Building the Cycling City

by Melissa Bruntlett

  Nowhere is that more apparent than on Vredenburg, the city’s major east–west arterial, next to Hoog Catharijne. In 1962, it was subjected to one of Feuchtinger’s early road-widening projects, leading to the construction of two bus lanes and four car lanes, along with a pair of unidirectional cycle tracks. Proving the adage “If you plan cities for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic,” the street was soon clogged, much to the ire of bus drivers, traffic wardens, and thousands of other users traveling that corridor. Within 10 years—after the relocation of a mall parking entrance—single-occupant vehicles were all but banished from the street, with one eastbound lane all that remained until Vredenburg was made completely car-free in 1996.

  Figure 7-1: After the Second World War, Utrecht’s delightful, human-scale city center was nearly sacrificed at the altar of the private automobile. (Credit: Modacity)

  A significant portion of the cycle traffic using Vredenburg today is headed to or from Centraal Station, a testament to the harmonious connection between bikes and trains in the Netherlands. Utrecht’s compact size and status as the country’s busiest rail hub—due to its central location—means that this relationship is stronger than anywhere else, creating some unique problems that require some unique solutions. The city was, in fact, home to the country’s first underground bike-parking facility, built in 1938. Demand has since skyrocketed, and officials are currently building a number of large and ample fietsenstallingen (“bike parking lots”) in and around the city center. In 2001, Utrecht was the natural choice to serve as the pilot city for OV-Fiets, the national bike-rental scheme: a convenient service that has expanded exponentially to strengthen the powerful bike–train combination.

  Over a period of 30 years, officials in Utrecht have gone from believing the bike would become extinct to beginning to cater to cyclists, but Wagenbuur insists that it wasn’t until the early nineties that cycling found its rightful place near the top of the transportation hierarchy. “Only after the adoption of ‘Sustainable Safety’ and the CROW Manual did cyclists get a place in our system,” he argues. “Then you see a big improvement in the standard of cycling infrastructure. So it took a very long time.”

  The period between 1994 and 1998 was a particularly fruitful one for active transportation in Utrecht, as Groen Links (“Green Party) vice-mayor and traffic alderman Hugo van der Steenhoven took over the reins. He worked closely with activists in the Fietsersbond to build out much of the cycle track network proposed in the 1974 circulation plan. Van der Steenhoven also oversaw the construction of numerous strategically placed buurtstallingen (“neighborhood bicycle-parking facilities”) across the city—empty shop fronts that were reclaimed and retrofitted to act as secure community bike storage. The City of Utrecht now owns and operates 36 such buurtstallingen in residential neighborhoods. Last but not least, he was responsible for the aforementioned decision in 1996 to finally close Vredenburg to private automobiles. That same year, Van der Steenhoven instructed City staff to begin studying the possible restoration of Catharijnesingel from motorway back to waterway, a vision that would ultimately take over two decades to be realized.

  If spatial constraints helped Utrecht retain its human scale after the Second World War, in stark contrast to Rotterdam, then these same constraints will also drive its mobility and planning decisions for the next century. “Utrecht is the fastest-growing Dutch city,” explains Wagenbuur. “It’s getting bigger, but the territory is fixed.” So absorbing 40,000 new residents in the coming years will mean that more-efficient modes of transport must be prioritized out of necessity, a reality that puts the automobile at the bottom of the list. “It’s the lack of space that forces this city to think differently,” says Wagenbuur. “More traffic of a type that is space-consuming is just not possible in the same area, using the same roadways. That simply cannot happen.”

  “It’s Really About Space-Efficiency”

  Just how does an ancient city like Utrecht plan for an influx of residents and still maintain their human scale? As Wagenbuur points out, despite its historic bones, the city hasn’t been immune to the same auto-centric thinking seen in cities around the world, and backpedaling from those ideas hasn’t been a quick fix.

  “It took about five decades from when Utrecht really embraced the car as king, and now we are looking for alternatives—especially in our spatial planning—to send another message,” explains Lot van Hooijdonk, deputy mayor for the City of Utrecht, who is in charge of the mobility and sustainability portfolio. “From the seventies until now, especially in the urban context, we really developed a new story.”

  In early 2016, Utrecht established a new mobility policy that centers on space-efficiency. Van Hooijdonk and her colleagues understand the importance of accommodating future growth without sacrificing the efforts of their predecessors. That involves looking at space in relation to the transportation hierarchy used across the Netherlands: pedestrians first, then bikes, then public transit, and finally, at the very bottom, the private automobile. Via street-narrowing, improving cycling facilities, establishing pedestrian-only spaces throughout the city center, and reducing vehicle parking, the message is clear: “The car is not king here.”

  Nevertheless, achieving space-efficiency in Utrecht is about reimagining not just the streetscape but also the buildings that border the streets, all in an effort to change behavior. “What we try to do in the new developments—where you have the chance to reorganize, where people start new routines—is to try to influence the choices in their behavior,” Van Hooijdonk explains. She notes that this is particularly attractive when looking at solutions in Utrecht’s nearby suburbs. “I think one of the great opportunities we have is also to make the regional infrastructure and network better,” she says. “While the city itself grows to 400,000 inhabitants, for the region it’s 800,000 to 900,000, so that’s double the number of people where you can attempt to influence their choices, and try to seduce them to take a bike over a car.”

  In order to convince higher levels of government to co-fund bike-infrastructure projects, Utrecht has opted to tout them as “no regret” solutions. As the Province of Gelderland discovered with the RijnWaalpad (the “Rhine–Waal Path”), these investments will not only make conditions better for people who already cycle, they’ll also provide an attractive alternative to those who frequent the overcrowded roads and railway system, especially with more and more people looking to e-bikes as an option for longer journeys. Van Hooijdonk is quick to acknowledge that the bicycle is not the only solution available, and she stresses that they also hope to improve public-transportation options, which are contingent on funding from the regional and national government.

  Back within the city limits, making space for the projected 10 percent population growth in a city so constrained by history and geography requires a deeper understanding of the link between housing and how people get around. As Van Hooijdink submits, they are now exploring ways of reducing the amount of auto parking in new developments in order to influence a conceptual transition from car ownership to mobility as a service: “We are trying to build between 9,000 and 10,000 homes, a density unfamiliar for us in Utrecht—making it a really urban space.” As for car parking, she says, “We have three scenarios: the most conservative is 0.7 cars per house, and the most progressive is 0.1 cars per house, which basically involves only car-sharing.” She recognizes that, even in a locale where the bicycle is so readily accepted as the most practical and efficient transportation choice, the real question is whether it is actually possible to convince so many new homeowners to forgo car-ownership altogether. It requires spending some political capital, but the City of Utrecht will forge ahead and see where the idea takes them.

  “Of course, they all include very good bike facilities. That’s the basics,” asserts Frans Jan van Rossem, the head of Utrecht’s bicycle programming. And those fundamentals are being taken very seriously at Utrecht’s Centraal Station, which currently sees more visitors annually than the national
airport at Amsterdam Schiphol, an impressive 88 million. Travel anywhere throughout the Netherlands by rail, and making a stopover or connection in Utrecht is almost a certainty. While the station is a thoroughfare for many rail passengers, Van Rossem is quick to point out it is also a key destination for many residents of the city and surrounding suburbs. “If you look at Amsterdam, they have a lot of smaller stations around the central station so they can handle lots of traffic,” he says. “But in Utrecht, the suburban train stations are not very big, so everything concentrates pretty much in the center, which is more or less a natural phenomenon, and that’s why so many people use the central station.”

  Van Rossem posits that the volume of people traveling to the station is in direct relation to the scale of the city. Because Utrecht has been built out from its moated center, even the farthest outskirts of the city are just eight kilometers (five miles) from Centraal Station, making it accessible to nearly every resident via 20 minutes on a bicycle or public transportation. At the same time, with very little space available for car parking in the city center, driving becomes an incredibly impractical and expensive choice. “We recently did a study that found that Utrecht has the highest percentage of people getting to work by bike and train: 51 percent of all people working in the city are getting to work by some combination of bike and train,” Van Rossem reveals.

  Just imagine that: over 200,000 people traveling from all points of the city and congregating in the center, all by bicycle. Van Hooijdonk points to two specific factors that have directly influenced that transportation decision. First and foremost, Utrecht is the only one of the four largest Dutch cities without a streetcar system to complement the national rail system. Their public transit system consists solely of buses, which tend to be less attractive and less desirable than a sleek tramway.

  But more importantly, it was a national decision made 15 years ago that really impacted the city’s future: “In the Netherlands, they decided we would improve the international rail lines to Belgium and Germany, and therefore the stations on these corridors should be improved. The Hague, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Breda, Arnhem, and Utrecht have all had new train stations built as a part of this decision,” she explains. “For Utrecht, the national decision to renew the train station fell into a bigger municipality project to renew the whole station environment, and nowadays we are realizing it. At this point, I think they have made the right decisions to make big bike-parking stations as a part of the whole context of these large renewals of the station, the municipality office, and the large mall next to the station.”

  By the beginning of 2019, Utrecht will be home to the largest number of publicly available bicycle-parking spaces in the Netherlands: a total of 22,000 public spots spread across several lots on the east and west sides of the station. This includes a single, spectacular 17,000-square-meter (184,000-square-foot) facility with spaces for 12,500 bikes, which—when complete—will be the largest such structure in the world. This project is financed by the provincial, regional, and municipal governments, with operational costs covered by the Nederlandse Spoorwegen (or NS, the national rail company), the rail infrastructure company (ProRail), and the City of Utrecht.

  But as Van Rossem points out, those sizeable operational costs will be incredibly difficult to cover without any sort of revenue stream. “That’s the conversation happening now. We think it’s good that the train passengers using these facilities also pay a part of the cost in operating them, but we don’t want to ask them to pay €0.50 [62¢ USD] each time,” he clarifies. “If you do that, they’ll think it’s too much hassle.” He and his colleagues are pushing to have a small charge integrated into the concession fee for all public transportation agencies, including the buses. “This is an ongoing national discussion. We have to find a solution to finance these bicycle parking facilities,” Van Rossem notes. “It cannot be that just the city government has to pay for them.”

  In Utrecht, a city where local policy is to continue reducing the number of car-parking spaces in the center, finding that local revenue is an increasing challenge. “In the development of fewer cars and more bikes in the city center—at this time, with it being paid parking—the cars are bringing the City millions of euros every year,” says Van Hooijdonk. “So if you want to get rid of these car-parking spaces and give them over to bike parking, you get rid of something that makes money for something that costs you a lot of money. It is a financial challenge,” she concedes.

  The solution bears some resemblance to Paul de Rook’s plans in Groningen, but on a larger scale. In order to build a new project or redevelop an existing structure, businesses not only have to provide car parking in the new facility, but also bike parking. “I don’t think many other cities in the Netherlands have implemented this, and it’s pretty much nonexistent abroad,” says Van Rossem. He points to several new developments in the city center—including new municipal offices and the World Trade Centre Utrecht—that, combined, will provide 11,000 private spaces; the City will then negotiate to make a number of them publicly available. “We share the costs,” he explains. “They invest in these new facilities, and then we do some of the operational duties.”

  Van Rossem sees this as an advantage to both parties. Shop owners and people who work in the city are realizing the importance of having access to good off-street bike-parking facilities because there are so many bikes crowding the footpaths. Business owners have been asking the City to solve the problem, which, he argues, they cannot do on their own. “We need cooperation. Those bicycles in front of their shops are also customers, and they don’t want to chase them away. So they recognize the need.”

  Scalable Solutions for the Most Bike-Friendly City in the Netherlands

  Looking at Utrecht from afar, it is easy to scoff at their struggles. What most officials wouldn’t give to be that city—with half the population cycling to work each day, with bike-parking problems, and with a delightful, human-scaled city center. But that small scale has started to create conflict with the ever-increasing share of people traveling by bicycle. Their challenge moving forward will be building on these successes while also increasing population density, all without sacrificing the livability, comfort, and historic beauty residents have come to expect of this special place.

  Vredenburg’s transformation from a car-choked traffic sewer to the single busiest cycle path in the Netherlands should be lauded as an amazing, forward-thinking achievement. On a daily basis, Vredenburg now sees an average of 34,000 cyclists moving east and west through the center, reaching a peak of 41,000 within one particularly busy 24-hour period. But as the city and the surrounding suburbs grow, those numbers are expected to increase further, eventually becoming unsustainable.

  Figure 7-2: Utrecht’s Vredenburg moves 34,000 cyclists a day over the reclaimed Catharijnesingel, previously an 11-lane stretch of motorway. (Credit: Modacity)

  “It’s partly a product of our new suburb,” reveals Van Rossem. “We have a very large new suburb to the west, and the university is to the east, so if people want to go to the university by bike, they choose this route mainly because it is the most direct from Leidsche Rijn to the university. Also, because the railways run predominantly north to south, there are not many other possibilities to cross the rail tracks, so that’s why this route is so important—because there are not many other options.”

  Along with Utrecht University, the new Science Park has become an attraction for international businesses and is currently the largest destination in the country inaccessible by rail. Projections are that it will employ at least 30,000 people, where the only options for getting in and out every day are the car and the bicycle—the latter being the main option. Both Van Hooijdonk and Van Rossem recognize the need for a scalable solution, and while a tramline to connect it to Centraal Station is under construction, speculation is that the new tram will be at capacity the day it opens.

  To ease that congestion, Utrecht has embarked on a project that was initially a measure of
practicality, but has since put them on the map as a place to marvel over the Netherlands’ latest piece of “bike bling.” As the neighborhood of Leidsche Rijn grew on the west bank of the Amsterdam–Rijn Canal, residents were becoming increasingly vocal about adding a bike crossing so they could get into the city without traveling miles out of their way. Just across the canal sat an old school in need of replacing, and the City saw a unique opportunity: build a new school that would serve as an on-ramp to the bridge, complete with a cycle path on the roof! “The Dafne Schippersbrug and the OBS Oog in Al School is a great project,” says Van Rossem enthusiastically of the new bike-pedestrian bridge and its innovative on-ramp. “I think it has to do with the tradition in Dutch society to work together to solve a problem, and also we don’t have a lot of space, so we are always looking for space-efficient solutions. I think it’s really brilliant.”

  Since opening on April 3, 2017, the number of travelers crossing the bridge has been steadily increasing. What was long just a line on a map has been transformed into a vital link to the city center and surrounding amenities. The neighborhood around the school has also benefited tremendously, and Van Rossem points to a sense of revitalization in the community. Of course, the new school is the source of great pride for its students and staff, many of whom get to use the bridge on their daily travels, and pedal down off the roof of the building to their classrooms!

  While officials look ahead at solutions for accommodating residents as they move through the city, they are excited about the completion of a monumental project that will inject a newfound emotional connection to the place they call home. After two decades of planning the removal of the much-despised “motorway from nothing to nowhere,” the City is set to reopen the Catharijnesingel canal as a complete and connected waterway by the year 2020. Van Rossem, who grew up in Utrecht, has nothing but negative memories of the former motorway. “It was a very dead piece of city,” he recalls vividly. “There was no fun; it was a very good place for people to use drugs, especially in the tunnels for goods delivery. I think that’s one of the reasons they started to rethink what to do with the space. It was not attractive and scary to get to by bike.”