The Third Track

My father used to point out that historical dramas on TV always got one thing wrong. When horses were shown pulling carriages along unfinished roads, there would be just two tracks. That's not how it used to be. In the past, there would be a third track in the middle created by horses' hooves and a track either side created by the wheels of the carriages. If there are just two tracks then that is an indication that only powered vehicles normally use that road.

Here in Assen in the present day we have three tracks on some residential streets which were not 100% cleared of ice this week. Those either side are made by the infrequent motor vehicles, while the most distinct track is that in the middle, made by the many cyclists who use this route.

This shows clearly how streets which people often imagine are "shared" between drivers and cyclists much as they might be "shared" in other countries are often not actually shared equally at all in the Netherlands. Rather, cyclists dominate because segregation of modes can also be achieved without building cycle-paths.

Ice cold in Assen

This cycle-path, 200 m from our home, provides a direct
route to the centre of the city. Just like the other cycle paths,
it's been swept and salted. This tight grid of high quality
primary routes is essential to make cycling accessible to all

It felt a little parky when I took our dog for a walk last night and on returning home I noted that  someone had asked me about how we get on cycling in the winter. How cold is it ? What condition are the cycle-paths in ? I decided I'd take some photos today and write a little about this (again).

Elsewhere in the city, a single direction cycle-path also
cleared of snow and ice

On return from the dog walk I noted that the outside temperature was a little below -11 C. For most of the week beforehand the temperature had been hovering around -5 C at mid-day and as I write this it's about -6 C. It'll get colder overnight.

A minor cycle-path, not necessary to use, and un-treated

We've not had masses of snow compared with previous years. About 17 cm of snow (7 inches) fell on Monday. It kept falling all day and though I swept our driveway twice, it didn't much look like I'd bothered by Tuesday.

Simultaneous green crossing in winter. I stopped for red.

During Monday things were a bit difficult because even the most effective of treatments for roads can't deal with snow which continues to fall. However, as soon as it stops the local government does a very good job of sweeping the paths and  treating with what appears to be a mixture of salt and sand.

Main route North out of the city. Someone with a passenger

Main cycle-paths are treated immediately, as are main roads. Residential streets are treated last. Where cars have been they compress the snow and this is more difficult to remove so conditions on some of these streets can remain unpleasant.

This is the same type of vehicle as is used for sweeping
cycle-paths. If the paths are of proper width then you
don't need narrow vehicles.

The photo on the left of a snow-plough going along our street shows how it can be. This was his second pass within 10 minutes. The gritters are switched on and off by computers using GPS. Therefore, they don't waste excessive salt where it's not needed but achieve an even spread around the city, wherever the driver happens to go. Without this, in the past, the area around the depot tended to be treated better than outlying areas.

We still have studded tyres in stock, as well as many other genuinely useful cycling products. There are more stories about gritting and snow removal, 

Oliebollentocht 2012

At the start

Last Saturday, the 29th of December, was the day of the Oliebollentocht. This is an annual social ride for velomobilists, around 60 km in length. This year it the circular route started from Zwolle and it attracted 157 velomobiles which was enough for a new world record. 157 is about 1/10th of the total number of velomobiles in the Netherlands, though quite a lot of participants were not from the Netherlands but from Germany, Belgium and France. One guy rode his velomobile all the way from Austria to take part.

I started making a video, but several other people made better videos than mine. I've picked out two of them.

Harry captures the fun in part by playing around with speeds and mixing up the order of the event:


The Questchen's video also shows the ride well and because he was in the same group as me (we rode in four groups of about 40, meeting up halfway and at the end), I appear in this video at about 7:20:

Going home, lighting up the cycle-path
Almost the entire distance between here
and Zwolle was covered on cycle-paths
of this quality.

Zwolle is 70 km South from Assen, I rode there on my own on the morning of the ride and rode back again afterwards with Peter. Quite a lot of the riding was in darkness at both ends of the day, and I again supplemented my inbuilt B+M light with a Philips headlight which lit up the road very well indeed. Roughly half of the total distance was covered on cycle-paths, and the other half on minor country roads which mostly don't function as through roads for drivers.

Wide, smooth cycle-path in Zwolle
with priority over the road. Zwolle,
like all Dutch cities, has a
comprehensive network of
good quality cycle paths.

By the end of the day I'd covered a total of 202 km at an average speed of 27.5 km/h, including all the slow-downs which occur when riding in a large group, wheeling the Mango through parking areas, slowing down and stopping to read the map on the way there and back etc. Such an average doesn't break any records, but it's a perfectly respectable touring speed and as I've pointed out before, providing another example how it's perfectly possible to keep up a good speed on Dutch cycle-paths.

Traffic stopped, crossing as a group

The entire day was a pleasure, and as ever, the infrastructure helped to make it so. Where else in the world could such a mass ride take place with a lot of people riding rather larger than average bicycles, often two abreast, at a good speed, with no problems due to motor vehicles ?

Finally, thank-you to all those involved with organising the Oliebollentocht, especially Paulus den Boer who hosted the event and the many volunteer verkeersregelaars who gave up a day to direct traffic and by doing so made things go very smoothly indeed.

How efficient is it ?
I calculated a while back that a strong person doing a manual job probably generates about 1 kWh of energy in an eight hour working day. I cycled for less than eight hours, so this journey was probably made on less than 1 kWh of energy. It's remarkable how efficient cycling is, and a velomobile is even more efficient than a normal bicycle.

Snow. What tyres to make it safe ?

Judy a hundred metres from our home. The cycle-path is clear of ice and snow

We had four cm of snow last night, the first real snow of the winter. It looks wonderful, but snow can be dangerous for cyclists especially if it is not removed from the cycle-paths and if it becomes compacted.

Marathon Winter Studded Tyre

Assen is quite good at clearing snow, but there can still be small patches of ice hidden underneath, especially later in winter. That's why the first thing I did this morning, before breakfast, was change the front tyre of Judy's bike for a Marathon Winter studded tyre.

Fitting a studded tyre on the front wheel is the best insurance possible against a fall. Why only the front ? If the front wheel loses traction then a fall is almost inevitable and it is difficult to do anything to control such a fall. Falls due to the rear wheel slipping are much less common and much less scary.

Parent with children cycling this morning. This cycle-path is
clear, but you can't see that from my POV.

You can see from the photo at the top that many other people had already cycled this way. People tend not to make so many trips for pleasure, but cycling for utility purposes doesn't reduce much in the winter in the Netherlands.

I'll cycle with parcels containing customers' orders from our bike parts shop to the post office a bit later today and mine will not be the only bike there.

We still have studded tyres in stock. Order them now and they'll be with you in a few days.

Photos taken during the trip to the Post Office
The temperature didn't reach above zero all day today, so the snow mostly stayed where it was, unless it was swept. Some photos below show conditions for cycling in Assen

Safe conditions are also helpful for people with disabilities (written about several times before on the blog)

Plenty of bikes parked outside the popular Hema department store in a pedestrian zone, and all ages of people arriving and leaving by bike.

Plenty of bikes at an indoor shopping centre.

Not many people use bakfietsen in Assen because conditions are safe for children to ride their own bikes. However, some people do transport smaller children by bakfiets.

A small "traffic jam" on the cycle-path. Utility cycling holds up in the winter because due to the lack of ice on the cycle-paths it is nearly as easy and as subjectively safe to cycle today as it is in the summer.

Tread on a bicycle tyre normally serves no purpose other than for marketing. Asphalt or concrete surfaces are harder than rubber, and grip comes from the small imperfections in those surfaces forcing themselves into the rubber. However, when there is snow the tread forces itself into the snow and that is where grip comes from. That is why any treaded tyre is better for snow. However, when it is icy tread doesn't work because ice is too hard to be deformed by rubber. At this point, the studs on the Marathon Winter tyres come into their own. They provide very small points of contact and pierce the ice. By doing so, you have far more grip than is possible with a rubber tyre. You can see both the tread marks in the snow and the black spots where the studs in my tyre pierced the ice underneath the snow, in the photo on the right.

For two wheeled bicycles, the most critical tyre is the front tyre. However, with a velomobile or other three wheel recumbent with two wheels at the front the situation is reversed. With that type of bike it is absolutely critical that the rear wheel does not lose traction as that can result in the bike rotating to travel sideways and turning over. That's why I fit just one Marathon Winter tyre to the rear wheel of my Mango making it possible to continue going for recreational rides in the winter in safety.

Avoiding potholes

Slight puddle before.
could get worse over winter

I've mentioned before that Dutch roads and cycle-paths don't often suffer from potholes. There's currently a patch of slightly rough surface between our home and the local shops, but that's as bad as it gets. I can't think of any actual potholes on any roads or cycle-paths that we use.

The reason, of course, is that standards of maintenance are very good.

A one metre wide part dug out to the depth of 4 cm over the
crack, two metres square over the depression. After digging,
this was sealed before filling.

A good example of this happened this week on a residential street near where we live. It's not a through route by car, but it is by bike and I ride there quite frequently as it's on the route to the post office. This street had a crack all the way across its surface which recently became noticeable by bike. There was also a growing depression which started to form a puddle. None of this was unpleasant to cycle over, and it was certainly not something you'd swerve to miss. In any case, there are almost never cars on this street, so the situation was never dangerous. However, if this had been left as we go into winter then ice would have formed in it and made the problem worse. Therefore it was fixed as you can see in this video:

Afterwards

Potholes are hazardous for all road users, but they are particularly dangerous for cyclists because of their potential to cause a crash should you ride through them and the need to swerve to avoid them.

It is better if problems with potholes are avoided by fixing the potholes than by expecting people to cycle around them, especially on busy roads.

A footnote to the blog: Is there any end to people thinking that I want to do their work for them for nothing ? Now Transport for London expects me to work for free.

Consistent, Convenient, High Quality Cycle-Paths Encourage Cycling

To achieve a high degree of subjective safety and through this convince the whole population to cycle, cyclists need to be kept away from motor vehicles. A comprehensive network of cycle-paths, as seen here in Assen, is a particularly good way to do this.

The first underpass runs top right to left
on this image, completely avoiding this
Roundabout on the ring road - previously
shown when I wrote about all
roundabouts in Assen)

In the video we cross the ring-road around Assen (there are many other crossings including here, here and here), go throught a residential area and leave the city by crossing the path of a motorway until we reach the edge of the first village (which featured in an earlier blog post). The cycle-path is continuous. In fact, this is only a very small part of it, and it's continuous for a long distance both before and after that shown.

This infrastructure is not named a "superhighway". In fact, it's not named in any special way at all as no-one thought it significant enough to put their name to it. It's "just" a standard Dutch cycle-path, one of many which make up the comprehensive grid which criss-cross the city and make mass cycling possible for everyone.

 It is normal to cycle to school even at a
temperature of -8 C with snow on
the ground.

En-route, you'll see many children on bikes. Also we pass a school entrance. You can't see the extent of the parking at this school from this video. Click on the link on the right to see more.

Speed limits on the roads nearby vary. At first we parallel a 50 km/h road. The ring-road which we cross has a speed limit of 70 km/h. All roads in the residential area have a speed limit of 30 km/h, and even though traffic is light because there are no through roads in this area there is still a cycle-path which provides continuity and directness for cyclists. The motorway has a speed limit of 120 km/h and then we ride parallel with a main road in the country which has a 60 km/h speed limit before the speed limit reduces to 30 km/h in the village. There is a separate cycle-path through the village too.

The route in the video is from A to B taking the blue line which is direct and provides consistent high quality inside and outside the city. Cars must take the red route, 3.5 km long and including a crossing which prioritizes cyclists.
Read more blog posts about how cyclists in the Netherlands make more direct journeys than drivers by avoiding traffic lights, or more about cycle-paths, or about how segregation is possible without cycle-paths, about school travel or many other things (see links to articles on particular themes on the right of every page, tags for posts at the bottom of every page).

This video resulted from running a camera as I rode around the route of the last study tour a few days before it started. However, I thought it showed enough interesting stuff to be worth showing here.

They came, they saw... September 2012 study tour

We've been running study tours since 2006. We started doing this it became obvious to us that there was a rather large gulf between what was thought in the UK, where we then lived, to be best practice in infrastructure for cyclists and what was everyday normality in the Netherlands and used by millions of people every day of the year. This blog started as a supplement to the tours. It was a way of keeping people who had been on the study tours up to date with new developments, and to try to stop people who had been on the tours from returning to their normality and forgetting how significant what they had seen was.

In September, six people from Britain came on the September study tour. Each time we've done a tour it has been different and this was no exception. Our knowledge grows so we have more to tell, but that's not the only reason. The Netherlands is not standing still and the infrastructure improves between each tour. Approximately half of everything seen in the first tour has been replaced, resurfaced or redesigned since the first tour that we ran here. There is no option to stand still when things change so rapidly.

Older residential streets - demonstrating how they do not operate as rat-runs because of a one-way system for cars which prevents through traffic. Also the low speed limit (30 km/h) and noisy road surface help to keep residential streets as places for people. Cyclists can of course use all these streets in any direction so they also provide an example of unravelling of cycling routes from motor routes.

Heading out of the centre on a wide & smooth cycle-path. Near 100% Separation of cyclists from cars is vital to achieve the high degree of subjective safety necessary to get the whole population cycling, and without the whole population it is impossible to achieve a high cycling modal share.

The most extreme woonerf in Assen. This is a residential development from the late 1970s / early 1980s. These homes are still popular, but modern developments look different. Woonerven are not designed to operate as through routes for cyclists or drivers.

Cycle-path between Assen and an outlying village. Resurfacing work due to tree root damage.

In a modern development a wide network of cycle-paths give cyclists an advantage of more direct routes than can be taken by car.

The school run is always interesting. Wide cycle-paths like this are the necessary infrastructure which makes it possible for young children to cycle unaccompanied. No amount of training can achieve this without the infrastructure.

Routes used by school children always have litter bins which collect most of the rubbish.

The width of cycle-paths in this area makes it possible for a group to stop and look at the bins without causing much of a problem.

The new cultural centre (library, theatre, cinema, concert halls) in Assen has indoor guarded cycle parking. You can walk from the cycle-park directly into the theatre without having to go back outside. It's free of charge and it's open from early in the morning until after the last performance finishes. If you have a problem with your bike then depending on the time of day, the staff can often arrange to fix it before you leave.

A cycle by-pass. Four kilometres long and four metres wide, this cycle-path allows high speed cyclists to avoid going through the centre of the city, and also connects some of the outlying suburbs.

There is no shortcut to a high modal share. It won't come about due just to "soft measures" such as training and it won't come about by campaigners and planners aiming low. The Netherlands achieved the highest cycling modal share in the world, and continues to build on this success, by building the best cycling infrastructure in the world. This gives people the highest possible degree of subjective safety as well as very convenient journeys by bike and that is what makes cycling an easy choice for the whole population.

Cycling modal shares correlate well with the degree of investment in cycling and the Dutch spend more on this than any other nation. €30 per person per year. However, it has been shown that even with what some people might consider to be "gold plating" of the infrastructure, cycling infrastructure is cheaper to build than not to build. Any nation could do this and any nation could reap the same rewards.