Building the Cycling City

by Melissa Bruntlett

  Fleming points out that while cycling can appear to be flourishing to those “within the bubble”—cycling enthusiasts, urbanists, city builders—there are swaths of the population being underrepresented. Even the Netherlands, a country that enjoys the highest rates of cycling on the earth, runs the risk of seeing those numbers drop as the baby-boomer generation is removed from the equation. Despite massive investments in cycling infrastructure everywhere, such investments often mean little to immigrant populations, who tend to live farther outside of city centers and experience higher rates of bike theft due to a lack of quality bike storage—if they even have bikes at all. “It’s hard to build up the cycling culture or interest in cycling without addressing these concerns first,” Fleming indicates.

  Projects like the Dafne Schippersbrug and Amsterdam’s Nescio Bridge help address these real and immediate issues. Whereas the former provides residents of the sleek new Leidsche Rijn neighborhood with a direct link to Utrecht and the central station, the latter connects less-affluent areas of Amsterdam to the city center. In both cases, the bike connection is more efficient than the car and rail links, fundamentally increasing accessibility to cycling in those outer boroughs.

  “This is the nice thing about Dutch design—they have cycling not just in their city centers but everywhere,” says Fleming. “So it’s in the Dutch brain to pick one street and say this is a street for bikes and another is a street for cars.” Fleming notes that, when identifying possible new bicycle routes, it’s not about having all modes of transportation share the same corridor, as is often prescribed on North American streets. The focus is more on what makes the most sense for that given space, with simple solutions favored wherever applicable. “It’s all about decoupling cycling, and when you have that decoupling mindset, it becomes quite natural to say, ‘Here’s an area that has a lot of cyclists and here’s an area that has a lot of cars, and they’re each quite happy to have their own space.’”

  As for the role prestige projects will play in the future of our cities, Fleming is skeptical. “Where do you go with shocking, brilliant architecture? As with the art world, you get to a certain point where there’s nowhere further to go. It’s a meta-narrative that architecture will continue to get more shocking and brilliant until you end up with Jackson Pollock. And then it gets to ‘Now what?’” More important than creating beautifully designed infrastructure, Fleming emphasizes, is recognizing that all this becomes moot when air pollution, congestion, and traffic fatalities—all major externalities of the private automobile—lead to car-free cities. Enabling people to maintain safe, reliable connections without depending on cars is the most viable, practical way forward—even in Velotopia.

  10 LEARN TO RIDE LIKE THE DUTCH

  The Dutch have created the safest and most complete bicycling network in the world, but we need to look beyond infrastructure and into their collective souls to better understand why riding a bicycle is so normal in the Netherlands.

  — CHARLES RUBENACKER

  Dutch and American Cycling Spokesman, Rubenacker and Company

  Beyond the paint, planning, and policies, what has nurtured the bicycle’s supremacy in the Netherlands—despite a minor blip in the 1970s—is that cycling has been a part of their social fabric for over a century. To the Dutch, as Carlton Reid points out, riding a bike is just a normal part of the everyday for virtually everybody. The challenge for coming generations will be to maintain that level of normalcy as the nation experiences a convergence of socioeconomic factors, including a disturbing trend towards de achterbankgeneratie (“the backseat generation”) and a sharp rise in cultural diversity.

  Since the 1970s, Dutch cities have been experiencing consistent growth in their immigrant populations, people from southern Europe and Turkey, as well as Morocco and other North African countries, either immigrating with their families or seeking refugee status. Often, increases in “non-Dutch” populations are blamed for low ridership numbers, with politicians and policy makers stating that immigration “dampens the levels of cycling growth.” To Angela van der Kloof, a researcher for Mobycon, a Dutch sustainable-mobility consultancy, this attitude is both inaccurate and counterproductive.

  Van der Kloof has been teaching biking skills to migrant groups for over 25 years and is a frequent speaker on the topic of growing cycling in immigrant communities. When people point to a perceived difference in cultural values to explain reduced cycling rates, she begs to differ. “We’re all humans,” she states. “We all have mobility needs. Between ‘native’ Dutch people there are a lot of differences, just as there are a lot of differences between newcomers. But there are likely more commonalities. This whole discussion in the cycling field, of putting a stamp on people’s foreheads, saying, ‘You’re a non-native, you cycle less than the Dutch’—I don’t like it. I’d rather look at longer-term perspectives.”

  While exact data is difficult to find, first- and second-generation migrants make about 20 percent of their trips by bike, a rate almost every global city would love to see. But because they don’t cycle at the same levels as their Dutch peers, it becomes easy to frame ethnicity negatively. Van der Kloof feels it’s a telling indicator of what the Dutch take for granted every day: that cycling is so ingrained in their society. Few ever consider the fact that immigrants may come from cultures where riding a bike just isn’t done, even in “developed” countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Not to mention that for many women, there often still exists a taboo around cycling that many Westerners would not understand. But it’s the commonalities she has come to appreciate—particularly the shared desire for the freedom to move and be in control of one’s independence. “The fact that you’re a Muslim,” she insists, “doesn’t say anything about your transportation habits or choices.”

  Van der Kloof began teaching migrant women how to ride in 1991, after she stumbled on a classified ad for trainers at the Immigrant Women’s Center in her community. As a master’s student of human geography, studying women in North Africa and the Middle East, she had done a great deal of reading on the topic, but wanted to do something more meaningful. “It was never my plan, but the beautiful thing about these initiatives I’ve seen over the years is that the need or request for these services comes from the people who want to learn,” she explains. “That’s the reason I’ve stuck with it for such a long time: it is really a bottom-up, grassroots program, and that’s its main strength. People want to learn to ride bikes.”

  Figure 10-1: For many immigrant women in the Netherlands, the bicycle quickly provides a newfound freedom and independence. (Credit: Modacity)

  Soon after these women arrived in the Netherlands from elsewhere, they began to attend courses to learn the language and skills needed to adapt to their new life, and they often asked if there were programs available to show them how to ride a bike. Immediately recognizing that they were living in a nation of bikes, they clearly saw that they needed cycling proficiency in order to gain for themselves the freedom to move around their new surroundings easily. “These programs don’t start because somebody in government says, ‘Hmm, this makes sense to teach people to ride bikes, because it’s part of our mobility system,’” Van der Kloof clarifies. “It is only now we are starting to realize that if you cannot cycle, you suffer from ‘transport poverty.’”

  Common in low-income and migrant areas in the Netherlands, transport poverty defines places with limited mobility options, whether public transport, cycling, or otherwise. In Rotterdam, for example, research indicates un- and under-employed residents south of the River Maas don’t have access to the same economic opportunities enjoyed by people elsewhere in the Netherlands, in part because of how the transport system works. Van der Kloof notes that addressing cycling is one part of alleviating transport poverty. It is also why they bring these courses directly to the people. “The women participating in these programs already have mobility problems,” she emphasizes. “So it’s silly to make them come to y
ou. Our strategy is to go to them so they can learn. And once they can cycle, they can come to our activities at the main center.”

  Van der Kloof has noticed that in many of the areas where she’s worked, word of mouth has been central to their success. “Once you have the first pioneers, and you have a good relationship with them, in a few weeks you might go from three to nine women. A few weeks later, there are twenty.” But she stresses that, ideally, the groups should remain small, because it helps the women know they aren’t the only ones struggling to learn to ride. It also helps them get to know their neighbors. “The whole experience is not just the trainer passing on knowledge to the group,” she explains. “There is also an exchange going on amongst participants, not only about cycling, but it is also about life here in the Netherlands, and this shared experience.”

  Part of that shared experience, and something Van der Kloof maintains is vital to the program, is learning to negotiate real-life conditions. She recalls seeing similar schemes where participants learn to ride in a park, building the skills to use a bicycle but not necessarily apply these skills to their daily life. “It may make sense in cities where the built environment is not so great,” she says. “But over here, why would you only teach people to ride circles in a park, when you want them to use it in their daily life?” In fact, she relishes the moments when she passes by former students on the street, using a bike to get from home to school, or the shop, or any other practical location, because it means they are enjoying the incomparable freedom and independence that cycling can offer.

  “Sometimes people ask me if I did any before or after surveys,” Van der Kloof recalls, “and we did think about it at the time, but actually, because we saw the women who had been participating out in the community, we didn’t feel the need to register that or to put a lot of effort into surveying them. We saw what was happening. We saw the positive impact and listened when these women told us how it had changed their ability to move in their city.”

  Although she stopped teaching in 2008, Van der Kloof dedicates her free time to passing on her knowledge to those looking to bring similar courses to their own jurisdictions. In 1996, while partnering with Snjezana Matijevic, the director of the Center for Immigrant Women, to locate funding, she teamed up with volunteers and participants to develop training materials that focused on traffic rules, including a booklet still used today. She also trains other instructors, produces videos explaining her methods, and presents at conferences. As she points out, it doesn’t have to be fancy, and often a simple guide with clear illustrations—for those still learning the language—goes a long way to help them learn the basics.

  The greatest challenge in going forward with plans like these, she notes, is finding funding. Which political party is in control dictates financial priorities, and with a more conservative government, these types of programs are the first to be cut. As she points out, such budget cuts can have lasting effects: “It damages this whole network of people who have been trained, and have been enthusiastic to train others.” But the effects don’t stop with the trainers: “Once you have the women on the bikes, they manage to also get their men on the bikes, they can teach their children, they can go out together, they encourage their friends to do the same.” The passing along of that knowledge from one group to the next has far greater impacts than just knowing how to ride a bike. She also points out that North American fundraising models are such that incorporating public and private donors is far easier, and could make such schemes simpler to fund and grow.

  It is the cultural exchange that Van der Kloof feels makes the program so valuable: “I really believe in this way of doing things because it is so basic. I mean it’s not rocket science. You have to do it bottom-up and you have to do it with your heart. Teaching skills is easy. Working on self-confidence and self-esteem, getting them to the point where they say, ‘Okay, I am a person who can do this, I can imagine myself cycling in a street’—that kind of process is the hard part. You don’t have to be an ‘avid cyclist’ to capture that and exchange it.” She contemplates that sometimes being overly enthusiastic presents a disadvantage, because it can create a blind spot, making it hard to believe that riding a bicycle is difficult to do.

  Reflecting on all those years of teaching, Van der Kloof shares this wonderful anecdote of what teaching immigrant women has meant to her: “With kids, you watch them grow and learn, until they reach this magic moment where you can take the training wheels off and watch them become independent. But when you teach an adult, you’re not holding them but guiding them. It’s like flying! It’s a moment a lot of adults cherish and love to share with each other.”

  Practical Skills for the Next Generation

  Given the obvious way that cycling seems to be a part of the Dutch DNA, one couldn’t be faulted for thinking that Dutch kids must be born on a bicycle. Of course, the reality is that, just like all children across the globe, they experience the same stumbles and falls when learning how to balance on their own two wheels, until one day the moment comes when they no longer need their mother and father to hold them, and they learn to fly.

  What makes the Netherlands stand apart from other countries, however, is the Dutch dedication to nationwide bike education for children. Jonneke Reichert is the program coordinator for traffic and health at the Fietsersbond, where she’s actively involved in coordinating their cycling instruction programs. Their mandate: to empower more people to cycle more often. Having previously worked in the Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Sport, with a focus on prevention, Reichert sees the direct link between regular cycling and better health. “For us it’s so normal,” she says. “It’s in our culture to start cycling at an early age. I think it’s one of the things we don’t think about much because it’s so common.” Reichert recalls her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter coming home from daycare with a diploma for Traffic Safety Learning, and not being surprised that she was learning these lessons at such a young age. For many regions, it is rather common for kids to navigate traffic lights, stop signs, and other conditions on “run bikes” (pedal-less bikes that toddlers use to get accustomed to balancing on two wheels) in a controlled course on the grounds of their preschool.

  But their existence throughout the country does not mean that the value of these courses should be taken for granted. As Van der Kloof notes, in a nation where everyone bikes, learning to ride independently is a critical skill. “That’s why we push it: because once they get older, we want them to cycle to school,” Reichert affirms. “In the Netherlands, the distances are not that far from home to school, so it’s one of the most important modes of transport. We try to get not only the children, but also their parents aware that it’s a way for them to become independent at a young age, so it prepares them for when they grow up.”

  Once kids are of school age, cycling education normally becomes a part of their curriculum, and while this isn’t compulsory across the nation, it is uncommon to find an institution that doesn’t offer such training in some form. “Of course, we at the Fietsersbond want it to be mandatory,” Reichert muses. For most Dutch children, their learning comes to a head around the age of 11, when they take a theoretical exam about traffic rules and safety. Reichert feels the more important exam, however, is the practical portion, where the kids pedal a selected route through their city, performing all the skills they’ve acquired in a real-life setting.

  Figure 10-2: A common sight on Dutch streets: children as young as five, who begin their training in preschool, cycling without adult supervision. (Credit: Modacity)

  “Most people remember when they were 10 to 12, taking that test, where you would have a whole tour around the city where you live, with parent volunteers at various checkpoints in disguise to see how the children are doing. I remember cycling it with my father,” Reichert reminisces. “You would always do it by yourself ahead of time, because you don’t want to fail the test. So it’s basically a part of growing up in the Netherlands.” Approximately 200,000 ki
ds participate in the program annually, and after successfully completing the exam, each is given a personalized diploma, something they can proudly display, knowing they’re all set for the independence that riding a bike will bring.

  Reichert, like Van der Kloof, argues that the situations presented in the practical exam are the most important part of the program. They do have some lessons in spaces where road conditions are simulated, with most schools participating in an education day at a dedicated “traffic garden.” But once they’ve passed, students know what to expect when they start riding on their own, and parents are confident enough in their abilities to let them roam freely.

  It sometimes seems that because of the success of this curriculum, most people in the Netherlands tend to take it for granted. This makes it difficult for the Fietsersbond to push for increased funding to get more people on bikes, because if the public perceives that it’s so common, why is training even necessary? Reichert concedes that not enough Dutch people know what the Fietsersbond actually does, and so they have to get better at claiming the little victories.

  That includes the rollout of their Traffic and Health Program in 2018. “It’s too narrow to look only at traffic safety and how to improve it,” she explains. “We believe that the more people you have cycling more often, the safer it gets. But it’s also really important from a health perspective.” She points out that the average trip to school is an easy way for students to get the recommended minimum 30 minutes of physical activity a day, as suggested by the National Health Advisory Board. Through her experiences in both the Ministry of Health and the Fietsersbond, Reichert has seen that there are some gaps to be bridged between the urban-planning world and the public health world. “The idea is that we try to connect them at the Fietsersbond. So when we talk about traffic safety, we look at the bigger picture: the more people who cycle, the safer it gets, and therefore the healthier people are.”