The challenge of declining bicycle sales in the world's leading cycling nation

A few days ago I quote tweeted this graph from Datagraver on twitter with a comment that "Sadly, cycling is dying in the Netherlands." The responses to this tweet were largely defensive and many people clearly didn't understand what I meant, so let's look deeper at the bicycle market in the Netherlands and consider what the consequences could be for cycling in this country with lower bicycle sales.

Shrinking sales don't mean an instant reduction in the bicycle fleet. This drop in bicycle sales is a leading indicator of a problem which will become apparent in the next few years.

How many bicycles are there in the Netherlands

The total number of bicycles in the Netherlands is currently reported to be about 23 million. That's about 1.3 bikes per person. This figure is of course pushed upward by all the people who own many bicycles, including pretty much everyone who I know, and pulled downward by people with no bicycle at all.

There are actually quite a lot of people who don't have a bicycle in the Netherlands, about a fifth of the population in total. People without bikes include babies too young to cycle, some people with disabilities and some older people who can no longer ride a bike or trike. There are also people even in this country who do not cycle by choice. In addition there's inequality in our society just like that of other countries and for some people the price even of a second hand bicycle is a barrier. A nationwide scheme tackles this to some extent by providing free of charge donated bikes to children.

The sales decline and the pandemic's effect on sales

You'll note from the graph that sales of conventional bicycles have declined to about a quarter of the level which they had 20 years ago, while sales volume of electric bicycles have grown from more or less nothing to a figure which slightly exceeded conventional bicycle sales in last year's sales figures. Those two trends are obvious without concerning ourselves with the two pandemic years, 2020 and 2021.

Both 2020 and 2021 were unusual because of the pandemic. Bicycle shops in 2020 were reporting record sales because of lockdown cycling, while in 2021 they were complaining about not being able to get stock because of supply chain issues.

In the year 2000 around 1.5 M bicycles were sold to a population of 16.3 M people. By 2021 only around 445000 bicycles were sold to a slightly higher population of 17.1 M. We've gone from one  bicycle sale per 11 people to around one bike per 39 people. i.e. Sales have reduced to a quarter of their previous level. Of course, e-bike sales have increased and if we include the e-bikes in the sales figures that makes a combined total of 923000 bikes sold in 2021, or one per 19 people. That's still a halving of the total number of bikes sold per person per year.

The average price of a new bicycle

As I reported before, the Dutch spend more on average on a new bicycle than people of other countries and this has increased rapidly. The average price paid for a new bicycle in 2008 was €603 but last year's average price was €1627 (vs. about 800 pounds in the UK and about $700 in the USA). There's a simple reason why Dutch people are willing to spend more: Because they use bikes more than those who live in other countries they spend more on their bicycles with the expectation of getting plenty of use from them.

The average bicycle price has increased faster in recent years because of the switch from normal bicycles to e-bikes. Bike shops have been perfectly happy with this outcome because the decrease in sales volumes is more than masked by a higher profit margin due to the increase in the average value of a sale. If you've ever wondered why so many bicycle manufacturers and dealerships in the early twentieth century became motorcycle or car manufacturers and dealerships by half way through the 20th century, there's the answer. They too found that they could make higher profits by selling motorized vehicles at a higher price. Cycling declined while few people took much notice of what was happening.

But there's an issue with this. Not everyone can afford to buy a new bike, especially at the average price paid for a bicycle in this country.

Second and third hand non-electric bikes provide the backbone of the bicycle fleet.

Many second hand bicycle sales are made by bicycle shops which take trade-ins of people's older bikes when they buy a new bicycle. Sales to third and later users are largely private. The value of a bicycle drops as it ages and each time it is sold to a new owner a bicycle typically also passes to a different demographic.

Even in the year 2000 with about 1.5 M bikes being sold each year, bikes of up to five years old made up only a third of the total fleet in use. i.e. two thirds of the population were riding bicycles which were over five years old, well out of guarantee and possibly on their third owner.

Bicycles sold in 2000 were on average used for about about 14 years. That was not a maximum age, but an average. Obviously some bikes are scrapped earlier for various reasons and others last far longer. This is a simple calculation: 14 years had to be the average life expectancy for a new bicycle in 2000 because with sales of 1.5 million bicycles a year and a bicycle population of around 21 million we were replacing about 1/14th of the bicycle fleet every year.

In 2021 with around 1 M bikes sold per year (normal bikes and e-bikes combined) and a total bicycle population of 23 M we now need our bicycles to last on average 23 years just to maintain the current fleet size. Unfortunately the type of bicycle being sold makes this difficult if not impossible. Half the bicycles being sold now are e-bikes and e-bikes are not practical for a second or third owner to maintain when they are over 5 years of age. 

While bicycles built of standard parts can be maintained more or less forever, manufacturers often no longer sell unusual and specialized parts of bikes after a few years, and this is especially problematic with e-bikes because even when they are available the price of batteries, controllers (the electronic parts between battery and motor including the display), motors and other expensive parts is often too high for a second or third owner and there is usually no cheaper substitute alternative available. Sometimes a second hand part can be used, but then you're stripping one bike to keep another going. New buyers are covered by a warranty but no warranty claim can be made by second or third owners so they have to cover the full cost of any repair and these parts often add up to cost more than the second hand value of an older e-bike. Because of this problem, we can expect that though e-bikes currently sell at a rate of half a million per year their shorter lifespans mean that they will only ever be able to contribute about three million bikes to the total fleet while the rest of the fleet will eventually have to be made up from the other half million normal bikes which were sold in the same year. But that unfortunately means that maintaining the current fleet level of 23 M bikes requires that normal bikes must have an unrealistically long average lifespan of around 40 years.

Lower sales mean a slowly reducing number of available bicycles

Shrinking sales and the type of bicycle being bought by customers of new bicycles will both affect the availability of usable second and third hand bicycles in the future. It will take a few years for this to be obvious because only a small proportion of the fleet is replaced each year and if they can't find what they wanted, most people can just hold onto a bicycle for a bit longer. But this will mean that the availability of rideable bicycles decreases over subsequent years.

The effect of e-bikes on the Dutch population

While in other countries the e-bike is often perceived a transport mode which is preferable to a car, it's quite clear that in the Netherlands with our rapidly growing car ownership and usage and plummeting sales of normal bicycles, that e-bikes are being used in place of human powered bicycles.

The reported distance cycled per year by an average Dutch person has remained constant for decades at just under 900 km per year, which is under a fifth of the distance that we would all have to cycle in order to exercise enough to maintain good health by riding bikes alone. Substituting e-bike kms for human powered kms only means that the Dutch population gets less exercise. A particularly worrying trend is the uptake in e-bikes amongst the young. It's now not at all unusual to see school children who barely turn the pedals by themselves at all on their way to school and back, reducing the potential for cycling to establish a good exercise habit from a young age.

There is also then a problem that these e-bikes are more expensive and less durable, which makes cycling a lot less democratic than it used to be. Parents who once struggled to provide a bicycle for their child are now under pressure to provide an e-bike instead.

Complacency doesn't solve any problem

Unfortunately these concerns are not being discussed, but are instead being swept under the carpet.

Cycling is a fragile mode of transport which if it is to continue at a relatively high rate, as is still fortunately the case currently in the Netherlands, will need protecting against competition from motor vehicles of all sizes including the small electric vehicles with which some people are currently enamoured.

There is much to lose and we're doing little to protect cycling against the threats that it faces. You can see this even with the current response to rising fuel prices due to the Russian attack on Ukraine. Our government immediately announced huge decreases in taxation for motorists, which ensure that driving remains competitive even as it boosts trade with an aggressive nation and continues to fuel the climate crisis, while they've done nothing at all to encourage people out of their cars, and in particular they've not encouraged people to ride a bicycle instead of driving which would be the most effective way to do some good to solve both those problems.

If we don't want cycling to decline in the Netherlands then we need to invest more in it. The main thing that the Netherlands needs now is wider, smoother, cycle-paths which take more direct routes and improve the competitiveness of cycling with other transport modes.

Things that don't explain the drop in bicycle sales

People in the twitter thread repeatedly made the following suggestions to try to explain the decline in cycle sales and it's probably worth repeating here why none of them explain the decline in sales:

It's not the annoying shared mopeds which litter
the sidewalks while waiting for someone to drive
a car to them and swap the battery either. There
have long been a small number of mopeds in NL

The decline in sales is not explained by SwapFiets, a company which provides a hire service to about 150000 cyclists or roughly 1% of the total fleet. I see it as an expensive way to ride a cheap bike but some people clearly do like their service and that's fine, but the numbers just are not there to explain a decline in bicycle sales.

It's not explained by the popularity of OV-Fiets as while that system is one of the largest bike share systems in the world it has only about 20000 bicycles, or about 0.1% of the total fleet. To an even greater extent than with SwapFiets, the numbers are far too low to make an appreciable difference.

It's also not explained by a reduction in theft. The rate of theft has dropped a little over the last twenty years, but this never really had much of an effect on the fleet size and a reduction in theft doesn't affect this either. Around half a million bicycles are reportedly stolen each year in the Netherlands. A lot of bikes, but a small fraction of the fleet size. Some stolen bicycles are vandalized and become unusable but the majority are either kept by the thief or sold to someone else who continues to ride them, so theft doesn't actually take many bicycles out of the fleet.

It's not explained by cycles becoming more durable. Actually, the opposite has happened. 50 year old steel framed bicycles with standard parts can still be repaired with inexpensive parts but the move to more exotic frame materials, more complex gear and braking systems made maintenance more difficult, and electric assist then had an even greater effect making many modern bicycles far less durable and less economical to keep in service. When people ask me if I can provide replacement batteries, controllers and motors for older (5 year +) e-bikes it's almost always the case that they are either no longer available at all or that if they are available then they're are far too expensive compared with the residual value of the bike. A replacement battery at €550 (that's the retail price of the only battery that is available today from one of our suppliers, which fits only a small minority of e-bikes) costs €100 more than the average price paid for a relatively new and expensive second hand bike bought from a bicycle shop, let alone the price of an average older bike sold privately. So while simple repairs to e-bikes are possible, more complex ones can't be justified. This is what leads to e-bikes being scrapped after quite short useful lives.

It's not explained by market saturation either. While enthusiasts can keep traditionally built bicycles in operation for decades while spending very little to do so, the general public does not do this. There's no sentimentality. If the bike is now worth less than the parts and labour for repair then the bicycle is usually scrapped. In the Netherlands, as explained above, bicycles last on average around 14 years before they need a repair which is too expensive and that's why sales of 1.5 million bicycles a year are necessary in order to maintain a static fleet size.

Update April 2024
Unfortunately, given two years of extra data, we can see that bicycle sales continue to decline, with sales having dropped by about a third since two years ago, to about a fifth of the level required to maintain the required static bicycle fleet size for mass cycling in the Netherlands.

At this point, with this low level of sales, we would need each new bicycle sold to last for sixty year on average just to maintain the fleet size, and that's completely unrealistic. Bicycles never had anything like that long an average lifespan, and modern bicycles, with more complex gearing, suspension forks and frames not made of steel, do not last as long as the simpler designs which made up most sales 40 years ago.

As a result, the pool of usable (mostly second hand) bicycles is now shrinking. As the average age of remaining bicycles gets older and they become un-repairable, there are fewer newer ones available to replace them. This results in shrinkage of the bicycle fleet and will inevitably mean that people cannot cycle so much as they used to. This is tragic for very many reasons.

If you need parts for a traditionally built bicycle then you're in luck. If you need parts for an unusual bicycle or to convert a less practical machine to be better for everyday use I can probably also help you. If you're looking for parts for an e-bike I certainly will help you if I can, but it may not be possible to find what you need. Please do ask, though.

Living without engines and car free day in the Netherlands

A photo from today's "commute", a round-trip
rider which brings me back home to work.

The last time that I travelled in any kind of motorized vehicle was in February 2019 when I took a lift with a friend to help him with an event. The last time I travelled with a motorized vehicle for my own benefit was in August 2018, driving the car that we owned but never much used to be recycled.

It's "car free day" today, but just as everywhere else across the world this is ignored by the masses who continue to drive their polluting vehicles to and fro. Every trip made by car, in every car including those which claim to have zero emissions, contributes substantially to climate change, the effects of which we increasingly feel as a result of the "natural" disasters which result from our changed weather.

There has been much on the news about the fires in California and Siberia, but here in the Netherlands we also see the result of this with new records being set on a regular basis. We began this summer with a near drought and just last week we had the warmest September day ever in this country, but just as with previous warnings, this resulted in no real change. People are back to their usual high emitting lifestyles. Cars are very much a part of this, with their numbers, their usage and their size all growing year on year.

But we can't blame cars alone for the problems that we're facing. The growth in flying is such that even now in the middle of a second wave of the pandemic there are just as many flights as there were four years ago without a pandemic. Almost all the growth comes from the richest people and the richest people continue to deny that they are the richest people.

That the short blip of reduced emissions due to corona was just a short blip shouldn't really surprise anyone. It certainly didn't surprise me as I predicted it back in April as even then people were talking about a "return to normal". The problems which face us are enormous but it seems that people don't know how to or do not wish to react in ways which will address them, and that applies even to the case  of a very immediate threat to our health from a deadly virus.

We are the rich and polluting minority and it is us who need to change our lives in order to leave a liveable planet for our descendants. Don't we want to do that ? Is it not a worthwhile thing to do ? If we can't convince people even to take the tiny step of taking part in a single car free day once a year, what hope do we have in effecting real change in behaviour and thinking ? However I'll try to set an example by living with the smallest footprint that I can manage, avoiding motorized transport so much as I possibly can.

No subsidy for the car-free
An interesting thing about the Netherlands is that drivers of cars receive subsidies from taxation paid by all, which of course means that while I try not to contribute to the pollution and other problems caused by cars, our government makes sure that I do so anyway. Talking of which:

Local newspaper on the 22nd of September
Our local newspaper has not covered car-free day at all. It is just not a thing here in the Netherlands. However car companies have huge budgets for promotion and there is always a budget to try to associate their dangerous and environmentally destructive product with something other than its danger and environmental impact. So instead of car-free day coverage we have, on the 22nd of September, a full page dedicated to a different event spread over three days in October when car drivers will fill the roads, waste a vast amount of energy and produce a lot of emissions by driving a million kilometres in "green" cars.

The quotation marks are mine. The article is promoting a deliberately created traffic jam of polluting vehicles. There is nothing truly sustainable about these vehicles. Unfortunately, governments listen to car company propaganda and therefore I and other people who do not drive are made to contribute to a government subsidy given to people who do drive. What's more, the subsidy is not having a useful effect and emissions from cars continue to grow in the Netherlands because people who drive overwhelmingly choose larger more polluting vehicles.

The text includes some words about cycling, walking or just staying home, but the emphasis is obvious. This is an event about cars and their intention is to do something incredibly wasteful, to drive cars a million kilometres for no reason whatsoever, while somehow managing to promote this event as "green".

Update: Car companies continue marketing their destructive product
The above can only sensibly be seen as a marketing exercise. There is nothing "green" about any kind of car. And is this marketing working ? A few days after this blog post was written there came an answer: it most certainly is working. Car usage in the Netherlands continues to grow year on year. The biggest increase is again in use of petrol / gasoline (benzine in Dutch) powered cars. Car companies spend much time pushing the absurd idea of green motoring which is a myth in itself but this myth is presented in such a way that it gets absurd amounts of attention such as that from our local newspaper above and from politicians, however their main product remains what it always was: Cars remain the same old polluting, planet destroying, dangerous product that they ever were. We can only ever solve the problems due to cars by having far fewer of them driven less. But car companies are still selling the nightmare scenario of more cars.

Real green transport
The million kilometres travelled in three days target of the motor lobby is actually not all that much anyway. A target for cycling in the Netherlands would need to be much higher. Most cycle journeys are more than a kilometre long and for most of any given working day Dutch people make more than a million journeys per hour by bike so a million kilometres would easily be reached by the end of the first hour on the first day of this exercise if encouraging cycling was really their aim. 

An endless search for quick fixes results instead in repeated failures

The Netherlands in April during the "intelligent lockdown"
which was actually no lockdown at all.

A new record was set in the Netherlands today. 1560 new cases of Covid-19 were reported today - the highest level of new infections that we've ever had in one day. This is a higher rate of infection by some margin than any day during March and April during the first wave of the disease. The second wave of infections is truly upon us.

How did we get here ? The answer is obvious: without actually eliminating the disease, without actually ever having had a proper lockdown which could perhaps have helped to eliminate the disease, our government re-opened everything. Instead of taking this seriously, as did countries such as Taiwan, New Zealand, South Korea and China (started by trying to cover it up, but have taken effective action since January), our government decided to downplay the risks from the beginning and when they were forced to take action they took minimum action for a minimum period of time.

Dutch people are now travelling to other countries on holiday, drinking in bars, eating in restaurants, going to school and university, commuting to work, and spreading the virus between themselves as if there was nothing at all to avoid. There are still some rudimentary hand washing facilities at shops, but hardly anyone wears a face mask (I do and it leads to odd looks) and people just do not keep the mandated 1.5 m distance from one-another.

What happened in the Netherlands was that instead of taking proper action to fix this issue, our government looked for a shortcut. Rather than a short and sharp lockdown to eliminate the disease locally followed by ensuring that people who visit or return from another country really do go into quarantine, international visitors are merely requested to quarantine themselves while everyone knows that most don't bother. Testing and tracing have been stretched to the breaking point so they are no longer effective.

Failure resulted from taking a shortcut. From looking for a quick fix which it was thought would allow the economy to be minimally damaged. In reality this is far from over and we can expect further damage to the economy as well as further deaths due to an inadequate response. The quick fix was anything but a fix. The countries which took effective action now have the least disruption to their economies and to lives.

The Climate

Of course it's not just on the pandemic that our policies have failed. Our environmental policy is also failing. Another record was set just yesterday: The hottest September day ever in the Netherlands.

 

Already two years old and we have not begun to
respond in an effective way.

Our emissions are not decreasing. We're not even slightly close to doing this. Why ? It's the same story. Instead of taking decisive action to change habits and reduce emissions we are taking a minimum change approach, which can only make a very small difference to emissions.

Instead of tackling the over-consumption which has led to climate change, people are looking for a magic way to continue with their wasteful lifestyles. Many people would rather buy a new car than consider making the changes to their lifestyle required to live car-free. Though the difference in energy usage and emissions between different powered transport modes is not large, it's easier to sell the idea of continuing a wasteful lifestyle including much international travel by switching from flying to some other slightly less polluting mode such as train travel than it is to sell the idea of travelling far less.

Instead of travelling less, we travel more and more each year by every powered mode, so even the slow growth of some slightly less polluting modes doesn't in any way "offset" the more polluting modes because they are growing as well. All this growth, whether from car, airplane, boat, bus and train, simply adds to the total emissions.

The top 10%, those with earnings over $13700 per year,
are the big polluters. We buy and throw away too much.

Unfortunately, people like to buy stuff. Buying a "green" product makes people think they've done something good, even though it is always better for the environment to reduce consumption. Buying less, not replacing goods regularly, not going on holiday, not buying new clothes when the old ones can be repaired and worn again, doesn't impress the neighbours but it does reduce emissions. Every product has a footprint. Using what you have for longer, and using it less if it's a product which consumes energy, is far more powerful than swapping to something new and certainly more effective than buying "offsets" to assuage the guilt of over-consumption.

The quick fix of buying things to try to maintain an unsustainable lifestyle, of trying to continue to live in the exact same wasteful way but with "green" products, isn't a fix at all. To reduce our footprint on the planet, to maintain a liveable climate, we need to change how we live. We need to live with less.

Building cycling infrastructure

This blog is of course mostly about cycling infrastructure. Here too we see the quick fix mentality.

This isn't exceptional, it's the normal standard. Cycle-paths
like this need to go everywhere to enable mass cycling. 

Very few places outside the Netherlands have even tried to build the complete grid of cycling infrastructure which we have known for 40 years is required to enable the majority to cycle. Instead, almost everywhere, there's a piecemeal approach. Small steps are taken. There's no continuity in space or in time. Not only do pieces of infrastructure not join up, but they don't necessarily last long either. An extreme example may well present itself after the covid crisis ends, or perhaps even before it ends, as we can unfortunately expect many temporary pieces of cycling infrastructure which have popped up during this period to be removed. Why ? Because they were never really a sign of genuine policy change.

With the growth in popularity of Dutch ideas around cycling, many countries are putting on a show of attempting to replicate this success but unfortunately it seems rather like cargo cult infrastructure which has a vague resemblance to what has proven to be successful in the Netherlands but with shortfalls which make it far less useful or far less safe. There are cycle-paths built far too narrow to work efficiently which give way at every side-road, and bicycle roads where the level of motor traffic is such that it will dominate and result in nothing more than a differently decorated normal road, big expectations from building a single "Dutch roundabout" in a totally different setting from the Netherlands complete with an expection of a level of safety which could not reasonably be expected if the same thing was built in the Netherlands under similar circumstances, "Dutch" style "protected intersections" in much busier settings but without the single most important aspect of the design, i.e. safety enforced by traffic light designs which totally remove conflict, so that the the same outcome surely cannot be expected, and design guidelines which look like grab-bags of good and bad practice from multiple sources. Short-cuts have been taken. None of this is the successful approach which people have seen in the Netherlands but something far more superficial.

It's also common to see praise heaped upon brand new infrastructure, rather than waiting for a proven track record of safety. That's something that we sadly see here in the Netherlands as well. In reality we can't ever know much about an individual junction's safety until we wait long enough to see what the long term safety record is, though of course immediate problems should be taken as a warning that there is a problem. Official Dutch stats about, for example, roundabout safety are based on observing hundreds of "roundabout years".

Merely swapping one kind of junction design for another won't solve many, if any problems. The Dutch success with cycling (and while this country has failed with Covid, it has done better than anywhere else with cycling) results from taking a comprehensive look at traffic across whole cities, and indeed the country. Motor traffic has been relocated to an extent which almost be comprehended elsewhere and this goes a long way to explain how cycling has been made safe and convenient in the Netherlands (at the same time, driving has never been more popular, but that's another story).

Waiting for a vaccine

While we continue to take shortcuts and opt for quick fixes instead of solving problems properly, we will continue to fail. Waiting for a vaccine can also be a position of putting off doing the needed work now in the hope that something else will remove the need to do that work in the future.

A few inadequate cycle-paths and junctions are not a vaccine which will result in people abandoning their cars en-masse and result in mass cycling. This is not new. It's been known for 40 years that a complete grid of safe go-everywhere infrastructure which keeps motor vehicles away from cyclists is required to begin to achieve that goal (luckily, it doesn't take 40 years to do the same).

Electric cars are not a vaccine for the myriad problems caused by cars just as trains are not a vaccine for the problems caused by aircraft. The best way to reduce the impact of motorized transport is to use it less. Cycling comes for free.

Negative CO2 emissions can't be relied upon to vaccinate us against climate change because this is an unproven technology which has never been scaled up to the extent that would be required. We need to change our lifestyles and reduce our emissions, quickly, leaving fossil fuel under the ground, not rely on future generations using as yet not invented technology to solve problems caused by our selfishness.

There is also as yet no vaccine for Covid-19. Many groups are doing research but until there is a vaccine we can never be sure that there ever will be one. This magic bullet against the virus won't be a quick fix either. Production will take time to ramp up and distribution will be an enormous logistical problem (IATA article: "Just providing a single dose to 7.8 billion people would fill 8,000 747 cargo aircraft").

There is really no alternative to doing a proper job instead of opting for a quick-fix solution. Business as usual can't continue. Not for Covid, not for the climate and not for cycling either. And anyone who promises you that a vaccine will solve everything in a few weeks time is a liar or a fool.

Update

Just after this post went live, five days ago, the main news here in the Netherlands was that both Belgium and Germany, our closest neighbours, had taken measures against travel to and from the most infected parts of the Netherlands. Non-essential travel is forbidden, but it leaves open the question of who defines what is "essential" ? One of the problems that we've had this whole time is that people will continue to travel, continue to spread the virus because far too many people think they are the exception to the rule.

Five days later we now have a new record infection rate. Over 2200 people tested positive for covid 19 over the last 24 hour period. The peak in April was just over 1300 so we're not far off double that now, and as the trend has been steadily higher each day (except Saturday and Sunday when there are fewer tests), this is really not good news.

Perhaps you wonder why I get my figures from "someone on Twitter". The reason is that the Dutch government stopped reporting daily figures back in July and someone voluntarily took their place (read his story here). Actually, our government has really let us down over Covid. With this new peak in infections you may also wonder what action they've taken. The answer is surprisingly little. Last Friday it was announced that bars would have to close at 1 am, resulting in considerable push-back from bar owners, and that some kinds of group events should have no more than 50 people at a time. These measures came into force on Sunday, and mostly apply only to the worst affected areas. Today our prime minister added that the huge crowds, not limited to 50, of football fans at matches should not cheer or sing. I doubt this will be adequate.

Update 29th September

Just a few more days and we've passed a new milestone: more than 3000 infections in just one day. That's well over double the highest number that were seen in the first wave of infections. Our government's response ? Yesterday there was a press conference at which it was suggested that bars and restaurants should shut at 10 PM instead of 1 AM as before and that people might like to wear face masks when shopping. It's not compulsory though. Shops have to make their own decisions about whether to try to enforce this, so they mostly are not.

The response of the Dutch government to this disease is astonishingly inept. Just today, 13 people more are reported as having died of Covid, making a total of nearly 6400 so far. Let us remember that this is optional. Compared with other countries we're doing astonishing badly. Taiwan for instance has a bigger population than ours, with 23.8 million people compared with our 17.4 million, yet their total deaths due to the virus thus far are just seven. Not seventy, seven hundred or seven thousand, the last of which which would make their rate comparable with ours, but just one digit. 7. i.e. relative to the population the virus has killed more than a thousand times as many people here as it has in Taiwan.

People continue to become infected and ill in this country because our government is incapable of acting in the face of a crisis.

A second wave in the Netherlands was not unexpected. Indeed, watching our lacklustre response I've been expecting it for a while. My Dutch class began at the start of this month but I had already opted out in August because it was obvious where we were heading. But it's been obvious for much longer than that. In June I wrote a computer game based around this eventuality. It's a free download. You'll also probably need an emulator for the antique computer that it runs on.

Making driving more convenient: Assen's FlorijnAs project attempts to reverse decades of improvements for cyclists.

Readers will have noticed that my blogging slowed down somewhat in 2015 and has not really picked up again this year so far. There are a number of reasons why, but the main reason for blogging less is that there is less good news for cyclists in Assen and across the Netherlands in general now than was the case eight years ago when this blog started. The good ideas have mostly been documented on this blog - see past posts (in the section on the right). This blog post describes a large scheme in Assen which is damaging the city, but please do read to the bottom as there's a long way still to fall.

Traffic in Assen in May 1979. Many readers will see similarities between this film and the appearance of their own city. I certainly see similarities between the film and British cities. Before and after images of some of the same locations can be found here and here.

As the danger of cycling increased, people cycled less. 1978
was the year when things finally turned around, infrastructure
started to improve safety and people started cycling more.
There is no support for the fictional "safety in numbers" idea
in this data. The much lower cycling modal share of the more
recent period compared with the 1950s and 60s and the
continued decline in injuries against relatively little
cycling growth during the 80s and onwards is the direct result
of infrastructure separating cyclists from motor vehicles

In most countries, bicycles reached their peak in the first half of the 20th century before being pushed aside in the second half of the 20th century. The year in which the Dutch cycled the least was one year before the film above was shot:1978. Why had cycling become less attractive ? Because policies which favoured cars had resulted in Dutch roads being clogged with motor vehicles. I think the film illustrates the answer very well. Cycling conditions were unpleasant because cyclists were only rarely separated from motor traffic.

The resulting conditions not only made cycling unpleasant due to low subjective safety scaring people away from cycling, but also led to the highest number of deaths per km travelled by bike that was ever recorded in the Netherlands.

The "Visie Aantrekkelijke
binnenstad 2030" from 2011
promised an increasingly
Autoluwe future for Assen,
but that's not the direction
we're heading in.

Dutch cities belonged to drivers in the 1970s. A policy change resulted in a second revolution on Dutch city centre streets which reversed this. The rest is history: City centres were returned to cyclists and pedestrians, and because the rest of the country was covered by a comprehensive grid of safe cycling infrastructure this enabled safe access to the city centre, even by children riding their own bikes.

It was only by implementing policies which prioritized cycling and deliberately improved the safety of cyclists that conditions in Dutch cities were changed from the unpleasant scenes seen in the film above. There are twice as many cars in the Netherlands now as there were when the film above was made, but cycling is far more pleasant and far safer these days than it was then.

However this doesn't mean the battle was won and that everything is going well. In fact, some of the lessons of the 1970s and 1980s are now being ignored in the Netherlands. New infrastructure which makes cycling less convenient and less safe is now being built.

Local paper: Parking garages are now
full due to the change in policy.
But who benefits from this ?

The FlorijnAs project in Assen is changing a lot of the infrastructure in the city in an adverse way. It's difficult to find anything positive at all about this project.

But the income from the
parking has fallen because
many drivers only use the
free supermarket parking
tickets (short term)

Last year's change in car parking policy has also led to problems for cyclists (I predicted this last year). Removing the out-of-town-center free parking and replacing it with half price (€6 for the whole day) inner city parking has, you won't be surprised to read, led to far more cars being along the inner ring road and into the inner city.

The increased parking in the centre has not benefitted the council because while the car parks and roads leading to them are now busier than they were, the total income from car parking has actually dropped by €100K per year as a result of the new policy. It also doesn't benefit shop-keepers because now that drivers use only the free tickets from the supermarkets to quickly do their shopping, they don't wander around to other shops and spend money there as well. The out of centre free parking used to enable this. Of course this policy which brings more cars to the city centre certainly doesn't help cyclists.

To add to the woes of the businesses in the centre of Assen, the council is supporting the building of an outlet centre on the outskirts of the city which of course will offer free parking and will help to ensure that out-of-towners use Assen's shops even less than now.

Below you'll find examples of how access to the city centre has been compromised from several directions:

From the North

The Molenbrug provides part of a main route to the city centre for people from the North-East. The narrowing of the bridge had already taken place when I wrote about this bridge last year, but at that time we still had a traffic light to stop cars. Now that the traffic light has gone as well, cyclists have less priority and worse safety than in the past. The removal of separate pedestrian facilities here also means that at busy times this bridge demonstrates all the problems which come from shared pedestrian and bicycle facilities.

The most dangerous junctions in Assen are uncontrolled crossings. One of them is further along this route to the North West and caused a fatality in 2009.

Read more about how the Molenbrug used to be.

From the North-East

Assen's roundabouts are all of a particularly safe design except for the two new roundabouts which resulted from the FlorijnAs project. These use an inferior design without a central waiting area which makes them dangerous for cyclists to cross. How did Assen lose the ability to construct safe roundabouts ? In this case, the new roundabout has replaced what was a direct priority non-stop through route for cyclists so this also causes an extra delay on a busy cycling route.

This road is being doubled in width. For motorists there will be two lanes in each direction plus a wide verge in the centre with attractive trees and a new row of car parking spaces which can be seen on the left of this picture. For cyclists, the new scheme brings the cycle-path on the left which is being built a fraction under the supposed minimum width of 3 m (which is actually too narrow for convenience).

Cycling infrastructure should support side-by-side cycling because this makes cycling more sociable and more attractive. This path is on one of the busiest routes in Assen but at under three metres wide this has been built too narrow for side-by-side cyclists going in both directions, too narrow for safe overtaking. and the lamp-posts are ludicrously close to the path itself. To the right, six lanes for drivers (one parking + two driving lanes + a verge + two driving lanes), all of which are wider than the cycle-path.

Jan Fabriciusstraat provides access from the East to the city centre. This very wide and busy road has space for multiple vehicle lanes, a grass verge in the centre for much of its length and pavements (sidewalks) of up to 10 m in width, yet cyclists have nothing but a 1.3 m wide on-road cycle-lane which is magnetically attractive for parking trucks. This is an example of wide pavement syndrome.

Also Jan Fabriciusstraat. Cyclists turning left have
to make a 130 degree turn on a very narrow path.

Where parking is provided, it is parallel to and right next to the cycle-lane, placing cyclists in danger from drivers who are concentrating on parking. The cyclists in the second photo who are heading in the wrong direction are children on the way to school. They are riding in this way because the planner of this street somehow couldn't find any way to enable a safe and convenient journey to be made by bike from the road next to the tall building on the left to the position where I am standing. Note that where the woman in red is standing there was once a wide good quality cycle-path which was removed when this street was redeveloped.

Read more about Jan Fabriciusstraat

From the East
Assen's railway station, built in 1989, is currently being demolished to make room for a new building. Most cyclists and most drivers in the station area do not have the railway station as their destination but are passing through, so direct through routes are important for both cyclists and drivers.

This video shows the direct routes South to North and East to West which existed across the station area at the beginning of 2015. They're old-fashioned, but efficient. The East-West route dumped cyclists into Stationstraat, a road which was also used by busses, but it was a wide road and unpleasant overtaking events were rare.

The new station plans include a tunnel so that drivers will benefit from an improved direct through route past the station. Cyclists making through journeys have their route made less direct and have to "share" a pedestrian area. Those heading East to West will then have to "share" a newly narrowed road with busses. Also note that for cyclists the infrastructure of the future is built of bumpy tiles, not of smooth asphalt.

The architect's impression of the new station. This is a road which will be used by taxis and busses en-masse. Anyone dropping off a train or bus passenger by car will do that right here in the middle of the picture in this shared space. Cyclists will have to make their way through this.

According to the architect, people will bring cats to the station. I suspect this will never actually happen in practice.

Update February 2019: The railway station has some of the problems described above. There is some conflict with people using the underground cycle-parking and those travelling through the tunnel by bike. However overall I think this has actually worked out quite well. Read a new blog post about the railway station.

South East

South East: Zuidersingel (which leads into Oostersingel) was narrowed and resurfaced in 2013 as part of the works which gave us the unpleasant Kerkplein shared space. The result of this work is that cyclists now find themselves used as mobile traffic calming devices. As I type this, the Zuidersingel layout is already being copied around the corner in Stationstraat as part of the new station development. As a result, the problems for cyclists which already exist in Zuidersingel/Oostersingel will also be seen in Stationstraat which is part of the main route to the city centre for most people who live in the East of Assen. It seems to be taking an awfully long tome for people to realise that "sharing" really doesn't work on busy through routes.

South

The Kerkplein Shared Space already serves as a barrier for people from the South who wish to enter the centre of Assen. With the new parking regime, the amount of traffic here has grown and with the extra traffic the unpleasantness of trying to negotiate this junction has also grown. Read more about the Kerkplein.

West
Luckily, redevelopment of some routes directly from the west into the centre of Assen occurred slightly before the FlorijnAs project started and therefore these routes were not in line to be redeveloped. However, they do lead into the areas of De Nieuwe Kolk and the Kerkplein, both of which cause issues for cyclists. Also there is one route from slightly North of West - which as it happens is our most direct route to the city centre, which is being disrupted. The existing primary cycle-route alongside the northern bank of Het Kanaal has been downgraded to a shared use secondary route and the well used footpath alongside has been made unusable to many people by the addition of steps

Constant conflict with pedestrians because while there is a separate pedestrian path, that path is so badly designed (it's down some steps by the water) that almost no pedestrians use it.

Because the corner radii are far too small, people have made their own path which after a few months already looked nearly as permanent as the real path. This is an indicator of badly designed / not fit for purpose infrastructure.

The replacement primary route is on the other side of the canal. Yes, it initially looks OK. However, the details are all wrong. Why have cyclists been short-changed in width once again on a primary cycling route when there is so much space available ? Why has the cycle-path been positioned so close to the road and so close to lamp posts ? Why is there a loading bay on the wrong side of the cycle-path when the empty shop which it is next to has its loading bay in a car park on the other side ? There is no reason to expect large numbers of pedestrians here so the pavement is overly generous.

Further along the same path cyclists have to give way twice to car park entrances. No priority on a primary cycling route. The old primary route on the other side of the canal worked better than this. Watch a video which shows what remains of the old route, which has been given a rougher surface than in the past.

What future for Assen ?
I am quite aware that some readers will look at the photos and videos above and wish that they had the same problems as Assen does. Clearly none of the problems shown above quite take us back to how the Netherlands looked in the 1970s. However, they all illustrate new problems which are being created for cyclists in this city due to cycling just not mattering very much to planners and motoring being given a higher priority. If this process continues then it could easily lead to a slow slide downwards in the cycling modal share. People don't have to experience much unpleasantness when cycling to make them give up.

Infrastructure which was built 5-10 years ago was of a higher quality than what is being built now. There is no good reason for this. Certainly not a financial reason as FlorijnAs is an astonishingly well funded project which has a total of €1.5 Billion to spend. The high level of funding combined with any downward change in quality is a serious concern as the extensive works of FlorijnAs will affect all cyclists in Assen and they already put the city back a small step so far as cycling is concerned.

I'm not very concerned as FlorijnAs isn't all of Assen and this still remains a city which overall is lucky enough to have amongst the very best infrastructure in the world. A few small steps backwards won't make a huge difference so long as the ambition to improve is found again.

As I understand it, Assen's previously stated ambition to grow cycling still stands. If this is more than mere words then the city needs to do better than what is shown above to retain present and encourage future cyclists.

What future for other cities ?
One of the problems with writing about the less good developments in this city is that some readers gain an impression that it is only Assen which is making mistakes. That is of course not true - it's just that I'm an trying to give an honest appraisal of the place where I live and there are not so many people doing this. Positive stories abound, including about things which are really not very good at all.

It's really not just Assen. This publicity shot from Groningen,
headed "further improvements in cycle facilties" not only
lavishes praise on horribly outdated advanced stop lines (bike
 boxes) but also uses a photo of the most dangerous single
street in the city as an aspirational image. I nearly fell from
my chair when I read this... Not what you want to emulate.

There is nothing uniquely Assen about any of  the problems illustrated above. The architects and planners who designed the infrastructure illustrated above also work elsewhere and they are doing pretty much exactly the same thing in several other cities while other planners and architects are making other mistakes here and elsewhere. It's quite normal that ideas wax and wane in popularity. In the Netherlands at the moment, cycling is not the big thing which politicians are trying to improve. For that reason we should not be surprised that this period of time doesn't bring the best improvements for cyclists.

However it is important that the attitudes change before too much harm is done. Keep going backwards at this rate and in forty years time the Netherlands will once again look as it did in the 1970s.

Study Tours
Yes, there are study tours again this year. While this blog post points out problems within Assen, this is still a city choc full of good examples. We also visit Groningen, which like any city is also a mix of good and bad and has plenty of its own problems. The majority of both cities work well and this is reflected in the high cycling modal shares. In any case, looking at problem areas gives us an opportunity to demonstrate how what might be seen as rather small issues ("wish I had that problem") actually really are important if a truly high cycling modal share is your aim.

There are still some places available on the April tour, but you will have to be quick to book. Similarly, there are also still places available on the May follow-up tour (contact us for details) on which we demonstrate what changed since your previous study tour.

Our service is to demonstrate what is good and also show what works less well so that participants know what should not be emulated. It's important to bear in mind that not everything Dutch is good. From every period there are both very good examples and also some poor examples. We have nothing to gain from implying that any infrastructure which is less than excellent works well enough and you can rest assured that we do not gloss over problems. I hope that the above blog post makes that clear.

The most dangerous junctions in Assen and other Dutch cities. What makes junctions dangerous ? What can we do to address that danger ?

Though there isn't a huge amount of traffic at this location, and though speeds aren't particularly high (this is an intersection in a residential area between a 50 km/h road and 30 km/h roads), this is the most dangerous road junction in Assen for cyclists. It doesn't look like much - just a simple road crossing. But simple crossings like this can be dangerous for cyclists.

The problem at this junction is recognized. It led to a redesign
early in 2015 which makes the junction look a lot smaller
than it did. It is not yet clear whether this will be enough
to address the safety issue in this location. Given that the
change was minor and near misses still happen here, I'm not
sure that I believe enough has been done..

This junction was the scene of seven cyclist injuries in the six years between 2007 and 2013. Compared with other cities, especially in other countries, this number is low. For instance, I once wrote about how a single junction in Cambridge had seen 43 crashes with cyclists in six years and how another in London managed to ring up 89 cyclist injuries in just two years. Assen's most dangerous junction perhaps cannot compete with the danger faced by cyclists elsewhere, but this doesn't mean that there is no problem. These most dangerous places could be better.

This junction stands out in large part because cycling in Assen is very safe. Seven cyclist injuries at one location is exceptional because in the same time period just 11 cyclists were injured at all of Assen's 28 locations with traffic lights put together and just two cyclists were injured across all 21 roundabouts.

The very good safety record of Assen's roundabouts is due to adopting a very safe design.

The traffic light junctions have a less obviously impressive safety record but this should be balanced against there being more traffic light junctions than roundabouts and due to traffic light junctions dealing with heavier motor vehicle flows than roundabouts. Many of the traffic light junctions used by cyclists in Assen have a design which is exceptionally convenient and particularly safe for cycling.

If Assen had not adopted such safe designs for larger junctions then it is likely that uncontrolled junctions like this would not be the most dangerous places for cyclists. But as a result of that policy elsewhere, the second and third most dangerous junctions in Assen for cyclists are also uncontrolled junctions - in this case where cyclists have to cross roads unassisted by traffic lights. These caused five and four cyclist injuries each (+ two fatalities - one of a cyclist and one of a moped rider).

Two weeks ago I took a follow-up study tour group to see why
this junction is dangerous. While we were there, both Charlie
and Mark photographed a near-miss. The cyclist was not
surprised to be told that this was an unsafe junction. The
driver was shocked by her mistake. Note that this happened
after the re-design which is supposed to have improved safety.

Why uncontrolled junctions are dangerous
The problem with uncontrolled junctions is that they rely upon perfect driver and cyclist behaviour for their safety. If everyone always behaves correctly, everyone always manages to work out exactly what every other participant in traffic is doing, no-one is ever distracted or makes mistakes, then these junctions work perfectly. Unfortunately, these junctions actually have to be used by real human beings and people do make mistakes.

Dutch drivers and Dutch cyclists are not special. They're people too. Given them confusing situations and they'll make mistakes in just the same way as do people elsewhere.

The problem with this particular junction was illustrated vividly to us on a recent study tour when a near miss was caught on camera (above). This was a genuine SMIDSY ("Sorry Mate I Didn't See You") incident. The driver simply had not seen the cyclist. Luckily, she took a second glance left and stopped her car just in time so that no collision occurred. Both parties were shocked by what had happened.

Let us consider the pressures on this driver as she wished to pull out of this junction and turn right: At this position, the driver has much to too. She needs to check for cyclists in her own street who may try to overtake on either the left or right side of her car and who may potentially conflict with a right turn and also check the cycle-lane on her left for cyclists (including the one she missed). She also needs to bear in mind what drivers might do - both those approaching from behind (hesitation may result in being rear-ended) as well as those going both left and right on the road she's pulling into and also those approaching from dead ahead who may turn across her path. This requires a lot of concentration and also a lot of head swiveling in order to look in all directions at once.

The danger at uncontrolled junctions is due to many pieces of information to be processed at once.

The most dangerous junctions in other Dutch cities
Uncontrolled junctions are not the most dangerous locations in every Dutch city, but they do appear quite often. For instance, Groningen's most dangerous junction for cyclists is an uncontrolled junction which is also the most dangerous junction for all modes in the whole country. 12 cyclists were injured across both sides of the junction over a period of six years.

Second place in Groningen is a tie between two junctions, each of which injured six cyclists: One of these is a different uncontrolled junction and the other location is a roundabout of the unsafe design in an older suburb which allows through traffic (read more about suburbs further down the page).

This is the safe roundabout to copy.

Unsafe roundabouts:
The unsafe roundabouts in Groningen (see the last paragraph) follow a design where cyclists have priority over other traffic by using a concentric circle cycle-path around the main roundabout. Unfortunately, this is nearly as difficult for drivers to use correctly as an uncontrolled junction, with a requirement to keep track of cyclists and cars from several directions at once and involving nearly as much head swiveling as an uncontrolled junction. A study showed that this design offers cyclists only an 11% improvement in safety over an uncontrolled junction so it should be no surprise to us that roundabouts of that design also quite often appear amongst the more dangerous locations for cyclists in the Netherlands.

The less safe roundabout design was first trialed in Enschede so perhaps it shouldn't be too surprising that Enschede's most dangerous junction for cyclists happens to be one of those roundabouts, where six cyclists were injured. Enschede's second most dangerous junction is an uncontrolled junction which injured five cyclists.

Heading west, the city of Deventer also uses the less safe roundabout design and there too the most dangerous junction is a roundabout. As in Enschede, their second most dangerous is uncontrolled.

Another city to use the less safe roundabout design is 's-Hertogenbosch. In this city, a roundabout which injured five cyclists and three moped riders is the most dangerous junction and second place is taken by another roundabout which injured another three cyclists and a moped rider.

Zwolle's most dangerous junction is another of those unsafe roundabouts, which injured seven cyclists, while second place is taken by an uncontrolled junction.

I have not been able to find a single example which where a roundabout of the safer design stands out.

Shared Space

The Laweiplein Shared Space in
Drachten, Many claims are made for a
low accident rate but it's the second
most dangerous place in the city.

Claims have often been made about improvements in safety in Drachten due to Shared Space junction designs. As it turns out, the most dangerous location in this small city is not a shared space, but another of those unsafe roundabouts, where four cyclists were injured and one cyclist died. However the second most dangerous place in the city, with three cyclists and a moped rider being injured, is a location which I've covered before: the Laweiplein Shared Space "squareabout" which has been central to many claims of improved safety in the past. Far from improving the safety of Drachten for cyclists, the Laweiplein is one of the main causes of danger.

Shared Space designs do not have a good record for cyclist and pedestrian safety nor for inclusiveness.

Traffic light junctions:
The most dangerous junctions in both Amsterdam and Rotterdam are large and traffic light junctions with an outdated appearance which include tram tracks and which have two-stage turns. These junctions, which injured ten and eight cyclists respectively, have similarities with those which have proven to be lethal in Copenhagen.

On the other hand, traffic light junction designs which remove all conflict from the junction don't stand out in these statistics.

Detail from the most dangerous Amsterdam junction. The cyclist on the right of the picture is perhaps trying to reach the left turn box just left of the car. Poor infrastructure design results in cyclists seeing a reason to position themselves like this.

Dangerous streets
While it's relatively easy to find the individual most dangerous locations, it's more difficult to identify streets with an obvious line of injuries along them. I'll give just three examples from Assen and Groningen:

Weiersstraat in Assen. A location with a poor layout of on-road cycle-lanes causing conflict between all modes. I criticized this earlier this year (maps and data from the excellent ongelluken kaart).

Gedempte Zuiderdiep in Groningen. While buses get their own lane, cycles and cars are made to "share". An unpleasant street layout which uses cyclists as rolling traffic calming devices: resulting in a row of cyclist injuries along it.

Nieuwe Ebbingestraat in Groningen. There's plenty of width here for proper cycling infrastructure and this could be a pleasant road to cycle down, but none is provided. The street has much through motor traffic and many cyclists are injured both by moving cars and by parked cars, e.g. through dooring. Cyclists are again used as traffic calming devices here and the result is another string of injuries as seen above. Update 2016: Remarkably, Groningen now sees this design as inspirational and wants to build more streets with this same dangerous design.

Video of Nieuwe Ebbingestraat: Groningen's most dangerous street for cyclists. The problems may look minor compared with some other places, but note now they arise for the same reasons as elsewhere: No or poor cycling infrastructure such as narrow cycle-lanes, advanced stop (bike) boxes leading to close over-takes, door zone cycling etc.
Whole suburbs can be made safe

Assen suburb of Kloosterveen.
Population 10000. No yellow:
No cyclist injuries recorded.

For the last 40 years or so, Dutch suburbs have been designed to have few connections by car and to discourage high speed driving. The result is that cyclists and pedestrian injuries are very rare within these suburbs.

We live in the Assen suburb of Pittelo, first to be designed along these principles and built between 1970 and 1975. There are many ways out of the suburb in all directions by bike, but just two exits by car, both of which go to the ring-road. As a result, there is no through traffic and there are no recorded cycling injuries over the last six years. The same characteristics are true of the very newest suburb of Assen, Kloosterveen, which also has zero cyclist injuries recorded.

Groningen suburb Vinkhuizen.
Population 11000. Cyclists
injured in several locations.

The Groningen suburb of Vinkhuizen has about the same population as Kloosterveen however it was built at the very end of the 1960s/beginning of the 1970s and came just too early to benefit from the new ideas about not allowing through traffic. This suburb has many more exits by car and allows through traffic both to an industrial area and another suburb. Many locations within Vinkhuizen have proven to be dangerous for cyclists, including both the roundabouts in this suburb, one of which is listed above as the second most dangerous junction in Groningen. Note that Kloosterveen has twice as many roundabouts as Vinkhuizen and that they appear on the busiest roads within that suburb. But these are all of the safer design and no cyclists have been injured at them.

Note that the most dangerous junction in Assen is also situated in an older suburban area, on a road which allows through traffic.

What is the role of infrastructure ?
Infrastructure of any type should be designed to serve the people using it. That may seem self evident, but time and time again we see infrastructure which is not designed in this way. e.g. streets in cities with a lot of cycling which ignore cyclists (as in the example shown in Groningen above, these can be dangerous). Infrastructure should be designed to accommodate the pattern of use which it is expected to receive, and should also be designed to take into account that human error is inevitable and therefore to reduce the likely consequences of error.

What improves safety ?
It is not enough to put a lower speed limit on a dangerous road design. 30 km/h speed limits are more common in the Netherlands than in any other nation: a third of the whole road network has this speed limit or lower. Lower speeds help a little, but note that many of the examples above are in low speed limit areas. It has long been recognized that lower speed limits do not ensure safety of their own accord.

Infrastructure which relies upon perfect driver and cyclist behaviour for their safety can also not create a perfectly safe result. Human beings make mistakes. "Accidents" are inevitable. Create situations in which there are too many things to do at once, especially where drivers' heads have to swivel repeatedly to look in several directions for things to respond, and you've created a situation where accidents will happen.

Uncontrolled junctions are unsafe compared with controlled junctions, but of course it's not practical to add traffic lights everywhere. Roundabouts of the "with priority" design are somewhat safer than uncontrolled junctions for drivers, but offer only an 11% improvement in safety for cyclists so these are not a solution to the problem.

The genuinely safe roundabout designs and safe traffic light junction designs lead to real improvements if they replace a more dangerous junction design, but of course they won't fit everywhere either.

Luckily, these larger and more expensive designs of junction are not required everywhere. In fact, they're only required where there are motor vehicles. Without the added danger of motor vehicles, especially of through traffic, uncontrolled junctions can have perfect safety records too: The safe suburbs discussed above (Kloosterveen and Pittelo) both have many uncontrolled junctions. Neither of these suburbs includes any traffic light junctions and only one of them includes roundabouts (four roundabouts of the safe design in Kloosterveen).

Almost all significant danger to cyclists comes from motor vehicles and therefore restricting car, truck and bus access from where bicycles need to go is the most effective way to improve cyclist safety.

1. Residential streets should never be through routes by motor vehicle.
2. City centre streets can largely be closed to car access and should also not operate as through routes.
3. Main routes between these places which must be shared with drivers need good quality cycle paths and well designed junctions.
4. Routes from which motor vehicles have been excluded have less need for such infrastructure because they will already not have the same clusters of injuries along them as appear along roads where cyclists and drivers "share" the same infrastructure.
5. Data which exists shouldn't be ignored. We can tell from a map of where injuries have occurred where intervention is required.
6. New isn't always better. Wide pavements do not improve conditions for for cycling. Unfortunately, such designs are now quite common around the world, including in the Netherlands.
7. Shared Space where cars and bikes are mixed is not a success for improving safety.
8. Paths shared between cyclists and pedestrians lead to conflict.

The most effective way to improve safety of cyclists is the same as it's always been: remove motor vehicles from where cyclists need to be and give cyclists their own space This not only improves safety for cyclists but also enables improvements in efficiency for cycling.

Sometimes it's necessary to build new roads or new bridges for cars in order to improve conditions for cyclists.

Study Tour

Study Tours. Click for booking information.

Since 2006 we've demonstrated the difference between safe and unsafe infrastructure on study tours of Dutch cycling infrastructure. We offer independent advice. See many examples in real life.

Update: Dutch Drivers
A news item published two days after this blog post includes the interesting fact that over 21000 speeding fines were handed out to drivers in Assen last year, who paid over €1.2M in fines as a result.

As I pointed out many times before, including above, Dutch driver behaviour is not different to that of drivers elsewhere. Safety for cyclists in the Netherlands comes primarily through good infrastructure design, not better driving.