 Thank you everyone for coming. This is a collaboration between a student general in Yesen Toburg on our series introducing the Netherlands. The topic today is cycling culture and we have two speakers from the cycling institutes in Amsterdam that are going to tell us some information about cycling culture here in the Netherlands. Yeah, I would also like to thank Jarno from my academic committee for contacting the speakers and yeah that's it. If one of you Vikas or either Lindsay, whichever one of you can start. Good afternoon. I'm Vikas. I'm here along with my colleague Lindsay and we represent the Urban Cycling Institute that is the think tank in the University of Amsterdam which mostly we do the policy advocacy and research on the cycling in Amsterdam as well as sometimes we also like work with some other government other nations who wants to improve their biking infrastructure and I'm glad to be here today. Yeah, so me I'll be just explaining the brief about how the cycling culture how is the how we like Netherlands is seen as one of the cycling heaven in on the earth so like they have the best biking culture like highest motor share in the biking infrastructure so I'll be just trying to understand like make you understand how we came came here till now. All of you are Dutch or like are you from like any of you from the like other country? Okay cool because like just to give a brief about where I come from so I come from India and this is how our streets looks like so you can see so streets are definitely wider but you don't see a space in it at all and you can't even see the any biker there you can see the lot of their two-wheelers so basically we are the motorized two-wheelers but we don't have like a lot of bikes in there and and the biggest cultural difference that I realized when I came in here is how we look down upon the bikers so so basically when I was back in India I last time I rode a cycle was when I was 16 years old and now I'm almost 30 so so basically we only ride a bike when we are a kid and after like when we go go to high school we never touch the bike somehow but when I moved in here I was surprised or pleasantly surprised to see these things so that was kind of a lockdown when I moved in so streets are like mostly empty and I was so fascinated to see the empty streets streets dedicated to the bikers and especially this this street image on the left so that's tram and the bike path so they you can see so they got the like a green green grass on the track so that initially I could not understand why they are wasting the road space because they could use this the same space but later on I understood like why why it's like they got green space or the this thing and as my stay was as I was like a as days went by I realized so its bike is not only about like for one like it it's a culture it's you know it's like everyone uses the bike so for example when I look back and when I compare I see only bike bike is used by the kids and the people who cannot afford the public transport or they cannot spend money on the transportation so they use the bike and that was very surprising thing for me and I could never imagine our city square or some of the like a central space in the city would look like this and that was a very big surprise for me then then this this was since I I'm working on the mobility you know mobility my sorry I forgot to tell you so I'm doing a PhD and then my I'm working on the mobility innovations and certainly those were the shocks that I got and then I wanted to know more and when I started talking about it with my colleagues and other people and then I got the interesting answers so like and and it was like biking was so normal here so no one was talking about it like it it's just like you you use it like as you use like other appliances like you use as your phone you know you just use it you you don't know what's going on so that's analogy that I was told like so biking for Dutch people is like water for the fish so you just you know use it you don't really think about it up what's happened okay I think I made the slide but anyway since it's here let's take a moment and think so let's do this exercise so say for example I got a friend who is completely blind and who cannot see what's going on in here but you have to help me explain that friend of mine that what this picture is about anyone what this picture is about what do you see whatever so so there is no wrong answer right so it's like this all answers I mean no every answer is right it is this about the perspective that how we look at the things right it's dangerous dangerous for whom for the deer uh-huh anyone else like there is no wrong wrong answer to it so road in the forest and animal is crossing yeah see all answers are right so there is no right or wrong answer so it's about the perspective that how we look at it so so when I was back in India so for me streets was always like a kind of a pipeline which facilitated the transportation from one place to other or from point A to point B so so that was the only purpose of street because I show the picture so you you can't really do anything like as as a like apart from being stuck in the traffic and somehow hope to go where you want to go you can't really do anything but the question is is the street is really about the only about the transportation or from just for the movement from one place to another or you know to facilitating the most efficient movement possible is it or street has other functions as well so if we go back so if you look at this street what do you see you see people uh I don't see I mean I don't think there is a car there's a cars yeah cars so yeah so you see so what this street is serving as so this street is not only serving as the most efficient pipeline to transport you from point A to point B but it also facilitating the other functions such as you see people standing there maybe people are selling something also you can walk you can interact with people I mean uh if you're from the small village or small city where you know like a lot of your neighbors so you always say for example if I'm walking in my village so half of the time I'm doing like this you know like I see the people I wave at them I interact with them so so what uh uh yeah uh so that used to be the function of the street but with the motorized motorized vehicle coming then streets started looking to look like this right and and this is the Amsterdam so and now it again looks like this so so what fascinates me here is so street used to look like this then they turn to be like this and then again then nowadays they look like this and then what drives that change so my my interest is or you know or the interesting thing here is like what drives this change what what makes this change happen so I'll just give you like a few see again this is again another street in the city of Amsterdam sorry I mean I my most of the knowledge is very limited to Amsterdam that's why that's why I would be talking more in terms of Amsterdam so this is also interesting thing about Amsterdam so when they were laying the metro line and this is called the numart area where they used to have this you see this is the open patch that used that was planned highway but later they they converted it into a more like a they just grabbed the plan of highway and then the now the this square the this same landscape looks like this so what so this change now you see the change like that that has happened over a period of time so so this pictures are shown you is like almost eight decades of the progress that how we how the Dutch public transportation has evolved evolved from more of a very open space where people could interact with and and stitches to serve like a lot of functions then moving back to the cars and then again coming back to bicycles then how this change has happened so first thing it's not the first thing but there are like a lot of contributing factors to it so one of the major factor is and that's I find that is really important especially from the experience that we understand is the people's movement like how people can force the changes that they deserve because if you go into the history and you you would find that these changes were not brought up by the municipality these were forced by the local people who wanted to change or make use of public spaces as it would suit them and not for the very few people who could own a motorized vehicle so one of the one of the driving factor for this thing was in the year 1972 so in 1960 late 1960s there was a oil crisis that shot up the gas prices that that means the driving the cars were was getting expensive and on the other hand simultaneously there was like a highest number of deaths that is like in in the year 1972 there were like 3600 deaths caused by the motorized vehicle and people were enraged by the fact that those street used to be like public spaces where everyone had the equal access but now the access was restricted and people were dying so out of those 3600 people most of them were children and then there was a huge movement by the local people it's called pardon my the Dutch pronunciation it's called kinder mode stop the kinder mode yeah so basically I'll translate in English so I mean sorry it's like a stop the children murder so basically they were seeing the cars or the motorized vehicle as the killing machines they they literally used to call them a killing machine yeah that's the one of the representational picture so so you see how this the change is so this is the people's participation or the citizen participation can make that change happen because like if you I mean so we get a lot of delegations from the other countries and and they they they they say I mean when we take them on the tour and and they are like you know you all what what you're saying you know it makes sense but our city is not Amsterdam because Amsterdam looks more like a historical city it looks very very well preserved and all but but what what matters is so this was not the case all the time infrastructure that we see now the convenience that we see now for the biking infrastructure is was not there always but that was like forced that that was the result of decades long fight of by the citizens this this is the kinder mode this the protest was in other places as well but center was in Amsterdam because they were like a lot of but but this is the 3600 people death was across another land not only in Amsterdam this was also this picture you see so in the last bottom last picture that's a John Lennon I hope you know this is this was rocks this rock star and he came here and you see like a bike in his bedroom so this there's one of the famous hotel in Amsterdam and so so you see so this change is how the citizens is influencing the change they deserve okay sorry I forgot to ask you about your background but that's more of a technical planning thing I'll just skip that one for now also that's really important especially for me why this this the you know the biking is like a fish in the water for the Dutch people because not only people make it as a part of life or the culture but also the influential people make sure that they're seen as seen on the bike so this is the Prime Minister of Netherlands so what that does is that give the strong message that as I told you initially that the in India we look down upon the cyclist as they are like a poor people who cannot afford any other medium of transportation and that's why they use but what this does is that the influential people driving that the for example John Lennon the Prime Minister of or the other other influential people riding a bike makes a point that it's it's not only about the status but it's about the culture that we develop and and it's about the sustainability Lins is going to talk about this one but I had this thing so I would like to conclude here with this question here so you see the two news articles here one is says the Amsterdam becomes the cycling capital of the world on the other hand the car ownership in the Netherlands is increasing to the highest level and that's the interesting thing so so in in India when when we talk about the biking so usually we don't talk about the positive sides of the biking but this is what goes as a meme around you know people talk about it so basically they argue that the biking is not healthy so now here I would like to leave you with these two questions oh sorry oh I can't go back with this one yeah so now what's going wrong so what what is basically happening though the cycling is the answer sorry Netherlands is considered as the cycling heaven still we see the rise in the car ownership and also this this this kind of like a growth mindset where we we want to have the higher and higher higher economic growth so that economy prospers and that's the false assumption yeah so what what this demands is is like we we need more like interdisciplinary people people coming from a very diverse disciplinary background to contribute to the cycling research so that you we can put more holistic understanding of the biking because the till now the entire transportation domain is looked as a pipeline and more of a very like a through the eyes of the traffic engineers and is developed by the eyes of the traffic engineers and yeah from here Lindsay will take over and thank you for the attention and we'll take the questions after Lindsay's presentation thank you so we've had Vika's talk a little bit about cycling history in the Netherlands how the Netherlands actually became the sort of Nirvana of cycling as it's often described but I'm kind of here to ruin everything because my PhD goes over looking at Dutch cycling culture from a bit of a critical perspective so I think first up the best place for cycling in the world yes it is but does that mean it's good which means it's good right is it though I hate to ruin everything but yes it's good relative to ever else in the world but on a relative scale you know that's saying okay you come from Dallas Texas you come from New York City where there's barely any cycle lanes somewhere like Amsterdam is going to look like paradise because you have protected bike lanes because you do have a high modal share but when it comes to being objectively good you know cycling is still a minority modal share in the Netherlands and cars still remain dominant in both traffic design and engineering and also to an extent in public policy although lease cycling has a seat at the table which invigorate very great many other countries such as the UK where I'm from it doesn't so at the moment the Netherlands is approximately tied with Denmark for the highest rates of cycling in the world significant investment occurs annually both in construction of new cycling infrastructure like the underwater bike parks just over in Amsterdam as well as expansion and maintenance of existing cycle infrastructure modal shares approximately 25 percent of all total trips as a total of trips not necessarily of distance and that's one of the highest shares in the world about tied with Denmark repeat myself but what's the problem this isn't an exhaustive list but while cycling rates in the Netherlands are indeed the highest in the world cycling does still remain a minority modal share secondly Dutch law mandates the use of cycle paths wherever they're available which means road riding is illegal which means if your cycling infrastructure is inadequate legally you have to use it no matter how busy no matter how congested it is when you've got cars to one side which are using up the majority of the road space and what this also means the fact that the Netherlands does have extensive cycle infrastructure is in conscious places like Germany the UK and even some place in America there exists relatively little pro cycling advocacy at least nothing that might be considered radical due to almost a sense of complacency particularly from the government which is we are the cycling nation we export our expertise worldwide what do we have to do better not really a huge deal so it's like because cycling is enabled even though it's not necessarily prioritized and planning there's sort of a lack of the radical pressure that there was throughout the 1970s and the 1980s to actually improve and change things so we've got to get on to why that is and this graph here is from one of the uh from one of the studies which I reference extensively at master's level which was John Putcher and Ralph Bruehler's making cycling irresistible from 2008 now what this shows is average daily kilometers cycle relative to 1952 with 1952 being the peak at 100 and then you've got the scale going down to 2008 so this isn't completely up to date but the picture is more or less the same with the exception of the COVID pandemic from which an awful lot of the research hasn't actually come out yet so what we can see here is in 1952 if cycling was at 100 percent of its historical model share at the idea of of cycling rates in the Netherlands it got down to a little bit less than 40 percent of that peak and in all of the advocacy all of the campaign stopped the kind of mod all the investments in cycling structure has only managed to get it up to about 50 percent again of its historic peak and it stayed more or less level there for the last 40 years at this point so the big question the big headline question why is this well in a word cars but I think we should probably drill down to that a little bit more when it comes to cycling oops that's a bit back no no peace sorry I haven't done a presentation a while so as I mentioned earlier while the Netherlands does have a relatively high model share of cycling at 25 world leading the model share of cars is approximately double this is an enormous amount of investment goes into highways goes into car parking and I can speak to this personally by the fact that I work as a side job as a feats courier in Amsterdam and while Amsterdam does have cycling structure and cycling is very much enabled by the design of the city by the design of the streets whenever you're using a bike which sort of doesn't fit into the mold of a typical Dutch bike which is you know a spads feed so you've got the coast break you've got you know carrying racks planners of a specific size you kind of realize what the limitations of this infrastructure are for instance if you have a back feeds there's a there's only a few places you're actually allowed to park that because there's about a model of feeds it isn't really included in the thought of like well what kind of cycles you need to accommodate for when it comes to cycle parking so we ended with sort of shortcomings that in a way are sort of rendered invisible by the fact that cycling does have a place of somewhat prestige relative to other countries in the Netherlands but there's still at the end of the day a fair amount that's being obscured by the fact that the Netherlands is a cycling country but it used to be much more of one and this is sort of a topic of interest to me because when you're looking at how to develop a cycling country in the culture in the UK for instance Netherlands comes up constantly as a reference point it is the country which pretty much every other government of the other country points towards is order to say well this is the example we should be following this is the country which has got it right and credit regret it is due you know you look at this even on just relative terms the rates of cycling in the Netherlands are double that of the UK in terms of distance cycle per person per day and cycling is approximately 2% of trips in the UK where it's 25% here so yes the Netherlands has got things right but that doesn't mean it's perfect and one of the biggest concerns to me one of the biggest aims that I'm in terms of research is well has the actual progress that the Netherlands has made and arresting the client of cycling and making it part of the transport infrastructure has that actually prevented the rates of cycling from growing and reaching back to their historic highs which particularly in light of climate change and need to drive a mobility shift away from cars towards cycling again because the bike is a very efficient machine it takes about 1% the resource to make a bike as it does a car that's become more important than ever so this sort of brings me to the next point which is where else is looking at building a cycling culture and where else is perhaps taking a bit of a different tax which the Netherlands historically has so excuse me if we do a little bit of rearranging of the Dutch flag not like that I'm talking about cycling not farmers France so Paris in France at the moment has had a new government come in over the last few years which has made a very big point to prioritize cycling over car travel and while there are some streets in Amsterdam which historically were open to cars and no longer are whenever you travel around the center of Amsterdam particularly in the sort of work I do as a feed scroll you see an awful lot of streets which are historic cobblestone narrow streets on which cars are still allowed what they're doing in Paris is actually completely blocking off roads cars entirely they're not building dedicated cycle infrastructure they're saying this road which used to be for cars is now just for bikes emergency access yes that's fine but if you have a car nope you're not allowed and that's sort of a bit of an interesting difference in approach versus the Netherlands where they approach here has been we're going to have this road four lanes for instance you look at somewhere like you look at somewhere like the road the university of Amsterdam sits on you've got four lanes of cars and then you've got two small bike paths either side and what that says to me is that cycling has in a way become subsumed to this mindset of traffic engineering it's just one modal shared needs to be accommodated for it's got to have its place but then cars have got to have their space and that means that the share that the modal share of cycling is sort of frozen in place by the design of the infrastructure itself because you've got all that road space which cars are allowed to use bikes legally prohibited from doing so and if you don't fit on the bike path if you've got an electric bike you've got a backfeet if you've got much other than you know the stad speed standard which the infrastructure is designed for you haven't really got a place so Paris is a very interesting example to me because they are looking at what the Dutch have done historically what the Dutch government has done in relation to cycling and saying well how do we improve on that how do we drive a mobility transition from nothing to you know making a relatively car-free city the 50-minute city as it frequently comes up has and it's interesting how starting from relatively little as Paris has has actually driven a more radical approach than we're currently seeing in the Netherlands which is very much just sort of like an evolution on what already exists so my point of interest at this point is well how do we change that you know how do we get back to the historic share of cycling that was seen in the Netherlands at its peak in 952 from where we've been for the last 40 years which is this plateau of cycling rates with modal share barely growing with distances remaining relatively the same and as I say we've got the climate change to deal with cars are a major driver of that not just in direct use but in their manufacturing disposal and the entire life cycle chain and as much as it's made about electric cars they still consume an awful lot of energy they serve enormous embedded energy so they're not a solution either so in my mind we have to get cycling back up to that historic modal share we need to displace the car not just accommodate it along with cycling into a scheme of transport we've got to become in a way a cycling nation before a car nation whereas at the moment as much as the Netherlands is friendly towards bike it's also friendly towards cars a little bit too much if you ask me so that sort of is what I just talked about but this is the point I kind of want to leave with which is this last bottom point here the first tarmac roads were built under pressure from cycling groups they were not built to accommodate cars there's a wonderful book out there literally called roads are not built for cars going over this but this infrastructure this road infrastructure which is now dominated by cars was originally designed and built for bikes so I think it's about time we start looking at how to take it back and that's me