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by wpietri
1398 days ago
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And my understanding is that this is a historically recent development, yes? That this bike friendliness comes from a conscious shift and a lot of hard work in the last few decades? I saw a lecture a while back by the head of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, who spent some months in Amsterdam and talked about this. It was inspiring to think how much was possible here with relatively modest changes. Changes which seem even more possible with the pandemic, as a bunch of streets here got converted to low-traffic roads. |
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The infrastructure and safety comes from a conscious shift and a lot of hard work, roughly starting in the 1970s. But cycling used to be the predominant mode of personal transportation until well into the 1960s; the average Dutch person simply couldn't afford a car until then. There are films of throngs of bicyclists completely blocking the road for cars, purely by overwhelming numbers. There were campaign films "educating" bicyclists about "their proper place on the road".
(A short, easy example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTcQ9tSyUCs . It's a commercial, it's message is "It's no fun driving a car in Amsterdam; bring a bicycle!")
Bicycle-safe infrastructure was as much about clearing the main road for motorists, as it was about making bicyclists safer, and relatively speaking, bicycles have dwindled in importance since the country started building bike-safe infrastructure; correlation, not causation.
So I'm a bit uncomfortable when people mythologize the infrastructural revolution of the 1970s. Yes, impressive work was done. But it happened within a specific cultural and economic context that doesn't exist anymore.