The Dutch Cycling Embassy handles all kinds of requests. They share information, connect delegations from other countries with experts, speak at conferences, and run “ThinkBike” workshops and seminars—essentially anything an organization can dream up to learn more about the Dutch experience. Oftentimes, this includes traveling to other countries to help them develop cycling programs. Since 2011, they have worked with 39 North American organizations and many more globally, each with varying needs and requests. For those that require travel, they coordinate bringing relevant partners along, helping to fill the gap depending on which questions may come up.
Interestingly, though, no matter where they visit, their approach is always centered on the same thing that it is back home: context. “I always like to respond to people who say ‘This isn’t the Netherlands’—because we hear it a lot—that cities in the Netherlands are different, too,” Borsboom explains. “Rotterdam and Amsterdam are two very different cities, and smaller cities also have their own culture and habits. There’s always a way for every city, you just need to figure out which way that is.” During their visits, they recommend a starting point, always recognizing what works for one community may not for another, but setting that foundation allows them to identify what challenges they are able to address and how. Borsboom does note that a particular challenge when translating ideas to North American cities is one of perspective: “It’s always fun to hear things like, ‘Oh, there’s not enough space!’ But really, you have so much space, you just can’t see it.”
Figure 4-2: As extensions of the living room, woonerfs (“living streets”) are traffic calmed to 15 km/h, such as this one on Utrecht’s Kapelstraat. (Credit: Modacity)
When working on infrastructure plans, Borsboom generally recommends three things to begin with: roundabouts, a network approach, and a “back streets” principle. The latter refers to shifting bike routes off main arterials with heavy traffic volumes and onto adjacent side streets, increasing the comfort of cyclists and limiting the amount of investment required for separated infrastructure. Once again, just as on Dutch roads, the ideas of traffic-calming, safety, continuity, and intuition are the benchmarks of any proposed changes. She has noticed that a number of cities are now removing stop signs in favor of roundabouts, a treatment that serves to slow automobile traffic without restricting their flow—a bit of a win–win. In Vancouver, this is a common element seen along their bicycle boulevards—the North American version of a fietsstraat—and, in Borsboom’s opinion, a definite step forward.
Connection, however, really is the critical ingredient, “I think the network approach is very important for cycling infrastructure,” she insists. “It’s better to have a bit of connection—one or two loops or interchanges but still connected—compared to all these cities that skip things like intersections, which are the hardest part for people on bikes.”
Everyone involved with the Dutch Cycling Embassy recognizes that they have an obligation to carefully consider the path forward for cycling. Considered experts in most cycling circles, Borsboom, the Embassy team, and their Dutch partners are positioned to continue having the hard conversations with other cities, in order to open their eyes to what is possible, and challenge their preconceived ideas about what isn’t. “I think it’s important to have organizations pushing the higher levels to make things better for cycling,” states Borsboom. Any city looking at boosting cycling numbers tends to focus heavily on building the “hardware”—safe and reliable cycling infrastructure designed to form a complete network. But Borsboom also emphasizes the importance of paying attention to the “software” component: encouraging behavior change and the mindset of the community. Not everyone rides a bicycle or even wants to, and organizations need to take that into account in their planning.
With that in mind, Borsboom and her team tend to look at the context of the places they are working with and the particular challenges they are experiencing in getting people to adopt cycling as a mode of transportation, and they adapt the conversation to one that is less about prescribing the solution than one where they are collaborating on something that will work best for the given situation. “You need to find the right argument for the person that’s sitting on the other side of the table,” she says.
Of all the work they’ve done over the years, Borsboom views their cooperation with the US Federal Highway Administration in 2015, and subsequent projects with the cities of Milwaukee, Detroit, and Washington, DC, as especially important. “It’s quite hard in every country to get everybody—all these different parties and opinions—together and to send them on this joint mission to help,” she admits. “They all have their own perspectives, goals, and expectations. And to have aligned all those expectations while also reaching the consensus they did within a week is quite an achievement, not only for them but also for us. We really learned from the experience, and the professional level we reached is now used to improve on other work we do.”
Borsboom sees a shift happening on a much more global scale, especially in North America and New Zealand, which she thinks are leading the charge in the new wave of bicycle adoption. She notes that many of the current fights occurring outside the Netherlands are no different from the ones that happened in Dutch cities in the 1970s and ’80s. It’s quite easy to forget that it was just a couple of generations ago that Amsterdam was widening roads, Utrecht was burying their canal beneath a motorway, and Rotterdam’s city center was a desolate place to be, all for the sake of making driving easier. Everything is dependent on examining the local context, behaviors, and habits, developing the basics first and then getting more creative.
When asked about the Dutch Cycling Embassy’s influence elsewhere, Borsboom is confident they are having a positive impact. “It’s so great to see the results of your efforts, and to be at the beginning of the tipping point in North America,” she reflects. “I think it’s really exciting. Every time I visit I see so much changing, and I’d like to believe we are at a changing point. It may be naïve, but I like to think positively, and I truly believe that we are at a unique moment in history.”
Capturing Car Trips in the Heart of Texas
A full 40 years after the Dutch experienced their own cultural tipping point, similar signs are being spotted on this side of the Atlantic, and in the unlikeliest of places. Places such as the Texas capital of Austin, which—despite considering itself a progressive oasis in a staunchly conservative desert—bears a striking physical resemblance to its car-dependent counterparts in Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, and El Paso. Decades of unrestricted, autocentric planning and policy have created vast, sprawling metropolises, which are among the highest in the country when ranked by population numbers and total area, and the lowest when it comes to population density.
Residents of these regions have virtually no choice when it comes to getting around—a condition aptly described as “transport poverty”—worsening the ever-familiar concerns of affordability, congestion, and social equity. The bicycle, seen as a tool for recreation but not transportation, has been reduced to the margins, making up just 1 percent of trips. In Austin, though, a consensus led by the City’s Active Transportation Division has emerged that attracting new people to cycling can address a great number of the city’s most pressing issues. In the last few years, the groundwork has been laid for an ambitious AAA bike network, the vision for which came through strategic partnerships with PeopleForBikes and the Dutch Cycling Embassy.
“We’d been following the development of protected infrastructure since stumbling across [City of Portland bicycle coordinator] Roger Geller’s 2006 paper on the ‘interested, but concerned’ cyclist in 2010,” reveals City of Austin transportation planner and street designer Nathan Wilkes. “We were also watching what Janette Sadik-Khan was doing in New York.” The subsequent release of the NACTO Urban Street Design Guide helped codify many of these foreign concepts that were then outside the realm of existing policy, and Wilkes began developing the notion
of an AAA network of cycle routes, which would form the basis of a pitch to PeopleForBikes’ Green Lane Project.
“Working with PeopleForBikes came a little out of the blue, but ended up being a pretty transformative process,” recalls Lauren Dierenfield, the City’s Active Transportation Division manager. In 2011, the Boulder-based PeopleForBikes—an industry coalition of American bicycle manufacturers and retailers—was seeking partner cities for its Green Lane Project, a five-year initiative to accelerate the spread of protected cycling facilities. One of Austin’s more informed, passionate, and savvy advocates suggested that City staff should look into applying, and the rest was history. “It set the stage for an overhaul of our Bicycle Master Plan, for all-ages-and-abilities cycling infrastructure,” recalls Dierenfield enthusiastically. “The process was very much inspired by the Dutch, but reinterpreted for a retrofit environment.”
Recognizing that cultural change must precede structural change, the Green Lane Project intelligently initiated a pair of tactical exercises, aimed at decision makers and the general electorate. The first was financing a delegation of four, including Austin’s city manager, bicycle program manager, public works director, and a council member, to join Meredith Glaser’s study tour of the Netherlands in 2011. A second delegation, including the city’s head traffic engineer, was sent in 2012.
PeopleForBikes also connected Dierenfield’s department with the Dutch Cycling Embassy, which traveled to Texas to conduct a ThinkBike Workshop in October 2012. The two-day program assembled politicians, planners, advocates, engineers, and entrepreneurs to engage in the planning process and discuss how Dutch principles could be applied to a local context. “They were mind-blowing,” raves Dierenfield. “They changed our entire thinking about bicycle planning and design.”
“There were four big ‘aha’ moments from the ThinkBike event,” explains Wilkes. “The first was, we needed to get used to spending more money on bikes. The second was, we needed to focus investment on areas where we could capture short trips. The third was, we needed to use bicycling to feed transit. And the last was, we couldn’t do bike-network planning without also planning for all modes.” Each of these points was underlined by an understanding that any successful network must reflect CROW principles of cohesion, directness, safety, attractiveness, and comfort.
The ThinkBike Workshop also featured the unveiling of the “MOVE Meter,” a groundbreaking web-based traffic-modeling tool, developed by the Dutch firm MOVE Mobility, that maps the frequency and distance of automobile trips in a given setting. When fed with the region’s travel-demand data—making Austin the first American city to utilize this asset—it created a heat map of car trips of less than five kilometers (three miles), the low-hanging fruit of active-transportation planners everywhere. “During the workshop, we were able to zoom into certain busy intersections and note that over half of those cars were traveling under three miles,” remembers Wilkes.
By overlaying this heat map onto the proposed bike network, and adjusting the latter to affect the biggest impact, the Dutch Cycling Embassy were able to advise how many automobile trips could be replaced by the bicycle—if conditions were made comfortable and convenient enough. “They suggested that for car trips less than three miles, we could capture 15 percent,” recounts Wilkes. “And later we added 7 percent of trips between three and nine miles, based on their actual data.” He claims those numbers are somewhat conservative, set at roughly a third of the Dutch national average, which would easily be achieved with a fully realized bike network, even in an auto-oriented American city. While cautious in their predictions, the Austin planning team realized that capturing short trips at these levels would result in a significant reduction in driving times, especially in the congested area where many of these trips are located: the city center.
Needless to say, the knowledge and ideas collected in that short period of time required a shift in strategy, officially summarized in the City of Austin’s 2014 Bicycle Master Plan, principally authored by Wilkes—with the help of a $20,000 PeopleForBikes grant—and adopted by the Austin City Council in November 2014. “Our 2009 Bike Plan was written in service to people who are bicyclists,” he explains. “The way we flipped it around in 2014 was to use bicycling as a tool that would serve the highest goals of our city articulated in the ‘Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan.’ We documented a strong case of community benefit, for a much wider-scale investment in a network that would make bicycling a safe choice for everybody for almost every trip.” The visionary new plan spelled out a $150-million, 600-kilometer (373-mile) network roughly divided into thirds: one-third consisting of off-street trails, one-third consisting of on-street protected or higher-quality buffered bike lanes, and one-third consisting of quiet neighborhood streets that provide connections between the other two assets.
Figure 4-3: The Dutch-inspired 3rd Street cycle track is the last piece of a fully connected, eight-kilometer (five-mile) sequence of AAA routes across downtown Austin. (Credit: City of Austin)
Faced with finding a way to pay for these critical upgrades, along with other mobility needs, the City of Austin placed a $720-million mobility bond on the November 2016 ballot, $46 million of which would be used directly on bike projects, with a number of other portions of the bond also significantly supporting bicycle infrastructure. While Dierenfield and her team were not allowed to participate directly in the election campaign, the benefits were well documented in the adopted plan, the news of which advocates were more than happy to spread far and wide.
To complement their efforts, Austin mayor Steve Adler declared 2016 the “Year of Mobility,” and in the spring, he participated in a study tour of the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway. Funded by the US Department of Transportation’s “Smart City Challenge,” Adler was joined by Austin’s transportation director Robert Spillar and US transportation secretary Anthony Foxx, who were photographed pedaling e-bikes on the streets of Amsterdam. “Most people aren’t going to get out of their cars anytime soon in Austin,” Adler reflected in a blog post. “But no significant number will ever be ready to get out of their cars unless or until there are alternatives. We have work to do in Austin, and I was glad to see that it can work in Amsterdam.”
Clearly, Austin’s leaders had done an effective job in communicating exactly what was at stake, and the bond passed with an impressive 59 percent of the vote. “It exceeded anybody’s expectations,” admits Wilkes, whose department now has five years in which to spend an amount of money that would have been a pipe dream a few years prior.
Two months after the proposition’s passage, PeopleForBikes announced that Austin was one of 10 US cities selected for the “Big Jump Project,” a new scheme focused on developing networks that triple the number of people biking there by 2020. “We feel very fortunate to be part of this ‘Big Jump’ cohort of cities,” says Dierenfield. “With this new opportunity, we see huge value in continuing to use the study-tour tool to allow that same level of discovery, understanding, and appreciation of how street design can achieve common goals of affordability, mobility, and quality of life.”
One of the first steps was to send a member of their team, transportation planner and street designer Alison Mills, to the Velo-City Global Cycling Summit in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in June 2017. “They do have this really impressive separated infrastructure, but to me, the importance of safe, well-designed shared street settings became apparent,” Mills says of her Dutch experience. “Everything they do there is not completely separated. A really important part of a network is managing to get those pieces as well, that connect to the separated infrastructure.” According to Dierenfield, Mills’ week in the Netherlands will bring a new perspective to a fast-tracked process: “She’ll be leading a team of designers shortly, as we graduate into some new models for project development and delivery. Having that understanding under her belt provides much more value to the team.”
And so the coming years promise to be eventful indeed for bicycling in Austin
, and the City’s staff know that they will still be able to discuss future concerns with the Dutch Cycling Embassy, despite their contractual relationship ending with the 2012 ThinkBike Workshop. “It’s always a pleasure to get their insights and reactions to how we’re approaching our work,” enthuses Wilkes. “It feels like talking to kindred spirits in the future. In many ways, they’ve been through everything that we’ve been through. They’ve been doing it for decades. They’ve made all the mistakes that we’re making. So we just need to do the work, and we’ll see where we are in 50 years.”
Cycle Superhighways That Fight Congestion
Having mastered the art of converting short trips by car to the more scale-appropriate bicycle, some Dutch jurisdictions are now looking further afield, hoping to capture longer, intercity car trips using a variety of innovative solutions. And while the Netherlands is already crisscrossed with countless rural cycling routes, many of these paths are narrow (at least by Dutch standards), meandering, and riddled with stoppages, making them less desirable choices for commuting outside city limits.
Addressing this challenge head-on is the region of the twin cities of Arnhem and Nijmegen—located in the province of Gelderland—a collection of 20 different municipalities situated on the eastern border with Germany. By applying “big picture” thinking, as well as a level of funding, planning, and cooperation not typically seen on Dutch cycling projects, they are in the process of developing a network of nine snelfietsroutes (“fast cycling routes”) that connect their major residential, employment, educational, and commercials nodes. These inspiring and trailblazing projects have put the region on the map, giving its planners a competitive edge when to comes to dealing with growth, traffic, and new opportunities to help their 740,000 residents get to work, school, the shop, and everywhere in between. According to Sjors van Duren, cycling consultant at engineering firm Royal HaskoningDHV, and the former Cycling Highway Network project leader for the Province of Gelderland: “The first one, between Arnhem and Nijmegen, was built because, back in 2008, the local chapter of the Fietsersbond [Cyclists’ Union] went to the vice-mayors and aldermen and said, ‘We need a better cycling connection between the cities.’”
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