Lloyd,

While I often agree with your positions --- I am wondering if you are trying to provoke a flame war with your comments in this posting.

Please note the significant differences in the two countries geography, size being the most prominent.

The second, well the article has the mention itself "Holland is a country without hills, and the popularity of the bicycle is attributed to this fact.", Maybe we can jokingly say the same about Saskatchewan but not many other places in Canada.

Michael

However, Michael, we cannot disregard some pretty awful decisions we have made as a country as far as transportation is concerned. Despite whatever choices others have made.

One cannot deny that the trolley and train systems that were in the U.S. only around 50 years ago were only torn up to replace roads because of funding from the automobile companies. These systems were wonderful and were great means of transportation for the masses. Had these systems been kept in place I wonder where we would be on oil prices, emissions, and the like.

I think that was Lloyd's intention for this post. By looking at other's decisions and the results we are able to better understand our own.

"One cannot deny that the trolley and train systems that were in the U.S. only around 50 years ago were only torn up to replace roads because of funding from the automobile companies. These systems were wonderful and were great means of transportation for the masses"

I'm not old enough to have seen these first hand, but am always amazed at the amount of old rail we used to have, and is now houses and businesses.

I have to ask though, if these were so wonderful, why did we tear them up?

So people could ride in an non air conditioned car listening to maybe AM radio? Was that so much better than taking a train that people in mass quit riding the train? I find that a bit hard to believe that is the sole reason.

Was the train overpriced? overcrowded? always late? I think there has to be at least a bit more to the story, but have never heard what it is.

AbbyJ

If you note I'm not arguing with Lloyd's intentions in submitting this posting, though you provide a kinder and clearer set of statements than Lloyd's original comments. Just to clarify I happen to agree with your statements and (hopefully Lloyd's intentions) on the transportation issue.

My concern is that Lloyd has made the post less receptive to others because of the tone/style in which he addresses the transportation history. I am aware of the removal of trams, etc was a detriment, but to compare Holland's and our transportation history without addressing the geography concerns could be be seen as naive at best.

Michael

As I understand it, there was a concerted effort by a combination of the automobile, real estate and the oil industries, assisted by the advertising industry, to destroy the US train and street car systems. They captured local governments and national legislative seats, assigned themselves subsidies and taxes, rewrote laws and so forth to drive the rail transport into the ground. It was also tied up with a shift of factories and workers from the centers of cities to the outskirts and the dispersion of what had previously been a highly unified and organized labor force. There is a book called Marxism and the Metropolis edited by Tabb which discusses aspects of this, and I am sure that there are many other sources as well.

I notice the old "counter-argument" that the Netherlands is small and flat but (name other country here) is not surfacing again. I think this is just a canard, basically.

The "small" part seems to assume that bike trips are assumed to be the regular choice for trips from one end of the country to the other. I am pretty sure that very few Dutch actually do this and if they do, it is just for recreational touring, the same as with people in (much) larger countries like Canada or the US. The fact is that bikes are overwhelmingly used for short-distance travel within towns and cities and somewhat less for trips between towns and cities that are located near to each other. Otherwise, the (excellent) train network, as well as buses, are heavily used for intercity travel.

The same underlying conditions -- i.e. sufficient density -- exist in most of the north-eastern US, coastal California, and at a smaller scale, in urban areas elsewhere in the US, as well as in much of southern Ontario and the Montreal area, and again, in smaller urban areas elsewhere in Canada. We could well have had a similar balance in transportation choices had we in North America taken the enlightened decisions the Dutch took way back when. Nothing in the nature of our physical environment forced us to make the choices we did and nothing forces us to maintain our current infrastructure imbalance into the future.

As for the flatness, if you have ridden in Amsterdam or other Dutch canal cities, you know you have to get used to the continual effort involved in the up-and-over ride you get with canal bridges. From my experience, this is no huge difference from biking in Montreal (negotiating hills between the river's edge and inland, and the hill between downtown and the main populated parts of town) or Ottawa (some hills in certain neighbourhoods only); maybe Vancouver and San Francisco are noticeably hilly in parts, as is the Washington DC area, but this is no impediment to someone who is used to biking and the hilliness is not much more of a problem than Dutch canal bridges. Sure, the flat centre of North America is more spread out, but there again, the cities are dense enough and probably in general, if Winnipeg is any indication, flat enough for easy biking. And this is also true for many other east coast cities such as New York (Manhattan in particular).

As for weather, the Dutch (like the Danish) get the North Sea winds that are a curse if you're biking into them, and a boon if they're at your back. Not much difference from any other place I've biked in. And of course, people will bring up the (aagh!) COLD and SNOW we get in Canadian winters as proof positive no-one could possibly bike in the winter. Neither is a real impediment in itself. You dress for the cold as you do for any other outdoor activity, including walking -- and winter city Canadians are used to doing so --, and as anyone who has lived in an especially wintery city knows, most of the time in a typical winter, the weather is quite bearable and, therefore, bikeable.

There are two things to keep in mind about snow and ice: one is that as with cars, bikes do better if equipped with proper winter tires; the other is that much of the bad conditions is due to the mess cars make of the roads, creating semi-packed pie-dough snow out of snow that normally would be easy to ride through, and compressing snow on the pavement into hard, slippery ice. With fewer or no cars on the roads, or with a mature network of bike paths, this problem would be much reduced and the plowing teams would indeed have a much easier time of it and could get more done if they only had to plow for bike traffic and essential public transit and commercial traffic, instead of for space-hogging private cars. Remember that the Netherlands and Denmark also experience freezing temperatures through much of the winter and have to deal with the same kinds of snow and ice problems, though with somewhat less snow than some winters in some Canadian cities, but the cycle commuters there don't wimp out just because of that.

as an inhabitant of the netherlands I agree with Christopher Miller.. most bike journeys are less than 5km (say 10 to 15 minutes at most), just to get down to the shops, to school, to work or wherever you are going...

and adding something that made me laugh a bit: it says a bike for every 2,5 inhabitants.. owadays it's 2,5 bikes for every inhabitant (I own 2 bikes, one old one for going out, so if it gets stolen or broken it doesn't really matter, and a new one for getting around)

I miss tulip mania myself.

Yes, there was a tremendous amount of rail infrastructure in the US that was destroyed during the 1940s - 1960s. But no, it was not a conspiracy of wealthy auto companies. The population simply preferred automobiles.

Think about it: in a society dominated by rail, in which few people owned cars, how could the auto industry simply overpower the rail industry? Where would they get the money to do this, when theirs were the smaller and weaker businesses?