Friday 23 September 2011

Cycling Study Tour - Cycling Embassy of Great Britain

Just a short blog post. We had a great time this week showing around the good people of the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain (plus Patrick Morgan from the Cycling Advocates Network in New Zealand).

Standing where there used to be a car park.

Marvelling at the width of a single direction cycle path through a village part way between Assen and Groningen (it's the same on the other side of the road).

Watching the action at a simultaneous green junction.

Railway station cycle parking in Groningen

Reading through books and the evening presentation.


Joe Dunckley caught primary school children at lunchtime in Assen. It's not the same school as we videoed before. They're all like this.

Secondary school travel in Groningen
Others have also already written about the tour: Sally Hinchcliffe (and again), David Arditti (and again), The Cycling Embassy of Great Britain (Day 1, 2, 3), stabilizer's photos, and through twitter.

On the study tours, we show what everyday cycling really looks like with the quality cycling oriented infrastructure of the Netherlands. We don't cherry-pick good locations because there is no need to. It's very simple: people make a huge number of journeys by bike because the infrastructure makes it possible with a feeling of subjective safety which is not rivaled elsewhere.

The study tour busts myths about the Netherlands. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. A good solution can be found in every location, from the oldest streets through to the newest. It's possible to achieve a similar cycling environment everywhere, but this requires that you really want it and will work hard towards it.

This is the second larger study tour which we have held this year. A little earlier in the year we did a tour with a group of Australian visitors.

4 comments:

Mark W. said...

That looks like you had a very good time. I already got that from all the information on Twitter, but it is good to also see it all in one post!

kfg said...

With the Australian group playing "Spot the Tourist" was easy peasy. This group, not so much.

Just an observation.

amoeba said...

The UK chose to have the fantastically expensive and completely unusable Trident and [by default] chose to make children and cycling dangerous. Whereas the Dutch have never AFAIK even considered WMDs and chose to make children and cyclists safe.

It seems to me that the Dutch have made the right choice and have saved a pretty sum at the same time. And those savings completely ignore the numerous very real benefits to a country of having a population that extensively uses active transport on a daily basis.

And as is quite clear now, getting children to develop a culture of exercise makes them healthier throughout their life, whereas the UK has a population that is leading Europe in obesity, but is that something to be proud of?

townmouse said...

Just to second everything David said: the eye opener on the tour is that it's ALL like that, not just on 'bike routes'.

I can heartily recommend taking this tour to anyone interested in seeing for themselves what first class cycling provision is all about.