Events and high temperatures. Keep cycling through it all.

July has been warmer and drier than usual for the Netherlands, starting off warm and slowly heating up until the last couple of days in which we've seen 37 C locally and slightly higher temperatures further south. Cycling of course continues through all weather, hot and cold. Here's a round-up of what's been going on in Assen over the last month.

The TT
More than anything else, Assen is famous for the TT racing circuit. This brings a huge number of visitors to the city - visitors outnumbering the locals 2:1 for a few days at the end of June (not July, but under a month ago at the time of writing). Luckily, motoring events no more create a motorcycle culture resulting in everyone travelling by motorbike than cycling events can create a cycling culture so Assen's cycling is safe from the influx of motorcycling enthusiasts.

People pick their mode of transport based on what is convenient and safe. Assen, like most Dutch cities, has high quality cycling infrastructure which makes cycling convenient and safe. Choosing to cycle is easy for everyone. That is why cycles are used for more journeys than any other mode of transport in Assen.

This year, a pop-up museum displayed historic motorcycles ridden in previous TTs.

The older the motorbikes were, the more they looked like bicycles with engines strapped on. That, of course, is exactly what motorbikes were in the beginning. There is a very long history of people who think that bicycles can be improved by making an engine or motor do most of the work. It happened with the very first motorbikes, with mopeds and it's happening again now with electrically assisted bikes. Most people, for most purposes, simply don't need a motor.

Outside the museum: most visitors had arrived by bicycle, which is just what you'd expect in Assen.

Supermarkets in Assen also go motorbike mad during the TT week. This supermarket had no less than six motorbikes dotted around displays of produce. I'm not sure what the connection is between tomatoes and motorbikes, but someone decided it was marketing genius.

Motorbikes and beer seem a more normal combination as it's clear that plenty of beer is consumed at the campsites around the TT track.

Outside the supermarket, but within the shopping centre. As usual, the majority of shoppers have arrived by bicycle.

But of course you don't read this blog to see pictures of motorized bicycles. I'll stick to human power from now onward.

Haren-Haren tocht
The last night of the TT festival was on the 30th of June and the music stopped at 5 am on the 1st of July. My alarm went off at 6 am so that I could make a good start in July by taking part in the Haren-Haren ride ("De Ultieme Wielerklassieker"). It's a very well organised sociable ride from Haren in the Netherlands to Haren in Germany and back again and this was the third time I took part. The route and distance both vary. This year there were different route options: a 30 km route for hand-bikers, a 105 km route which turns at one of the refreshment points within the Netherlands and the full route of 165 km length.

7:56 am: 25 km from home, I join the queue for "Velo Koffie" in Haren

Almost everyone rides a racing bike for this event. Recumbents and velomobiles are also permitted.

The route is very well signposted, with arrows like this showing which way to go at every junction and often in-between, which is a great help on long stretches.

The route mostly uses the extensive network of excellent cycle-paths in this area, which cope perfectly well with a thousand fast cyclists following the same route together.

Cycle racers gain a huge aerodynamic advantage by riding in a group. I have my own personal aerodynamic advantage when riding singly in a velomobile, but the difference in bicycle shape means I can't profit from riding in the middle of a group.

Germany. See flag and the different style of buildings which appear immediately after we cross the border. Naturally there's nothing else to note. A seamless border within the EU.

The furthest point was a stop at a small airfield just short of Haren (DE). Cake and sport drink were served. Then we rode back to the Netherlands.

A section of country lane in Groningen on the way back to Haren (NL). Roads like these do not function as useful through routes for drivers so there are very few cars to contend with. Cyclists so far as the eye can see.

As ever with rides like this some preparation is required. In particular it's a good idea to make sure your bike is in good condition. Because punctures are not amusing at all when you're a long way from home I don't use "fast" tyres but instead go for reliability. Schwalbe Marathon tyres pumped up to their maximum rated pressure are perfect.

Preparation also means sun block and a hat, and it's also important to take care of what you eat and drink. Hummus and salad sandwiches are my usual staple for lunch, augmented with nuts and crisps, snacks and a banana. In additional to a couple of bidons of water I also took a bidon of energy drink and had cartons of soy milk and fruit juice stashed away. I find that what seems appealing before or at the start of the ride isn't necessarily what you want to eat by the end of it so variety is important so you can find something that you like. Short distance cycling doesn't require eating anything more than usual, but on longer distances you do need to eat: This ride consumed about 4000 calories.

In total I rode 215 km in slightly over six and a half hours which is good enough for me. I was home, had a shower and was sitting in the garden with a book by mid afternoon. A very enjoyable day.

Regular weekend / midweek rides
Quite apart from our daily cycling for utility purposes, Judy and I try to get out for rides on the weekend and sometimes also mid-week

Wide cycle-paths mean sociable cycling.

There's a butterfly garden a few kilometres away which we visited on one of our recent rides. No butterflies stood still long enough to get a decent photo, but this dragonfly posed nicely for a photo.

An oddity on the cycle-path network of Drenthe: This kink in the cycle-path seems ideally designed to allow display of a classic car.

Watched by a horse while stopped for a snack.

Tractors are sometimes quite horrible to follow because of their exhaust fumes. They're usually limited in speed, in this case the tractor was limited to 30 km/h making it not difficult to race. We were rewarded with fresh air to breath.

One of the joys of living in a rural location is being able to buy fresh vegetables while cycling. These courgettes for sale at 40 cents each were actually quite large marrows. I bought one of them and it fed us for three nights.

Plenty of space for cyclists on the cycle-path along the canal

Unfortunately, there's not always fresh air to breath. Boats like this burn twice as much fuel per passenger kilometre as Concorde. Because no-one ever checks their emissions they get away with producing horrible clouds of smoke, yet local governments invite them into city centres just when they should be trying to reduce such pollution, especially near where people live.

Dutch lessons
I've mentioned in the past about how children not only cycle to and from school in the Netherlands, but schools also take children on trips by bicycle. That's something that doesn't happen so much elsewhere because of worries about liability but it's very normal in the Netherlands.

School trips by bike are not only for children. I signed up for a new course of Dutch lessons at the start of this year and our end of year activity was, of course, a cycle-trip. A few weeks ago we rode about 30 km one evening to a nice location in the countryside where we shared a picnic.

My fellow students and our teacher somewhere near the front .

Making deliveries
"Free delivery by velomobile" is a service which you won't find offered by many companies.

We offer local customers the option of free delivery by bicycle, which we normally say is within the city. However sometimes the sun is shining and I could do with a bike ride and I'll go further. One customer 25 km away who ordered a tyre and inner tubes this month received his parts by velomobile. A 50 km round trip through Drenthe is always tempting.

We don't only write about cycling and about bicycles, we use them every day and we sell parts which work for everyday cycling.

Parts for the customer - a tyre and two inner tubes.

Stopped for lunch on the return journey

Colour change in cycle-paths
When it's not rained for a while the cycle-paths of Assen change colour due to tyre wear. Particulate pollution isn't something to celebrate, but at least there is far less as a result of bicycles in comparison with cars.

Particulate rubber as a result of thousands of bicycles on dry asphalt. It's washed away by even quite light rain.

The much larger problem resulting from a few cars demonstrating performance during an event during the TT festival a whole month ago. There are orders of magnitude more rubber dust here: at the time of the photograph, this evening, this had survived several downfalls of rain.

Bicycles as Pollution
Assen's new railway station, built to replace the old station which dated from 1989, has now opened. With it, the temporary station's cycle-park has been closed. Owners of bicycles which had been parked there were warned weeks in advance that they had to remove their bikes. Most of the bicycles were removed, but these are the bicycles which were left at the station and which have been collected for scrapping. The blue shed is full and there are more bikes on the other side of it:

A small part of the temporary cycle-park a few days before closure. Most bikes had been removed.

But a month later these bicycles, extending into the blue shed and beyond, could be found near the town dump waiting to be scrapped. They're not all wrecks. Bicycles as pollution.

Self-destructing cycle-paths
The heat has taken its toll on some of the cycle-paths locally. I came across this a few days ago: A concrete cycle-path which had cracked spectacularly. This happens occasionally when the expansion gaps become full of solid objects such as small rocks. Luckily, there was a work crew already fixing the problem.

Heat damage to a concrete cycle-path

By the time I found this damage it was already being fixed

In order to avoid damage to asphalt cycle-paths which could melt, salt is applied in exactly the same way as it is in winter.

Fietsvierdaagse
For the last 53 years, Assen has hosted a Fietsvierdaagse. It's a four day cycling event in which 11000 people took part this year. I rode on just one day, Thursday, and entered to ride the 100 km route rather than the more popular (and slower) 40 km route.

I've enjoyed the fietsvierdaagse routes, short and long over different years since we've lived here but I think it's a mistake that they've stopped putting up arrows for the longer routes as that makes them much less fun to follow. GPS on a bike isn't really my thing: I don't want to have to stare at a screen when cycling.

People arrive at 8:00

The fietsvierdaagse is about gezelligheid, not speed.

While the shorter routes are way-marked, the longer routes are not. Following a not very well printed map without GPS and often finding myself riding on the same paths as people taking part over much shorter distances was impractical so after going along half the distance on approximately the route as I was supposed to I made the rest of the journey along familiar routes back home on which I could keep up a sensible speed.

Another delivery
All the parcels we send out to mail order customers begin their journey on one of our bikes, most on our cargo bike. Customers within Assen either collect from us or we deliver and use it as an excuse to ride a bit further. This morning, delivery to a customer 2 km away turned into an 18 km ride. Not a long distance, but a nice way to start the morning.

I made another delivery this morning, taking an oversized chainwheel to a customer just 2 km away from home in a new suburb of Assen.

In total, this delivery to a customer 2 km away resulted in an 18 km cycle-ride. Part of the journey back to Assen was along this dead-end (to cars) country lane which serves half a dozen farms. It is being improved with safer edging.

Assen

Assen now has a rainbow zebra crossing. I'm all for recognizing diversity in all its forms. Something notable about this particular crossing is how it has been created. Some rainbow coloured crossings are not legal zebras because of their design but in this case the white stripes comply to the regulations for a standard zebra contrasting to the surface underneath, which can be any colour. Unfortunately, they've dropped the advisory cycle-lane broken white line through the rainbow section, and this is right in a location where drivers enter the cycle-lane regularly because its on the inside of a corner. The paint looks nice, but this change doesn't fix several other problems of this junction either.

This evening in Assen. My town bike among the others parked near a cafe.

Continuing a theme from above, the spearmint in our garden attracted dozens of bees today.

Perspective
Thus far, all the cycling I've done this month on all the bikes I've ridden adds up to about 750 km.

The Tour-de-France ends tomorrow. Competing cyclists will have ridden 3351 km in the last three weeks, somewhat exceeding my efforts.

The finishing line

However, even more impressive and happening as I write this, Nici Walde is attempting to break the human powered 24 hour cycling record which currently stands at 1219 km as well as the women's record which stands at 1012 km. She started at 10 this morning and will continue to ride until 10 tomorrow morning and she'll have to maintain an average speed of better than 50 km/h for 24 hours. At the time of writing Nici has covered 602 km in the first 12 hours. Already awesome. Good luck Nici.

Update: Nici Walde rode 1088 km in 24 hours, easily breaking the previous women's record. That is the absolute limit of human power as of the 29th of July 2018.

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A day at the races: Motor racing events have no effect on cycling in the Netherlands. It's the quality of infrastructure for everyday journeys that influences people towards cycling. Similarly, cycling events elsewhere don't increase cycling levels because they're not supported by infrastructure

I've never had much interest in motor sport. When I was a child I remember being taken to see motor racing twice and having found it noisy and unpleasant. I now live in Assen. The city's TT circuit is world famous, known as the "Cathedral of motor sport". This facility attracts many thousands of visitors to the area, but motor racing was not one of the things that attracted us to the area and until yesterday I'd never been to the track for a motor racing event...

Thousands of local people arrived by bicycle

The Dutch DIY chain Gamma holds an annual Racing Day at Assen's circuit. It's free to attend this event if you have tickets from the shop or their website. When I bought some DIY materials a few weeks ago the cashier pushed a couple of free tickets into my hand so we decided to go and check it out yesterday.

As with any event in or around Assen, thousands of local people arrived by bicycle. But with this event attracting over 100000 people in total from across the Netherlands (more than Assen's population), it shouldn't be any surprise that a lot of people arrived by car and motorbike.

But far more people arrived from all around the country by car and motorbike

Just as noisy as I remember the being as a child.

Assen recently built a new motorway junction by the TT circuit and this helped to keep cars away from the city and from cyclists but of course when lots of people try to drive to one place at the same time, that tends to cause problems. There were so many visitors that the police put out a warning that the car parking was full and suggested that visitors find alternatives. There was at least one injury on the way to the event and a huge traffic jam afterwards due to a crash on the motorway.

Curious about where those black circles came from ?
Wonder no more. Tyres are clearly too cheap.

None of this had any effect on our 6 km cycle journey to the circuit. Our route was shorter than the shortest possible driving route, mostly unravelled from that for drivers and we had far fewer traffic lights to wait for than would have been the case by car. For us this was far more convenient than driving and clearly lots of local people thought the same as these are the reasons why people cycle to events. After we'd had a years' usual dose of fumes and particulates, we had just so uneventful a cycle ride back home again.

Three children and their parents wearing "Kawasaki racing
 team" jerseys cycling home from yesterday's event on one
of Assen's many safe cycle-paths.

My verdict: Well worth the price of admission ;-) In fact, it was actually quite a lot of fun - especially watching smaller older cars being driven fast around the hairpin on three wheels (not all of them finished the race intact). After watching this event, I got back on my bike and cycled home - just like thousands of other people.

Cycling is popular, motor racing is popular too
When I've been to the TT circuit before, it's been because there have been occasional cycling events there. The 2009 Vuelta a Espana had its prologue on the TT circuit, and that one-off event (for which we also got free tickets that time through a bank) attracted a fair crowd of 40000 people. But that's not so much compared with the 100000 people who can be attracted to the same location for motor sport events.

Motor racing is incredibly popular. So is private car ownership.
But cycling is always safe and is more convenient for many
journeys so Dutch people cycle a lot. In Assen, more journeys
are made by bicycle than by car.

Dutch people like cars a lot. They also like bikes. Many people have access to both modes of transport. Both modes of transport have their uses. Many people take part in or watch both related sports. An interest in any one of these things does not have to exclude any of the others.

Dutch cycling is not in the blood but in the infrastructure
It is sometimes forgotten by camaigners elsewhere that the Dutch cover 3/4 of all their km traveled by private automobile. The Netherlands is a wealthy country with a fairly high rate of car ownership. There are enough cars and there is enough driving in the Netherlands that cars could be utterly dominant to the extent that they would make cycling unpleasant. Indeed, that situation had already arisen by the 1970s in the Netherlands, when people owned far fewer cars than they do today. Domination of cars led to an increase in cyclist injuries and a steep decline in cycling.

In the early 1960s, British people cycled more than the
Dutch now. Without support, cycling declined sharply.
With support it would have remained significant, just as
it did in the Netherlands.

Dutch people now cycle for a higher proportion of journeys than people of any other country not because cycling is "in the culture" but because cycling been transformed through a change in infrastructure so that almost any destination can be reached conveniently by bike without having to deal with motorized traffic. Dutch cycling infrastructure has made it possible for cycling to survive alongside a rise in motoring, removing danger and noise and enabling journeys to anywhere by bike, even motor racing circuits.

Go back a few decades and you'll find that British people cycled for a higher proportion of their journeys than Dutch people do now. As cars came to dominate roads, the UK suffered the same steep decline as the Netherlands did, but because no measures were taken to prevent that decline the decline continued. The same happened across most of the world. For instance, in New Zealand.

Nations once thought to have "cultural" cycling can suffer declines just as well as can those where cycling was forgotten about decades ago. Twenty years ago, Denmark stopped emphasizing cycling, bringing about a decline. The fastest decline in cycling ever seen is that happening now in China, where cycling was once far more significant than in the modern day Netherlands.

Cycling can survive only where it is supported. Unfortunately, recent plans in the Netherlands do not offer the same support to cycling as was offered 20 years ago and this is putting Dutch cycling in danger. If cycling is no longer the most convenient and safe option then people will drive more. This is demonstrated by all the places where that has already happened - a very long list of places which includes the Netherlands.

But while there are always reasons to warn about a possible decline, we're not at that low point yet. Cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands is of the best overall quality in the world, good new examples of infrastructure are very good indeed, and stand out cities (Assen is one of them) demonstrate good practice which all other countries would benefit from emulating.

Want to see change ? Change the infrastructure, don't run events
Just as how motor racing events in Assen don't make people in Assen drive everywhere, cycling events elsewhere won't make people cycle. What does change peoples' behaviour is infrastructure. Assen has a comprehensive, finely spaced grid of very high quality cycle-routes which allow anyone of any age to make their journeys safely by bike. If you build the same in your city you will see a change in behaviour.

A previous event in Assen: Every year there is a driving demonstration on city streets. People mainly attend this event by bicycle. No sign whatsoever in Assen of a sporting legacy leading to an en-masse switch to formula one racing cars...

This isn't a sponsored post. Our free tickets came in the same way as the other 100000 attendees free tickets - through buying DIY materials. Gamma's Racing Day is an entertaining event and I can see why it's popular.