Anybody who has visited the Netherlands won’t be surprised to learn the Dutch are up to their ears in bicycles. But those bikes have now began to encroach on public space so much, municipal governments are left with few other options than to remove some of them by force.

Read more:
http://www.nrc.nl/international/article2482297.ece/So_many_bikes,_so_little_space

Dutch spending still rising…on bicycles
Mon Jan 25,

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Recession or not, the cycle-happy Dutch are still spending a lot of money on their bicycles — nearly 1 billion euros’ worth a year, in fact.

About 1.3 million bicycles were sold in the Netherlands last year, at an average price of 713 euros (623 pounds) each, an industry association said on Monday.

That led to total revenue of 950 million euros for the year, up 4 percent on 2008, the RAI Vereniging said. The per-bike price was also up 3.5 percent.

The country’s flat geography and high population density has made the bicycle one of the primary modes of transportation, with 18,000 km (11,180 miles) of cycle paths nationwide.

Statistics compiled by the International Bicycle Fund show a higher percentage of all trips is made by bike in the Netherlands than any other country in the world. According to Statistics Netherlands, in 2007 nearly one in four Dutch workers commuted by bike.

(Reporting by Ben Berkowitz, editing by Paul Casciato)

P. 115 reminds you that a reflector must not be blinking; the Dutch translation corrects this on p. 119 by stating that the tail light must be constant, not blinking. Logical, really, as a blinking reflector is a light, not a reflector.

P. 75 contains a quote which to me sounds misunderstood. It says: “ … a new development in the Dutch cycling infrastructure itself is to have the bike path right next to the road at intersections, since wider spaces between them … make it more difficult for drivers to see and yield to oncoming cyclists when making a right-hand turn. Currently, drivers have to practically turn around in their car to see if a cyclist is approaching – food for thought for other countries in the developmental stages of a cycling infrastructure”. The Dutch translation on p. 77 omits the intersections and translates oncoming cyclists as “naderende fietsers”.

The main reason why bike paths are separated from the road is to keep the two inequal contenders for road space out of each other’s hair. Both having their own roads, they have one less “enemy” to watch out for. And positioning the bike path somewhat further away from the road at intersections results in making it a regular crossing at right angles; this is shown often enough in Mark’s videos as seen on David Hembrow’s blog and on their YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=markenlei#g/u. Now if I were in a car turning right at an intersection and heading for a crossing with a bike path, I would say that spotting an incoming enemy at 3 o’clock requires less head turning than spotting the same enemy at 5 o’clock – which would be the case when the bike path runs directly parallel with the road.

There may be a translation hiccup here. “Naderende fietsers” are simply approaching, from any side. “Oncoming cyclists” as in oncoming traffic come up from ahead, not from behind – although as a non-native English speaker I may be wrong in this interpretation. But even then the statement still doesn’t make sense to me.

Just my 2 cents.

But seriously I also lived in Groningen for a couple years. That was fun and it’s a lovely, bike-centric city but I vastly prefer my life in “crime ridden” Amsterdam where kids play in the streets and women can walk safely through pretty much any neighborhood at night.