Just watched this new short video about the Danish Bikeability research project.
The Bikeability project is a large mixed methods study involving research both in Denmark and the Netherlands – more here.
and while on the topic of cycling cultures…some material from the recent Building Cycling Cultures event is available here.
I’ve been wanting to the North Sea Cycle route for a while and in August, I took a week to do the bit that skirts Holland and then took other cycle routes through Germany. Our plan was to head up to Copenhagen to visit friends for the weekend. Everything was going well until Lubeck when we discovered that we could not get our bikes on the train to Lolland. (We wanted to hop across to Denmark and continue the cycle but trains and time was against us). So, we ended up on a train direct to Copenhagen. A much longer trip would have been better as a week barely gets you into the rhythm of touring. Nevertheless it was great to experience the Netherlands and Germany by bike.
Time: 6 days
Distance: 680kms ++
Start: Hook of Holland (The Netherlands)
Night 1: Egmond aan Zee, Bergen
Night 2: Holwerd
Night 3: Bad Nieuweschans
Night 4: Berne (Germany)
Night 5: Jork
Night 6: Lubeck
Train to Copenhagen
We were not the only tourers to catch the Harwich to Hook of Holland ferry.
The North Sea Cycle route was well marked once you looked for these signs and worked out that LF1b was east and LF1a was west. (We did a lot more than the 680kms as we went off track quite a bit at first.)
It was interesting to see some of the cycle infrastructures, such as this secure parking and toilet station in Den Haag.
A system of interconnected cycle paths took us through sand dunes….
… along beaches…
… and through farms.
It was used by a wide variety of cyclists; families with small children, roadies, commuters and tourers. Helmet spotting became a game as they were pretty rare.
We did however spot an eclectic range of cycles.
And the route was dotted with local stalls offering home made produce.
Ah, the cycling appetite is a wonderful thing.
I have been (rather slowly) reading Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s deservedly popular book The Spirit Level. Very broadly speaking, Wilkinson and Pickett argue that societies with higher levels of inequality (like Britain) have higher levels of mistrust, fear, and jealousy; which lead to higher levels of various social and health problems. They use a variety of statistics, examples and anecdotes. Including this one: cafes in some European countries (not Britain, apparently!) leave blankets out for people sitting outside the cafe in cold weather, as the cafe owners do not worry that someone will run off with all the blankets. Britain is also one of the few European countries where citizens are constantly recorded on CCTV camera in the name of “security and safety purposes”.
So, I was thinking about cafes and blankets when I kept seeing bicycles in the Netherlands that appeared to be unlocked. Now they weren’t really, they were secured by a built-in lock around the rear wheel, like so -
- but I suspect that in UK cities, this kind of lock would be viewed as little better than no lock at all. I carry a heavy D-lock and a super-heavy chain everywhere, and I rarely stop at a shop without putting both on.
Now of course, there’s plenty of bike theft in the Netherlands – our friends in Arnhem pointed out a bike in their street that had lost its new saddle – but I wondered whether the UK’s bike-locking arms race, like our apparent tendency to appropriate cafe blankets, could be connected to our higher levels of inequality…
I then wondered if it would be worth making more of inequalities between users of different transport modes, as a specific form of inequality embodied and experienced in public space. This isn’t a dimension of inequality that Wilkinson and Pickett focus on, although they do talk about the popularity of SUVs as being linked to high levels of inequality and status anxiety. But how about inequalities between transportation modes as a dimension of inequality itself? How does it connect with other forms of inequality (with my “comparative social policy” hat on), and how does it affect the sociological variables discussed by Wilkinson and Pickett such as mistrust and fear?
Cycling and (in)equality is likely to be discussed at the Lancaster Bicycle Politics workshop where I will be presenting a co-authored paper. Aurora Trujillo will be presenting a paper at Bicycle Politics on “Cyclists as an Oppressed Group” – so more may well follow on this topic in due course…
The blog and website has gone a bit quiet lately, because of Kat and I being on leave. I’ve spent part of my leave time cycling in the Netherlands with my partner James, and I thought that readers of the blog might be interested in some reflections on this. Caveat – it’s all a bit anecdotal (I am not an expert on cycling in the Netherlands, and with this being a holiday I wasn’t taking detailed notes!) and just represents initial thoughts. Also, I’m only going to include some thoughts as otherwise the post will be huge… so there may be more later and quite likely I will change my mind about some things.
This is a map of our route, although one small section from Leuk-Maastricht wrongly appears as a straight line as the GPS track didn’t record correctly. Some of the route’s in Belgium and a very little bit’s in Germany. It’s from Hoek van Holland down to Maastricht, and then back up again to visit friends in Arnhem.
Based on the cycle tour I felt that cycling in the Netherlands is more pleasant, overall, than cycling in the UK. Many things seem different and many seem more similar (car ownership is also high in the Netherlands, for example, and we saw a lot of cars parked and driving on main roads, although minor roads generally seemed very quiet).
Lots has been written about this on the blogosphere and elsewhere, so I just concentrate here on a few thoughts that maybe don’t appear so frequently…
(1) We saw quite a range of cycling-related infrastructure, mostly high quality in terms of surfaces, consistency, etc. There were off-road cycle paths both next to roads and away from roads, as well as quite a lot of on-road cycle lanes. Sometimes the cycle path was actually the pavement, although usually it wasn’t. Other times there was no cycle-specific infrastructure, although there might be home zones and traffic calming. We also saw permeability measures so there were a number of roads that were dead ends for motors but not for others.
In rural areas, we saw many roads where it looked like the number of motor traffic lanes had been reduced from two to one, by getting rid of the central line and painting two lines at the edge of the road. This seemed to help slow down motor traffic, as cars could not assume they could safely pass an oncoming motor vehicle without swerving.
The picture below shows a road where cycle symbols have been painted in the side lanes, but this was often not the case. You can just about see where the original middle line has been removed.
(2) Along the route there did seem to be some variations in the quality and type of infrastructure, and in the way drivers treated cyclists. In Rotterdam we found on-street covered cycle parking that I think was for residents living in flats – in other towns and cities we more rarely saw this.
(3) In the Netherlands, cycling two or more abreast is common. Where two people cycling next to each other pass another two people cycling next to each other, cars generally wait for them. This was extremely pleasant – although for a UK cyclist, it can be hard to cycle next to one’s companion without accidentally starting to race them! (By contrast see the UK highway code here for the position on cycling two or more abreast and much more).
(4) The cycle connection (knooppunt) network, which also extends into Belgium, generally seemed to make route planning a lot easier – it meant mostly we only relied upon one map for the whole journey. (I wouldn’t recommend that for a similar trip in the UK). Knooppunt sign boards appear every few kilometres, so if you were making a journey you hadn’t made before, following the signs would mean you’d only have to plan the first and last bits of the journey. With few exceptions (yes, we did get lost a few times) the routes are well signed.
(5) Some cyclists do wear helmets in the Netherlands… but generally only sporty cyclists, who seem sportier than their UK counterparts, often with full matching lycra, no baggage (just a water bottle and puncture kit), and helmets. Many times in rural areas we were overtaken by these cyclists but their speed was usually so fast that it was hard to get a picture!
