It’s been just over a year since we left London to move to the Dutch city of Rotterdam after 10 years of living in the British capital. The reasons for our move were many, and although we miss the roots we put down in London, overall we’ve settled into life here very quickly and easily.

The first 6 months was mostly spent getting settled into a new rented flat (twice the size of our London maisonette) and looking for our new permanent home, which we quickly found out was going to be this old little farm house in the middle of the Zuid Holland countryside.

We spend the next 3 months doing up the farm house and getting it into a state we could live in. We’ve been in for about 3 months now, it makes quite a change from living in the city.

“But how do you get to the city to work?” I hear you ask, good question, glad you asked it. A few weeks ago I tweeted my journey to work, but here I have a little more space to expand on it.

Being a sitting behind a computer at a desk while interacting with real people kind of a professional, I need to get to the office in the city everyday, and so that was priority number one for me. I was used to cycling 8 miles for an hour or so each way in London, so this wasn’t something I was afraid of, but it needed to be a realistic prospect. It turns out we’re about 14km from Rotterdam centre, which although doable is a tough call for me twice a day, so I banked on going multi-modal and mixing in a train trip via Gouda, two stops on the Intercity service from Utrecht.

Gouda is famous for its cheese, and to make cheese you need lots of cows and thus lots of farms. So my morning commute starts me off on a road across the polders between the farms. The road is narrow, single track, with passing places for vehicles, approximately 4 metres wide with water on either side and is pretty straight. The straightness combined with the narrowness means that it’s quite comfortable to ride along, vehicles can see and be seen from a long way off so there’s never a nasty surprise around the corner.

Morning traffic is mostly children cycling to school and people heading out to work from the houses along the road. It’s a through road, but makes up two sides of a square with two provincial roads, so it doesn’t make any sense to use it unless you are accessing property along it.

After a kilometre or two I get to the cycleway across the fields.

It looks (and is signposted) just like a regular side road, but the entranceway is only 2.5 metres across and the big blue cycle sign shows everyone that this road is only for bikes. Warning markings on the road warn traffic of the potential danger of bikes turning in or exiting from the cycleway, although there is no actual road hump/table.

This action shot shows the cycleway. It runs alongside the fields across to the village of Gouderak, linking our road with the village.

To get to Gouderak by car you have to go a longer way around, in principle there’s nothing from stopping this cycleway from having been a fullsized road (in fact it’s used by tractors to access fields) but if it was it’d mean that motor traffic from this direction would have to travel through the residential areas of Gouderak and would have a negative effect on the residents.

Like many villages in the area, Gouderak sits behind the dyke that keeps the river from the polders below.

Once through the houses, you emerge onto the dyke road through the village. This is the main road through the village, it is narrow and twisty with bad sightlines, but as you’d expect for a village street it has a 30kph speed limit and a brick surface that helps calm traffic.

Leaving the village, the surface changes to smooth asphalt with suggestion lines and red asphalt shoulders.

The suggestion lines have the result of visually narrowing the roadway to look singletrack, this is a common treatment in the region for dyke roads that carry motor and bicycle traffic to the villages and where road width is limited by the width of the dyke.

At the end of the dyke road we reach the Gouda ringroad which has a bi-directional cycleway running alongside it.

We join the cycleway and cross the ringroad at the roundabout. Bi-directional cycleways are common on out of town main roads where the cycleway can be physically separated from the roadway by a metre or more of verge, and there are no side turnings and only major junctions (roundabouts or light controlled junctions) with other roads to deal with.

Then we’re off ringroad cycleway and onto the city streets proper. Suggestion lines again but this time in an urban setting.

Overall this section is fine due to the low volume of motor traffic but it’s the worst part of my journey and would be much nicer if separate cycleways were added to each side of the road.

Note that trucks are banned from this road but only overnight (10pm til 6am) presumably due to night time noise.

Finally we reach Gouda train station and hunt for somewhere to park in amongst the sea of parked bicycles.

The journey is just over half an hour all in.

Many people I see cycling to the station cycle much shorter distances from within Gouda or from Gouderak, but there are many high school children cycling as far as myself or further from the villages to the school in Gouda. It is possible to drive and park at the station (€5 per day with a train ticket) but you have to approach the station on the main road from the other direction, the town side of the station has a minimal amount of paid on street parking.

5. Tile cycleway surfaces (klinkers) are not the best thing for riding on when it’s wet and autumnal. Especially not on thin racing tyres.

— Paul James (@pauljames)

November 4, 2014

The surfaces of the cycleways in Rotterdam are either smooth red asphalt or are made up street bricks.

Uni-directional cycleway tiled with street bricks, aka “klickers”.

Bi-directional cycleway surfaced with smooth asphalt.

The asphalt is amazing, but the bricks, when they’re uneven, or when it’s wet, then they’re “fun”. It’s a very uncertain surface.

Luckily, they’re gradually being phased out, hopefully before I end up on my arse one dark rainy night.

So, one of the main argument against cycle tracks is that they place the cyclist into the “left hook zone” at junctions. A cyclist going straight on is in danger of being hit by a left turning motor as the road positioning of the cyclist can not block the path of the motor vehicle before it makes its turn unlike a cyclist in the primary position in the main carriageway can.

Cycle tracks are of course used successfully in other parts of the World, so lets look at how the Dutch solve these problems and how we can apply this learning to the UK. The devil is as always, in the details.

At junctions, between major and minor roads, when we don’t need anything beyond give way priority and we have space, we bend the cycleway away from the major roadway to create a turning space between the two.

View the Vine

If we’re talking about the junction between a major road and an access road or driveway, then we continue the cycleway onwards unabated along with the pavement and make the gateway to the access road be the one to yield and deviate.

Let’s say you have a road profile that looks like this, with a cycleway and a footway on each side of the street separated from the roadway by a buffer/lamp post/traffic sign/rubbish bin/whatever space:

Then when it comes to allowing access from the roadway across the cycleway and footway, this is the profile that the Dutch build: 

See this location on Google Streetview

The first thing to notice are the steep curbs that require cars to cross the cycleway and footway at a walking pace. First the curb up from the roadway onto the buffer space, secondly the curb up from the cycleway onto the footway, and finally the curb down from the footway into the access road.

Not only is the angle from the road into the gateway extremely tight, but the vertical deflection is uncomfortable at anything above walking speed. Combine these two factors together and you pretty much guarantee that motor traffic moves slowly across the cycleway and footway.

Next notice the buffer space. This is used along the length of the street for the following:

• Tram/bus stops
• Trees
• Storage of miscellaneous street furniture
• Car parking
  
• Bike parking
• Space for turning into side roads
  
• Space for waiting to cross the road on foot/bike

Very useful, and multi-purpose, depending on the location along the street. The rule seems to be, if there’s nothing more important, throw in some space for parking.

So as you can see, this buffer space is supremely important to the makeup of the street.

In the UK, we often place the buffer space in the centre of the road between the traffic lanes. I guess the idea is that the most dangerous type of collision is the head on crash as the impact speed is potentially twice the speed limit, so if you can separate these vehicles you can lessen the likelihood of these occurring, when in fact what you do is encourage faster moving traffic.

Picture courtesy of Mark Treasure

For more about the UK situation, check out The Ranty Highwayman’s words and pictures on the subject from almost 2 years ago.

4. Salmoning (going the wrong way) appears to be a common & an accepted thing, especially on the uni-directional paths on wide boulevards.

— Paul James (@pauljames)

November 4, 2014

It’s a little surprising when you suddenly come face to face with a bike coming the wrong way along the cycleway and you have to duck back into the stream of bikes hopefully without cutting anyone up.

It actually turns out to be less of a problem than you’d think, the single direction cycleways on the wide boulevards that make up the city are wide enough for easy passing. Salmoners mostly seem to be taking shortcuts in places where they’d otherwise have to cross the road twice rather than travel a short distance the wrong way on the wrong path.

I fully expect that these salmoners know what they are doing, it’s quite hard to accidentally end up going the wrong way. Junctions always push you in the correct direction by using curved versus square corners, a square corner is just hard to turn around and so your subconscious knows that it’s not a correct way to go. Even when you get to the end of a bi-directional path, the centre white lines and the curbing stop you from accidentally turning into a salmon.

3. “Give way from the right” takes a little getting used to, especially when it appears to be optional to some people.

— Paul James (@pauljames)

November 4, 2014

Unlike in the UK where at an unmarked junction you give way to whoever is deemed to be going straight on along the more major of the intersecting roads, in the Netherlands you always give way to traffic coming from the right.

And unlike the UK where unmarked junctions are few and far between due to our love of white paint, they are the default on access roads and quite common on distributor roads in the NL.

Article 15

1. At road junctions, drivers must give priority to traffic approaching from the right.

2. The following exceptions exist to this rule:

a. drivers on unpaved roads must give priority to drivers on paved roads;

b. all drivers must give priority to tram drivers.

Trams are the exception, you don’t mess with trams.

What this means is that there are times when you are travelling straight on along a road but you have to give way to anything turning right from a sideroad into your path.

This has the effect of slowing traffic travelling along the road at junctions as they act like unmarked reverse priority mini-roundabouts (although in practice they are marked with a speed table).

When it comes to bicycles, it appears that either some cyclists and drivers don’t understand this rule of the road and inappropriately yield (or don’t yield) for each other, or it’s just that some drivers expect cyclists not to yield and so will wait for cyclists even when they actually have the right of way. This causes a little ambiguity sometimes, although usually with everyone yielding for each other rather than the other way around.

2. Everyone rides, people from every walk of life, but distances seem limited to 3km. Pedelecs increase this distance and are very popular.

— Paul James (@pauljames)

November 4, 2014

Rotterdam is a pretty multicultural place, it’s arguably the most multicultural city in the Netherlands, according to Wikipedia, nearly half the population is non-Dutch, and yet it’s quite clear that all sorts of people cycle. Old, young, male, female, Dutch, non-Dutch, I would argue that there’s less middle aged people cycling, and less men than woman. To me, as a place, it totally destroys the old “the Dutch cycle because of culture” canard.

In the city centre, cycling is still the fastest and best way to get around. Even with the excellent tram network and the overall central district being quite small (London west-end sized), many people I know cycle to get around the city, and not just for getting to work, but for going shopping and visiting friends etc. too.

A 15 minute tram ride can be easily ridden by bike in 10 minutes, so as long as the wind and rain hold off, it’s usually the better choice. If you are travelling further, then it’s less clear cut for most people and more will instead elect for the tram and metro.

Living out of the city but commuting into the centre, you get the usual urban cyclists like you find in London, as well as students and high school children heading to local destinations.

But then you also get men and women in suits going into town, many on electric assist bikes. The winds can be strong and harsh, so if you’re lucky you can find a pedelec to draft behind and piggyback off of their motor.

About 6 weeks ago I did a series of tweets of my initial thoughts on cycling in Rotterdam. I want to spend a few minutes expanding on them.

1. You can cycle everywhere, the quality of the infrastructure varies but you can guarantee that it exists.

— Paul James (@pauljames)

November 4, 2014

Rotterdam is not renowned within the Netherlands as a great place for cycling, but you have to remember that it’s got a lot of serious competition. First a quick history lesson.

In the Second World War, as a key position between Germany and Britain, Rotterdam was bombed completely flat by the Nazis in a bid to break the Dutch resistance and force the Netherlands to surrender. After a day of intense bombing, the entire city centre (2km square) was burned to the ground, the only medieval building to survive was the church of St Lawrence.

This meant the city had to be rebuilt, between the 1950’s and 70’s it was transformed into a modern US style city with large blocks and wide boulevards. Luckily, at this point the Dutch had already started down their path of building cycleways along main roads and so a comprehensive cycle network along the boulevards was also built.

The centre of the city has cycleways on each side of the main streets, they are 2+ metres wide, smooth and flat and meet at block corners with large traffic light controlled junctions. Due to the width of the cycleways and the streets in general (2 x tram lanes + 4-6 x traffic lanes + 2 x cycleways + 2 x footways), salmoning is common as there’s plenty of space to pass people coming the other way while crossing and then crossing back to get to a destination on the near side is much slower than going against the flow for a short distance.

Further out of the city centre, in the newer parts of town and along the Nieuwe Maas riverside, bi-directional cycleways are the norm as sideroads are fewer and further between and there’s more space between the main roadway and the cycleway reducing the problems when roadway and cycleway must cross.

Sometimes the cycleways do run out, but when they do you are either out of the city and have a quiet access road without through traffic, or there are still cycle lanes better than any in London. Some areas of the city are old and the bike infrastructure looks it, but motor traffic numbers are restricted or there are much better alternative parallel routes.

Although Rotterdam isn’t like the medieval streets of many European cities, I think there are many lessons for London and beyond to learn from it.

It’s been all quiet on Pedestrianise London for far too long, and for that I can only apologise. Over the last 3 years since I started this blog, the cycling climate in London has changed and the beginnings of change are starting to be seen.

So why the radio silence? Over the last 6 months I’ve been busy moving my family and my life out of London and to the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. I think there comes a time for most non-native Londoners when you know you have to leave before the city completely consumes you. With my wife being from Rotterdam, my young daughter being of pre-school age and thus immune to large lifestyle disruptions, and family living nearby, this feels like the sensible move for us.

I hope to continue to write stuff here, but hopefully with more of a lean on how things are done in Holland’s 2nd city (and beyond).

“But”, I hear you say, “I don’t know anything about Rotterdam”, well, it’s the 2nd largest city in the Netherlands (after Amsterdam) and the largest port in the Europe. It’s situated in the province of South Holland at the south end of the Randstad economic area, has a population of 600,000 people, 1.6 million in the greater Rijnmond area, oh, and it was bombed completely flat in the 2nd World War and was thus totally rebuilt in the 1950’s, as such it’s renowned for it’s crazy architecture.

Oh, and of course, bicycles.

Presuming we all agree that cycle tracks are a good thing along main roads with high (>2000 CPU/day) motor traffic volumes (which I think we do), then we need to decide whether we’d prefer two single direction cycle tracks on each side of the roadway, or one bi-directional cycle track on one side of the roadway.

Visualisation of the Mayor’s cycling vision along Blackfriars Road.

Let’s spend 5 minutes looking at the pros and cons of bi-directional cycleways and at when the Dutch use them. Let’s start with the positives:

• They take up less road-space than two single direction cycleways. You can get away with less width as you don’t need as much curbing or buffer space, plus they can help with tidal flows.
• There’s less to build and maintain, you have half as much to sweep.
• Depending on the roadway in question you could have less junctions to deal with, if you have many turnings on one side of the road, running a bi-directional cycleway on the opposite side so as to save on conflicts might be a good idea.

And the negatives:

• Conflict points with side roads are more dangerous as bicycles will be travelling counter to normal traffic flow. The solution is to buffer the cycleway from the roadway with a cars length (5 metres) to provide a turning refuge, but this adds effective width to the overall required space.
• Can make entry and exit points of the track awkward as bicycles have to cross the roadway to gain access to the cycleway. Running the cycleway for the complete length of a route removes this problem but can cause abnormal stage requirements at the junctions either end.
• Danger of head to head cycle collisions.

So with that all said, which is best?

As always, it depends on context. If we look at what the Dutch say and do we can see that they prefer single direction cycle tracks within urban environments and on distributor roads where conflict with motor and pedestrian traffic is more likely.

The inner ring road in Amsterdam has single direction tracks on each side.

Out of town and on larger through routes where side road turnings are prohibited/minimised, the comfort of bi-directional tracks wins out.

A rural through route with a separate bi-directional cycleway in Drenthe.

If we transfer this to a London context we would come to the conclusion that for example, running a bi-directional track along the Embankment is probably the best solution due to the “completeness” of the route and the lack of side turns on the river side.

Visualisation of the Mayor’s cycling vision of Victoria Embankment.

Whereas the Torrington Place/Tavistock Square cycle route or the Theobalds Road/Clerkenwell Road/Old Street route are probably better suited to single direction cycle tracks due to the number of interaction points with pedestrians and turning motor vehicles.

Images of Clerkenwell Road and Torrington Place courtesy of Google Street View

As always, it’s the right solution for the right situation, there’s no one size fits all solution, you have to look at the bigger picture and look at the road network as a whole, not just at the section or junction in question.