The extraordinary efficiency of bicycles, the potential of active modes, and the role of active travel in transport poverty

Last month my eldest daughter ran the Amsterdam marathon. She achieved her aim of running the 26.2 miles (42.2 km) in under her target of four and a half hours. A marathon is something you need to train for. The race was won by the spectacular Eliud Kipchoge, an extraordinary athlete and the world record holder, who has won nearly every race he's ever entered and who finished with a time of just over 2 hour and 5 minutes, but I'm still also very impressed with Eliza's achievement. It takes a lot of effort to run that far without stopping. I certainly couldn't do it.

One of several stops on our route through the countryside. We
weren't in a hurry today.

Twice as fast using a quarter of the energy
Like many people these days Eliza uses an electronic device linked to her mobile phone which monitors heart rate and speed and can calculate her energy usage. To run the marathon required about 2800 kcal.

Two weeks later I went for a bike ride with my daughter. It just so happened that this was also over 42.2 km and as she carries the same device for all exercise we could make a comparison. On the bike ride the energy consumption was just 700 kcal (about the same as one home made pizza). What's more, though we weren't in anything remotely like a hurry (we stopped for refreshments, for coffee, to buy bread from a baker and vegetables from a farm), our time was still several seconds better than Kipchoge's best ever marathon time and remember that Kipchoge's faster time over the marathon distance required him to expend somewhat more energy than Eliza had to.

A sack of onions joined us for the second half of the ride.
Running or even walking 20 km doesn't really work with a load

The difference in efficiency between running and cycling is extraordinary: On a bicycle an average person can easily travel faster than a world champion can run. We can use a quarter of the energy to travel at twice the speed. Because it takes so much less effort to cycle than it does to run we need no special nutrition or training before setting off to travel the same distance as a marathon. There's no expectation of damage to your body from a bicycle ride of marathon length. What's more, we can do all this while carrying far more than it is practical to transport if running or walking.

The potential of walking as a mode of transport

My cargo bike loaded up with parcels full of bicycle parts.
I ride this to the city centre often. If it were not possible to do
this by bicycle then I'd have to use a motor vehicle.

Both walking and cycling, the two really practical active travel modes, should be encouraged. But there is far more potential to cycling than there is to walking. Walking is of course a lot less tiring than running, but this comes at the expense of even lower speed. Speed is not everything, but the distance we can travel by any given mode is dictated more by available time than it is by the distance itself. That's why many everyday distances are are longer than is practical to walk. A relatively fast walking pace is only around 5 km/h (3 mph). This works only for the shortest journeys because the time taken out of the day is just too long if we try to walk for longer journeys. What's more, it's not possible to carry much when walking. All these things limit the potential of walking as a mode of transport. Children who live really near their school can practically walk to it, but even most of those who live within the same suburb as their school will need to use a faster mode of transport. Similarly, people who live in a city centre may be able to reach nearby shops by walking, or those who live in a suburb can reach some local facilities by walking, but it doesn't work over a larger radius.

A successful pedestrianized city centre, accessible to all.
Conflict is avoided by obvious demarcation of where cyclists
should ride by use of different colours and kerbs (forgiving).

The two hours that it took to make the leisurely 40 km recreational ride around the countryside described above are about the same amount of time as it would take us to make a reasonably brisk walk to the city centre and return again. We have done this occasionally, on a Sunday just for the novelty of it, but it's not something that we do on a regular basis. On the other hand, we cycle there almost daily for one reason or another. Cycling to the centre takes less than 10 minutes, which makes cycling a highly competitive mode with driving a car the same distance. Also, by using a bicycle we can transport almost anything and do so with far more ease than by carrying it while walking. So that's how we make those journeys.

Pedestrianization projects in city centres are not generally intended to be used by people who have walked to the city centre because almost no-one does that. They are instead used by people who have travelled by motorized vehicle to reach the city centre. Pedestrianization projects which exclude cyclists actually work against active travel.

Walking and cycling policy need to be different because walking and cycling are different.
If someone runs through a crowded area for pedestrians it's likely be seen as an anti-social act. Yet many places combine cycling and walking policy and even the infrastructure for both modes as if this is reasonable. It's not.

A few weeks ago Judy and I brought home a new floor for
our home by bicycle. Two 10 km round trips were required.
This would not have been possible by walking.

Cycling and walking are not the same. A bicycle allows anyone to travel at twice the speed of a world champion runner, to cover marathon distances without any great difficulty and a bicycle also allows people to transport loads which are well beyond what they can lift, let alone practically carry over a distance of kilometres.

Unfortunately this potential is often not understood. Through a non-cyclist's eye, cycling is often perceived as being much like walking. This is one of the reasons why it is common to hear that it's "not possible" to carry home grocery shopping by bike, that it's "too far" or "too sweaty" to cycle to work or "impossible" to cycle in winter. None of these things are true, of course. They're just the ideas that people have because they've not actually tried and experienced for themselves how easy and convenient it is to do those things by bike.

The objection to shopping by bike can be due to a misunderstanding of how convenient it is to carry items on a well equipped bicycle designed for everyday use. The concerns about commuting are often based on overestimation of average commuting distances combined with perceptions that cycling is no quicker than walking or that it will take as much effort as running and therefore result in sweating a lot. The objection to winter is often due again to a lack of familiarity, or perhaps also to having seen people on less well equipped bicycles struggling.

In this photo my other daughter, Alice, and her dog demonstrate
parallel cycling and walking infrastructure in Groningen.
Pedestrians and cyclists shouldn't be mixed on through routes.

In places where which lack well designed cycling infrastructure, any trip by bike will likely be seen as akin to an extreme sport. Indeed, it may well be both difficult and dangerous if the infrastructure is lacking and that is a good part of what prevents people from even trying to cycle in many parts of the world.

Cycling can be made very inconvenient indeed if cyclists are required to behave as pedestrians or weave through motorized traffic. Indeed where bicycle riders are given a choice of either not taking advantage of the efficiency of the bike or riding in conditions which cause danger, the whole point of the bicycle as a practical and safe means of transport is lost. Not cycling where conditions are poor is in many cases actually quite a rational decision.

The importance of cycling policy

It's of vital importance that we reduce climate changing emissions.
Cycling is the best way to reduce the emissions of transport.

But cycling policy is important, especially now, because bicycles are the most efficient vehicles in existence. Unlike other low or "zero emission" vehicles, bicycles in most cases genuinely have zero emissions. After all, we all need half an hour of exercise a day to be healthy and drivers eat too so in most cases the carbon cost of the "fuel" for cycling is zero. But even if we forget about our actually needing to eat and count the full carbon cost of food, we can eat in such a way that our "emissions" are still less than a tenth of even the most efficient motorized transport modes. Also remember that the embedded energy in even a sophisticated bicycle is unlikely to be greater than 1% of the embedded energy of a car. This wonderful machine avoids the many problems caused by motorized transport while giving us competitive travel times. Cycling is almost always quicker than taking a bus, often quicker than a car within towns. And let's not forget that while other transport modes cause health problems, there are many health benefits to cycling.

Cycling is so obviously a good idea, but it's still being overlooked in most places on the planet. This is something that we really have to change. We are living in a climate emergency. The most efficient transport mode on earth should be getting the highest degree of public support from world governments.

How to make every bicycle efficient
Let's continue with a short piece of advice about making any bicycle efficient. While some bicycles have more potential efficiency than others, all of them, no matter how old, no matter how inexpensive, are amongst the most efficient vehicles on earth. It doesn't cost anything to set up a bicycle for maximum efficiency. That's just a matter of quite simple maintenance:

1. With any bicycle, start by setting the saddle height so that you can extend your legs properly. We pedal with the ball of our feet but can approximate the correct distance from saddle to pedal by straightening our legs so that the heel just rests on the pedal). If the saddle is too low it costs a lot of extra effort.
2. Pump up your tyres to something approaching the maximum recommended pressure written on their sidewall. Note that in most cases bicycle tyres need to be pumped to far higher pressures than car tyres so a car pump isn't ideal. Under-inflated tyres consume a lot more energy from the rider than correctly inflated tyres.
3. Make sure the chain isn't worn or dry. Each link should be exactly half an inch long. 1% wear is enough that you should replace the chain to avoid wearing other components unduly (measure over many links or use a specifically designed measuring device). The chain also needs to be oiled (WD40 falls off, grease is horrible on a chain and thick oils are not ideal, but any thin oil including proprietary bicycle chain oils will work) so that the internal links are wet (the outside need not be). A dirty/rusty chain often makes an unpleasant noise as well as consuming more energy.

Also see my guide to the features of everyday bicycles.

Taking care of those things is enough to optimise the efficiency of any bicycle and any bicycle combined with its rider is more efficient than any other machine that exists.

While many bicycles, especially outside the Netherlands, are sold with no means of transporting cargo, almost all bikes can be fitted with an inexpensive luggage rack which makes transporting goods more easy.

Please note that this is not a complete guide to safe cycling - also ensure such things as that your brakes and gearing work correctly and that you have fitted any equipment that is required to cycle legally in your country (e.g. bells, lights).

I'm a hopeless runner. The furthest I ever ran was just short of a quarter marathon more than 30 years ago and that was more than enough. I can still cycle 200 km in a day without a problem but running any distance at all results in knee pain.

We make our living by selling bicycle components so if you order something we will of course supply it. But to make your bicycle more efficient you need only to follow the steps above. Do that before buying anything else, including from us.

Think your travel distances and times too great for the bike ? Dutch commutes are the longest in Europe.

People continue to claim that the Dutch cycle more frequently than people of other nations because Dutch journeys are shorter than those of whichever country the claimant happens to live in.

However, this idea that somehow the shortness of journeys in the Netherlands is the reason why the Dutch cycle more than people of other nations is simply not true.

A recent report reveals that "On average Dutch people spend one and a half hours en route each day. That is 15 minutes longer than the average time on the road for citizens of 16 EU countries, and it is also the longest." Yes, you read that right. The Dutch travel for more time every day than people of other European nations. What's more, "Holland has, at 92%, the highest percentage of the total population traveling daily and France has, at 72%, the lowest percentage."

The report also mentions that "In most East European countries, traveling by public transport takes up 20% of all travel time." This reinforces something that I blogged about a few weeks back. The choices that people make about transport are in large part determined by the wealth of the nation they live in. Local public transport (i.e. the bus) is not an option that people will easily be convinced to take if a private form of transport is available. However, that private form of transport can be a bicycle rather than a car: "Of the 91 minutes that the Dutch travel on average per day, 17 of those minutes are spent on the bicycle (19%). The neighbours i.e. the Belgians and Germans, cycle on average only 5 minutes per day, and other Europeans cycle even less. In the Netherlands, Slovenia and Italy, only 7 to 8 percent of the total travel time is spent on public transport."

Dutch people know that they travel a lot, but, as is common everywhere, they over-estimate the difference between their travel times and those of other nationalities: "Dutch people think they commute longer than residents of other countries, but in reality things are better than they suppose. Commuters in Holland spend on average 2 minutes longer per day commuting than commuters do in other countries."

Journey distances - Over what distances will people cycle ?
Having established that a lack of time spent travelling isn't what makes the Dutch cycle for such a large proportion of their journeys, let's look at something else.

In all countries there are both longer and shorter journeys. In a larger country there is a potential to make longer journeys. However, the regular journeys that people make are constrained by time and in all countries most journeys are relatively short. I pointed out that 40% of journeys in the USA are under 2 miles (3.2 km) in length. Here are some figures showing what percentage of short journeys in several different countries are made by bike:


The left cluster shows how in the Netherlands, 37% of journeys under 2.5 km are made by bike. In Denmark, 27% of them are made by bike. In Germany 14% and in both the UK and the USA, 2% of journeys up to 2.5 km are made by bike.

The second cluster shows the figures for distances of 2.5 km to 4.4 km. In this case, the numbers are 37%, 24%, 1% and 1%. The third cluster of bars is for 4.5 km to 6.4 km. At this distance, 24%, 15%, 7%, 1% and 0.4% of journeys are made by bike.

Journeys of between 4.5 and 6.4 km are cycled 60 times as frequently by the Dutch as by Americans.

The Dutch cycle considerably more than people in other countries which spend less on cycling infrastructure.

What keeps people from cycling is not distance. Rather, people won't cycle even for short journeys if the cycling experience is not pleasant. How likely the general population is to cycle correlates very well with the level of expenditure on cycling infrastructure.

The Netherlands, Denmark and Germany all spend more than average on cycling, and the result is that their populations are more likely to cycle for short journeys than people of other countries which spend less.

In The Netherlands, everyone feels comfortable to cycle, including children, older people and those with disabilities. People make a huge number of cycle journeys each day.

In the UK and USA, only a tiny proportion of the population choose the bike even for the very shortest of journeys, and by the time you get to the 4.5 km - 6.4 km journey length, the already very small participation has already shrunk to a half or a quarter of what it was for the under 2.5 km journey length.

Other excuses are summarized here.

September 2012 update
It's been pointed out to me that some people are misinterpreting the words "Of the 91 minutes that the Dutch travel on average per day, 17 of those minutes are spent on the bicycle". This does not mean that every Dutch person has a multi-modal commute. It simply tells you how much commuting is by bike vs. other modes. In the Netherlands, just like most other countries, people do what is most convenient for them. For that reason, they mostly do not have multi-modal commutes. Most commuters use one mode for their commute, either walking, cycling or driving the whole way from home to work. Other commuters combine short journeys by foot, by bike or in a car with public transport, but these commutes are counted only as public transport commutes. Dutch railway stations do provide a lot of cycle parking in order to support combining bikes with trains, but the total capacity of the railway system is not particularly high in the Netherlands. If you live in a place where trains have standing room only during commuting times then you probably have about as much multi-modal commuting as is normal in the Netherlands.

2013 update. Do the Dutch make long journeys by bike ?
One of the other common myths about The Netherlands is that all Dutch bicycle journeys are short. This is far from the truth. As in most countries, people are more likely to choose a bicycle for a short journey than for a long journey. Figures show that a remarkable 34% of all journeys made in the entire country over a distance of under 7.5 km (5 miles) are made by bicycle. However, the figures also tell that 15% of journeys over a distance between 7.5 km and 15 km (9 miles) are by bicycle and that 2% of all journeys over 15 km are by bicycle. Now 2% isn't much, but even selecting just these longer journeys, cycling has a higher share than many countries do of all their journeys by bike. The Dutch cycle longer distances far more frequently than do people of other nations.


A later blog post demonstrates how Londoners use cars for journeys of the same lengths and for the same purposes as Dutch people use bikes.

The graph came from "Making Cycling Irresistible: Lessons from The Netherlands, Denmark and Germany", by John Pucher and Ralph Buehler.

Cycling's Recommended Minimum Daily Allowance. Do you ride your bike enough to maintain good health ?

Do you ride your bike enough to maintain good health ? I suspect that many people actually do not. A surprising amount of cycling is required if that's the main thing you do for exercise

Many sources suggest that half an hour a day of exercise is around the minimum to maintain good health.

My racing bike. A left-over from the 1980s, steel frame and
non-indexed gearing. Not the most comfy choice for me for
long rides, ideal for a quick spin around town & countryside

Because I work from home, I don't have a commute forced upon me, as was the case in the past. That means I don't automatically get a daily dose of cycling by going to work and back. Our deliveries are all made at least partially by bike, but while that means I'm riding a relatively heavily loaded cargo bike, the short round-trip distance of about 3 km doesn't take long enough. For that reason, I go out for a "commute" on at least some mornings even though I don't have to.

This morning I rode a little over 16 km, going through the town, stopping for traffic lights, heading out into the countryside against a stiff headwind and returning home again with a tailwind which of course can never add as much as the headwind already took away. It took me 31 minutes to cover the distance. I'm not about to set any records at that speed. That's not the point. This is moderate exercise, taking it fairly easy, expending enough effort to get slightly out of breath sometimes, enough to raise a bit of a sweat but certainly not enough to make my heart pound as if is going to pop out of my chest.

Recommended Minimum Daily Allowance - 15 km
At a moderate rate of exertion, 30 minutes of cycling at a rate conducive to maintaining health equates to covering about 15 km at an average speed of about 30 km/h. 15 km per day equates to about 100 km per week or about 5500 km a year. i.e. it takes about 5500 km of cycling each year to do enough exercise to maintain health.

Another day, with company, I rode another trusted old friend
on which I've ridden many thousands of kilometres over the
last 20 years.

If you ride a round-trip commute of around 21 km (13 miles) each day five days a week then that's just about perfect and will add up to about the annual target figure. If your commute is shorter, take a detour sometimes. People like me who don't have a regular commute to account for 5500 km (3300 miles) each year probably ought to get out on their bikes more often, which is what I do these days.

An inexpensive bike computer helps keep track of the total. It's December and we're heading into winter, but that's no reason to stop: Cycling in winter is particularly rewarding.

How this relates to other means of transport
If cycling is to benefit us as exercise as well as a form of transport it should be our first choice for at the first 5000 km that we travel each year. Until we've covered that distance we can consider the cost of the "fuel" used to cycle to be zero as the alternative would be to burn away the same amount of energy by wasting it at a gym or in some other sporting activity.

Motor vehicle enthusiasts occasionally make an absurd claim that the environmental cost of providing food to humans riding bicycles makes us so much less efficient than modern motor vehicles that we'd be better off driving a car than riding a bike. It's nonsense of course. Bicycles are the most efficient vehicles on the planet by some margin. This goes double for the first 5000 km because expending that energy through our bodies isn't optional. We don't need to eat extra to be able to ride those kilometres, we merely need to eat what is required to maintain a healthy weight while also taking a healthy amount of exercise.

Faster than light travel
Further to the above, cycling is the only means of travel which allows you to cover distances at infinite speed, taking no time at all to make your journey. No time at all needs to be allocated for most cycling journeys. How so ?

Let's begin by assuming that we will actually do that 30 minutes a day of exercise which is required to remain healthy. By exercising while you cycle you can fit in two 15 minute journeys each day (e.g. to work and back) without allocating any specific "cycling" time. It's just your minimum exercise. By comparison, driving a car might appear to get you to work in about half the time, taking 8 minutes each way, but afterward you'll also need to drive to a gym and back (5 minutes each way) and you'll also still still have to spend 30 minutes exercising, but in this case pointlessly staring into space on a machine in the gym instead of watching the world go by as you cycle. So overall, driving takes as much time out of your day as the actual travel time in the car, in this case 26 minutes (8+8+5+5), while cycling anything up to thirty minutes a day actually takes no time at all.

Disclaimer
I sometimes write about health and cycling, but I am not a doctor. In particular, I am not your doctor and I certainly cannot offer health advice to you personally. If you need health advice or you're thinking about changing your exercise habits please see a professional.

Update: What about the Dutch average ? What about e-bikes ?
It's often quoted that the average Dutch person cycles less than 1000 km a year. If so, they're obviously not doing nearly enough exercise on their bikes to keep themselves healthy. I'm not sure I know anyone who really cycles just 1000 km a year, though. It's almost impossible to ride less than a thousand kilometres a year if you use a bike for everyday journeys. I find I often cover twice that distance on my town bike each year even though most of the distance that I cover is on other bicycles, and I don't even have a regular commute these days.

Research has shown that average e-bike riders don't get much exercise at all. If you are trying to maintain your health by riding an assisted bicycle then you will possibly not get much benefit unless you turn the assistance down and also ride much more than 5000 km a year. If you ride less than that distance then you could consider turning off the motor altogether. Otherwise you can expect less of a health benefit than would result from riding a 100% human powered bike.

The car-free myth. The Netherlands is a great country to live in if you're car-free, but it's a very long way from being a car-free country. Dutch car ownership and use are at an all time high.

The 1970s in Assen. The city was then full of cars. Cars are
now restricted in the city centre, but it would be incorrect to
assume that they've gone away. In fact, car numbers have
tripled since this photo was taken.

A myth has grown up about the Dutch being enthusiastic cyclists who live in green cities and rarely drive. In reality, the majority of journeys are made by motorized vehicles and people who live car-free are in a small and shrinking minority.

A life without motorized vehicles
Over the last year I've travelled about 7000 km. 6200 km was covered by bike and the rest I walked (I walk our dog 2 km a day on a normal day, sometimes much more). 6000 km is nothing to boast about. It's by no means an extreme distance to cycle in a year - it's barely more than enough to provide the minimum amount of exercise required for health.

It's quite easy to arrange a life so that you don't need to drive. When I took jobs which were too far away to cycle to, I moved closer to them so that they were within cycling distance. My shortest round trip commute was about 8 km and the longest was 60 km, so work was always within reach by bike and I never "had to" drive. When we lived in the UK we either took our children to school on a bike with us or we walked with them. Here in the Netherlands they made their own way by bike just like all the other kids. We've always made routine journeys like grocery shopping or visiting the dentist by bike because it's more convenient that way. It's also easy enough to carry food for a family in bicycle baskets or panniers or, if you really need a lot of things at once, in a trailer.

30 kg of parcels on the way to customers yesterday. The first
few km are under our control. We don't own or use motorized
vehicles so our customers' bike parts travel by human power.

I work from home these days so I don't have a commute, but I do cycle for work: Our business doesn't make use of motor vehicles so I transport parcels with a cargo bike. That distance is included in my total (all my bikes have bike computers so its easy to add up the total).

I've only travelled by motor vehicle twice over the last year, both times to help a friend with his fledgling business. Otherwise all my travel has been by bike or by foot.

We did actually own a car until a year ago when I took it to the scrapyard. I've not missed it. Cars just are not that fantastic. I didn't own one for most of my life and during the period when we did own a car, it would often go months (sometimes years) without either of us finding a reason to drive it, resulting in frozen brakes and dead batteries as the most common maintenance issues. It was occasionally a very convenient thing to have access to, but it was mostly a nuisance.

While we never used a car much in the UK, living without a car is even easier in the Netherlands because the excellent cycle-path network makes cycling much safer and more convenient. Conditions for cycling where we live in Assen are better than average for the Netherlands - that's not something which happened by accident but on purpose: we chose this location after looking around most of the country. But as a result, cycling is just excellent here.

The Dutch cycle-path network goes everywhere and works well anywhere in this country for people who don't want to have to rely upon a car. However, it would be a mistake to assume that because some people get about by bicycle in the Netherlands, and because some people make a choice not to run a car, that this means that cycling is in a healthy state in the country, or that a large percentage of people are happily living car-free because of that excellent cycling infrastructure. The willingly car-free are actually a small and decreasing minority.

On days off we go riding in the countryside. There are cycle-paths everywhere, not just in the cities.

Cars - the transport mode chosen most often by the Dutch.

A Dutch motorway in the middle of the day. The traffic is
constant and growing. Emissions, particulates, noise, all are
growing. This isn't helped by higher speed limits than in the
past leading to higher fuel consumption (130 km/h = 80 mph)

In 1992, 42% of Dutch households were car-free. By 2016 this had dropped to about a quarter. Car ownership has continued to increase since then. Higher car ownership leads to higher car usage. Almost anyone who can easily afford a car has one and there aren't many people at all who choose to go without if they can afford one: Amongst people of average income, just 12% of households don't have a car and that drops further to just 6% for high income households.

It shouldn't be a surprise that lower income families are most likely not to own a car as this is clearly a function of affordability. It's not a curse in the same way as it can be elsewhere as the excellent cycle path network offers relief from transport poverty. Therefore Dutch people who can't afford a car are not stuck with a terrible choice of trying to prioritize keeping a car or having to pay for expensive public transport as happens to people elsewhere. However the impressive road network which everyone pays for is primarily of use only to those who do own a car.

Cycling is still a significant mode in this country with around a quarter of all journeys still made by bike, but the lengths of journeys that Dutch people make has steadily grown and those journeys are increasingly being made by motorized means. The most popular vehicle by far is the private car. It's not helped by the tax free allowance of 20 cents per km driven paid on top of the salary by most employers (something which gave me quite a nice bonus when I cycled 60 km a day to get to work and back) which helps to encourage long commutes. Dutch commutes are the longest on average in Europe.

Cycling in the UK and Netherlands 1950-2000

Cycling dropped precipitously in popularity in the 1950s and 1960s with the rapid growth of motorized transport, especially private cars. The decline was arrested back in the 1970s, but cycling has not grown much since then. The motorized modes of transport which we sometimes like to think that we conquered have in fact continued to rise in popularity.

When I first wrote about car ownership and car-free living in the Netherlands 11 years ago I got two things wrong: First, I was overly impressed with the relatively high percentage of car-free households (42%), which unfortunately has now nearly halved. Second, I thought at the time that I could see a levelling off of car ownership in the data which was then available. That turned out not to be the case. The blip in the data can still be seen in the middle of the graph below, but you can see for yourself what happened afterwards:

From 197 cars per 1000 people in 1970 we've grown to 662 in 2019. i.e. we now have more than three times the number of cars per person even compared with the "bad old days" of the car dominated 1970s as portrayed in photos like that at the top of this article. We mustn't believe our own myths about having conquered the car. The simple fact is that Dutch car use has grown continuously for 70 years much as it has in every other nation. The government expects that growth to continue and roads are being expanded to cater for it.

The rise in driving is obvious to anyone who has been taking notice of how busy roads in this country have become in recent years. We've lived here for 12 years now. During that time we've seen enormous expenditure on road expansion all the way across the country and the number of vehicles being driven has increased to fill all those new roads.

Several shocks to car ownership can be seen on this graph if you look very closely. e.g. cars declined by 2/3rds during the second world war and you can also see a slight reduction in the rate of growth which coincides with the 1970s fuel crisis. However, none of these shocks to car ownership look actually did anything significant to prevent an ever-increasing rise in driving. The Dutch government continues to plan for more growth.

There are now around 8.5 million cars on the roads in the Netherlands. That's a million more cars than when we moved here 12 years ago. A million more cars contributing to climate change, creating particulate pollution and noise and putting people in danger. A million cars spread across the entire road network of the Netherlands means an extra car every 7 km. Of course they won't be evenly spread, and much of the time they'll be parked by homes. The extra cars are visible in Dutch cities. For instance, this city (Assen) has about half of one percent of the country's population, so we probably have around the same proportion of the additional cars, which is about 4000. There are roughly 250 km of streets in our city so we can now expect to find an extra parked car every 16 metres on residential streets in comparison to the situation 12 years ago.

This graphic show the imbalance between the small danger cyclists create and their relatively large exposure to danger.

While much has genuinely been done to make cycling safer here, the main cause of injury and death to cyclists (apart from older people having single sided collision on e-bikes) remains motor vehicles so we really do still need more work on this. Adding extra cars to every street increases the potential danger on every street.

On average Dutch people travel about 6500 km per year by car (that's an average per person, not per driver). You'll note that it's about the same distance as I cycle each year. Car ownership in recent years has grown especially strongly amongst older people. 50-65 year olds, 65-75 year olds and especially drivers aged 75+ use their cars far more now than ever before with 39% growth in the distance covered by in 75+ drivers between 2005 and 2015.

Not just cars. All motorized transport is a problem.

Our local airport installed solar to
greenwash its image. They don't put
fossil carbon back under the ground.

The total distance travelled per year by the average Dutch person is about 11000 km. You'll note that this is nearly double the distance distance travelled in cars. Much of the difference is composed of longer distances travelled by air. Flying is one of the fastest growing modes of travel in the Netherlands.

The rise in flying is something I've written about before. Between the 1960s and now, commercial flying has increased by a factor of 30. During that time, the efficiency of aircraft has improved by a factor of three, leaving us with 10x the emissions now that we had in the 1960s.

The use of trains is also growing sharply in the Netherlands. This not only means more trains, but also more, bigger railway stations. All of this has a huge environmental cost. While it's common to find people celebrating the enormous cycle parks at Dutch railway stations, they're not really an example of cycling success. What they represent is that Dutch people increasingly do not use their bicycles to make whole journeys but instead use them to allow them to make longer journeys by motorized transport. Cycling is not a green mode of transport when it is used merely as an adjunct to a motor vehicle.

The efficiency myth
If each car is twice as efficient then we have similar emissions to the 1980s, when cars were also not sustainable. If each car can be made three times as efficient then we can reach a situation where a much larger car fleet has the same impact as cars had on the Netherlands in the 1970s. But all that can do is return us to a similar pattern of energy consumption and emissions as we had from cars in in the 1970s, and that wasn't sustainable either. The only way that we will reduce the impact of cars is to have far fewer of them.

We see a similar picture with air travel. Graphs showing ever rising numbers of flights rightly cause many people concern. Unfortunately, a significant number, including campaigners on green issues, seem to think that making the same journeys by a different mode can fix the problem. It can't. The most optimistic estimates for emissions of high speed rail are that the emissions due to trains are about 90% lower than that per passenger km of an aircraft. There are reasons to doubt such claims, because for example they ignore the high environmental cost of railway infrastructure, but let's stick with that claimed 90% improvement for now. The question we need to ask is "was flying sustainable 40 years ago" ? The answer is of course that it was not. Now take a look at this graph:

It is estimated, byAirbus who hope to sell lots of aircraft, that flying will double over the next few years. Just imagine it were possible over the next 15 years to shift all those air passengers onto rail with a 90% improvement in efficiency. If that were possible, then we would expect the emissions of trains carrying those passengers to be proportional not to 15 trillion RPK by air per year, but to 1.5 trillion. That's about the level of air transport in 1979. i.e. if everyone switched to rail then by 2034 we'll be able to travel with the same emissions as we did 40 years ago. Of course, this wasn't sustainable 40 years ago and it won't be sustainable in the future either.

We need to travel less. Sailing ships and bicycles have no emissions. Everything else does.

Los Angeles in the 1950s. Does this look like a picture
of sustainability ? There are many more cars today.
Improving efficiency is not enough to solve the problems.

Not just a Dutch problem
Of course this isn't just a Dutch problem. The same things are happening world-wide. A few weeks ago I wrote about how the number of cars in the UK has doubled in the last 30 years, a similar growth rate to the Netherlands. Another interesting case for me is the USA. It's interesting because the USA was the first nation to adopt mass motoring. Perhaps they've reached a limit to growth in emissions ?

The photo on the right shows traffic in Los Angeles in the 1950s. The accompanying text points out that building more roads couldn't solve the problem of ever increasing traffic. This was already understood to be a problem 60 years ago.

It could be thought, optimistically, that US car ownership should have plateaued since that time however that has not happened. Instead, the numbers of cars on US roads have continued to rise.

How quickly has US car ownership risen ? Well, there are twice as many cars now as in the mid 1970s and at least four times as many as when the photo of Los Angeles in the 1950s was taken. That is why traffic congestion on roads remains a problem today. The US did not succeed in building its way out of congestion. Nor will it succeed in building its way out of emissions. This graph illustrates why:

For some years during the second world war no new cars at all were available to buy, but data points ten years apart shows little effect due to a total lack of new cars during that period. Similarly, the fuel crisis of the 1970s is almost impossible to discern. The rightmost part of the graph is flattened slightly because the final figure I could find was from 2017, while I really needed ownership figures from 2020.

Graph from a recent blog post about car growth in the UK. It's dramatic enough but note that this actually looks less steep than it should in comparison with the others because the X-axis scale is different: even the insert which looks steeper goes back only to 1950.

As with the Netherlands, car efficiency is being pushed as a way of solving the emissions problems of cars. However, no creditable study of the environmental impact of electric cars suggests that total lifetime emissions are significantly better than those of conventionally engine cars. The most optimistic studies suggest that total emissions could be as low as a quarter of that of cars with conventional engines but even if it were the case that electric cars had a quarter of the total impact of conventional cars, this could only return US emissions from cars to a similar level as that which they had in the 1950s, a similar level as was seen at the time of the photograph above, levels in other countries such as the Netherlands to those seen as recently as the 1970s and levels in developing countries to perhaps those of around decade ago. The emissions in the 1950s, 1970s and 2000s were not sustainable. Achieving those same emissions in the future with four times as many cars on the road also won't be sustainable. All we do is set back the clock a little. We don't really change anything.

We need to travel less. Bicycles and sailing boats are the only really sustainable modes of transport and these are the modes which should be encouraged above others.

What can be done about this ?

the excellent cycle paths in this country help us to run an
ethical business, but they're not attractive enough to convince
the majority of people that they can live without a car.

The Netherlands has built the most comprehensive grid of mostly very high quality cycling infrastructure anywhere in the world, but we are still failing to make cycling attractive enough to encourage people not to use motorized transport because actually we are still encouraging people to make ever more and longer journeys.

We need to change how our society is structured. Quite apart from the climate changing effects, the road deaths and the particulate production due to mass transport, people are wasting far too much of their time making long journeys in motorized vehicles. This is not a good use of our limited life-spans. The resultant stress is not good for our mental health. Instead of encouraging people to make long commutes by paying them 20 cents per kilometre that they travel, by giving subsidies for buying new cars and providing free public transport for commuters and students, thereby encouraging a high degree of use of motorized vehicles, we should be encouraging people to live near their work or work near their home. If we're going to offer subsidies, we should subsidise people to live in an ethical and low impact manner. For instance, we could subsidize people to move home to near their work, rather than help them to make long journeys every day. Maybe we could start to subsidize the most efficient vehicles on the planet instead of those which are amongst the least efficient.

Many people already choose to live in a less impactful way. They already choose to move instead of commute, to travel by human power even when carrying quite heavy loads. However while this behaviour benefits everyone it is not something which the government really supports. We certainly don't see a cent of subsidy for behaving in an ethical manner.

A poster from an a protest
against our local airport.

We also need to start to tax air travel in particular, but also all long distance transport by any means. It's an outrage that air travel is encouraged by both government subsidies for the airports and flights as well as a total lack of taxation on the fuel. Despite all efficiency improvements, the environmental impact of aviation has risen by a factor of ten during my lifetime. We need to fix this (and recognise that switching to an alternative mode which is "90% more efficient" represents nothing more advanced than setting the pollution clock back to the wasteful 1960s.

Other countries: You need to do all of that and also build the cycling infrastructure. Otherwise your citizens will, even more than the Dutch, feel that they have no choice but to drive cars daily and to travel long distances. Our continued relatively peaceful existence on this planet requires that we act.

We are asking the wrong question
Lots of people are asking the question "how can we continue to make ever more long journeys in future?" Few are asking the question "how can we live lives which require us to spend less time travelling?"

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Update 27 August: Here come the urbanists
This blog post has attracted quite a bit of attention on twitter and has been re-tweeted by people who appear not to have actually read the text but who seem to think that the graph showing rising car usage indicates something along the lines of that Dutch suburbs have failed and that in future everyone should live in densely populated cities and travel by bus or train. That is not what the text above says. I don't say that because it would not be helpful and it would condemn the world's population to a grim existence of living on top of one-another in packed cities.

1. Population density: The Netherlands has the world's highest proportion of journeys by bike, but it does not have especially densely populated cities. Cycling is relatively attractive in the Netherlands because people can make a positive choice to cycle on infrastructure which is convenient and safe.
2. Suburbs: Suburbs can be designed to encourage and support a high degree of cycling and walking. This results in far more attractive living conditions than a densely populated city. Think of a suburb as being quite similar to a village, so long as we make sure that there are facilities within the suburb and that they are not built as dormitories.
3. Public transport: It is true that Dutch people do not use public transport much. However, this is not a negative point about the Netherlands. Instead of being large users of public transport, the Dutch have the highest use of non-motorized transport in Europe. In fact, the proportion of journeys walked or cycled in the Netherlands is higher than the proportion of journeys taken by public transport in any European nation, even much poorer nations where there is less choice other than the take public transport. Walking and cycling are the two truly green transport modes. It is certainly not beneficial to seek to encourage people to swap bicycles for public transport.
4. Public transport and wealth: The use of public transport declines with wealth. People who who a choice, because live in a more wealthy country or become more wealthy, are less likely to accept that their journey from A to B should take place on someone else's timetable and include a detour through C and D. That is why people opt to drive, and in the Netherlands why they opt to cycle as well. The Netherlands is one of the richest countries in Europe yet has one of the highest rates of non-motorized transport. That is a success. It's possible because cycling offers direct and convenient journeys. We merely need to provide go-everywhere infrastructure to make it also safe and attractive.

This article aims to bust a myth about the Dutch being particularly keen cyclists who do not drive because the fact is that Dutch people are quite wealthy, they own a lot of cars and they drive a lot. However it does not aim to call the relative Dutch success in cycling anything other than a success.

This country has the highest modal share for cycling in the world. Our cycling infrastructure is second to none and this has created opportunities to cycle which do not exist elsewhere. The infrastructure has normalized cycling amongst a population which is rich enough to drive for a higher proportion of their journeys than they do.

The problem that we are facing now, along with every other nation as none have tackled it, is that we have not addressed the ever growing usage of motor vehicles. Every car, bus, train, airplane is polluting the planet and slowly killing us. We need to reduce the usage of motor vehicles and should not aim simply to swap from one motorized vehicle to another because as pointed out above ("the efficiency myth") that cannot not solve the issue.

The Netherlands offers a tantalizing glimpse of something that other countries could and should adopt. Building high quality cycling infrastructure works to give people a positive option, addressing the problem of motoring to some extent. However it's not enough. We must also counter motor vehicles.

The "disappointing" response
For some reason some people see the growth of driving in the Netherlands as particularly surprising, as if they expect the Dutch to be different to people in other countries.

Dutch people are people. On average they're fairly wealthy so can afford cars. They are just as influenced by advertising and the appeal of shiny new things as anyone anywhere else. What's more, there are tax breaks and subsidies for buyers of new cars, Dutch roads are excellent, traffic jams are rare and here in the Netherlands you can actually make a profit from a long commute by car because you'll be paid an extra 20 cents tax free for every kilometre of your commute.

What is unusual in the Netherlands is the extent to which people still choose to cycle, despite all this encouragement to drive. They do so because the cycling infrastructure makes cycling an appealing, convenient and safe option. But until we stop encouraging driving, we can only expect the number of cars and the distance that they're driven each year to continue to increase.

Update 17 September 2019 - A new official driving record has been set by Dutch drivers
A study just published by the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics has found that Dutch drivers drove their cars a record distance in 2018 - a total of 121.4 billion kilometres, or 1.2% more than in 2017. The average usage per car actually dropped by 1%, but the 2.2% growth in the number of cars over a year more than made up for that (note in the text above the shift from people being passengers in cars to driving alone). The growth in total kilometres driven for business use at 4% was higher than the growth in individual use at 0.4%, but it's important to recognise that both of these figures show growth.

Light blue shows personal car usage which has grown steadily year on year while the dark blue shows business use which took a dive with the 2008 crisis before rising more sharply. Note also that while businesses are catching up and did so particularly last year, it's a steady increase in personal usage which is actually the big growth area.

Due to the diesel scandal, the use of diesel powered cars has dropped by 2.5%, but the growth in petrol powered cars was greater at 2.7%. While the Netherlands has by some standards quite high numbers of electrically powered cars, only 0.5% of total km driven are driven in an electric car vs. 99.5% in fossil fuel cars. Even if they were a solution to something (which they are not), their numbers would in any case be too small to make a difference.

In other recent news, European cars are getting bigger with SUVs now making up 36% of total sales, expected to rise to 40% by 2021. This trend can also be seen in the Netherlands. This, unsurprisingly, has resulted in CO2 emissions from motor vehicles rising year on year. While car companies are supposed to limit their average emissions per vehicle sold to 95 g of CO2 per km, the average SUV emits 120 g over the same distance. From January car manufacturers will have to pay a €95 fine per g CO2/km per car. To work around the fine, car manufacturers are subsidizing some buyers to buy lower emission cars so that they can continue to sell the high emission cars to other purchasers, keeping their average emissions per vehicle at the highest point that they can without paying a fine. It's an accounting trick. i.e. not helping in any way to clean up our environment.

Even if electric cars were a solution, which they're not, they remain a tiny fraction of the cars sold (even here, and more so worldwide). What's happening at the moment is that we're seeing more and more fossil fueled cars being added to the roads. They each have an expected lifespan of around 20 years so we're locking in a high level of fossil fuel consumption for personal transport for another 20 years. And this year's cars are not the end of the story: we also have no reason to expect much to change next year, or the year after. Car companies plan to continue to produce more cars for as long as they can, oil companies plan to produce more oil to fuel them. No-one is actually tackling this problem. Somehow we're supposed to want to see our carbon emissions decrease before 2030, but all of those new cars cumulatively will work to ensure that this doesn't happen by staying on the roads for many more years than that.

The only solution is for car usage to drop. So what is the Dutch government doing about it ? Much the same as any other: the budget which was just announced includes billions for more motorways, billions to install 1.8 million extra charging points for electric cars, billions to encourage people to make long journeys by train, and also a little bit for cycling which a minister described as "the secret weapon against congestion". So secret that it receives little in funding compared with more polluting modes of transport.

Burning oil

I don't have rights to a photo of the Saudi Arabian attack
so this is actually a gas flare near my home.

In addition, readers will no doubt also be aware of the drone attacks at the weekend on the oil processing plant in Saudi Arabia. This has been quite big news and it has led to oil price rises. The thick black smoke resulting from the flames is obviously a significant pollutant. But note this: If were not burnt as a result of this attack all that oil was going to be burnt anyway in a car, truck, bus, train or aeroplane somewhere near you. All that carbon was going to be emitted into our environment. The burning with black smoke is less efficient and has resulted in a lot of soot, but the soot hasn't been converted into CO2 as would have been the case had that oil been burnt as was intended. The attack may actually have resulted in lower CO2 emissions than would have been the case otherwise. We need to stop burning oil, whether in vehicles, power stations or in attacks like this one. It's all the same.

Are younger people driving less ?
One part of the picture is that the influence of younger people on the growth in driving in the Netherlands is less than the influence of older people who on average account for more of the growth. Naturally, there have been some attempts to make a generational issue out of this, to make out that the young are behaving differently because they think differently. Unfortunately, there's no real evidence for that. In fact, these differences are very small and there is another better explanation: It's not about age, it's about wealth. Wealthier people drive more than less wealthy people. This holds true for entire nations (though NL bucks that trend a bit) just as much as it does within a nation.

Dutch lottery advertisement. Yes, you can win a bike.
But I suspect most people would rather win the car.

There is no indication that younger people are driving less by choice. Rather, younger people these days are under more financial pressure than was the case for people of the same age a few decades ago. For instance, accommodation is more expensive now and is consuming a larger proportion of income. Rents are higher than they used to be and it's really much more difficult to "get on the housing ladder" now than it was when the people who are older now were getting started. As a result, other things have to be prioritized. But give people money and they tend to buy a car. That's why lottery adverts always feature cars, including here in the Netherlands.


Car companies are no more likely to solve the problems which inevitably come from using cars than cigarette companies can be relied upon to solve the problems caused by their product. Different new cars are not the answer to any of the problems caused by cars. We need far fewer cars.

Update September 2020 - even more driving
We now have the stats for 2019. Another record year of car driving here in the Netherlands. Dutch drivers drove 122.5 billion kilometres last year. While the 1.2% rise in driving last year prompted my concern, this year we've seen an even bigger 1.9% rise.

Benzine is Dutch for petrol / gasoline. I think you'll work the others out for yourselves.

The main growth was, unsurprisingly, in petrol / gasoline powered cars (light blue in the graph), which still outsell all other kinds of cars. While use of electric vehicles has doubled, they are still only a tiny fraction of the total so even if they were transformative, which they are not, their numbers are still too small to make any useful difference and that will remain true for many years to come. To solve the problems caused by cars we don't need different cars but fewer cars being driven less.

Fact check: Dutch car ownership continues to rise, just as elsewhere around the world