This morning, Marjolein de Lange, a mobility consultant for cycling, walking, and road safety, and a campaigner at Fietsersbond (the cycling union in Amsterdam), taught us about the history of transportation in Amsterdam.
Amsterdam is about 219 km^2 and has 4,852 inhabitants per km^2. Amsterdam initially encountered challenges because of the necessary separations between living spaces and industrial spaces where people worked. While there was an early biking plan illustrating the time to reach the city center, the traffic planning through much of the 20th century, like many places, focused on making more space for cars.
While car ownership grew with post-war prosperity, the oil crisis, and traffic violence sparked people to start thinking differently.
Cycling improves space, flow, and efficiency. While 30 cars can get through a traffic light in 60 seconds, 50 bikes can get through in 15 seconds. Cycling is healthy for people and the city; it is low tech, and offers low cost mobility. Cycling also helps social safety because people are more likely to help others if they are on a bike than in their car.
How to you precipitate this shift? You make cycling safe for all, make it easy, and make it fast. Start with orgware (getting planners on the same page, organization), hardware (infrastructure), and software (people, education, skills).
The city council really defines the progress here, but despite right or left leaning, the council generally supports biking. This does differ per district, though, and wealthy areas are slow to adopt and thus have many problematic streets.
Amsterdam funds roadwork with money from car parking. Paid parking brings in money, reduces cars, and make space. Parking policy is space policy.
When people got too hot and sleepy to continue to focus, we went out on a bike tour. We saw areas with continuous and raised sidewalks and cycle tracks, which not only reduce the speed for cars turning onto the road, but also indicate that cyclists and pedestrians have priority. We also learned about the recent ban on scooters in the bike lane (with some exceptions), and that for the first eight weeks, the policy was not enforced but used as an opportunity to inform.
We continued our ride through different neighborhoods and finished at a lake south of the city. I split off, grabbing a salad and taking it to Vondelpark. I joined up again for a happy hour with some local young professionals – it was interesting to hear about their projects and perspective on implementing improvements in the US. Surprising to me is how central cars are – in their view, when you remove cars you have a ton of space to work with, but you have to account for where those cars will go.
We grabbed dinner at a tasty Indian restaurant, then picked up some wine and enjoyed it in the park with many other people looking for a cool spot.
