This includes raising awareness in adults about how crucial they are to a cycling-friendly environment. By working with their local divisions, the Fietsersbond has developed maps identifying “safe drop-off” or “kiss-andgo” zones: areas where parents are encouraged to drop off their children and allow them to walk or cycle the final distance on their own.
Reichert is also quick to advise that while most Dutch kids complete their practical cycling exam by 12, the Fietsersbond’s work with these kids does not end then and there. They continue their work into high school, emphasizing that it’s not only about learning how to cycle, but also how to behave in traffic, with a focus on behaviors more common in teens.
Looking ahead, Reichert says that in the coming years there will be a focus on directing their marketing to young people, with a campaign highlighting the Fietsersbond’s education programs and teaching them about the inherent health benefits connected to cycling. She also notes that it is high time the Dutch start celebrating what a remarkable cycling culture they have. “I think it’s important to showcase that what we have is quite special. It’s been repeatedly pointed out to us, and we want to commemorate in some way,” she explains. The first idea on the list: lobbying UNESCO to get cycling identified as a key element of the Netherlands’ national identity, because it is something the Fietsersbond and many other Dutch people are—or at least should be—incredibly proud of.
Reaching Seattle’s Next Generation of Riders
As more and more North American cities begin investing in budding networks of cycling infrastructure intended for all ages and abilities, the conversation has shifted to how leaders, advocates, and community organizers can complement their efforts with education and outreach programs aimed at the next generation of riders. Finding a realistic and relaxed environment in between the classroom and the real world can be a significant challenge, but is absolutely essential for getting people who are hesitant about cycling to give it a try.
Steve Durrant—a Seattle-based landscape architect and vice president of Alta Planning + Design—was visiting Copenhagen in 2014 when he encountered just such a safe space: one of their bustling Trafiklegepladsen (“traffic playgrounds”), complete with painted streets, roundabouts, traffic lights, road signs, and pedestrian crosswalks. “It was in the fall, and it was a crappy weekend day, and I was thinking, ‘Well great, I’m not going to be able to see anyone actually using it,’” he recalls vividly. “But it was full. There were all sorts of kids and families in there, really tiny kids, and it was really inspiring to see.”
As a certified instructor for the League of American Bicyclists, Durrant immediately recognized the power of such an immersive and experiential teaching space. “Usually what happens is that we find a parking lot, take tennis balls or traffic cones, mark out a route, and say, ‘Imagine this is a street,’” he explains, admitting that most students have difficultly visualizing a few parking stalls as a real-life street. “Especially for kids,” he acknowledges. “Just watching them attempt to make use of a space like that is really complicated.”
Upon returning to Seattle, Durrant didn’t have to wait long for an opportunity to channel this newfound inspiration and build what might be North America’s first “traffic garden.” While working on the site design for a new Northeast Seattle headquarters for Cascade Bicycle Club, one of the nation’s largest bike clubs, he proposed that one be built in an adjacent alleyway, and the White Center Traffic Garden opened in the spring of 2016 as a teaching space for their educational programs. While it wasn’t nearly the scale and scope he would have hoped, it did lay the groundwork for a larger, more extensive project in a south Seattle park a few months later.
One of Cascade Bicycle Club’s more virtuous and fruitful programs is the Major Taylor Project (MTP), an after-school program that hopes to empower youth from diverse communities through bicycling. “They had been approached by King County Parks about a little-used park in a neighborhood just south of Seattle, in White Center, and wanted to activate part of it,” explains Durrant, who suddenly found himself with the blank canvas of two tennis courts that had been made obsolete by the opening of a new tennis center nearby. “There were two foundations [the YES! Foundation and the White Center Community Development Association] that had money ready to get into a community-building project like this,” he says. “And Cascade Bike Club was ready to provide the services. So we just rolled into it.”
Providing his professional services in exchange for promotional consideration during the Cascade Bicycle Club’s varied annual events, Durrant transformed those two abandoned tennis courts into a functioning miniature streetscape, intended to help kids learn the skills necessary to operate a bicycle and become familiar with roadway marking and signage. From the day the “traffic garden” opened, Durrant could see how quickly kids picked up on the intuitive design: “They just understood it. They didn’t need any orientation to what they were looking at. Stick to the right. Stay on the road. Stop at the crosswalks. It was pretty cool.”
With the addition of a reclaimed shipping container to serve as an ad hoc storage and maintenance area, the White Center Traffic Garden has also served as a home base for local MTP participants. “A big part of what they’re doing there is trying to provide activities that help kids realize their potential as leaders,” describes Durrant. “They’re looking to improve opportunities for people of color, people of lower income, and people who are historically underserved by city, county, and community services.”
By offering scheduled programming to these otherwise-excluded youth, organizers help them develop a unique set of skills, provide them with a place for valuable social interaction, and empower them with a sense of accomplishment about their abilities. Members are even able to earn their own set of wheels by dedicating a certain amount of their time to maintaining and fixing the bikes, and teaching the younger children to ride. The program runs the length of the school year, culminating in participants riding the STP—the 320-kilometer (200-mile) ride from Seattle to Portland that Cascade sponsors each summer.
Figure 10-3: Since opening in October 2016, the White Center Traffic Garden in south Seattle has welcomed the city’s next generation of riders. (Credit: Steve Durrant)
According to Durrant, delivering a (literal) safe space for cycling is particularly important in those poorly served communities with little to no infrastructure and very few people on bikes. “The traffic playgrounds, especially in those contexts, give even the more mature and bold riders a place to practice their skills,” he claims, pointing out the sad fact that drivers in those areas are less likely to be aware of cyclists. “They can learn what the rules of the road are, in a space where the hazards are much less severe.” This has the added benefit of developing road users who are much more aware of their surroundings and are careful never to treat getting from A to B too casually: “It’s important that they learn those skills as a cyclist, but also as a pedestrian, and—maybe even more importantly—as a motorist.” As an added bonus, the traffic gardens also create a latent demand for better bicycle infrastructure, helping parents and children alike realize they would rather be separated from traffic than riding in it.
In addition to the Major Taylor Project, the traffic garden will be utilized by the Cascade Bicycle Club’s various classes, summer camps, and after-school programs, as well as being part of a dedicated cycling curriculum for five nearby (elementary, middle, and high) schools. Predictably, the reaction from the local community has been incredibly supportive, but Durrant was truly taken aback by the remarkable response on social media after its opening was covered by a neighborhood weekly newspaper in October 2016. Since then, images of children joyfully negotiating the White Center Traffic Garden have spread to websites such as Next City, Fast Company, Planetizen, Inhabitat, Streetsblog, Clean Technica, Seattle Bike Blog, and BikePortland. As a result, he has been flooded with phone calls from across the country. “People seem to keep discovering it, one way or another, an
d so we’ve been getting contacted fairly regularly,” he explains. “I’ve received phone calls from at least twenty different communities, which means there are probably three or four hundred interested in some way. These are just the 10 percent that have bothered to make contact.”
But translating that interest and enthusiasm into another physical project has been a challenge, primarily because Durrant insists on sufficient funding to do it right. “I’m trying to hold the line on people having a decent construction budget, to do a really nice job of it,” he says, “because I think they will cheat themselves by low-balling it.” And while he had the great fortune of finding such supportive stakeholders early on in the process, Durrant believes it should be easy enough for advocates elsewhere to build such a coalition—as long as the benefits are clearly communicated. “It’s such a graphically obvious thing, when you see it, if you go out there and just watch, any weekend when there’s not a program going on. Some kid shows up, and they know exactly what to do,” he recollects fondly. “There’s just no question about it. Even if it’s their very first time on a bike, they understand it.”
When asked if he has any advice for community organizers interested in building their own traffic garden, Durrant is direct: “Find a great site with an avid owner who isn’t going to throw up administrative and bureaucratic barriers, and partner with agencies that are engaged and interested in making it happen.” The wonderful response he received, combined with the growing interest in bicycling as a mode of transport, has Durrant dreaming of taking his passion project nationwide. “I don’t think that’s an unreasonable dream to get a million dollars to build a hundred traffic gardens around the country,” he says. “I think a little bit of seed money would go a really, really long way.”
Gaining New Perspective from an Emerging Cycling City
While cities like Seattle begin the decades-long journey of rediscovering a culture amenable to cycling, residents of virtually every Dutch city now take for granted how comfortable cycling has been made. Fifty-plus years of fighting for and embracing the bicycle has made it so completely natural, so incredibly normal, that it is just something people do, without overthinking it. Cycling has become as unremarkable as walking, and it is only when the Dutch travel elsewhere that they truly appreciate how unique their people and places are.
“I remember surprisingly little of cycling as a kid, because it wasn’t a ‘thing.’ It’s just what we did,” recalls Lennart Nout, an urban mobility specialist and colleague of Angela van der Kloof at Mobycon. “I don’t have a lot of memories of walking. So I don’t have a lot of [memories of] cycling.” Nout’s earliest bike-related memory is of sitting on his dad’s bike’s back rack, insisting on facing backwards to watch the world go by. He began riding on his own two wheels at the tender age of four, including the two-kilometer trip to elementary school in central Rotterdam.
First riding side by side with his parents, then with his older sister, and eventually graduating to biking alone by age 11, Nout kept on pedaling into adolescence, enjoying the freedom it offered him and his friends, who weren’t counting down the days until they received a driver’s license like most of their peers in the Western world. “Teenagers cycle the most here, so it’s definitely very different,” he explains. “You would be very strange if you came to school by bus, public transport, or car.”
Figure 10-4: Cycling remains ubiquitous and normal among Dutch teens. No social stigma, no special gear, just autonomy and mobility. (Credit: Modacity)
It took a six-month, post-secondary exchange in Auckland, New Zealand, for Nout to gain a new perspective on where he was raised. “Then I realized that cycling really has an impact on, not just what you do in a day, but what the city looks like, where people live, and what you can get done in a day,” he says. “When things start to be annoying or inconvenient, you notice something is missing.” Puzzled by the way his colleagues would default to walking a kilometer or two to get where they were going, instead of using what he perceived to be a far more efficient way of getting around, he resolved to purchase a bike and begin cycling, despite a distinct lack of quality infrastructure. However, it didn’t take long for him to notice the strange looks from passers-by, and for the first time he was less a person on a bike and more a particular thing, something of note in other people’s day: a “cyclist,” part of a niche group.
Despite completing both an undergraduate and postgraduate degree in urban planning at the University of Groningen, only in hindsight does Nout comprehend how blind his compatriots are to how bikes contribute to a better built environment. “I don’t think the word bicycle was mentioned once in my studies,” he reveals. “That was a bit of an eye opener, because back then, Dutch universities didn’t really train cycling planners.” This realization was particularly stark in Groningen, where he could see the lack of similarities between “The World’s Cycling City” and other, more car-dependent towns nearby. “There’s such a notable difference,” he adds, “but nobody knows why, or how important that is.”
After acquiring his master’s degree in 2011, Nout decided to head back to Auckland to settle down with his partner Ruth, a native Kiwi. There, he found a niche as a cycling planner for transportation consultancy MRCagney—developing a new bike-specific unit that he pitched during his job interview—at a moment when the local and national governments were about to get very serious about cycling. “There was a lot more talk about cycling. Slowly, there were more people riding,” he recollects. “That’s when I realized how important it was. If you tweaked that one aspect, it could be the easiest win for changing the city.”
However, Nout recalls one specific incident in the summer of 2013 that provided the perfect illustration of how far Auckland’s militant bike culture still had to go. He and Ruth were out riding side by side one Sunday morning, wearing their regular clothes, no helmets, and skipping a couple of red lights along the deserted Ponsonby Road. They were spotted by one of the more zealous local cycling advocates, who was in the middle of a 60-kilometer (37-mile) ride and was sporting the obligatory carbon fiber, styrofoam, and Lycra. The next day, he called out Lennart and Ruth in a blog post on the Cycle Action Auckland website, claiming they were “ruining it for everyone else” and reinforcing the stereotype that cyclists are scofflaws who break the rules all the time. “That was really one of those moments where I was like, ‘Well, I’m not a cyclist. I’m just riding a bike,’” Nout remembers. “It was just because we were riding like we would walk. If you’re walking, you don’t wait for the lights when there’s nobody around. We just happened to be on bikes. For us, it was a nonevent. We didn’t even think about it.”
But this was at a time when Bike Auckland—the city’s current, more-inclusive advocacy group—was still called Cycle Action Auckland. Comprised predominantly of white, middle-aged men who’ve spent their lives fighting for bicycle rights, they were quick to pass judgment on anyone who could be seen as threatening their agenda. At the time, this included Lennart and Ruth. He was understandably frustrated by their willingness to accept painted bike lanes over physical separation. “Luckily, they’ve transformed themselves, and since transformed the conversation in Auckland. They’re now more a positive force,” he states reassuringly.
Since then, a coalescence of Bike Auckland changing their name and Auckland Transport, the local transit agency, hiring Kathryn King as walking and cycling manager has led to a sea change in perspectives on cycling in Auckland. Combine that “perfect storm” with $37 million (NZD) in local funding and $100 million promised by the national government in 2014, and Auckland had the beginnings of something quite special. And while maps and drawings of a separated cycling network demonstrated sure signs of progress, nothing did quite as much to put Auckland on the cycling map as the Te Ara I Whiti (“The Lightpath”), a spectacular, magenta-colored cycleway that converted a redundant motorway off-ramp into a memorable first piece of the network, featuring 300 sensor-controlled LED light poles.
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p; “That was the first time there was a positive story about a cycleway opening on the front page of the New Zealand Herald, because it was such an amazing photo,” recalls Nout. “There was literally nothing you could say that was negative about this project because it was so stunning.” As the crown in Auckland’s fledging system, the pink path is now being used by City engineers as an anchor to connect the radial routes. People go out of their way to ride the pathway, and it’s a safe place for children to learn to ride for the first time. Nout notes that it was the first uncompromising piece of infrastructure that was above and beyond what Aucklanders were expecting, and a positive step forward in a political climate in which getting out a positive story about cycling has been historically very difficult.
A combination of personal and professional reasons brought Lennart and Ruth back to the Netherlands in 2016, after Nout was offered a position working with sustainable-mobility consultants Mobycon. After a year or so renting in pricey Amsterdam, the pair decided to purchase a home in Leiden—a relatively small city of just 120,000 people, 50 kilometers (31 miles) to the southeast—but they definitely did not sacrifice quality of life for affordability. Thanks to the bike–train combination, Lennart and Ruth are perfectly mobile despite being car-free, traveling to four or five cities around the country on a typical week. Even in a smaller town like Leiden, the mobility options and quality of life afforded to them exceed those of most other places in the world. “It’s the little things. On a day-to-day basis, you don’t really notice it that much,” says Nout. “But noise is one of the biggest things. I’d never realized how quiet it is here. The city center is car-free, which makes it so peaceful and quiet.”
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