In News & Events on the Dutch Volvo website:

Bij Volvo staat veiligheid voorop. Niet alleen van de mensen in een Volvo, maar ook van iedereen eromheen. Daarom introduceren we nu de POCito: de Volvo onder de kinderfietshelmen.

Translation: At Volvo safety comes first. Not only for the people in a Volvo, but also of everyone around it. Therefore we now introduce the POCito: the Volvo amongst the children’s bike helmets.

Am I being simplistic in seeing this as essentially the same as Smith & Wesson introducing and promoting children’s bulletproof vests to protect them from the guns they make?

Volvo continues in their press release to explain that each year in the Netherlands 35 children under 12 die “in traffic”. They don’t qualify whether this gruesome statistic has anything to do with bicycles, but actually that’s fairly irrelevant: Deaths and serious injuries amongst children while cycling are almost entirely inflicted by automobiles. As Mikael Colville Andersen frequently comments: They’re conveniently “ignoring the bull in the china shop.”

Later in the same press release Volvo explains their promotion of mandatory helmet laws in the Netherlands. From a business perspective it’s the obvious choice. The Dutch city planners widely recognize the danger that automobiles present to other street users and have been working hard for decades to minimize it. The primary safety tactics include excluding and slowing automobiles, and separating autos from bicyclists and other road users. This has very successfully led to both the safest roads in the world and the highest cycling rates. Promoting or enforcing helmet use, on the other hand, has shown to reduce cycling rates while safety gains are debatable at best.

Though we should always strive for improvement cycling is already mighty safe here in the Netherlands. Let’s just briefly look at Amsterdam, the capitol city in rough numbers:

Thus…

As noted in an earlier post…

Heck, we can even go further and note that universal helmet use would indeed probably prevent death in a couple of those six yearly incidents, but certainly not all of them. And then there’s that other pesky problem: It’s been demonstrated that helmet laws and promotion decrease cycling rates and reduced numbers of cyclists increase the danger of cycling. So aside from deflecting some blame what does Volvo expect to accomplish through widespread helmet use?

Cartoon by Wulff Morgenthaler via Copenhagenize.

My excuses for the lack of precise numbers and supporting statistics; There’s an impatient toddler tugging on me and it’s time to head to the office. But I can assure you I didn’t pull the above facts out of a hat or sleeve. If you want to investigate further there are plenty of numbers to be found elsewhere in this blog and far more on David Hembrow’s excellent blog.

The question whether cycling is decreasing in popularity in Amsterdam or the Netherlands has been raised here several times. Each time the answer has been “No, transportation cycling is actually increasing here.” Today yet more statistics were listed in the Bike Europe trade website that show that bike use continues to rise.

from Bike Europe (via Fietsberaad though I couldn’t find it there) with my commentary mixed in:

AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands – The bicycle is the means of transport used most often in Amsterdam. Between 2005 and 2007 people in the city used their bikes on average 0.87 times a day, compared to 0.84 for their cars. This is the first time that bicycle use exceeds car use.

There are not many places in the world where bicycle use actually exceeds car use, and certainly no other capital cities. But it gets better…

In 2006 the inhabitants of Amsterdam engaged in some 2 million trips a day, an 8% reduction compared to 1990. This is due to the number of trips per person per day falling from 3.6 to 3.1. The number of transfers has fallen in the old city within the ring road in particular.

These seem to be the total numbers of trips, made by all means of transportation.

The number of trips by car, compared to 1990, has fallen in all districts (-14%), whereas the number of trips by bicycle has only risen within the ring road (+36%). The bike is used most often in the town centre (41% versus an average of 28%) and the car least often (10% versus an average of 28%). This can be attributed to the restrictive parking policies enacted here since the 1990s.

Not surprisingly the higher the density, the more bike use is favored. Thus where we live and the WorkCycles shops are the number of bicycle trips is at least four times as great as car trips.

‘Dienst Infrastructuur en Beheer’, the infrastructure department of the city registered approximately 235,000 car movements in both directions at the city centre in 1990; by 2006 this had fallen to 172,000, a decrease of over a quarter. Over the same period the number of daily movements by bicycle rose from 86,000 to over 140,000 (+60%).

Let’s keep up the good work so that in a generation cars will be an insignificant part of the traffic and street scene in Amsterdam.

These statistics about cycling just in from the Dutch RAI, “branch organization for mobility”…

There are 19.1 million two-wheelers in the Netherlands (and 16.4 million people). This includes 634,000 motorcycles and about 500,000 mopeds and scooters, thus about 18,000,000 bicycles. Of course could pretty much guess this just by looking at the bicycle covered streets of each town. Its obvious there are about as many bikes as people, and they’re mostly city/utility bikes that live outdoors.

The number of motorcycles has doubled since 1998. Having (also) ridden a motorcycle for many years I can take some guesses about the significance of this: The motorcycle has steadily lost its bad-boy image, becoming more accepted and mainstream. As traffic and parking worsen the motorcycle (like the bicycle) becomes a suitable alternative to driving a car.

The Dutch rode rode their two-wheelers a total of 19 billion kilometers, about 3 billion more than in 1998. That’s approximately 1200 kilometers per resident of all ages, shapes and sizes per year. Considering the population too young or otherwise unable to cycle, that’s an awful lot of kilometers per person. One could argue that the inclusion of motorcycles skews the statistics, but then there are only 1/30th as many motorcycles as bicycles.

Elsewhere the bicycle usage stats are separated. Here we see that the Dutch cycle, on average, 909km per year, which translates to 2.48km per head, per day. This has largely held steady since 1991, the earliest year shown in the chart. Thus, a definitive NO to the question posed in an earlier post “Are the Dutch replacing their bikes with cars”.

Below some more statistics I find interesting

Sales of new bicycles in the Netherlands in 2007 by type (x1000):
846____City bicycle
227____Child’s bike
141____Hybrid / trekking bike
89_____Electric bike
48_____Mountain bike
33_____Folding bike
14_____Racing bike
50_____Others
3______Unknown
1401___TOTAL

Average purchase price for a bicycle in the Netherlands in 2007:
€603____All bicycles including department stores
€709____Sold through bicycle shops

Length of bicycle paths and roads per province:
872_____Groningen
997_____Friesland
1183____Drenthe
1401____Overijssel
549_____Flevoland
2182____Gelderland
947_____Utrecht
2307____Noord-Holland (Amsterdam region)
2198____Zuid-Holland (Rotterdam, the Hague region)
680_____Zeeland
2793____Noord-Brabant
962_____Limburg
17071___TOTAL

If 17,000 km of nearly perfect bicycle paths and roads doesn’t sound so impressive then just look at a map of the Netherlands to see how small this country is.

Source: RAI vereniging. Read it for yourself here. In Dutch of course.

UPDATE September 2009: A new and very thorough study of the Dutch bicycle path network was recently completed. It was determined that the earlier figure of 17,000km was highly inaccurate. In fact it was determined by actually measuring the roads with modern electronics that it is approximately 29,000km. But if that isn’t incredible enough consider that that is only a measurement of the bicycle paths separated from auto traffic. Painted bike lanes, as most of the world regards as “bicycle infrastructure” were not even counted. If they did they’d basically have to include the entire Dutch road network.

The question of how many people die each year as a result of bicycle accidents in Amsterdam and Holland in general comes up periodically. I’ve usually thrown out the figure of “a handful per year” that I’d once heard. It turns out that this is about right. Toby Sterling, fellow Amsterdam resident and blogger whom I’ve never met did the research and compares it nicely with other countries and the statistics for murders in Holland as well.

Here’s Toby Sterling’s blog and discussion of bicycle accident deaths.

And Toby’s earlier post here.

Here are some quick excerpts though Toby’s original text is more fun to read. Basically the message is simple: despite extremely high rates of cycling and negligible helmet use the odds of being killed while cycling in the Netherlands are extremely low.

Rick Pepper of 11 Gear sent me this interesting barometer of how safe a city is. Using hidden cameras and cheap bicycles as bait, Mariano Pasik gauges crime in different neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. His hypothesis: the longer it takes for the bike to be stolen the safer the area is. Pasik now invites others to do the same in their cities to create a worldwide insecurity index.

Whether or not the bicycle test safety scale is adopted on a wider basis, Pasik’s films are entertaining in a sort of “real-world reality show” way. Eventual thieves pass the bikes numerous times, scoping them out, looking for locks or owners. Its pretty clear from the videos that the thieves are not professionals. Most just seem like opportunists rather than hardened criminals. Pasik suggests that they’re deliberating on the act, in a sort of internal conflict between good and bad.

Have a look at lapruebadelabicicleta