[CorbenDallas]

Amsterdam resident here. Such a good infrastructure and laws for the bycyclists make them not giving a single shit about the way they are actually driving their bycicles. And their behaviour and driving style is often very offensive to both pedestrians and car users. So it's not that straight and black and white.

[DavidHm]

Former Amsterdam resident here.

I feel a large part of this is the frustration with all the tourists just randomly wandering on the bike lanes without a care in the world.

It doesn't justify the behaviour, but it does explain it a little bit.

[mpol]

That is mostly just Amsterdam. In the rest of the Netherlands this behaviour is being frowned upon.

And it is often not the Dutch people. Half the people in Amsterdam is tourists.

[sambe]

In Amsterdam at least, it is certainly not tourists who create most of the problems. Tourists are just a nuisance, usually clueless and going very slow and massively in the minority despite the overall popularity of the city.

Dutch cyclists are substantially more likely to be running red lights without looking, at speed. They are more likely to be using their phone - meandering all over the path - or at night without lights. Stopping or turning without signalling - without checking over their shoulder - or pulling onto a cycle path without looking. There's also just as much nuisance cycling from groups of students two or three bikes wide having a social event during rush hour as there is from tourists wobbling around trying to figure out where they are going.

This is a familiar pattern: exactly the same as car drivers, people think being experienced means you can get away with being lazy and/or selfish. Then just blame "those other people" for the problems.

[mcv]

Amsterdam cyclists certainly have a tendency to consider traffic rules more as suggestions than hard rules, but there's still a huge difference between the kind that runs a red light because there's clearly no crossing traffic, and the kind that runs a red light on a dangerous intersection without watching while on the phone.

It's a minority, but I regularly encounter cyclists who clearly want to die. The most blatant example was a mother who was trying to direct her children to ride against the direction of traffic between a bike lane and two car lanes that just came from the A10 (presumably because she had to take the next road left and didn't want to cross the busy street twice).

[mrsuprawsm]

Cycling without lights and texting while driving is only really dangerous to the cyclist in question though, not really for other cyclists.

Turning without signalling is a bit of an annoyance though, I run into that fairly often.

Kids cycling two by two is also frustrating because you can't overtake, but it isn't directly dangerous.

The fact that cyclists here in NL can break the rules with impunity and still stay pretty safe is probably a consequence of how good our infrastructure is, imo

[simongray]

Same exact situation in Copenhagen. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only cyclist who respects red lights.

[CorbenDallas]

Nah. Guy with bunch of very small kids on his bicycle crossing on red without throwing even a quick look is not a tourist - I'm living in Amsterdam for five years now and that's enough to understand that :)

[zelos]

I notice that whenever I visit Amsterdam. I love cycling in the Netherlands, but the cyclists are awful.