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My brief sabbatical to Europe concluded this month with a trip to the Netherlands, mecca for any urbanist-and-safe-streets-advocate.
It was my first time in Utrecht, but it felt so familiar and comfortable, like an old shoe. It was as if the entire city was a community–an extension of everyone’s homes. It imparted the same kind of feeling one gets walking around a park, or an outdoor market, except it was just regular streets full of bicycles, the occasional car or truck, and lots of pedestrians.
An aerial view of Utrecht in the bad old days. Photo: Bicycle Dutch
How does one reconcile old photos such as the one above with today’s Utrecht, marked by gable-roof houses, canals, and bicycles? Surely they can’t be the same place? (But they are).
As an American, the Dutch city of Rotterdam, my next stop, makes that easier to picture. Rotterdam was bombed to smithereens during WWII. Well into the 1970s it was still being rebuilt like an American city–with skyscrapers, large glass-and-steel structures, freeways, and huge roads to maximize car throughput.
It’s still a modern-looking city with wide streets and tall buildings. There’s nothing really “Dutch” or European about the architecture or layout, as I hope the photo of the skyline below makes clear. From this view it could be Pittsburgh or Toledo, minus ribbons of concrete freeways running through and around downtown:
Rotterdam, Wikimedia Commons
And yet Rotterdam, like Utrecht, also feels perfectly comfortable to walk and bike around in. Watching the movement of so many people on bicycles, trams, on foot, and even by car, was a kind of poetry. No horns. No aggression I could see or hear. No gridlock. And there was so much life on the streets.
A typical corner in Rotterdam
The Dutch are still making improvements. Since the last time I was there, ten years ago, Rotterdam has moved away from building bike “lanes” or even protected lanes in the way one normally thinks of them. Rather than carving a fraction of the space from the street from cars and re-purposing it for bikes, they’ve been shaking the street Etch a Sketch and constructing completely separate roads for bikes, with wide separations between the two modes. Bike riders barely have to interact with or take notice of drivers except at intersections. And the intersections are, of course, Dutch–no dangerous slip turns or mixing zones.
Modern Dutch bike lanes are almost completely separate from car space.
My friend Ju-sung, who I stayed with in Rotterdam, has a modern little row house in the suburban neighborhood of Zevenkamp. He and his wife own a car; there are lots of cars there. Facilitating a suburban neighborhood where cars may still be desirable to own and use doesn’t mean making it difficult or even challenging to use transit, ride a bike, or walk. Actually, we walked and took the metro everywhere. All the modes co-exist, but without the constant conflict and danger one experiences trying to walk or bike around an American suburb.
My friend’s neighborhood in suburban Rotterdam. Note there are lots of cars. Image: Google Earth
I went jogging around the neighborhood too and admired the harmony that existed with the many walking trails, wetlands full of ducks and other birds, bicycle lanes, car lanes, and trains.
Because I had a large suitcase, my friends spared me a transfer on the way back and drove me to a mainline train station to connect with my return flight on my last morning there. They discussed driving me all the way to Schiphol airport, but the train was a faster, easier way to go. Ju-sung came with me, all the way to Schiphol departures, to see me off. You can do that for a friend when trains are fast, frequent, and reliable.
An example of one of the many bike-only roads in my friend’s suburb of Rotterdam. Image: Google maps
How do they also have such great transit? Investment of course. But the Dutch also don’t make things so damn complicated. The Rotterdam metro, for example, runs on the surface as soon as it leaves the center district. When on the surface, it has complete pre-emption over other modes. As such, it’s easy to get downtown and trains are fast and frequent. And it doesn’t cost billions per mile to build and maintain.
The Rotterdam metro running on the surface, at a bicycle grade-crossing
All of this may seem like an urbanist fantasy. But it’s real. And it’s achievable everywhere, if leaders want to make it happen, as they’re currently doing in Paris, Brussels, Lyon, and elsewhere.
I broke up my flight home and overnighted in Boston. Walk around downtown Boston, as with the downtowns of all medium to large American cities, and one experiences a place overwhelmed by traffic rumble, giant SUVs, pollution, enormous, multi-lane roads, basically no bike lanes, and non-stop gridlock. It was shocking how intimidating and incredibly unpleasant it was to be back.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Dutch design can be applied everywhere if people can just get the car-must-rule meme out of their heads.
L.A. County needs to embrace physically-protected bikeways, robust traffic calming around schools, and similarly transformative, safety-focused projects
Caltrans, we need complete streets everywhere, including at freeway interchanges (or maybe especially there); Public agencies and academics join forces to develop AV standards; Republicans really want to suspend the gas tax; More