But there is a bigger issue at hand here that I do not seem addressed by any of the commentators so far.

Let me start with a prediction. In a few decades it will be considered bad manners or even illegal to leave private property in public spaces. Wether it is a car, bicycle, a boat, a billboard or whatever.

With our ever growing wealth we tend to own more stuff. That is how our consumer society is arranged after all: buy, consume, own. Sharing, renting and public property are getting more popular, but are certainly not the norm.

All that stuff takes up public space rather than private space. A selfish act by the material man. It is just cheaper to leave stuff out there rather than to hire shelter for it (I do so for my bike, costs me €100 a year).

If you want to be nice and considerate, you should not park your bike in the street but find paid shelter for it. The city of Amsterdam has projects to increase such spaces and you can sign up, petition for them or start one yourself.

Most bicycles are like cars. They just stand still and occupy public space 23 out of the 24 hours in a day. The rest of the time they are just a waste of scarce materials and public space. Rent and share is the answer. I would therefore like to promote not to leave your bike (or anything) in public for long and use it most of the time.

What is really antisocial is to leave a bike (no matter what size) in public space and hardly use it. For that reason I recently sold my second bike which was just standing there with a flat tire in a rack in the street. Waiting for the rare occassion for when I have guests staying over or when my main bike is in maintenance. I will just rent one from now on in those circumstances.

That is why projects like the Velib’ in Paris are very good. Many people do not really care what bicycle they drive, as long as it works and it brings them to their destination. But thousands of those crappy bikes in the streets of Amsterdam amount up to a lot of mess. These people could and should all be using Velibs. No maintenance and an extremely low nominal fee.

In Amsterdam (where the sticker in question was stuck) the bakfiets might have had some status associated with it for a short couple years, between the hippie alternative period and the current bourgeois boring period. At this point they’re just vehicles and I see everybody from hippies to “yuppies” to Moroccan moms riding them. Any status has long since evaporated as have idealistic reasons to ride one type of bike or another.

But your rolling up of all that preconceived and angry social commentary (basically bigotry) into such conveniently insulting descriptions is frankly amazing.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the bakfiets. I think it’s a cool bike. What I absolutely fucking *hate* is the people who tend to ride them (in Leiden anyway): smug yuppie parents.

Urgh! I loathe yuppie parents, with or without bakfietsen.

I should explain to our American friends. Here in the Netherlands, and especially the more affluent Randstad, the bakfiets is a status symbol. It’s ‘green’, but it’s also significantly more expensive that a simple bike with a child-seat front and back. Because don’t kid yourself, Henry, thinking that if a parent didn’t ride a bakfiets he or she would drive a car instead. Not in Leiden, nor in Amsterdam. A car needs parking space, insurance, petrol and what have you.

Now, my parents, rest their souls, never had a car. They didn’t even have a driver’s license (neither do I, by the way). So how did they move around with three kids in tow? Why, by bike of course. With kiddy seats. Or public transport. My dad rode his bike to work for more than forty years. Not because he was ‘green’ or of some cultural subgroup, but because the bicycle was simply the cheapest and most convenient way to get to work. These modern yuppie parents in their bakfietsen though.. You’d think they bloody *invented* bicycling with kids.

I really like the bakfiets, though. It’s a cool bike. It’s the people who own them who get up my nose. Point in case; last week I walked past a rather expensive (private) music school in Leiden. It’s where all the toffeenosed hot potato ‘rents send their preschool kids to bang on triangles and such (as opposed to the municipal music school where kids can learn to play an instrument for half the price). The pavement was literally *littered* with bakfietsen. There must’ve been at least a dozen, if not more of them. So many, in fact, that you could not walk on the pavement, or even on the bicycle path next to it to pass. I had to venture into the fucking road. Thoroughly annoyed I checked around the corners. The residential streets next to the musicschool had lovely empty pavements. Would it be too much to ask of yuppie mamma to park her bakfiets a hundred yards away from her destination and *walk* those last few yard instead of blocking the pavement for pedestrians and bicyclists alike? Apparently Precious was too delicate for that. But don’t dare to complain, because *they* are GREEN and environmentally friendly and not in a car, so don’t dare to complain, you yobbo prole!

I almost wish these antisocial bitches *had* bought a Chevvy instead of those bakfietsen. They would be just annoying with a car, I’m sure, they would no doubt park on the pavement as well, but at least they wouldn’t be so smug about about it. Being ‘green’ doesn’t give you the right to block the path. A bakfiets is a cool and practical bike, and if you’ve got the money for it, more power to you. But park it in such a way that you don’t hinder other cyclists or pedestrians, and don’t assume that because you’re such an obvious cool and environmentally conscious parent that this suddenly absolves you from observing traffic rules (I swear, give a mother a bike with two child seats and she’s careful in traffic, but let her put those kids in a sturdy wooden box and suddenly she’s invincible! The blitheness I’ve observed.. But that’s another rant for another day)

So yes, I grinned at that sticker. Not mine, though, because I happen to think that damaging or defacing another person’s property is even more rude that blocking the pavement.

But every trend has it’s backlash and now they’ve achieved a bourgeois reputation. Some see bakfietsen as the SUV’s or minivans of Amsterdam. But, hey, parents are always an easy target for those without young kids around. It’s very difficult to be “cool” with babies around.

Still, I suspect I would not be very polite to someone I caught stickering my bakfiets.