The Grid. The most important enabler of mass cycling, but a cycling concept which is often misunderstood.

The need for a very fine grid of high quality, safe and efficient cycling routes is something I've been writing about for many years. Since 2008 on this blog, for instance. It may seem simple and obvious, but this concept is often misinterpreted and very often watered down.

Does your city have an airport ? If not, pretend that it does for a moment. Think of a truly amazing airport with a dozen modern terminal buildings, three long runways which can accommodate the largest and fastest passenger jets, huge hangers for maintenance. But then imagine that your city has the only airport in the world. How useful is it now ? How many passengers use it ? Where do they go to ? Without linking to other places, your airport can never reach its potential. You may have a few flights for joy riders, a few enthusiastic air enthusiasts may fly off and land in fields, but flying as mass transport will never happen. To reach its potential, your airport must link to places where people want to go to.

Just as with our hypothetical airport, an individual cycle-path is only as useful as the rest of the grid of routes to which it connects. Even exceptional pieces of bicycle infrastructure are almost entirely useless on their own. They only reach their potential when they are part of a very finely spaced grid of routes which connects to all destinations. To be suitable for all people, this must provide a high quality level of service to all of those destinations. The average quality of service experienced by cyclists dictates how many people will cycle.

Example of a real, successful, cycling grid

Primary (red) and secondary (blue) bicycle routes in Assen. Grey lines are mainly residential streets almost completely free of motor traffic, green are recreational routes. Primary routes are never more than 750 m apart, but note that all the space between them is also available by bike. There are no real gaps in this grid and it leads right from villages outside the city to the city centre. Total map width approximately 6.5 km.

Part of Assen's primary cycling grid.
There are lots of cycle-paths like this.

Assen's bicycle route grid as shown in the map above deserves some explanation. The city has well over 100 km of cycle-path completely separate from the road. These paths are built to an extremely high standard. Most of the red and blue lines on the map show this type of cycle-path, though some high quality cycle-paths are not counted as either primary or secondary routes so are not shown as such.

Four metres wide smooth concrete but
this is merely a green recreational path

Recreational routes shown in green are also usually separate cycle-paths but because these are intended for recreational use they can be of lower quality. That shouldn't be taken to imply that these are of lower quality.

Many recreational paths are of equivalent quality to main routes.

Residential street in the Netherlands. Re-built so that it is
unusable as a through route by motor vehicle.

Most cycling in Assen takes place on the blue or red lines because these are the route segments which provide useful direct routes for everyone to take to their destinations. However the cycling grid really also includes all those grey lines as well and their total length greatly outnumbers the length of cycle-paths.

The grey lines on the map show every street which lies between main roads and main cycle-routes. These are perhaps the most interesting and certainly the most misunderstood part of the grid. Many of the grey lines are residential streets or shopping streets. Almost all these grey streets have 30 km/h speed limits, but the importance of the low speed limits is very often over-emphasized. These streets are civilized to an extent by low speeds, but what really makes a difference is that there are almost no cars moving at any speeds. While these grey streets offer many through routes by bicycle, they do not offer through routes by car and therefore cyclists rarely have to concern themselves with cars when riding on those streets. Drivers are directed around residential streets so almost none have any motorized traffic on them at all and any cars which you might meet are most likely to be driven by residents accessing their own street.

To summarise: Assen's cycling grid goes everywhere, it has many high quality cycle-paths, but no "sharrows" and very few routes marked by relatively in-effective painted on-road cycle-lanes. Inferior junction designs such as advanced stop lines (aka bike boxes), central cycle-lanes and multi stage turns have been eliminated, while good roundabout and traffic light junction designs are common. Many one-way restrictions help to prevent drivers from using residential streets as through routes, but none of them apply to cyclists. Note that average speeds for cyclists are relatively high because stops are infrequent. Due to cyclists being unravelled from motorists they are often directed around large and time consuming junctions because they are needed only on motor routes.

Assen's grid is successful. More than 40% of all trips are made by bicycle here.

An effective grid must go everywhere

Living or working near to a cycle-path is not enough. Building a cycle-path only in a new suburb, or next to a school or through a recreational area is not enough. True mass cycling requires that people be given the option of making all their journeys by bicycle with a high degree of subjective safety.

Where children can ride no-hands and
unaccompanied to and through city centre
streets, that's real safety.

For a truly high level of cycling, the grid of cycling infrastructure needs to go everywhere. For instance, the grid must reach:

1. all homes
2. all schools
3. all workplaces
4. all shops
5. all sport facilities
6. all religous buildings

Feel free to add on any other category of destination that you can think of. Everything needs to be on the grid. It is only when the grid goes everywhere and to everything that it has a chance of serving for the entire population to make a proportion of all their journeys by bicycle. It is only by making cycling available to the entire population that it is possible for a high share of all journeys, for all purposes, to be made by bicycle.

Planning of a grid must be undertaken on a grid scale. No single road, street, cycle-path or road junction stands by itself. If streets are considered individually then it is almost impossible to achieve a good result because it is impossible to emphasize different usages if the usage is expected to remain the same. Attempts to change streets while leaving them with exactly the same usage as before are a common reason why people think they have "not enough space" to change.

Good conditions for cycling are created primarily not by moving cyclists away from where the traffic is, but by moving traffic away from where the cyclists are.

It's essential that it's possible to cycle to all locations. The high quality grid of infrastructure for cycling must go everywhere and it does no harm to allow cyclists to have through routes very nearly everywhere. On the other hand, while drivers also need to be able to access everywhere, through routes by motor vehicle need to be controlled because through motor traffic does cause harm. i.e. it is the routes for motor vehicles which need to be moved to places where they cause least harm.

Fake grids (half a grid isn't a grid)

The Netherlands achieved a level of cycling nearly double that of the second place nation by providing a high degree of both safety and convenience for anyone who cycles on every journey that they choose to make by bike. This requires a high density grid as shown above, which exists not just within particular cities but which goes absolutely everywhere. It is only by providing this level of service that cycling is made accessible and acceptable to all segments of society. Children can ride their own bicycles to Dutch city centres in safety because of the continuous high quality infrastructure.

The term "grid" has been adopted in many places, but it's quite often the case that the ambition is at a far lower level than is required for success.

London's "grid"

This proposal for London looks superficially similar to the grid
of cycle-routes in Assen, but it is not similar. The purple lines
are in most cases not even comparible with the grey on the
Assen map. Even these "include main roads". Only the blue
lines are "superhighways" and the quality of those is suspect.

For example, London's proposed grid of cycle routes is shown on the left. This looks superficially similar to the map of Assen above but there are several very important differences.

The area covered by the London map is approximately 4x as large as Assen, yet there are fewer cycle routes indicated by differently coloured lines. Note that even these lines are deceiving:

Only the blue lines on the map are "Cycle Superhighways". The grand name unfortunately hides that many of these routes are of surprisingly low quality.

The purple lines shown on the map are merely "quietways".

Update 2016: I was too generous to London. It turns out
that the dark lines show the true extent of the grid in
London in 2016, save for one cycle-path.

Unfortunately, the importance of unravelling modes has still not been fully understood in London and so even these "quietways" are not comparable with normal streets in Assen (grey lines on map above) because these will largely remain busy through roads. What's more, using these quietways won't result in cyclists being able to make direct journeys because they have in large part been selected as the routes to put cyclists onto in order to achieve minimum disruption to other modes, rather than because they are where cyclists need to go. As a result, these "quietways" mostly appear on back streets which don't lead to many destinations.

Further reading: Quietways have been criticized elsewhere for not being providing particularly quiet or direct routes for cyclists and being meaningless due to poor junction designs.

Note also the second map added in 2016. For all the noise made by London with regard to cycling, it's sobering to see what the true extent of decent quality cycling provision in the city actually looks like. These paths do represent progress over what was there before but far too few decent cycle-paths exist for them to make any real difference to the modal share of the city. Compare with the map at the top of this piece which shows the extent of the network over the whole area of a small Dutch city.

Toronto's #minimumgrid
Another currently popular theme is the idea of the "minimum grid". I'm not a fan. I don't see the point in talking about building anything down to a "minimum", especially when we know that minimum is not enough. It seems to be a popular meme at the moment and many places have discussed the minimum grid idea, but this still makes no sense for any of the places where I've seen it discussed.

Toronto's current cycling infra map. This is a very long way
from being continuous and covering the whole city.
#minimumgrid means not nearly adequate to effect change.

Toronto is a huge city of 2.6 million people where the minimum grid idea seems to have taken hold. There is currently very little cycling infrastructure and the quality of what exists now in Toronto is the subject of many complaints. Nevertheless, the call here is for a mere 100 km of cycle-path. That's less than we have in Assen but to serve a population 40 times as large.

This is not even close to enough cycling infrastructure. Why is the aim so low ? I also have to wonder what the quality will be. Two years have passed since I criticized the Ontario Bicycle Facilities manual and it doesn't seem like much has changed. The solutions on offer remain both primitive and old-fashioned and there are proposals to adopt such inconvenient and proven dangerous ideas as mixing zones, two stage turns and bike boxes. Scope for improvement is limited to only a few streets and to a low quality standard so this again can't come close to enabling cycling for everyone.

There is very much which can be learnt from the Netherlands with regard to building better infrastructure for cycling so I was rather disappointed to find that one of the most prominent references to Dutch practice on a Toronto website about a new design was about nothing more than a possible pattern of tiles on a street. The big picture has somehow been missed. The important messages ignored.

Campaign for #maximumgrid!
There is no low minimum standard which is worth campaigning for. We know this because city scale Dutch research in the 1970s already demonstrated what is required to encourage cycling. Very high quality but sparsely built cycle-paths did not lead to significantly more cycling. For a grid of routes to enable cycling it must be high density and go everywhere. This has been known for 40 years so why are people still fighting for less ?

Forget the "minimum grid" and campaign for a "maximum grid". i.e. a grid which goes everywhere, for everyone. This is proven to work.

Less is never more for cycling. Cycling never suffers from infrastructure which is too well designed, nor does it suffer from a grid of routes which offers people too many safe choices, or from people being able to make all of their journey in safety instead of just some of it. There is only a problem where infrastructure is poor or non-existent and when people are given attractive places to cycle.

Plan a little and you'll only build a little, build a little and you'll achieve only a little. To achieve great things you need great plans. The more infrastructure that you have and the better the quality of that infrastructure, the better the result will be.

There is no tipping point
There is no minimum level of cycling infrastructure above which cycling will definitely grow. There is no tipping point, no avalanche effect where by reaching a particular level of cycling, growth becomes inevitable. There is simply no evidence at all to support these ideas. However, there is plenty of historical evidence from all countries in the world that a decline is possible from any level if cycling conditions decline.

There was more cycling almost everywhere worldwide 60 years ago than there is now. That includes the Netherlands. The Netherlands has more cycling now than any other country in the world but has been hard to achieve this position. The Dutch are no more tolerant of unpleasant cycling conditions than people of any other nation. The high modal share here relies on there being very good conditions for cycling. Cycling declined precipitously in the Netherlands between 1950 and 1975 when planners were most interested in motor vehicles and though there have been steady increases since the 1970s, cycling is still less popular here now than it was in the 1950s. This country now has the best infrastructure in the world and this makes it possible for anyone in the Netherlands to cycle as much as they wish to with a fewer problems than occur elsewhere. But it's still not perfect, still not at a level which causes no problems at all to anyone.

Just as in other countries, people will cycle on the pavement

in the Netherlands if conditions are not conducive to safety

This harms cycling even in the world's leading cycling city.

Where does unsafe infrastructure fit in ?

Just as in any other place, unsafe infrastructure in the Netherlands damages the grid by creating a gap which will put people off cycling if it creates too much danger or too much inconvenience. A high cycling modal share is a very fragile thing. Everyday cycling should never feel akin to taking part in an extreme sport. If people are put off due to danger and they stop cycling then it can be difficult to convince them ever to start again. While the Netherlands has a more comprehensive grid of cycling infrastructure than anywhere else, this country is certainly not perfect and we find that where there is bad infrastructure, the Dutch react in much the same way as people anywhere else: They either cycle in such a way that they avoid the problem (e.g. by dismounting and walking or riding on the pavement) or they don't cycle at all for journeys which take them through problem areas.

If areas where people feel unsafe and under pressure are small and while they are easily avoidable, their total effect on cycling modal share is small because working around the problems isn't too difficult. However if problematic infrastructure is widespread and there is no way to avoid dangerous areas then the obstacles becomes insurmountable for most people by bike and a reduction in cycling modal share is assured. This is a difference between a proper grid and the fake grids referred to above.

Recent mistakes in Assen led to increased pavement cycling.
on a few streets where cycling is not as safe as it should be.

The city of Groningen features on our study tours in large part because it allows us to demonstrate how cycling has a particular demographic in this student oriented city more than it does in other Dutch cities. Unattractive and unsafe infrastructure particularly affects how often vulnerable people cycle, though the high rate of cycling by the student population masks this effect. We have seen similar localized increases in pavement cycling here in Assen too where recent mistakes have been made in this city.

What works to make cycling more popular ?

I write quite often about problems in the Netherlands but just as with the infrastructure highlights, the problems need to be put in context. Bad infrastructure here causes the same problems as it would elsewhere however it should always be remembered that the worst of the problem infrastructure in the Netherlands covers a very small part of the total area of the country while the grid of good to excellent infrastructure covers the whole country. Examples of dangerous infrastructure have relatively little effect on the excellent Dutch cycling safety record because they are rare.

Discover what works to make cycling attractive to and safe for everyone. Book a study tour to have this all put in context. The next open study tour takes place in June 2015.

Assen on Monday afternoon. When there's a big event in the city, thousands of bicycles are parked everywhere. Note the very small child cycling to the city centre on his own bike. We would like all children to have this degree of freedom.

Related issues

While writing this piece, two related issues came up which I think require a little more explanation.

I've a collection of cycling route maps
from places I've been. I worked on the
Cambridge map and I believe the short
recreational routes that I wrote up are
still part of the latest edition. Cycling
specific maps are not necessary in
places with a proper grid for cycling.

Cycling route maps
Most Dutch cities do not have cycling route maps. This may seem surprising when all Dutch cities have high levels of cycling compared with other nations. Cycling route maps are actually a symptom of a problem. One of the things which becomes unnecessary when there is a proper high density grid for cyclists is consideration of where people should cycle in order to maximize their safety.

Note that I am not saying that there's anything wrong with cycling route maps. They can be a very useful tool for people who live in an area where cycling doesn't necessarily feel safe for people riding anywhere where they want to go. They can be useful for advising people about where they can cycle in safety. These maps can also be a useful campaigning tool if they are used to help to point out to officials where there are problems.

However when you can cycle safely everywhere and take the most direct routes to all locations by bicycle, there is simply no more need for advice about the best detours around direct routes to avoid dangerous areas and obtain a degree of safety unavailable on the direct route. When this has been achieved, cycling route maps simply are not needed any more.

Residential streets

There's often chalk on the street where
we live. Children at play.

Directing motor vehicles around residential streets rather than through them doesn't only provide benefits when cycling.

Because they are so quiet, both in terms of traffic and noise levels, Dutch residential streets almost always meet the requirements for socially connected living and children use them as playgrounds.

On the first edition of the Cambridge cycling route map we missed out some of the council's preferred routes on purpose to make a point about how we thought much of the infrastructure was not good enough. For later editions, our work on the map was handed to the council (who could afford to print them). They put the substandard infrastructure back on the map, but they didn't fix the infrastructure...

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. It's
4 m wide and widely separated from the road. There are
Excellent junction designs along here.

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. 3.5 m
wide and widely separated from the road with
good junction designs

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 and most journeys will be made for the most part on that average infrastructure.

Boringly average infrastructure. Four metres wide, great
junction design and 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 everyday, mundane infrastructure which forms the largest part of most peoples' journeys which is most important to encourage a high cycling modal share. This is what most people will use for most of their journeys.

Similarly, some places make quite a lot of noise about having a few good cycle paths, or a network which covers part of a city. Nice photos can be taken on those cycle paths and they seem good so long as we gloss over the problems which occur at junctions and that they don't take people to all their destinations. Giving too much credit to a place which has an inadequate network also misses the point. A proper finely spaced grid of high quality routes which cover everyone's journeys is a prerequisite for a high cycling modal share. Exceptional pieces of infrastructure spread spread thinly across the country are only useful to a minority for some of their journeys and if the "good" cycle-paths are exceptional enough to be noteworthy, they're in the same category.

Not a "superhighway", just a cycle-path 3.5 metres wide
providing a direct route between city centre and suburb. It
is very important that cyclists get to use direct routes.
Good quality is far more important than a flashy name.

So let's hear it for mundane, common, ordinary, unexceptional and boring infrastructure. Forget the the idea of exceptional stuff, it is the mundane which needs to be good and it's that mundane yet really extraordinarily good infrastructure which needs to go everywhere.

How much extremely good infrastructure do you need ? That depends on how much cycling you want to see. It should be no surprise that expenditure on cycling is proportional to modal share.

The truly exceptional thing about Dutch cycling infrastructure is that in this country, "mundane" infrastructure is of extremely high quality, is excellently maintained and is absolutely ubiquitous. This mundane infrastructure in the Netherlands is what makes the high modal share possible because it keeps cyclists away from cars and trucks for all of every journey. This very high quality infrastructure is available to everyone so that they can make a large proportion of their journeys by bicycle without any nasty surprises, ever. This extremely high quality grid of cycling routes is kept open even during road works or when there has been snow. Anyone who wants to cycle is enabled to do so as much as they wish to. This maximises the modal share for cycling, whatever the demographic mix of any particular area. Old, young, rich, poor, locally born people and immigrants all cycle in the Netherlands.

High quality routes can also be roads if cars are removed from
by unravelling motor and bicycle routes. Read more
and watch a video about this particular bicycle road.

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. Don't let them get away with offering indirect routes which don't go to all destinations efficiently. 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 parts of the same city, 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 on our Study Tours to show how the infrastructure works and why it enables cycling so much. 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 every 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 have less than 200 metres to cycle in a quiet culdesac (30 km/h limit) to reach 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".

100% segregation of bikes and cars

City centre street, no cars allowed. Clear signage gives
loading times for deliveries

Again and again I read comments of the form "even in Holland not all parts of rides are segregated" or talk of "similar road exposure" in the UK vs. the Netherlands. I've been accused of making out that the cycle-path network in the Netherlands is more extensive than it actually is.

Such comments are based on a misunderstanding of the differences between the way that roads and streets are designed and used in the two countries.

"Shared" street ? Not on an equal basis. It's a through route
for bikes but access only for cars.

The misunderstanding usually arises because someone notices the simple statistic which says that while the Netherlands has about 130000 km of roads, there are only about 35000 km of cycle-path.

This sounds, of course, like there is a serious short-fall of segregated cycle paths.

The first misconception is that people look at these figures as if those 130000 km of roads are exactly the same as roads in their own country and assume that cyclists find themselves in conditions which are like in their own country. That's not correct.

The second misconception is to assume that because there are a quarter as many km of cycle-paths as roads that Dutch cyclists spend 3/4 of their time riding on roads. That's also not correct.

City centre streets are busy, but with bikes instead of cars

Quite simply, these are the wrong ways to look at those figures.

Dutch people do cycle on a mixture of cycle-paths and roads. However, this does not mean that cyclists in the Netherlands spend much of their time mixing with motor vehicles.

Over the last few decades, the Netherlands has unravelled the networks of car and bicycle routes. If you compare routes for the same journey by bicycle and by car, then in very many cases you will find that the two routes are very different to one another.

A child rides a bike in the middle of a bicycle street.
This was once a busy through road by car. Now access
only by car / through route by bike.

I've demonstrated this principle several times on this blog (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8). In some cases the separation of routes is achieved by building of cycle-paths. However, in many others it is achieved by removing cars from the roads. Sometimes when new roads are built, the old road can serve cyclists very well.

These days, very many roads and streets are simply no longer part of the route network for cars. They still allow access by car, so that deliveries can be made and people who live along them may reach their own homes by car should they wish, but they are not through routes by car. As a result, such streets are absolutely not dominated by cars. A cyclist using a road on such a route has much the same feelings about safety as someone using a cycle-path.

It is only when cycling doesn't feel like an extreme sport that it can become so popular as it is in the Netherlands.

Residential street. No cycle-path required as it's not a
through road for cars. Residential parking, but these cars
rarely move.

Residential streets in the Netherlands rarely work as through roads for cars, even if they were originally designed to do so. This makes them excellent places to cycle or walk with a high degree of comfort and safety.

In some cases, this has been formalized by creation of woonerven, but many of the same characteristics can be found in residential streets which are not woonerven.

Woonerven have a speed limit of "walking pace". However, they are not the only roads with low speed limits. In fact, over 40000 km of roads in the Netherlands, a third of the total, have a speed limit of 30 km/h or lower. This lowering of speeds on minor roads has been done to the maximum possible extent. It is now difficult to achieve more safety by this method  as roads which remain through routes for motor vehicles are not effectively calmed simply by changing the speed limit.

In a village, primary school children cycle home
unaccompanied on streets which are not through routes
for cars. From an average age of 8.6 children
travel unaccompanied

The photos give examples of different roads and streets on which cyclists have the same feeling of subjective safety, and similar degree of actual safety, as on a cycle-path.

These principles are not used only in towns. They are also common in villages and in the countryside.

Minor streets in villages don't work as through roads so drivers don't use those to "rat run" either. This makes it possible for quite young children to cycle to school and back unaccompanied.

Between towns in the Netherlands you can often find two roads next to each other. One for cars, the other for cyclists, agricultural vehicles and access to homes. Sometimes the route for drivers isn't visible from the route for cyclists.

Route signs in a village. Only one direction offered by
car, lots by bike.

Even in the open countryside you can ride long distances by bike on "roads" and rarely see any cars at all. Such roads only make a through network by bicycle because they are joined by cycle-paths. For drivers, many roads in the countryside offer nothing more than long detours, dead-ends, and roads with rough surfaces which don't get cleared in the winter.

Unravelling, or separating, the routes taken by motorists and cyclists has many advantages, including a reduction of noise and exhaust fumes as well as the increase in safety which comes due to a reduction in the number of chances for conflict.

Cyclists achieve subjective safety when they do not have to mix with cars, not specifically because they are on a cycle-path. Roads which have (almost) no cars on them do not require a cycle-path to parallel that road. A remarkably large proportion of roads in the Netherlands are, for all practical purposes, free of cars. This is just one reason 35000 km of cycle-path does not represent a short-fall compared with 130000 km of road.

Those roads on which there is an appreciable volume of traffic can be relied upon always to have segregated cycle-paths alongside. By this manner, very nearly full segregation of modes is possible when cycle-paths have a total length which is "only" about a quarter of the total length of the roads.

While cyclists are segregated from traffic in every photo in this blog post, this is the only photo in which this was achieved by building a cycle-path. This is a through road for cars and is used by a higher number of motor vehicles, so it needs a cycle-path.

The title of this post is deliberately provocative. However, it's not inaccurate. This has been my experience: When cycling in the Netherlands, you are almost always segregated from traffic, whether by means of a cycle-path, or otherwise. I have ridden many tens of thousands of kilometres in the Netherlands but not yet found anywhere that felt so dangerous for cycling as did my daily commute in Cambridge. My total experience of "road rage" in this country remains just one minor incident in nearly five years.

This map, which accompanied the printed version of this article from the Fietsberaad about Enschede, shows how main routes for cycling have in large part been unravelled from main routes for motor vehicles in that city. In the article it is explained that the absolute maximum number of motor vehicles per day on these routes should 2500 - i.e. a number that you might find on a residential street. More than this and the route starts to feel unpleasant and threatening for cyclists.

This unravelling of the cycle network from the motor vehicle network is taking place all across the Netherlands. Where there are higher levels of motor vehicle usage, even within residential areas, the public shows a preference for separated cycle-paths.

Many cyclists who visit the Netherlands on holiday remain oblivious to concepts like this. It is common that people who visit on holiday report that they had few problems cycling in the Netherlands despite there being cycle-paths for only part of their journey. Often this is ascribed to better driver behaviour, perhaps through better training. However, people who make such statements have simply not noticed this "hidden" policy. Roads here are not the same as roads in other countries. Segregation of modes takes place even where there are no cycle-paths. Sustainable safety principles require that conflict is reduced and that is what results in the much better subjective safety when cycling.

Our unique experience of having lived, cycled and campaigned in both the UK and the Netherlands has led to the programme of our three day study tours in which we transfer as much as possible of this knowledge. The tours are hands-on. Or, rather, they really are tours. You use the facilities for yourself, accompanied so that we can explain about what you are experiencing. To find out more, please book a tour.

It's not a substitute for a tour, but to get a flavour of what this is like in practice, please watch the following video. It shows a complete, normal journey by bike in the Netherlands. In this case, nothing more than the route from a fairly close by shopping centre to our home:


This post originally referred to 29000 km of cycle-path in the Netherlands. However, this was an older figure. There are now reckoned to be about 35000 km of cycle-paths.

This blog post introduced the term "unravelling" into the English language as a translation of the Dutch term "ontvlecthten". There was no previous English translation of this term. Others have picked up my translation while an academic paper in 2013 used the term "unbundling" instead to represent the same concept. 

The Grid - How the Dutch found that the only thing which really encouraged cycling was a dense network of high quality infrastructure

The map on the right shows an area which is approximately 6.5 km wide. That on the left shows main routes only on a small portion of the map on the right, just over 2 km wide. Nearly all the coloured lines show the positions of good quality cycle paths separated from the road. Almost all the minor streets which are not highlighted work as through roads by bike but not by car so these provide a tighter grid than is shown in the picture.

Back in the 1970s, after the Stop de Kindermoord protests, the Netherlands went through a period of rapidly revising roads. Research had to be done in order to find out what worked for promoting cycling, in much the same way as the UK with their "cycling demonstration towns" in the mid 2000s (which unfortunately were abandoned). The Dutch research is documented in an article by the Fietsberaad.

One of the conclusions reached was that good quality cycle routes attracted cyclists but were of almost no use to most people if they were not very close together. This conclusion appears on page 43 of the article referred to above (page 41 of the PDF file) where there is discussion of the result of building a few sparse high quality paths in 1975 in both Den Haag and Tilburg. The evaluation in 1981 showed that these sparse cycle-paths had not significantly increased bicycle use across those cities. These paths were of good quality, acceptable even today. They were the sort of path that elsewhere might be referred to as a "superhighway". However, they were not effective because there was no real grid. i.e. they were too far from people's homes and destinations to be of use to everyone on all their journeys. People won't travel extra distance to get to a safe cycle-path, because the convenience has already been lost by doing so.

The experiment which worked, now copied everywhere in
the country: Delft main cycling route grid 2005.

Delft was the location of a different experiment. They built a three level grid. Here the city network had a a 500 m spacing, but there was also a district network with a 200-300 m spacing and a neighbourhood network with a 100 m spacing. These cycle facilities were within easy reach of every home and every destination and they brought about a permanent increase in cycling, as well as an increase in cyclist safety. It was concluded that policies discouraging car use are also needed, but the importance of a closely spaced grid of good quality routes for cyclists was established at this time and adopted quickly across the entire country.

That is how it was established that good quality cycle paths should be a maximum of 500 m apart and that extra cycle-paths should fill in the gaps so that cyclists never have to make detours to attempt to use better quality facilities.

It's now everywhere
The map at the top of this blog post comes from a presentation about plans for Assen given by the city architect on a recent Study Tour.

Conceptual version of "The Grid".
Primary red routes 500 m apart,
district routes in green and
neighbourhood in blue fill in gaps

The left half of the map at the top of this post is a close up of Kloosterveen, a new housing development of 8000 homes which is being built on the west of Assen outside the existing city boundary. This shows rough locations of just the primary-route cycle-paths through the suburb which provide access to schools, shops and other services as well as to the centre of the existing city and to the west to link up with villages and other towns. A new direct route to the city centre was built provided by 4 m wide cycle path and a 5 m wide bicycle road and over which the dual carriageway ring road was lifted on a new bridge. This attention to detail results in journeys from the new housing estate being quicker, more convenient, and more pleasant by bike than by car because there are no traffic lights on the route to the city centre by bicycle.

The right half of the image at the top of this post is a map of Assen and surroundings. In total the map covers an area about 6.5 km across, so you can see how closely packed these cycle paths are. Note that routes also go well outside the city, to all commuter villages around Assen and all the way to other cities such as Groningen 30 km directly North and Hoogeveen 40 km to the South.

There is a requirement within Assen that primary cycle paths are never more than 750 m apart. They're usually much closer than that. However, all is not lost if you're riding on a secondary route as these are also of very good quality.

Secondary cycle-route quality in Assen. This path is 3.2 m
wide so narrower than a primary route ought to be. Still very
adequate for the level of cycling traffic. Note that there are
always separate pedestrian paths.

The photo on the right is of a cycle-path on a secondary route. It is over three metres wide, not shared with pedestrians (they have their own 2 m wide path), it's very smooth and direct, it is lit at night, and it is a pleasure to cycle on. Good maintenance is required not only on the primary network, but also on secondary routes like this. See another blog post showing how cyclists came first when there were road works in this location.

Every area of the Netherlands has adopted similar guidelines. The grid of closely spaced high quality routes extends not just across one housing estate, not just across one city, not just to a few outlying developments of one city, but right across the entire country.

Unravelling of motor vehicle routes from bicycle routes has also resulted in a denser network of direct routes being available by bike than by car.

In practice this is how it works out for us: cycling from our home, in a culdesac we cycle not more than 200 m before we reach two different cycle paths which provide cycle routes to all locations. This is not remotely unusual, but rather what you'd expect for almost any residence in the Netherlands. See a video of one route from our home to the centre of the city.

Milton Keynes
has some cycle-
paths but not a
proper high
quality grid.

Other grid designs - Milton Keynes as an example
Some people may have noticed some similarity in the language above between the Dutch grid of cycle-paths and the grid of routes for cars which exists in cities in many other nations.

For instance, Milton Keynes in the UK is a "new town" constructed around an extensive grid of car routes which are just as effective at encouraging driving as the grid of cycle-routes across Dutch cities is effective at encouraging cycling. Building this grid to enable driving was a deliberate decision. Milton Keynes was designed as an expression of the ideas of Melvin M Webber, an urban designer who was famous for his ideas about "mass automotive mobility" and who was known as the "father of the city" of Milton Keynes.

Milton Keynes is dominated by cars today because this is exactly how it was planned to turn out. Dutch towns are dominated by bicycles because that is exactly how they were planned to turn out.

How good are the London & Toronto "grids" ?

What basic standard of infrastructure is required ?

Must the grid be made of cycle-paths ?

All posts about the importance of a good cycling grid

Further posts show how the route from the new suburb was built and what it's like to ride from the centre of the city to Kloosterveen and a video showing the route from the shopping centre at Kloosterveen back to our home.