Riding with Amsterdamize
May 1st, 2010 | By Fredcaster | Category: Photos & Videos, Travel
Last Sunday I arrived in Amsterdam for business and had the great pleasure of spending time with Marc from amsterdamize.com. He met me at my hotel, we rode to a cafe for some coffee and Dutch apple pie, went to Vondelpark, talked about cycling, and just enjoyed the ride.
You can hear Marc on the next episode of The FredCast. In the meantime, here are Marc’s photos from our ride.
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A great interview with Marc, I especially liked that you were interviewing him in Vondelpark. As you mentioned, it is amazing the number of bicycles moving through the park! A few more random comments to add to Marc’s observations, and perhaps some thoughts on the “darker†side of bikes in Amsterdam:
Firstly, cycling in the Netherlands, and Amsterdam, falls into a number of categories – racing, touring, everyday use. The most visible category is the latter where the bicycle doesn’t so much supplant car usage, although it does to some extent (we picked up our new oven from a shop 5k away using the bike since we don’t have a car), rather it is a substitute for walking or short haul public transportation. It is essentially “pedestrian acceleration”. Very little cycling is for longer trips, witness the few number of bicycles coming and going from Schiphol. The vast majority of workers at this huge airport arrive via public transport, not by bike.
As you noted, almost no one wears a helmet when using their bike for everyday use. A big exception however is people who are on racing bikes, where my experience is that 75% of road bike riders wear a helmet. But then they are typically wearing full kit, travelling at high speeds, etc.
No matter how much you like bicycles and there integration into daily life, you have to admit that at some point piles of rusting bikes locked to every conceivable immovable object, and everywhere else, can be an eyesore. They block sidewalks and doorways, spill onto the street – a real mess. Therefore the city takes aggressive and costly action to tag and remove abandoned bikes, especially around train stations and other busy public areas. A number of very nice parking stations have been built, and the cost for parking is typically free or €.50 per day. Even the largest of these stations, the one you posted the photo of at Central Station, needs to be periodically scoured for abandoned bikes.
When compared with Copenhagen or any city in Germany, the quality of every day bikes is very low (this in not to say they don’t last forever, only that they are simple and functional). This is partly due to the complete absence of hills, making single speed bikes entirely appropriate, but also due to shocking theft rates. I’ve seen nicely equipped trekking bikes in cities across Germany secured with nothing more than a simple wheel lock; don’t try that in Amsterdam. The theft rate gives rise to the interesting phenomena of when a bike is stolen the owner may lament the loss of the expensive lock more than the loss of the bike!
Because the bicycle is king, many riders assume a definite arrogance with regards to other road users – terrorizing pedestrians, running red lights with impunity, failing to obey right of way rules, parking where convenient to them without regards to others, etc. Only last week I saw a guy with two kids in a “bakfiets†(a cargo bike) blow a red light and nearly get creamed by a bus in an express lane. He was on the phone. There are plenty of responsible cyclists but also plenty of irresponsible ones.
Is Amsterdam bicycle heaven? Sure it is, there is no place like it in my experience. The down sides just have to be managed.