Erstellt am: 29. 6. 2011 - 14:31 Uhr
Why The Dutch Love To Cycle
Vienna is going to get a new "Cycling Chief" whose job it will be to double the number of cyclists in the capital by the year 2015. Vienna is lagging far behind other comparable European cities when it comes to persuading its citizens to hop on their bikes instead of sliding into their cars for short journeys and this although cycling is proven to be green and healthy and is said to be less stressful than driving and even fun.
We decided to sort out this prospective Cycling Chief with some good advice on creating a peddling utopia so we phoned up a friend in Amsterdam. While 5% of daily journeys in Vienna are currently made by bike, the strong-thighed Dutch make over a quarter of all short journeys by pedal power. Perro Dejong is from Radio Netherlands, which is based in Amsterdam. He says cycling works in the Netherlands because “cyclists are equal partners to any other party in traffic there is no sense of cars being somehow all powerful.” Instead, cyclists are a force to be reckoned with and their needs “are naturally built into any new city development.”
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But it`s not all about the infrastructure. In a recent Presse article a Global 2000 activist criticized Vienna`s cycle network as being ill maintained and badly planned, but it has to recognised that in recent years city authorities have plowed much money into building more cycle paths in Vienna without there being any significant increase in cycle participation. So why is the situation so different in the Netherlands?
Perro Dejong puts it down to culture. “It`s always been such an organic part of Dutch society. Even the Queen has been seen out on her bike.” Other countries, he suggests, are far to obsessed with building more roads and worshipping ever bigger cars. “If you see cyclists as impoverished car drivers who can`t afford an automobile, you are never going give cyclists the respect that they deserve. Culture is the key factor here.”
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When Austrians have been asked why they don’t cycle more, the two most frequent excuses have been the cold climate and the hilly topography. Well, anyone who has been to Amsterdam in winter will agree that it is not significantly more clement than Vienna; the cold wind that blows in off the North Sea can chill you to the bone. It is of course famously flat but Perro won’t accept that as a defining factor in his country’s love for the bike. “Have you ever cycled on the flat against a very strong wind? It’s no joke! No, the absence of hills isn’t the reason” Again he says it’s the culture that plays a role here. The weather can be fierce but people have grown up used to cycling in such conditions. “Cycling near the dykes where there is nowhere to hide from the cutting wind is a formative experience. It`s something everybody does from a very early age. So you don’t question it.”
He says it is this fact that cycling is deeply engrained in Dutch culture that gets people on their bikes rather than concerns about health or environmental impact, although for those reasons companies stimulate their workers to buy bicycles which are made tax deductible. “Yes it is part of official policy,” concludes Dejong, “but it is more important that it is part of public consciousness.”
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Cycle participation is slowly on the rise in Austria but this rise has been accompanied with an ugly increase in confrontation between car drivers and cyclists (the same is true in Britain by the way). Dejong’s talk of “equal partners” suggested to me that Dutch street life was conflict free. He laughs at my naivety: suggesting that Amsterdam is a city of “near misses” where the shouting matches between irate car drivers and furious cyclists feature heavily, but “because there are such a lot of cyclists they are a force to be reckoned with, they stand their ground.”
And because of the number of cyclists, drivers are naturally more used to them and more away of their needs, frailties and eccentricities (Dejong describes some of them as “like lemmings”). It is the famous critical mass that the cycling advocates elsewhere are working towards. As Dejong puts it “critical mass is the perfect way to explain why cyclists are equal partners and why car drivers are not higher up the food chain in the Netherlands.”