Be like the Hovis boy !

Back in the 1970s, the TV in Britain often showed this advertisement for Hovis bread. It features a boy making a delivery on a traditional delivery bicycle.

These bikes are very practical and still in demand. However, it can be difficult to find such real butchers bikes in good condition these days. I can help out. I sell front racks for bicycles in several different styles which can be fitted to most bicycles.

There is a frame mounted rack like this:

And a handlebar mounted rack like this:


You can see full details of both styles here. I can of course make a bike basket to fit either style, or indeed to fit a genuine old delivery bike.

You may also be interested in a page of description of British delivery bicycles

A visit to Nijmegen

This video has explanatory captions which are only visible when it is viewed on a computer and not on a mobile device

Nijmegen, 160 km south of where we live in Assen, is considered to be the oldest city in the Netherlands. It's a city with many beautiful buildings which celebrated its 2000th year in 2005.

My friend Terry (who visited us last year and features in another post about a bike ride between Assen and Groningen ) lives in Nijmegen and I visited him last Saturday by train, taking along my folding bike.

The free of charge, guarded and secure cycle park that we use is one of five in the city.

Nijmegen has many historic buildings, and much reconstruction was required after the second world war to repair the city. Much of the devastation of the city was the result not of the occupying forces, but of Allied bombers accidentally bombing the city centre on February 22nd 1944.

Many of the older buildings were recreated much as they used to be. However, the shopping centre was rebuilt with wide avenues to take motorised traffic, on the American model. As you'll see from the video, this is not how they have remained.

While the Netherlands is not a hilly country overall, Nijmegen is quite a hilly city. This has not prevented it from having a high rate of cycling.

In 2002, the new government of Nijmegen decided to invest €10M over 4 years in new cycling infrastructure. The population is 161000 so this comes to over €15 per person per year.

Nijmegen was nominated as Fietsstad 2008 (Cycling City 2008) but lost out to Houten.

I also visited Nijmegen back in 2005, and wrote about the bicycle museum. The centre of Nijmegen is, like most city centres, "nearly car free".

Priorities when it snows

There was a bit of snow overnight. Just a couple of centimetres, but enough to make the world look white. As usual, the gritters have been out in force and cycling continues at the usual rate. On average, all year around, each person in Assen each makes just short of 1.2 bicycle journeys per day. The high levels of actual and subjective safety are the reason why. Cycle paths are always kept in safe conditions to preserve the high cycling rate.

This top photo is of the road at the end of ours. While the road itself is just a 30 km/h (18 mph) speed limit residential road which goes nowhere, a main cycle route emerges at this point and continues behind me. As you can see, the cycling route has been cleared of snow but the minor roads have not unless they are part of a cycling route.

Further along, we find the cycle paths are all miraculously free of snow, even if the canal is not.

Later on there were people clearing ovals on the canal for ice-skating. The ice is very thick now, so safe to skate on.

Many people are hoping that this winter will be cold enough for the Elfstedentocht. This is a one day 200 km ice-skating race & tour between 11 cities in Friesland (a province of the Netherlands). Around 15000 people take part.

This bicycle road is also an important route, being used by thousands of bikes per day because it provides a direct route to an outlying suburb. It may look a bit like there are bike lanes here, but actually the red parts together are substantially wider than the black bit in the middle. Also, the road is only about 200 m long and provides access only for drivers. Cyclists can go through bollards at either end and continue their journey on cycle paths.

On small patches here that the gritters had missed there were many many bicycle tracks.

I got here a little late to see the rush hour in full swing.

Much closer to home, our children set off in the snow to their schools this morning.

These are the tracks they left as they went, footsteps alongside the wheels turning into just the wheel tracks as they got onto their bikes.

It's quite normal for children here to cycle to school every morning, whatever the weather.

In this photo you can also see some play equipment on the small green in front of our home. There is always play equipment near homes.


This photo is taken a little further along our small street.

I count nine bikes (from eight houses) having already made a right turn at this point. Quite a few more went straight across, and of course I was about to add my own tracks.

Lastly, here is a photo from our local paper today of the gritting trucks and their drivers in Assen. In the photo you can see five full sized trucks and six of the smaller ones which can access the cycle paths. There is a map of cycle path gritting routes on the council's website.

There is also freely available salt for using on your own driveway or around your house. We have some. It's a mixture of fine salt and gravel slightly larger than sand.

There are now quite a few posts showing the result of the extensive gritting here. They each have the gritting tag. There are also a number of other winter posts. Some of these show how extensive the gritting is. It's not just something that happens within city boundaries. I should also point out that the next time I went past the point in the top photo, the road was clear of ice too. However, the cycle path and route was done first.

Inner tube vending machine

Have you ever had a puncture when the bicycle shops are shut and needed to buy an inner tube to fix your bike ?

This vending machine on the wall of a bike shop in Assen provides cyclists with a place to find a new inner tube 24 hours a day.

Provided, that is, that they know where it is (it was in Groningerstraat. Unfortunately it's gone now. There's another in a village a little way south of Assen).

There are also vending machines  for whole bikes and for emergency bike lights. If you need Continental Inner Tubes, or a whole range of other quality bike components, we have them in our webshop, which is also open 24 hours a day and which has lower prices than this machine.
 

Bikes at a school in winter

On a ride today I passed this primary school and thought the bikes looked nice in the sun. They're a pretty typical collection of Dutch children's bicycles. Each has mudguards (fenders), a chain guard, a way of carrying school books, dynamo lights etc. Practical bicycles built on a small scale.

In this case you see just the bikes from the junior class at this school. It's a small school and each class parks their bikes in a separate place.

When my children left for school this morning I noticed that the outside temperature was -9 C ( 15 F ). That's also the temperature at which these primary school children will also have cycled. Because it's so cold at the moment one of my children went on a school trip today to go ice-skating. As is normal for school trips, the class cycled to the frozen lake where they skated.

Last year I took a video of children cycling to school at a relatively mild -2 C. You can watch that video here.

There are also other posts on this blog about travel to school and about winter cycling.

Winning the prize

Time for a new year's resolution. Let's spread a cycling culture everywhere !

It seems that all cities these days say they want to have a cycling culture. It may not be immediately obvious how to get one, but a good clue is to copy other places which have achieved it.

The Netherlands is a very good place to look. There is more cycling here than in any other country. As a result, compared with most other places, every city here is a "cycling city" with remarkable levels of cycling.

Even those cities where the level of cycling is considered to be "low" have over 20% of journeys by bicycle. Where the level of cycling is "high," up to 60% of journeys are by bicycle. The cycling culture extends well past the edges of cities and far into the countryside. Good quality links are made between towns as well as within them. Impressive as the cities are, this is a cycling nation, not just somewhere with a few cycling cities.

If you want your country to emulate the success of the Netherlands, consider coming on one of our study tours for cycling planners and campaigners in order that it is possible for them to see the variety of cycling infrastructure in this area. The environment is such that it promotes cycling due to the high degree of safety and the convenience for cyclists.

The first photo is of a three wheeled bakfiets being given away in a competition in our local supermarket. Presumably every one of these supermarkets in the country gave one away to their customers on the same week. The second photo is of a leaflet in a packet of biscuits. This company was giving away 125 cargo bikes to people lucky enough to find a "golden biscuit." Such practical bicycles are quite common competition prizes here, as they are a very attractive prize in a place where everyone cycles.

Op Fietse

Anneke, a regular contributor to this blog, drew my attention to this song, "Op Fietse" ("On a Bike"). It was recorded in 1997 by a Drents band called Skik. They are singing about how wonderful it is to cycle here in Drenthe, describing various parts of the province, how they can do whatever they want cycling around with the wind in their wheels, without a care in the world. Riding up to the German border before riding back again, across heath and through forests, along the side of canals. Wonderful. It really is just like that here. The song is in the Drents dialect, and the lyrics are here.

In 1997 this song made it into the top 40 here in the Netherlands.


I realised on hearing this that I had heard the harmonica before. It's in this video which was amongst a number of videos promoting cycling that I put on my website a few years back.

After some wonderful pictures of people having fun on their bikes, the titling on this one says "As we like sitting on the bike so much, why stand still in a traffic jam ? Cycling to work - a good thing."

If you're interested in experiencing for yourself what it's like to cycle in Drenthe, the cycling province of the Netherlands, where cycling is something so pleasant that it encourages people to sing about it, please take a look at our cycling holidays.