A good through road transformed into an excellent through road. Costings of improvements for cyclists

Before

In 2007, when we moved to Assen, this road, Groningerstraat was being redeveloped. It is a popular route for cyclists as it provides the most direct route possible to the city centre from the North of the city.

The road was dug up to a considerable depth, all the way from the front gardens on one side of the street to the front gardens on the opposite side of the street. Then everything in between was replaced. A complete new road was built for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers.

While the road was dug up, the electricity, gas, telephone, sewage and other services were updated at the same time. This is the normal way of organising things in the Netherlands because it prevents wrecking the new surface in order to do maintenance.

After

The new road was then constructed, including very much upgraded cycle facilities as you can see from these before and after photographs. The new cycle path is 2.5 m wide on each side of the road (each side is unidirectional), has a completely smooth surface (an upgrade from the old tiled surface) and provides much better segregation from motor vehicles. The cycle path has priority over every side road.

We were surprised not only at the quality of this work, but also at the price. A budget document from the city shows that the cost of this work for a 0.4 km section (both sides of the road so 0.8 km of cycle path) was just €200K (see the item on the second page: "fietspaden langs Groningerstraat, tussen Thorbeckelaan en Kanaal, verbreding fietspaden naar ca 2,5 m, rood asfalteren, voorrang bij de kruispunten, € 200.000"). That compares very well with costings I've seen for cycle paths of a much lower quality in the UK.

And not only is the amount taken from the cycling budget for this piece of work low by UK standards, but the total budget for cycling in the city is extraordinarily large by UK standards.

The budget for the two years covered by that document is arranged under different headings. Each heading has its own budget. These come to a total of over € 5.7 M to be spent on cycling in Assen over the two years covered by the budget. That works out as a cycling budget of 43 euros per resident per year over these two years.

The combination of low cost and high budget is what makes it possible to get things done so quickly.

The junctions were also renewed, including a simultaneous green junction shown in another blog post, which cost just €32000 (the first item in the budget document)

Before

Some more photos. One extra "before" and three "after" photos.

Note that there are children in several of the shots. It's quite normal here for children to travel right to the centre of the city on their own bikes. This is perhaps the ultimate expression of parents feeling confident in the safety of the cycling environment.

After

This level of subjective safety is vital to achieve a high cycling rate including all demographic groups.

Note also in this photo how on-road car parking was preserved for residents. It's important that residents concerns about car parking were also addressed when the new work was done. Not taking care of this can result in conflict between cyclists and residents, or cars being parked on the cycle path.

Also you'll see how it's possible for friends to ride beside one another, and how everything is possible while motor vehicles are kept at a distance.

The cycling rate in Assen is now 41% of all journeys. While it's not the highest rate in the Netherlands (Groningen has a higher cycling rate), that's still a higher rate than any city in other European countries. More journeys are made by bike here than are made by car. Infrastructure like this is has made this possible.

I've featured this road twice on this blog as a comparison with Gilbert Road in Cambridge, a road near where we used to live in the UK, which is much the same width and had much the same budget for cycle infrastructure, but which received far inferior reconstruction for about the same price.

It was also featured to show how secondary school children cycle along this street as part of their route to get to school from villages outside the city.

Also see a newer blog post which illustrates why "dooring" is not a problem on this road.

The explanatory captions on this video are only visible when you play it on a computer and not on a mobile device.

The photos were taken on Saturday afternoon when there were quite a lot of people about. I made this video on Sunday morning when the shops were shut and very few people were doing anything. However, the video shows the infrastructure of the entire length of the new part of Groningerstraat. This quality of cycle path makes for efficient as well as safe cycling.

Several other blog posts cover other aspects of this street's highly successful design cycling. Please click here.

The "before" photos come from an official document of the local government of Assen, and the bike that I rode to make the video is a Sinner Mango velomobile.

Nijmegen's big bridge for cyclists

Sometimes a really big link is required to make cycling convenient. This huge cycle bridge in Nijmegen is one of them, complete with escalators to help cyclists take a short cut.

Note the width of the bridge. It is wide enough to prevent conflict between cyclists travelling in opposite directions.

The bridge is known as the "snelbinder". This is a play on words. The elastic bungie straps that many Dutch people have to attach luggage to their bicycles racks are also called snelbinders, and the word suggests that it is something that provides a quick link. The main span is 235 metres long and the bridge reaches 26 metres in height.

There is a wikimedia photo on the left showing the escalator for bicycles. Click for a larger version. There are also some more photos of the bridge here.

Nijmegen is considered to be the oldest city in the Netherlands. The city has an urban population of 280000 people.

I previously featured a video showing town centre cycle parking in Nijmegen. Nijmegen is also the location of the largest bicycle museum in the Netherlands.

There are also escalators for bikes which run beside steps for people. However, the closest I've been able to find to a video showing these in use is this.

This blog post features one of Mark Wagenbuur's excellent videos

Why this isn't so important as you might think Exceptional infrastructure like this is always interesting to see, but what causes people to cycle in large numbers is the very tight network of everyday, but high quality, cycle routes.

Den Bosch at high speed

I featured a few videos by Mark Wagenbuur of 's Hertogenbosch a few weeks back. Here's another one, showing another location in the city at rush hour.

In this case, there is no real segregation of modes. However, cyclists so much outnumber drivers that the behaviour of drivers is kept in check.

I've written before about how I dislike "Shared Space" in areas with much motor traffic. My objection still stands (and I still avoid riding through the shared space centre of Haren), but it's very different where the "balance of power" is different. If bikes outnumber cars then it can work with a fair degree of comfort and safety for cyclists.

Beauty and the bike

For some time now I've been aware of the Darlington Media Group's production Beauty and the Bike, which is to have its premier on the 9th of December in Darlington in the UK.

In this project, investigating why it is that British teenage girls don't cycle in the same way as their German counterparts do, a group of British girls from Darlington were taken to Bremen in Germany.

The British girls ride bikes infrequently. The German girls ride a lot. Even from this short from the film you can see why this is. The infrastructure in Germany supports and encourages cycling as a means of transport, while the infrastructure in the UK does not.

From the Darlington Cycling Campaign Blog:

"Why do British girls stop cycling? By simply asking this basic question, the film reveals the damage that has been done by 50 years of car-centric transport policies. Whilst we fill our lives with debates about risk assessment, cycle helmets, cycle training and marketing strategies to try to persuade people to cycle more, the basic barriers to cycling remain untouched - generous urban planning towards the car, and the resultant poor motorist behaviour towards cyclists. Is it any wonder that most people find cycling unattractive in the UK, but attractive in cycling-friendly towns and cities? It's the infrastructure, stupid!"

In other words: it's all about subjective safety

Darlington is one of the "Cycling Demonstration Towns" in Britain. They have recently produced a report on the effectiveness of what has been achieved so far.

After the cycling demonstration town initiative, 2.9% of Darlington pupils have cycling as their usual mode of travel to school. Just under 23% of the adult population of the town have used a bicycle in a typical week in the previous year.

Temporary cycle parking

Back in the summer we visited the Delfsail event, at Delfzijl in the North of the Netherlands. It's a wonderful event, with sailing ships from all around the world. It wasn't a cycling event, and we travelled by train, so I didn't bother mentioning it on here.

However, there was one thing which was particularly worthy of mention on this blog.

Temporary guarded cycle parking !

The photo at the top shows the yellow van from where people were administering the parking while the other photo shows a wider view so you can get an idea of how many bikes were being fitted into the car park they'd taken over.

Note also the number of bikes outside the park. As ever, there were thousands of bikes everywhere, and most were not parked inside the organised area.

Paying to use cars, not to own them

The Netherlands is soon to be the first place in Europe to tax people's use of cars rather than ownership. The expectation is that six to ten percent fewer car journeys will mean that traffic deaths will fall by about the same percentage, saving twenty to forty lives a year in the country which already has the world's safest roads.

The scheme, called the "kilometerheffing" (simply "kilometer charge"), boils down to a GPS system in cars which will record how much they are driven, where and when. The intention is that driving on busy roads in the rush hour will cost more than driving on less busy roads at other times. It is intended to be a revenue neutral change to the tax on motorists, so that 60% of drivers will see their costs drop. Of course, if people drive less, the overall amount of tax paid to the government by drivers will drop. The proposal is nevertheless a bit controversial with some drivers, especially those who drive long distances at present.

There are also advantages in reduction of traffic jams and CO2 emissions.

Car ownership in the Netherlands is already lower than it might have been due to policies which make alternatives more attractive. It's difficult to know whether this will result in more or fewer people owning cars, but it should certainly help to increase the cycling rate in what is already the world's top cycling nation.

The Fietsberaad expect cycle usage to grow by 10% due to the kilometerheffing.

Update
It didn't pass. The Netherlands is still waiting or the kilometerheffing. However, so far as cycling is concerned, carrots are more important than sticks.

It's also covered here and here

Stopping ban by schools

No-stopping in school hours outside schools
in Groningen

Groningen has recently implemented a stopping ban by many of its primary schools. This is to spread to cover all schools in the city within a two and half years and will be rolled out as the safety of home-school routes is enhanced.

This means it is now illegal to stop with a car adjacent to the schools between 8 am and 4 pm on week days. i.e. No children may be taken to school by car.

By British or American standards, the rate of children being taken to school by car is already extremely low. Just try to spot any children being taken to school by car in this video shot at a local primary school.

Of course, a good idea like this won't just stay in one place. It's also spreading to other towns within the Netherlands. Perhaps it can also spread outside this country ?

It is vitally important for cycle campaigners to campaign for children. Today's children are tomorrow's cyclists - or perhaps not if the infrastructure isn't good enough and streets are so subjectively unsafe that parents won't let their children cycle.

And further afield ?

In Cambridge, schools look like this
due to parents dropping off and
picking up their children.

Like most countries outside the Netherlands, Britain could do with trying this. Here's the scene that we saw every day outside Mayfield primary school which my children attended in Cambridge. Virtually all the cars in the picture have brought a child to school. Even the car in the middle of this road junction is parked, as is the one in front of it which is obstructing the dropped kerb.

Another view of the Cambridge
school on another day. Children
do not drive. Their schools should
not be dominated by cars.

When "everyone else is doing it", there is no legal enforcement against illegal parking, and there are generally no really safe ways of getting to the schools by bike, is it such a surprise that parents see driving their children as the only safe option ?

But before a ban can be successful there needs to be a proper alternative provided. There needs to be proper safe cycling routes to schools so that it is possible for children to cycle alone or with their parents.

Update 24/2/2010 Mayfield primary school in Cambridge, the school next to which the photo just above was taken, has now decided to campaign against a ban on parking in a cycle lane on a road a few hundred metres from the school on the grounds of "concerns about where parents will leave their cars when they drop off and collect their children". They are prioritizing parents' cars over the safety of children who might cycle, even on roads at a considerable distance from the school.

Update 2011 Despite the school, and others, protesting against them, the very timid proposal of slightly widening cycle lanes on one road in Cambridge did go through - but what they did was to a much lower standard than it should and could have been. Note that this doesn't change the situation on the road which the school itself is one, as that's in a different road. Similar scenes to those in my photos continue at that school and many others in the UK, and other countries.

Update 2013

Parents waiting outside a Groningen primary school for younger children as older children ride by. On a study tour in June we saw a parent stop her car at this school illegally. Other parents were shocked and deliberately blocked her way. After driving her car home, the driver caught up with us by bike to explain, apologise and ask me not to report her to the police. As it happens, this driver really did have a good reason to do the wrong thing on this occasion. It was never my intention to cause her a problem, but this demonstrates how great the social pressure on parents not to drive to school is in Groningen.

There are more posts about school travel, including videos and photos of schools and children on bikes. Also see posts about the problems facing British children vs, the joy of being a Dutch child.