The importance of the mundane, why the mundane must go everywhere and why "mundane" must be very good.

Chatting in safety on "just average"
Dutch cycle-path.

Occasionally we've covered exceptional examples of cycling infrastructure on this blog. It is not only this blog, or only the Netherlands that produces such infrastructure. Such projects, big and impressive, often large bridges, tunnels or cycle-parking facilities, are photogenic and prestigious. They can also be the subject of press releases from the city in which they are built, or the designers and they're very popular amongst bloggers, on facebook and twitter. However, an emphasis on such things paints a false image.

Riding to school. No hands required on
the sort of mundane infrastructure you
can expect to see everywhere

It can be a pleasure to use exceptional pieces of infrastructure, but I'm uneasy about the amount of attention which such things achieve. The whole world doesn't look like the exceptions, not even to a cyclist in the Netherlands. After all, the very word exceptional means "deviating widely from a norm". By definition, almost all infrastructure is not exceptional but is actually just average.

Boringly average infrastructure
kept clear of ice in winter.

Prestige projects are very popular with politicians who want to make a name for themselves, and they can be great to have as an extra. However, it is the quality of design of the mundane infrastructure which is most important to encourage a high cycling modal share. This is what most people will use for most of their journeys.

Prestige projects are not important at all if they are in isolation and not linked by a grid of high quality routes.

Not a "superhighway", just a cycle-path

So let's hear it for mundane, common, ordinary, unexceptional and boring infrastructure. Forget the exceptional stuff, it is the mundane which needs to be good. What is exceptional about the Netherlands is that the mundane infrastructure is of high quality, excellently maintained, and perhaps most importantly, ubiquitous. This mundane infrastructure in the Netherlands is what makes the high modal share possible because it is available to everyone for all their journeys. The few pieces of exceptional infrastructure are spread thinly across the country and only useful to a minority on some of their journeys.

High quality routes can also be roads
if cars are removed from them by
unravelling motor and bicycle routes

The importance of having a tight grid of high quality routes to encourage the use of bicycles was a lesson learnt way back in the late 1970s and early 1980s and still just as valid today. Don't let your city get away with offering just a few prestige projects or just a few particularly good routes. Such proposals may sound good, they're great for boasting about, they're great for photo shoots and publicity purposes and politicians love to have their names associated with big projects. However, a few pieces of exceptional infrastructure cannot cause an appreciable change because for most people making most journeys in other places the experience of cycling will remain the same as it was before they were built.

One of thousands of small bridges
for cyclists doing what it needs to do

Average Dutch infrastructure is what is featured most on this blog. It's also what we demonstrate most when we show people how Dutch infrastructure works. We take the routes that normal people take to destinations that normal people go to. We use the infrastructure that normal people use. There is no point in cherry picking a few particularly good pieces of infrastructure as this only creates a false image. It wouldn't show how people actually cycle on a daily basis and what is important to make this high rate of cycling normal.

So what is this "grid", then ?
It's simple in concept. Within a few pedal strokes of home, everyone needs to be able to reach infrastructure on which they not only will be safe but on which they will feel safe. It must take the cyclist to any destination in a convenient manner and it must be contiguous. No stops and starts, no need to "take the lane" to cross large junctions.

Main cycle-routes should be separated from each other by no more than 500 metres. Secondary routes fill in between to get the spacing down to about 250 m and neighbourhood routes fill in the gaps where needed.

Conceptual version of "the grid". Cover
your whole country like this.
Red = main cycle routes 500 m apart,
green = secondary, blue = local links.

In practice, the grid is of course not arranged on strict North-South / East-West lines, but curves with the landscape, runs alongside canals and rivers with bridges to cross periodically, goes across the countryside and through the towns and cities that people live in.

However, the everyday experience is as if it were such a strict grid. For instance, from our home we only need to cycle 200 metres on the quiet culdesac in which we live (30 km/h limit) before reaching either of two high quality four metre wide cycle-paths which take us to every possible destination by bike. See the actual map of primary and secondary cycle-routes in Assen in a previous post about "the grid".