Default to Green: cyclists have priority while drivers wait for the lights to change

Assen has 28 traffic light junctions. Three of them are set up in such a way that they default to green for cyclists. i.e. their usual situation is showing a green light for cyclists and they will only switch to red for cyclists and green for motor vehicles a sensor leading to the junction is triggered by the motor vehicle.

Red shows cycle-paths, blue shows the direction from which cars are leaving the motorway at this junction. X and Y are two junctions which default to green. The video was made at position X.
The area covered by this map is only about 500 m wide. Cycling infrastructure has to be built at a very high density in order that it is useful. At the western end, the cycle-paths link with little used service roads. To the east they are unbroken to the centre of the city.

The junction featured in this blog post is one of two very close together on a secondary cycle route in an industrial area in the west of Assen which give priority to bikes.

The roads in this area all have 50 km/h (30 mph) speed limits and with this being an industrial area you might have expected that most cyclists would be adults. However, even in this location, cyclists are provided with separate infrastructure from the road and are prioritized on those cycle-paths. There are good reasons why. Cycling has to be efficient and subjectively safe in order to be an attractive means of transport. Cycling also needs to be a "go anywhere" mode of transport to make it a default method of getting about rather than a "some journeys" mode of transport. If the cycle-path network did not reach into the industrial area, this would be a "no go" area for many people and what's more, if there were many places like this then cycling would no longer be a mode which could be relied upon to take you to any destination in comfort. As a result, fewer journeys would be made by bike.

If you want a high modal share for cycling then you need good infrastructure everywhere. When there is a tight grid of high quality cycle provision over the entire country it becomes possible for the whole population to cycle to any destination. Distances become less of a barrier if the experience is pleasant and that is why the Dutch do not only make shorter journeys by bike but are also more willing long distance cyclists than the people of any other nation. This wouldn't be true if the infrastructure didn't make it attractive.

On the way to junction X on the map above I first had to ride past junction Y. This young girl was riding alone in the industrial area next to a motorway junction. It's not a route used by many school children because it's not really a direct route for them between school and home. Perhaps she was riding to her parents' workplace or to a dentist further along here? However, the point is that whatever her destination, it's safe for her to get there by bike. It is an error to only try to provide good cycle facilities in town centres, for short journeys or only close to schools and housing. Unless cycling is made to be safe and convenient everywhere, it will never become a mode of transport used by everyone to make a large proportion of their journeys. For a high cycling modal share, a grid of high quality provision needs to go everywhere.

Why so few bikes in this video ?
This video has been six years in the making. That may sound ridiculous, and of course I'm not claiming that I've spent six years sitting there with a camera. However, this junction is particularly difficult to demonstrate because it reacts to both cyclists and drivers and normally there are either too many people using the junction for it to be demonstrated or it's the middle of the night and you can't see anything.

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This was the first time that I've found myself in this location with my camera and with little enough motor and cycling traffic that the timing of the traffic lights could be recorded. At more popular times you simply can't see so clearly what these traffic lights are doing. This is the reason why we show you a different default to green traffic light on our study tours.

Traffic lights which work like this are almost exactly the reverse of many pedestrian and cycle crossings. e.g. "Toucan" crossings in the UK. As it happens, we have three of those in Assen as well, and they have also been made efficient for cycling.

Inadequate infrastructure causes injuries. Better infrastructure prevents them. Learning from two minor crashes. Mini Roundabouts are unsafe for cyclists

My mother lives in Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset, England. Just before Christmas, my mum was involved in a crash while cycling. She had right of way when turning right on a mini roundabout. A driver coming from her left drove into her without seeing her.

My mother was following the line shown in red. The crash happened at the blue cross. See it on Google Maps.

The driver who hit my mother is not a bad person. She was apologetic from the start, took my mother to hospital and has checked up on her since then. The driver also paid for repairs to the bicycle and admitted liability to the police.

My mother was not seriously hurt, but her minor injuries have caused pain for some weeks now. A couple of days ago, my Mum collected her bike from the bike shop which made the repairs and rode it home. That's brave. Many people never cycle again once something like this has happened to them. While careful cyclists rarely have collisions anywhere in the world, including the UK, cycling becomes subjectively far less safe for people who have had this type of experience.

Crashes like this are quite common in the UK. They're usually referred to using the word "SMIDSY" ("Sorry Mate, I Didn't See You") as that's what drivers say so very often to the people who they have injured.

However, while crashes like this are common, they are rarely the result of deliberately dangerous behaviour. This is why neither legislation against drivers nor additional training are likely to make such events less frequent.

Another view of the same location. The red line shows the route that my mother takes to ride her bike home from the town centre.

The Blame Game
Who should we blame for this crash having occurred ?

My mother is a very careful cyclist and was riding according to the highway code when the crash occurred so she can't be blamed. The driver of the car has to take some responsibility because it was her action which caused the crash.

However it would be a mistake to think that these two parties are the only people involved. We need to look at why the driver made the mistake. This didn't happen for no reason at all, it was at least in part the result of the environment. Because crashes like this continue to occur I don't find it constructive to continue to blame either of the two principle actors.

It's not just Burnham. Britain has many
mini-roundabouts. This one near our old
home in Cambridge often caused us
problems by bike. Car crashes also
occurred. At least one person has died
at this junction since we left the UK.

This is a busy road junction yet it's designed as a mini-roundabout. Mini-roundabouts like this can be quite efficient for motorists but many cyclists find them to be dangerous. On a mini-roundabout, people have far less time in which to make a decision than they do on a full-sized roundabout. This leads mistakes being made and makes it far easier for motorists simply not to notice bikes and their riders amongst the more common and far larger motorized vehicles.

The speed limit at this junction is 30 mph (50 km/h). Burnham doesn't have any lower speed limits than this, not in residential areas which should not be used as through routes by car nor even by schools, even though schools exist for children yet children never drive cars to school.

The petrol station adjacent to the mini-roundabout adds more uncertainty. This station has a total of three entrances and exits, one in a side road and two of which divert traffic onto and off from the mini-roundabout. Passing drivers may also be distracted by reading the advertised fuel prices.

While both cyclists and pedestrians have no choice but to use this junction to get across the town, there is no provision here for cyclists to ride around the junction safely nor even to help pedestrians to cross the road.

The mini-roundabout is in the distance in this image, this is the road along which my mother was going to cycle in order to get home. Is this an equitable way to allocate space ? Both the mother with children and the person in a disability buggy have to use extremely narrow pavements while drivers enjoy wide lanes. The closest safe provision for crossing the road as a pedestrian is behind the camera.

Just like in other towns in the UK, planners here have only considered motor vehicles as a mode of transport. However, even that has not been done very well.

British Road Design
The roads in Burnham-on-Sea are very typical for a British town. I rode across this junction hundreds, if not thousands, of times when I lived in Burnham in the 1980s and 1990s. There has been no significant change to the roads in thirty years.

While British roads have not changed in design in the last thirty years, that is not true of the Netherlands. Sustainable safety principles applied progressively to Dutch roads in the ten year period between 1998 and 2007 are credited with having reduced the fatality rate by 5% per year. While the number of injuries for car occupants in the Netherlands is at around the same level as in Britain, pedestrians and cyclists are safer here than in the UK. Dutch children are far more likely to be independently mobile than British children and they are much safer than their British counterparts as they make their way around.

Comparison of the same road as above in Burnham (left) and a similar road and junction in Assen (right). The overall width of pavement, cycle-path and road at this point in Burnham is somewhat narrower than the example from Assen. Nevertheless, despite having less space overall, the British example allocates more space for cars even at this narrow point: the driving lanes in Burnham are about as wide as the driving lanes in Assen and the car parking lane, even though no parking is allowed. Extra width could be allocated to pedestrians and cyclists even here, but that isn't done even further along the road where it's much wider. Note also the smaller corner radii into side roads in Assen to reduce speeds and make crossing easier and lower speed limits in all residential streets. The width of the driving lanes of this street in Assen were reduced in 2008.

Burnham-on-Sea is a small town (the population is less than a third that of Assen at under 19000 people) but the roads in the town are always busy with cars. As in most of the UK, there is little alternative but to drive. Very few people will ever feel comfortable to cycle when the infrastructure design makes it so obvious that drivers are preferred over cyclists. In these conditions, people often believe driving to be a necessity.

When we visited in October, we saw that cycling provision is still virtually non-existent in Burnham. Enthusiastic cyclists ride their bikes, but there is little to attract those who are not enthusiastic cyclists. Many of the people who we came across who cycled used the pavement and apologised for doing so, or avoided the direct routes by using back streets and narrow pedestrian only cut-throughs.

The red line at the left shows part of the route taken by my mother to get from home to the town centre. The green line on the right shows the only cycling infrastructure in this area, a cycle-path built on the edge of a new housing development on the Eastern side of the town. This single path is of relatively good quality by British standards but it's not very useful because it skirts around the town and doesn't provide a direct route to common destinations. A very finely spaced grid of high quality cycle-paths is required to enable safe mass cycling. The blue line on the far left shows where Sustrans tell cyclists to ride along the beach.

Where the best cycle-path in Burnham
crosses a minor side-road, the corner
radius is large to enable high speed
when entering the residential streets
and drivers have priority. Also note
how much space is allocated for
driving vs. other modes.

A recently built housing development on the Eastern edge of the city provided a single cycle-path. However, this path is compromised in quality (narrow, gives way at all side-roads, low social safety) and doesn't actually go anywhere very useful. It skirts around the edge of the new homes where it was easy to build rather than going where it would provide a useful route.

There's a stark contrast between the housing development in Burnham-on-Sea which is typical for Britain, and what we've seen with a new development built on the edge of Assen which is typical for the Netherlands. In the Dutch example, cycling is not an afterthought. Not only was this development designed to enable most children to cycle to school but the new suburb also came with all facilities including a pedestrian and cycle friendly shopping centre. What's more, not only does the new development in Assen have an extensive network of internal cycle-paths, but it its construction also involved extensive works to provide a direct, unobstructed and nearly car free route to the city centre by bicycle.

Is everything perfect in the Netherlands ?

The collision in Assen took place at
this junction in an industrial estate

We go to some lengths to point out, both on this blog and on the study tours, that the Netherlands is not perfect. While the overall standard of the Netherlands is very good, there are plenty of places in this country where the infrastructure is not yet up to scratch. Plenty of work remains to be done. We have observed that those places which have inadequate, old-fashioned, infrastructure are often the scenes of collisions.

This is a long, straight road with lanes
just as wide as those used in the UK.
Drivers often exceed the speed limit
of 50 km/h in this location. No cycle-
paths here to keep cyclists safe.

This was illustrated in the last week because a friend of ours was involved in a very similar crash here in Assen to that which befell my mother in Burnham-on-Sea. Like my mother, our friend was bruised but not seriously injured. Her bicycle had some damage. The car driver in this case initially wanted to leave the scene of the accident but did co-operate.

It's often the case that people from outside the Netherlands overestimate the effect of "Strict liability" law. This was not a deliberate act and law does nothing to prevent accidental crashes. The driver simply "didn't see" the cyclist when he used a junction to turn around. No change to the law can prevent crashes because they address the wrong issue. The law does provide the useful service of ensuring that the crash victim will have her bicycle repair paid by the insurance of the driver.

Proper cycling infrastructure in this location almost certainly would have prevented the crash from happening because this removes the chance for a collision to occur. There is easily enough space for a cycle-path along this route and it is highly likely that one will be built in the future. The Western end of this area is to be rebuilt in the next few years and I expect to see changes for cyclists when that happens.

The route taken by the Assen cyclist through the industrial estate is shown as the bottom line, in red. The location of the crash is shown by the blue cross. No-one used this as a through route until very recently when a new bicycle bridge joined the short green section of cycle-path on the right to the red road. There are many cycle-paths in Assen and they go to all destinations. The longer green line across the top shows one good quality route (mainly cycle-path) to the same destination. This shortest safe route is 0.8 km longer for this particular journey, hence the desire to save time by choosing the red line. As the red route now makes a useful bicycle through-route, it is imperative that a cycle-path is built alongside it to improve safety.

Bad road designs are unsafe

Further along the same road, still in the
industrial area, there's a painted mini-
roundabout (new since we moved here)
Dutch drivers cut corners just as British
drivers do. This type of infrastructure
is no more safe here than in the UK.

Bad infrastructure in the Netherlands is no more safe than is bad infrastructure in the UK. Where conflict is caused by road design, problems of safety also arise.

In the post second world war period, the Netherlands and the UK were transformed by the rise of the private car. Starting in the 1970s, the Netherlands took a different path. Some forty years have now elapsed of this second phase of transformation. People now take priority and road safety has improved by a huge margin.

In some places, old fashioned and unsafe infrastructure remains in the Netherlands. In the case of the street featured above, it affected relatively few people until the recent opening of a cycle-bridge made it into a short-cut for some journeys by bike. It is now important that this street too needs to be updated to make it safe - part of an on-going process.

Book a Study Tour in order to find out about
what works and what does not work for cycling
in the Netherlands.

Just because something exists in the Netherlands, that doesn't mean it works well for cycling. Many things can be found on the road network of the Netherlands or are promoted by Dutch companies but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to copy all of them. This is why we offer independent advice about infrastructure. We're in a unique position to understand and explain, having experience of the UK and the Netherlands, and we have no company's product to sell.

My mother and Kona are not the only cyclists in Burnham-on-Sea. This town is also home to the world's oldest triathlete.  On the theme of the last paragraph above, some may remember that I criticized a Dutch company last year who offered "Dutch" infrastructure which was not the same as they would build in the Netherlands. Public companies are amoral. Just because they have Dutch roots that does not mean they're interested in cycling. Profit is their motive. The same company has now become involved with achieving consent for a shiny new nuclear power station just 10 km from my mother's home. That's not very "Dutch" either - there are no nuclear power stations under construction in the Netherlands near the mothers of the people at the top of Royal Haskoning.

A cycle-path for singing

SINGING CYCLE-PATH:
Here you can officially sing as you cycle. No need for
un-natural pauses in you song as someone cycles past

What do you get for Christmas for the Dutch cyclist who already has "everything" ? How about a cycle-path for singing on ?

It's a stunt by the Fietsersbond, the Dutch cycling union. It's not (yet) official policy that cycle paths are designed for singing. But it's also a sign of what cycling is in the Netherlands. Apart from those places where things have gone wrong, cycling is joyful here, just as it should be everywhere else.

Joyful cycling is something worth working towards in time for next Christmas. Aim high. For everyone to feel like singing when they cycle you need a very high degree of subjective safety. Remember who we're doing this for, and don't take too long about it.

On-Road Cycle-lanes are dangerous. Oostrum's children deserve better

At nine in the morning on the 27th of November, a sixteen year old girl in the village of Oostrum (in the province of Limburg, in the south of the Netherlands) was seriously wounded when she was involved in a crash with a car. Sadly, this was not a unique event. While the Netherlands is the safest country in the world in which to be a cyclist, it is still the case that hundreds of people are injured and killed every year in this country. The Netherlands could still do better.

In the case of this unfortunate incident, some residents have been calling for changes in order to improve the safety of their children. When the Dutch TV programme HvNL (Heart of the Netherlands) reported on the incident they included comments from a local politician who wants change as well from a local councillor who saw no problem. During the short time that they were on site, the film crew caught a collision which could have resulted in a serious injury:

Where the collision occurred and where the film-crew saw
another collision during a short visit. Making such a
manoeuvre across traffic is difficult and error prone.
View on Google Maps

Why is this road dangerous ?
There is a common thread running through many stories about traffic accidents in the Netherlands. Where injuries occur, it is often the case that they take place where the infrastructure is sub-standard. This location definitely has substandard infrastructure.

It's easy to see where the opportunity for the crash came from. This road carries a lot of relatively high speed motorized through traffic as well as a lot of cyclists. Many of the cyclists are children going to school and they have to make a difficult to judge manoeuvre, crossing parallel traffic while checking both behind and in front, as part of their daily journey.

On-road cycle-lanes
Cycle-lanes are not really infrastructure at all, they're just paint. This road is decorated by particularly narrow on-road painted cycle-lanes and does not have the physical infrastructure which could protect cyclists from the danger of motor vehicles.

Further along the same road in Oostrum. Narrow
cycle-lanes encourage cyclists to ride in the gutter
and drivers to overtake. This is bad infrastructure.

Wide cycle-lanes (wider than 2 m) can be useful in some locations as they can then help to encourage drivers to pass at a safe distance. However, even wide on-road cycle-lanes are not suitable for roads where there are many motor vehicles or where either the motor or cycle traffic doesn't fit in the allocated lane.

Narrow cycle-lanes like the one involved in the incident in Oostrum don't work very well anywhere. These encourage cyclists to ride in the gutter and they encourage drivers to expect cyclists to be in the gutter. Cycle-lanes of this design encourage close passing and risk-taking by drivers. They're often associated with drivers overtaking cyclists and almost immediately turning across their path. All cycle-lanes, regardless of width, make it difficult for a cyclist to safely turn across other traffic. Junctions need more thought than is apparent on this road.

Advanced stop lines (bike boxes) are often associated with
on-road cycle-lanes, including here in Oostrum. ASLs make
drivers frustrated behind cyclists and make them anxious
to overtake. What's more, these cycle-lanes even encourage
cyclists to ride in "the door zone" next to cars in parking bays
 at the same time as encouraging drivers to overtake those
cyclists within a pinch point. This is poor infrastructure which
causes many conflicts. At least cyclists don't have to deal
with drivers turning right at the junction. Just because you
can find an example of something like this in NL
that doesn't mean it is good and should be copied.

More about Oostrum
In a location where many children cycle to school this lack of well designed infrastructure encourages dangerous behaviour by those children and puts them in danger. But it's not only at this point - the road looks much the same for a stretch of about 1.5 km, well into the next town, Venray, and for most of the distance, including where the collision took place, the speed limit is relatively high at 50 km/h

The local councillor interviewed by the TV crew doesn't see the problem. He gave a response on camera in which he said that there were good sight lines and everyone should be able to see what everyone else is doing and behave accordingly. British readers may find parallels with Boris Johnson's widely criticised comment that cycling in London is "OK if you keep your wits about you".

Elsewhere in Oostrum, Google's camera spots people
"voting with their feet" and continuing on the pedestrian
path rather than switching to riding on the road. There
are no cycle-paths within Oostrum.

What about training and "Strict liability" ?
Unfortunately, the councillor has slipped into a common mode of thinking amongst people from all countries. It is imagined that given enough advice, people won't make mistakes. This is a fallacy. People will always make mistakes. This almost defines us as being human. Not only will no amount of training prevent either child cyclists or adult drivers from making mistakes, but law changes or punishment for mistakes will also not remove the possibility of mistakes occurring.

Readers from overseas who sometimes over-estimate the effects of "strict liability laws" in the Netherlands should note that this law doesn't prevent mistakes from being made in locations like this where the infrastructure is inadequate to the task of keeping people safe. The Dutch drive no more perfectly than do people of other nations, and while Dutch children receive limited traffic training in school, it's quite obvious from watching groups of children cycle that this doesn't have anything like the beneficial effect on behaviour that training advocates imagine.

Just because someone is Dutch and lived through campaigning forty years ago about childhood freedom and safety, that does not mean they will automatically understand about these issues. Some people simply can't see things from the point of view of others. Cycling is almost too common in the Netherlands. People take it for granted and don't realise that the high cycling modal share of this country is due to infrastructure and not culture.

The raised table in the centre of Oostrum is a more modern
feature. This probably does help to reduce speeds in the
centre, but the direct road to Venray has been overlooked

Sustainable safety prevents injuries
What makes Dutch roads and cycle-paths safe is not training or strict liability but Sustainable Safety (Duurzaam Veilig). Sustainable Safety is a policy of reducing the opportunity for mistakes to become injuries by reducing the consequences of making such mistakes. Roads should be self-explanatory and forgiving (read an article which explains more).

The passing of time
Stationsweg is the road to Venray's railway station, so has probably always been quite busy. However, it hasn't always been like this. At some point, probably in the 1980s, adding cycle-lanes to this road perhaps seemed to make sense. However, the world didn't stop then. Both Oostrum and Venray have experienced growth in the last thirty years. There are many new homes, many more people. Car ownership in the Netherlands has grown and the use of cars has also grown with it.

Not all infrastructure in this country has been updated to current standards. Stationsweg in Oostrum is just one of many examples of roads which lag a long way behind the standards of 2013. The principles of Sustainable Safety have yet to make a dent here. There's some catching up to do.

Change is needed
Residents of Oostrum are absolutely right to demand changes which will improve the safety of themselves and their children. The safety of the next generation is the best thing any of us we can possibly campaign for.

In my view there are several obvious ways in which safety could be improved at the point of the accident:

• Diverting motorized traffic using this road to other routes would remove much of the danger from cars, regardless of other measures.
• Lower speed limits would make it easier to judge the speeds of cars and reduce the severity of injury.
• A raised table and narrowing of the motor lane to a single vehicle width could reduce the speed of cars at the point of crossing.
• A 90 degree crossing would make it easier for cyclists to see cars coming from both directions.
• A central reservation for crossing would remove the need for cyclists to see in both directions at once.
• A parallel cycle-path along much of the road would provide more distance between motorized vehicles and cyclists.

(note that the list includes mutually exclusive suggestions)

Have the Dutch forgotten what was achieved ?
in the 1970s, the Stop de Kindermoord (Stop Child Murder) protests gained mass support. Other local actions such as dramatic protests in De Pijp in Amsterdam also played a part in changing the way people thought about safety on the streets. This country began to transform itself 40 years ago. and that happened because there was popular support for change. While not everyone was in agreement at all times, the entire population was behind the idea of children being safe and infrastructure across the country was transformed as a result.

Unfortunately, keeping up momentum is not easy. Because such a long time has passed, people have forgotten how important this was. The safety of children is no longer an explosive campaigning issue. The situation in the Netherlands isn't bad overall. Dutch children are still rated by UNICEF as having the best well-being in the world, but this is a sign of past success and did not come about due to current policy. The adults who led the change in the 1970s and the experts who designed the improved infrastructure have largely retired. There are signs that their good ideas are to some extent being forgotten. The children of the early 1970s, for whom the actions were taken, are now middle aged and even their own children are grown up. Younger activists are largely unaware and unappreciative of what was achieved and how unique and significant this was. Even Dutch people often fall into the easy trap of believing that they cycle because it's in their culture. We've found that people are quite shocked if shown pictures of what their streets used to look like because they don't remember the problems that designing towns solely around motor vehicles used to cause.

This is a dangerous time for the Netherlands because some of what made this country great is being forgotten. It should be no surprise that Dutch children are being taken to school by car more often these days.

Why take a study tour ?

Cyclists approaching Oostrum from the west are kept safe by
cycle-paths on both sides of the main road. Riding from here
through the village at a quiet time could easily lead to a
misleading impression.

When we first started visiting this country (in the last century), there was no-one to guide us and we formed impressions based solely on what we saw. Like other people who have done the same, we came to some incorrect conclusions.

Compared with villages in other countries, it's possible to approach Oostrum on surprisingly good quality cycle-paths. The village largely has relatively low speed limits and contains both a raised table in the centre and on-road cycle-lanes leading to the west. Not all of this is bad, and of course it could appear to be an example of relatively good practice. It would be easy to overlook the problems cause by the use of on-road cycle lanes on a busy road, especially if these were not witnessed first hand because of the time of day when they were observed.

We find it is not at all uncommon that people take photos of substandard infrastructure that they've found in the Netherlands and try to have similar ideas adopted after they return to their own country. Not only does older infrastructure not necessarily make itself obvious if you're from a country which is less advanced with regard to cycling but people also sometimes view what looks more familiar as more achievable, even though the cost difference is often not large, and doing something twice in order to fix a mistake is always more expensive than doing it properly in the first place.

We're independent and will simply show you
what works and what does not. We do not hype
the services of any other company.

We initially started running study tours because no-one else at all was offering this service. There is much that other nations need to learn from the Netherlands but this knowledge was either not being transferred or it was being misunderstood (e.g. enthusiasm about what the Dutch got wrong. e.g. Shared Space). As a result of our relatively early start, having moved here, learnt Dutch and as a result of having shown hundreds of people both what is good about cycling in the Netherlands and the pitfalls that must be avoided, we now have more experience than anyone else. Being completely independent of any other company we have no reason to push ideas in order to sell them. We simply show you what works and what does not.

If Oostrum were local to us, we might visit to point out problems to be avoided. However there's no need to make a special trip. There are bad examples of infrastructure closer to home which already feature on our study tours, where we explain the problems caused. We also, of course, feature examples of very good infrastructure and encourage people to learn from these about what really works to encourage cycling. Our tours allow you to save yourself from misunderstandings and wasted effort.

The Netherlands has the difficult job of being in front and not having any other country to copy from. In other countries the job is much easier and there's no time to waste. You're already decades behind what the Dutch have achieved and the Netherlands still stands as very easily the best example to try to emulate.

Note that in most cases, Dutch children make relatively uneventful journeys to school. This is what makes cycling to school so popular in the Netherlands. However we have to be wary because there has been a small decline in recent years.

A visitor's view of Groningen railway station

Our friend Mike Rubbo came to stay with us in March. It was -10 C here but people were still cycling much as they always do. We had had a chance to get used to the weather, of course, so I thought Mike did well to survive outdoors at all, having come here from the Australian summer.

Mike wrapped up warm to film the
school run in Kloosterveen, a new suburb
of Assen. It's impressive whatever
the weather.

The above is the first of the films that Mike has finished about cycling in this area. This film was shot around the bike shop and cycle parking at the largest railway station in Groningen, with particular emphasis on one of the shop's customers, a lady who uses her electric bike to get around in and around the city and who had an amusing story to tell.

Bikes are everyday transport in this country for the whole population, whatever the weather.

What has Britain learnt since the 1960s ?

A few days ago I asked how much Britain had progressed in the last six years. Now I'm looking further back in history. In the 1950s and 1960s the Rank Organisation made in the UK made a fascinating series of films called "Look at Life". These films documented many aspects of British society fifty year ago. Youtube user dokkertrigger has made many of these films available.

I've chosen three of the films because of their relevance to planning and cycling. You occasionally see bikes, but note how the narrator never mentions cycling in these videos (nor others I've watched). Bicycles simply were not taken into account by 1950s and 1960s traffic planners, not in the UK and often not in the Netherlands either.

November 1964. The problems caused by cars are already obvious. Amongst other ideas, the new town of Cumbernauld was designed to accommodate pedestrians (not cyclists) separately from motor vehicles and to provide space for each family to own one car (a mistake sometimes repeated). The video starts with scenes of Oxford Street in London, one of "Britain's noisy fume filled towns and cities" where pedestrians "compete with the motor car for room to move":

Not that delays are already thought to cost £500 million pounds per year. A considerable part of this could be saved if people could safely cycle. Cycling is not a cost to the economy, it's repeatedly been shown to be a benefit to the economy.


May 1959. Amongst other highlights, huge traffic jams are already a problem. See the start of works to try to solve the problem such as building flyovers above peoples' homes (accompanied by remarkably jolly music) and the start of planning for Elephant and Castle in London, a large junction which became the most lethal for cyclists in London:


September 1962. Bypasses are being built. One village to benefit is Stilton (this village gave its name to the famous cheese, though cheese made there now is not allowed to use the name Stilton):


The cross-roads where the dog is lying on the road at the end of the video now looks like this:

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It's interesting to note that while this road is still a dead end, the road markings have been changed to those of a busy through road. By-passing this village was not really enough on its own. No provision was made for people to travel by means other than motor vehicles or walking and local people are concerned about how future plans to expand the nearby A14 (motorway in all but name) will affect commuters who drive to Cambridge.

It would be interesting to know whether many children cycle to school within Stilton. I would guess not as despite having a bypass this looks not much different from any other British town and children here won't have the same easy experience as Dutch children. Similarly, I'd be interested to know whether many secondary school children cycle to nearby Peterborough for their studies. There are secondary schools within 10 km, well within normal cycling distance for Dutch school children, but cycling there would require riding on shared use paths with no separation from cars travelling at 100 km/h and negotiating large road junctions.

Time for another revolution

These videos often mention that the UK is behind other countries in Europe in building a road network, and they talk about avoiding mistakes made in other countries due to starting later. The UK could do the same with cycling, copying only the best examples. However, there's something else that I find interesting.

Assen in the 1960s after years of
planning which prioritised cars. Just
as in Oxford Street in 1964, railings
are used to restrict pedestrians to
narrow pavements

All western countries went through a similar spree of road building after the second world war. All saw the same 1950s ideas as the future, copying what was seen as a "modern" American example. Most countries stopped right there and policies have continued as if the car oriented 1960s never ended.

The Netherlands started off by doing the same things. This country followed the same policies as other countries, prioritizing cars above all else. This resulted in scenes like those on the photo to the right all across the Netherlands. Streets were dominated by cars just as was the case in the UK at the same date.

The same street in 2007 after policy
had changed to make a more liveable
city. See how this street works now.

In the 1970s, Dutch policy changed, resulting in what was once the busiest street in Assen now appearing to have been designed to look much less like a through route even than the bypassed centre of Stilton.

From the 1970s onwards, people walking and cycling became important in the Netherlands. Streets which were transformed in the 1960s were transformed a second time. It is this second transformation which other countries are still waiting for. Just as the UK looked to Europe to see how it could transform itself efficiently into a motoring oriented country, so the country could now look to the Netherlands to find out how to make this second transformation.

The narrator in the first video notes that "London won't be rebuilt in a day". Actually, remarkably little progress has been made in 50 years. Exactly the same problems remain. If planners and politicians remain stuck in the 1950s mode of providing for motor traffic above all else then progress will remain stunted.

Now go and listen to one of the most lovely songs ever written about building roads and the struggles of working people in general.

London's cyclists are not to blame for London's low cycling modal share, it's the politicians who should take the blame

Low cycling nations and low cycling cities don't have a problem with how well cycling is marketed, they have a problem with how well their infrastructure works for cycling.

Six Londoners died in a short period of time recently and this has been followed by protests including a "Die In".

Neither London's Mayor, Boris Johnson nor the Cycling Commissioner, Andrew Gilligan, appear to be aware of their role in what has happened. Both have made remarks on the lines of that there is nothing they could do by changing infrastructure which would reduce the incidence of deaths. They are  deliberately misleading people and the people they are misleading most are those who voted them.

Cycle-paths are one of the forms of
infrastructure which keep Dutch
cyclists safe.

Here in the Netherlands we have infrastructure which reduces the incidence of cyclist deaths. We used it every day. I've offered my time twice to the Mayor in order to demonstrate what it is and how it works, but it would seem that he's not very interested in knowing what he needs to do to keep cyclists safe.

Yesterday evening I watched a news programme from the UK in which Andrew Gilligan blamed cycling campaigners for making cycling look dangerous. He suggested that cyclists making cycling sound dangerous this was the reason why a BBC survey revealed that a fifth of London's cycle commuters have stopped cycling. Yes, he actually laid blame on the people who promote cycling. This is a disgraceful distortion of what is actually happening under his watch.

Back in March, just after Boris Johnson appointed his friend as cycling commissioner, I was skeptical of their motives and suggested that this was a time when campaigners would need to become more busy than before. It was clear then that London would rely on hype, exaggeration and marketing rather than actually building the infrastructure that was required to make change happen. I gave he post the tag "broken promises" because even as they made their promises, it was obvious that they would be broken. Nothing that has happened in London since that time reduces my skepticism.

It's possible to ride for six years without incident
A few days back I realised that while up to six years ago I had quite regular unpleasant experiences when cycling, I'd now had six years of having no unpleasant experiences at all, not having been cut up even once, until that run of six years was broken just one month ago. What is special about six years ? Six years ago we emigrated from the UK and we've lived in the Netherlands since that time. Why one month ? One month ago I rode a bike for just a few hours in London and it reminded me what it is like to ride a bike in the UK.

Why isn't it like this for everyone ?
In order to encourage people to ride bicycles, the choice of doing so has to be made easy. Routes taken by bicycle need to be direct, they need to be as free as possible of stops, and the conditions need to be and to feel very safe. Unless cycling is subjectively safe, most of the population will never cycle.

The best way of improving both actual safety and subjective safety is to do one simple thing: remove motor vehicles from the spaces where cyclists ride.

The BBC's survey revealed a fifth of cyclists had been involved in a collision. This is not just a problem with subjective safety, but of whether people are injured or die when cycling. It's not a marketing problem which can be solved by not talking about dying, it's a problem with the experience that people have if they get on a bicycle, which in London is always tense.

Two-thirds of London cyclists admit they sometimes ride on pavements to avoid busy junctions. They do this not because it's convenient (it's not) but because it feels safer than continuing their journey on the road. To solve problems like this we first have to understand them.

London cyclists don't dress like this
because it's fashionable but because
they are scared

In one of my very first posts on this blog, more than five years ago, I noted that "Cyclists are the pit-canaries of the roads. If they're numerous, dressed in ordinary clothing and wide-ranging in age you can tell that you are in a location where cycling is "normal" in society and where it is safe enough, and feels subjectively safe enough, that everyone cycles. If people feel they have to dress to be safe then this is a sign that they do not have adequate subjective safety."

London's cyclists still look very much like the pit canaries of the road and there are good reasons why. If you cycle in London then you have to be concerned about your own safety. The BBC survey included several questions about subjective safety. For instance, one question asked whether people thought their family and friends were safe when cycling. Nearly 70% said no. The low subjective safety is why people wear bright colours, helmets and face masks. These are not fashion accessories, they're tools for survival. They're not worn because someone said it was unsafe, they're worn because people feel unsafe when cycling.

Until London gets to grips with why people feel unsafe when cycling and until the city starts to do something about the reasons why people feel unsafe by building infrastructure makes cycling attractive to everyone, the city will not see a rise in cycling to levels comparable with the Netherlands.

Cycling in London doesn't need marketing, it needs infrastructure !

The same principles apply everywhere
Any place which has given inadequate attention to making cycling safe, convenient and enjoyable will see stagnation at a low percentage of journeys by bike as only people who particularly like cycling will ride bikes.

Journeys by bike in London never broke through even 5% of the total. Sadly, this decline has occurred before the city has even done one percent of what it needed to do to make mass cycling happen in the first place. However, declines can happen anywhere and examples of it happening should be a warning to us all.

It's not only London which has seen cyclists give up. Once mighty Denmark has unfortunately also seen the equivalent of one in eight cyclists give up. This decline came about for the same reasons as the decline in London. They ignored the importance of building good enough infrastructure and tried to use marketing to fill in the gaps. Voluminous international publicity turned out not to be enough to make people feel safe when they experienced problems on a daily basis such as junction designs which cause conflict and have killed seven Copenhageners already this year. While it may still seem a step beyond what many nations have, to copy Denmark's "success" actually means to copy what doesn't work in Denmark. That's why I suggest that the Netherlands remains easily the best country to try to emulate.

While the Netherlands is currently on top that doesn't mean that this country is any more immune to these issues than any other. Plenty of Dutch people take what they have for granted and simply don't know why it is that they cycle. Denmark should especially serve as a warning to the Netherlands as policies and practices from there and marketed to this country could reasonably be expected to end with the same result here as they did where they came from.

The Dutch don't cycle because it's "in their blood" but for the same reasons as anyone else would cycle given conditions which made cycling into an easy option to choose. When cycling is convenient, offers direct and uninterrupted journeys and both feels and is safe then people choose to cycle. When conditions are merely adequate and when incidents happen often enough that people remember them and become concerned about their safety, cycling will stagnate or drop.

Not all Dutch cities grow cycling at the same rate. Here, just like everywhere else, people cycle in response to infrastructure and not in response to marketing.

Hope for the future
Cycling needs actions, not words. A million volumes of marketing material do not have the same value as one metre of good quality cycle-path, and that's universally true. To a first approximation, cycling modal share is proportional to expenditure. Politicians control the funds and they need to release them in order that cycling can grow, not make excuses for inaction or blame cyclists for their own misfortune.

The Netherlands achieved its cycling success by building a remarkable country-wide network of world class infrastructure and not by marketing. Other countries could achieve the same results in the same way. There is no proven alternative method which leads to true mass cycling.

Update 6 December 2013
Usage of London's bike share system is also falling. This is also being blamed on cyclists. When I was in London a few weeks ago I tried the system and found it to work well enough as a civil amenity. However, I also cautioned that it's not cycling infrastructure.

For four and a half years I've been writing about the limits of London's bike share system and how it can never lead to a real cycling "revolution" in the city. Bike share answers the wrong question. London's problem was never a shortage of bicycles, but was always a shortage of pleasant conditions for cycling.

London's aim should be to become a city of ten million cyclists. This will never happen while instead of fixing the infrastructure, London's politicians seek to pass the blame for the majority of the population being scared to cycle onto the few people brave enough to do it.