Amsterdam, a Bicycle Paradise

You can’t understand just how awesome a great bicycle city is until you ride it.

We’ve all seen the photos of Amsterdam or heard about the bicycles, but when you actually come here and get to really taste the joy of a bicycle-centered city, it’s like a whole new world. In fact, it’s heaven.

The brilliance of Netherland’s transport system is one that is rarely referenced which is not only a shame, but an international injustice.

That anyone is subjected to the traffic congestion, air pollution, the inconvenience of car parking, the economic burden of petrol or a road toll, when cities like Amsterdam solved all that long ago, is a global absurdity.

Riding in Amsterdam makes you wonder how on earth Melbourne ever got itself in a traffic mess when the solution was found long ago.

It’s not like no one knows how to integrate bicycles, trams, buses and cars in to a city’s transport system.

With all the fuss in Melbourne about which option Council will or won’t take when it comes to bicycle lanes, you’d have thought we were the trail blazers leading the world in doing something extraordinary, untested and ultra experimental!

It’s simple. One man, one vote. One vehicle, one lane.

No need to ponder it. All that’s required it to acknowledge what Amsterdam acknowledged years ago: without the bicycle and the bicycle lanes, car drivers would simply be not be able to move in the city.

So how is it that Amsterdam avoided the traffic jam and kept the bicycle as a key mode of transport while other cities fell in to the car trap?

Tom Gogefrooij from the Dutch Cycling Embassy thinks the answer lies in two things: the Netherlands never had a large car industry and thus a car lobby, and the Dutch have a strong egalitarian society where equity and fare share are highly valued.

I’d say it took more than that. I’d say it took politicians and decision makers having a clear vision based on an worthy goal and not an object or a profit margin.

If your goal is to move people with ease, freedom and choice you’d choose the bicycle and the bus, if your goal was to sell a transport product that made you the biggest profit, you’d choose the car.

As Ria Hilhorst, Policy Adviser at the Directorate of Infrastructure, Traffic and Transport in Amsterdam says, no matter the political leaning, all politicians in Amsterdam know that bicycles are vital to the economic and social success of the country.

There’s just no argument here as to whether cars and bicycles should share the road space, whose road it is, or who pays for the road and thus has more or less right to it.

It’s simply, if there are four modes of transport then there are four lanes.

And it really is that simple, because even in Amsterdam they experience conflict between transport modes as soon as they fail to provide separate lanes for very different vehicles.

In recent years the motorized scooter has made a come back in Amsterdam. The scooters are vulnerable in car traffic and so they have been allowed to drive in the bicycle lane, but sure enough because the scooters can accelerate faster between traffic lights and leave in their wake a cloud of smoke,  those riding bicycles are not happy to share a lane that was create to rule out those things out.

Amsterdam is without a doubt transportation heaven and I sure hope, in fact I plan on it, that Melbourne won’t wait till we die a painful death waiting in a traffic jam before we build our own bicycle heaven right here on Earth!