amsterdam. In Amsterdam it's a
lovely (and safe) experience, whereas in San Fransisco it was positively
hazardous. The key difference being the thoughtful lane designs in The
Netherlands where you have dedicated bike lanes physically separated from the
car traffic. In San Francisco you are often mixed with or adjacent to car
traffic or parked cars - leaving you susceptible to parked car doors suddenly
opening, or being caught in a moving car's blind spot.

~~~
pul
> leaving you susceptible to parked car doors suddenly opening

Dutch driving instructors teach 'the Dutch reach'. You get into the habit of
opening the car door with your left hand, so you'll automatically look for
cyclists that may be passing by.

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Fronzie
I've always lived in the Netherlands, but I've never seen anyone opening a
door that way. We do, however, look in the rearview mirrors before opening the
door.

~~~
pul
I too live in the Netherlands and always do this. Guess it's not as common as
I thought then.

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dreamcompiler
I love Utrecht. It's a college town with the cultural and intellectual vibe
that always engenders. It's a very modern town but you can turn a corner and
walk half a block and suddenly it feels as though you just took a time machine
to the 16th century. Best of all worlds.

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lifeisstillgood
I cycle commuted in London in the late 90s and 2000's and we pushed then for
two items - to be seen by other road users as real road users (ie not
something just to be brushed aside) and for dedicated cycle lanes that would
improve safety.

I started cycle commuting again about a year ago (Boris Bikes) and guess what
we have dedicated "cycle superhighways"

And the problem it turns out is _us_ cyclists

There is always a traffic jam on the dedicated pathway - the blue cycle lane.
And so some (usually but not always male) cyclists jump on and off the lane
and engage in dangerous overtaking manoeuvres.

Worst, is that the blue lane runs along normal roads and so has traffic lights
at the same positions - and that I guess 25% of cyclists ignore completely a
red light and plough through - and twice I have seen these idiots hit
pedestrians and two weeks ago came across the fire brigade washing the blood
away

We campaigned and rode to be taken as real roads users - and when we got real
roads with real traffic light we ignore the real rules of the road

Cyclists need to have number plates and fines for breaching traffic laws.

sorry.

~~~
estsauver
I wonder why that is, I see very, very little of that mentality in the
Netherlands.

There's also a very interesting phenomena where right now in London the people
who bike are "Cyclists" where they're much more likely to be enthusiasts,
people who want to really go fast, people who have Bicycling as part of their
identity. In the Netherlands, it's just a way of getting around and not an
ideology.

The other contributing factor could be size. London is so much bigger than
most Dutch cities. If you're commuting across London, speed probably matters
much more to you.

~~~
thekid314
Yeah, many of the cyclists in London wear fancy clothes and ride fast bikes.
It's an identity thing.

There is an sad/interesting gender gap too because many of the cycle commuters
are male. There should be a real push by companies to make cycling more female
friendly. That means having easy changing rooms/showers at work and giving
women a little more time to get ready in the morning.

I love biking in London, going fast to the Aldi and carrying my groceries back
on the special bike lanes, but there are still issues to resolve.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
The gender issue is real - I would put the ratio of female to male cyclists on
the commute at about the same as in the software teams at work. Perhaps there
is a similar thing going on

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mmcnl
Though this article is true, there's nothing exceptional about the Utrecht
bicycle infrastructure. The great thing is that the bicycle infrastructure
throughout the entirety of The Netherlands is of extremely high quality. In
the suburbs the bicycle experience is actually much more pleasant than in
cities: the lanes are wide, there hardly is any congestion and you can really
go anywhere on bicycle lanes without being forced to do some weird manouvering
(which is very common outside of The Netherlands). Utrecht is just a good
example of the incredible bicycle infrastructure in The Netherlands as a
whole.

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dep_b
It can be a bit overwhelming during rush hour though, two way bicycle traffic
of multiple cycles next to each other going at different speeds. Makes
crossing Vredenburg almost like a real life game of Frogger on foot.

~~~
estsauver
I think the other thing that's not mentioned much is that most Dutch cities
are commuting at quite low speeds. I'm lucky to average 10mi/hr.

There's a huge change in the energy of a crash as you start going faster. A 15
mi/hr biker has 2.25x the energy of a 10mi/hr biker and so if you crash it's
so much worse.

At 9mi/hr, you're pretty much always walking away from the crash.

~~~
jacquesm
The bigger factors here beyond raw speed are age and weight of the rider. Kids
can have the most crazy falls at any speed and bounce right up whereas an
elderly or overweight person falling from a stand-still position can get
severely injured. Hip and shoulder fractures are (unfortunately) quite common
in octogenarians that still cycle.

~~~
consp
I'm quite big and somewhat overweight but taking Judo lessons as a kid saved
my ass many times falling (off my bike). I would recommend it to everyone to
learn to fall.

The electric bike craze for elderly people isn't helping as they now travel
about twice as fast as they used to.

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estsauver
I actually fell yesterday while trying to unclip my bike peddles, as a case in
point.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I never fall when unclipping! Can't happen. But I ride a recumbent trike.

~~~
jacquesm
I rode a recumbent, not a trike. I still have half an Ikea in my right leg due
to the accident, and I also _almost_ flipped a recumbent trike so please be
careful, they are not as stable as they seem.

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thomasfl
This documentary about Utrecth is p0rn for bike lovers
[https://vimeo.com/344373585](https://vimeo.com/344373585)

~~~
ralfd
This is literally the video the article is about.

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shusson
> have brought on much-larger windfall of social benefit

One of the things I love about Amsterdam is how the city changes in the
evening. It gets quieter because there are less cars. People can go to pubs
without driving (cycling under the influence is illegal but tolerated). And
almost the entire city is accessible within 20 minutes.

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stunt
Designing cities for car is a huge mistake!

~~~
LeonM
Utrecht officially became a city in the year 1122, the oldest known records
about Utrecht is that it was a roman outpost since 50ad. So I don't think it
was designed for cars ;-)

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davedx
Yep! U-traject, the “bridge over the river U”. Utrecht is great

~~~
exceptione
No, the river is the Rhine. _Traiectum_ is the noun for _transire_ (verb),
going through. It was a place where you could cross the river, hence a
strategic place to build a _castellum_ , as the Rhine was used as a natural
border _(limes)_ for the Roman Empire.

The u stands for _uut_ (old Dutch), meaning downstream. Although I am not 100%
sure if U doesn't simply stand for _uit_ , which means 'from'.

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fuball63
I love cycling, but I live in a very hilly environment, which is why I don't
think it will really take off here, unfortunately.

I always try and think about designs for a "ski lift" for bikes, just as a
thought exercise. Is anything like that being actually made?

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monort
It exists -
[https://youtu.be/zipZ5kwhFfs?t=37](https://youtu.be/zipZ5kwhFfs?t=37)

Nowadays it's easier to just mount an electric motor on your bike.

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pinkfoot
I wonder what the carbon footprint of all the concrete they put down to achive
this is?

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speleding
Dutch bike roads are made of asphalt or bricks, I've seen very few made of
concrete

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ncmncm
At first I thought this was about the much-admired discount art supply store
chain.

But there is a city with that name, that clearly must court cyclists more
ardently than the most devoted retailer of paints and brushes.

