Building the Cycling City Read online

  Other citizen-led collectives were formed, many representing a specific interest or geographic area, including De Lastige Amsterdammer (“The Troublesome Amsterdammer”), Amsterdam Fietst (“Amsterdam Cycles”), Kabouters (“Gnomes”), Fietsersbond (“Cyclists’ Union”), Amsterdam Autovrij (“Car-Free Amsterdam”), and Wijkgroep de Pijp (“De Pijp Neighborhood Group”). Many weren’t shy about putting their kids on the frontlines, and in 1972, the children of the latter were filmed demonstrating with signs, blockading entire streets to through traffic, and lobbying for safer “play streets” in their community, alongside their parents. Wooden crosses were planted in a nearby park to commemorate avoidable traffic fatalities. This outpouring of support was fueled by residents who recalled a time when their streets were about more than just moving and storing cars: “In Amsterdam, you had people with living memory of what streets were like when they were children,” Dinca suggests. “That was enough to ignite that desire for a different urban reality.”

  While groups like the Provos, Stop de Kindermood, and Fietsersbond didn’t necessarily coordinate their efforts, their concerns did converge, and they ended up reinforcing one another in the fight for a different type of city than what was being proposed. “They all had different perspectives,” recalls de Lange, who participated in protests as a teenager. “Maybe they wanted more playgrounds for children, more safety for children, more space for cyclists, or more space for living. But most of it was focused of having a city that was not overwhelmed by cars.”

  A Choir of Divergent Voices

  Elected officials heard the choir of divergent voices loud and clear, and in 1972 the city council decided, by a single vote, to scrap the motorway. “There were 22 councilors in favor of that plan,” recollects de Lange. “But 23 were against it. So that really was a close battle. ‘Urban renewal’ had been rejected by the smallest of margins, and Jodenbreestraat and the surrounding community was saved from the wrecking ball.

  Not wanting to lose the gathering momentum, activists ramped up their efforts. In a decisive act of solidarity, Amsterdam Autovrij, the Provos, and Fietsersbond organized a series of annual demonstrations leading up to a vital municipal election. In July 1975, 3,000 people on bikes took to the streets of Amsterdam to push for a more cycle-friendly city. The following summer, it was 4,000. In 1977, 9,000 attended, 3,000 of whom lay down with their bikes in Museumplein (“Museum Square”) to commemorate the 3,000 annual deaths the Dutch people suffered at the hands of the automobile.

  Provos leader Luud Schimmelpennink declared 1978 would be the fourth and final such protest, and it attracted an astounding 15,000 people. Four days later, their cause was given a tremendous boost with the election of a brand new council. And that autumn, a replacement Verkeerscirculatieplan (“Traffic Circulation Plan”)—reducing motor vehicle traffic and parking, and prioritizing walking, cycling, and public transportation—was passed overwhelmingly by a vote of 38 to 7.

  “The 1978 election was a real change,” says de Lange, noting that these demonstrations were about more than just making noise. “The activists wrote reports to make sure people were informed about what to expect from various political parties, how they previously voted on mobility issues, and which politicians they should vote for.” The Fietsersbond also published their Fietsknelpunten Nota (“Bicycle Bottleneck Report”), which identified problem spots in the city for cyclists, as well as possible solutions.

  As soon as he was sworn in, the new deputy mayor for traffic and mobility, Michael van der Vlis, spoke to the protest groups and invited them to join him in a new bicycle-planning group that would include city officials and civil servants. “There were internal discussions at the Fietsersbond where they asked, ‘Are we going to cooperate with the enemy, who had been so much in favor of cars?’” de Lange remembers. “But a large majority said, ‘Yes, we should. We might have to make some compromises, but we see more advantage in cooperating than only demonstrating.’”

  Thus began a productive and fruitful partnership between the Cyclists’ Union and City staff, starting in 1978 with their collaboration on Amsterdam’s first genuine cycling strategy, which built off the existing Bottleneck Report and Traffic Circulation Plan. “It was a vision about how you could achieve a bicycle city,” explains de Lange. “What sort of infrastructure would you like? What kind of planning and policy do you need to accomplish it? It was a broad perspective on the bicycle city, with concrete solutions for problems that cyclists were facing.”

  Looking at Amsterdam today, it would seem the 1978 policy equated to thousands of kilometers of bicycle-specific infrastructure, creating a seamless network across the entire city. But the truth is actually a little more complicated and counterintuitive. This cycling utopia was built on traffic-calming rather than bike lanes. Instead of constructing separated cycle tracks on every street, officials started with speed-limit reductions, parking restrictions, through-traffic limitations, and lane narrowings and removals. This strategy proved to be incredibly fruitful, and—as biking flourished across the city—cycle routes were established in response to those increasing numbers, particularly on streets where bicycles regularly outnumbered cars. The spread of separated cycle tracks—which take more time, money, and political will—was more incremental, having been gradually built one at a time over many decades, although they now exist on nearly every major street.

  Figure 5-2: Saved from the wrecking ball, Jodenbreestraat remains a street for people, moving tens of thousands of cyclists—and not cars—each day. (Credit: Modacity)

  Dinca maintains this is a critical lesson for twenty-first-century cities looking to make cycling the primary choice for their residents: “Right now, a lot of cities are talking about making themselves better for cycling, but we can’t talk about making them worse for driving.” She concedes, though, that it is an easier conversation to have in a densely populated place like Amsterdam or New York: “It’s really hard to push for speed reductions in an area that’s so spread out, because everything is built around high speeds. This ends up being a huge barrier in car-dependent cities such as Los Angeles. Lower speeds are much more palatable when people are traveling shorter distances.”

  Much like the speed issue, compact cities offer a distinct advantage when it comes to encouraging a certain level of activism. “The role citizens play is really important,” Dinca acknowledges. “There is so much community involvement in Amsterdam. Part of the reason why is because of the urban fabric—because of density, and land use, and people talking to one another—that makes it much easier for residents to get organized, to empathize, and even just to know what’s going on and get involved.” This is not to minimize the challenge other cities face if they try to replicate Amsterdam’s success. “Every city is different, and has to find their own ways to improve the city,” continues de Lange. “But I think what they can take from Amsterdam is the long-term vision and long-term policy that Amsterdam has been using. To build a bike city, it takes thirty or forty years, because you have to do it on almost every street.”

  Nevertheless, both Dinca and de Lange agree that it’s not nearly as simple as copying-and-pasting these cycling strategies and expecting success. Says Dinca: “Part of it was luck, part of it was wisdom. But somehow Amsterdammers managed to realize for themselves and articulate what a livable city is all about. Every city has its own unique conditions and challenges. So it’s not about making all cities like Amsterdam. It’s about making them better versions of themselves.”

  Pulling Back the Curtain in the Social City

  Move around the streets of Amsterdam today, and it’s hard to imagine a time when bicycles didn’t dominate the city’s landscape. Truly, the success of the protests and activism of decades past is painted on the serene faces of thousands of cyclists as they move in an effortless ballet around their streets, enjoying the fruits of a social city. Ask any local about their cycle culture, and they will respond with a shrug, “What cycle culture? This is just what we do.” Th
e reality is that most of them take what they have for granted, spending little time thinking about how their lived experience is remarkable when compared with other cities around the world.

  Until five years ago, Dr. Marco te Brömmelstroet was no exception. “If there is one moment I really started to understand what is special about the Netherlands,” he says, “it was when I was invited by a journalist to observe peak rush-hour traffic in Amsterdam. It allowed me to stand outside of my behavior and see the dynamic occurring at intersections. That’s when I realized how special cycling here is, and how it can provide a lens to rethink the language used in transportation planning. But it also made me realize I have a moral obligation to try to understand cycling, and to support those who bring it to other contexts by adding a critical perspective.”

  As academic director of the University of Amsterdam’s Urban Cycling Institute, Te Brömmelstroet has spent a lengthy academic career studying urban planning, transportation, and geographic-information management. He ultimately describes himself as a planner with an interest in mobility and the relationship between the urban form and mobility behavior. “It’s important to realize that, in the Netherlands, an urban planner is also a social scientist,” he claims. “So I’m interested in how people make plans, and how they engage with different types of knowledge in doing so. Not so much the design or engineering of them.”

  Through the Urban Cycling Institute, he offers a summer-school program called “Planning the Cycling City,” coordinated by Meredith Glaser (see chapter 4). Each session begins with a simple warning to the students who have traveled from around the globe to participate: If they wish to hold tightly to romantic notions of cycling, then they should walk away and continue to live in blissful ignorance. If they want to truly understand the unconscious nature of cycling in the Netherlands, they can watch as the curtain is pulled back, inevitably spoiling some of the fun. “Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. But it’s a necessary evil to help others understand,” he advises.

  For Te Brömmelstroet, the moral obligation to understand cycling pushes beyond simply sharing his knowledge with his students, recognizing that relying solely on the CROW Manual to solve Amsterdam’s new bike-related challenges is wholly insufficient. To date, the city has managed to make things good for cycling within a car-dominated paradigm, but—now faced with increasingly bike-dominated environments—the manual has started to seem incomplete, and planners and officials need to start thinking outside the box. With researchers from the Urban Cycling Institute, including Glaser, he has spent years looking past quantitative data, instead studying the actual behavior of cyclists to inspire more behavior-based planning.

  For instance, Te Brömmelstroet and his team—pairing up with the Copenhagenize Design Company—observed about 20,000 cyclists at 10 intersections throughout Amsterdam during morning peak hours, collecting data less focused on travel times and more on movements and interactions, observing stress levels via intercept surveys and ride-along interviews, and quantifying social interaction through monitoring eye contact. The goal of their work was to open up the thinking around data collection, offer a new visual language and a new set of metaphors to support creative solution-seeking, which would in turn lead to innovation, perhaps even fundamentally changing how transportation planners work.

  Of the ten intersections studied—all of which are now being redeveloped using the data collected by Te Brömmelstroet’s team—two of these solutions stand out as innovative steps forward in behavior-based planning. For example, the “funnel”—or “bag of fries” as it’s now called because of its resemblance to a paper cone filled with French fries—is a busy intersection where a bidirectional cycle track crosses the street called Mr. Visserplein, at the foot of Jodenbreestraat. At the very site of the 1970s freeway fight, tens of thousands of cyclists now travel through that corridor, rather than the tens of thousands of automobiles that David Jokinen and his peers originally envisioned. Originally, on a red signal, cyclists would fill all the available space in the waiting area, spilling over into the oncoming lane as well as the adjacent pedestrian crossing, due to a lack of capacity. As the light turned to green, they would naturally organize themselves back into their designated space in a logical way, and carry on.

  “That was a very good example where we could show the current conditions, but also show that it was putting people in a stressful situation they didn’t want to be in, and they were solving the problem with the design by themselves,” Te Brömmelstroet explains. And while users were addressing the issue directly, it led to the question: How could transportation planners design to cater for this natural behavior? In his opinion, their solution was beautifully simple: adapt the waiting area to suit to the behavior by redrawing a single painted line on the pavement. Instead of having two adjacent 4-meter- (13-foot-) wide cycle tracks, the City enlarged the waiting area to 6 meters (20 feet), and reduced the oncoming area to 2 meters (6 feet), creating a funnel that returns to the 4-meter width as it crosses the intersection. “This area is still used by the cyclists in the same way, but it fits the area much better. People are much less stressed and feel more supported by the design in their behavior.”

  Changes to the “bag of fries” intersection did not affect travel patterns for motorists, who enjoyed the same green time, so the design stayed within the confines of car-based engineering. On nearby Alexanderplein, however, the modifications would be more dramatic. After analyzing the behavior and stress levels of cyclists, along with the speeds of trams and cars, the recommendation required a bit more outside-the-box thinking: remove the traffic lights completely and “force” people to use eye contact and social interaction to dictate flow. Implemented initially as a trial, the now-permanent adjustment had no negative effects on travel time or safety, but instead created a whole new level of engagement. The former stop-and-go, high-stress experience was replaced with fluid movement, lower stress, and increased eye contact. When interviewed during the follow-up study and asked how they felt about the removal of the traffic lights, 10 percent of respondents said, “What traffic lights?”

  The success of these projects affirms Te Brömmelstroet’s belief in the importance of performing observational studies before, during, and after a project in order to build evidence of what is achievable in transportation planning with a more inventive mindset. “It’s a great example of how the planning practice is changing through an innovative way of looking at reality,” he says. “Something that’s so mundane in the Netherlands, the fact that we don’t reflect on the act of cycling, is great. But it means we’re not used to making policy for it, and that’s really changing at the moment. People are taking it more seriously, and this banal thing of cycling is actually pretty special.”

  Figure 5-3: Mr. Visserplein’s “bag of fries” demonstrates that, when the CROW Manual is inadequate, behavior-based planning can fill the gap. (Credit: Martijn Sargentini)

  The City is continuing to move forward with the traffic-light project, commissioning the Urban Cycling Institute to study ten more intersections for potential redesign, now as part of their official Meerjarenplan Fiets (“Strategic Cycling Plan”). However, Te Brömmelstroet insists that agencies like the Fietsersbond and other cycling activists need to keep demanding more. “The City is doing the right thing at the moment, because the dynamics are there. More people are coming into the city and there are more people cycling,” he suggests. “But citizen protests are necessary to push beyond responding to existing trends, and call for a long-term goal—where politicians and planners want to get to, not just solving problems right now.”

  “What we see is that we need to step up the recognition that if we think cycling is important—and I think there are enough reasons to think that—then we need to make an active effort in policy making,” Te Brömmelstroet continues. “This means we need to have visions and strategies for the future.” He points out that Amsterdammers take so much about cycling in their city for granted, meaning most politicians
are unaware of potential threats, which aren’t a subject of public debate. The approach so far has been to react to a disruptive problem after it becomes one—as has been the case for diesel-powered mopeds and speed pedelecs (electric-assisted bicycles that travel upwards of 45 km/h [28 mph]) using the cycle tracks—instead of looking forward and creating policies and visions to protect what it is the people want their city to be.

  Te Brömmelstroet also notes that Amsterdam is experiencing similar pressures to those challenging other global cities: as economic growth increases, it creates a push for greater investments in public transportation and new innovations in the field—such as autonomous vehicles—many of which could have an adverse effect on cycling. As engineers focus on improving travel times and efficiency, there is the potential to lose something much more valuable—the cohesiveness created by social interaction within a city. “In the seventies, Amsterdam citizens demanded a social city designed for the people who live there and not the ones who travel through it,” he recalls. “This needs to be the same discussion today. The public debate should not be confined solely to transportation, because that’s way too limited in the face of these challenges.”

  Despite uncertainty around how future innovation will impact the cycling city of Amsterdam, Te Brömmelstroet remains rather optimistic. He has tremendous faith in the “swarm”—hundreds of thousands of people traveling through the city by bicycle, with little regard for how their movement has been made seamless and intuitive—as well as Amsterdam’s proud cycling culture, however little Amsterdammers themselves may appreciate it. While he has lost his naïveté about the behavior of cyclists because his observational studies have revealed how truly remarkable and special cycling in Amsterdam is, he is grateful that the work of the Urban Cycling Institute can contribute to the romantic idea of cycling for his fellow citizens. “After all, I wish that everybody can keep experiencing this remarkable phenomenon unconsciously,” he declares proudly.