Dutch Streets are 300% Safer than American Ones. Why?

most urban streets are too dangerous they're too hostile in the u.s where i'm from a hundred people a day are dying because of traffic because of the roads when cities have about one third of their space dedicated to streets streets have a very important function and they can be a very of high potential to to make changes but we're going to go into the city and sort of see the layers of the city all right okay let's do it let's go so for those who watch the channel you might have seen a couple years ago we did a tour with meredith around amsterdam and i think this one's going to have some similarities as but you'll have some slight differences with doing some lessons along the way and really focusing on what we can take from the experience here into different cities which i think you're really beneficial for a lot of different people uh throughout the world hope you guys enjoy it is a little drizzly out here hopefully the camera survives and hopefully tara survives we'll have some fun we're testing out the weather sealant on this camera we'll see how it holds up they say paint is temporary but i think also rain is temporary it's going away what does the dutch say tara what are they made of sugar what do you think are you made of sugar right now [Music] so we just rode from the outskirts of amsterdam huh and into more of a neighborhood feel huh and we went from some of the lowest cycling rates and now we are in a place with uh with higher rates of cycling it's denser right yeah look at the buildings we have people who live here out where the urban arrow headquarters are there's not a lot of people living in in closer quarters actually the netherlands is one of the densest countries in the world but it's not too high it's not a huge high-rise building it's very moderate three to four stories but we have people if we look around us here what elements besides this protected bike lane what elements of the urban environment do you think supports higher rates of cycling here smaller more narrow cozier streets we just we just rode our bikes through a very residential area right where the streets are much narrower what's across the street from us a supermarket a bike shop restaurants there's probably doctor's offices there's pharmacies there's uh daycares we just passed a school there are amenities there's services and amenities for people who live here right here in this neighborhood and so land use is a huge component of transportation and these two things go together like a pair so when we have places for people to get to it affects how they arrive there by bike by foot by car the feel of the street right it's a it's the aesthetics the quality of the street as well is narrow the speeds are slower we can have a conversation here and hear each other that also makes means that the public space is something that enhances the the quality of the area it makes people want to come here the lesson here um at least to me of course everyone has their own lessons but the main lesson for me is that um is that there are these very critical environmental factors that that help cycling and land use is one of them services amenities places where people want to go mobility is is not just something that people do just to do not i mean most the time it's the places that people want to reach and so if we bring those places closer to people they will be able to reach them more easily we're actually not going too far and then we'll get into a little bit more of the the design yeah okay masks bubble is so many things sorry and from that stop to this stop you probably noticed we went off on two little you know uh speed tables went down and up and went down right maybe you also notice that the texture of the pavement is uh they're they're stones right they're pavement stones for the most part there's all these little small elements of the of the environment that are slowing cars down a lot of this happened some in the 70s but actually much later as well it wasn't until the 1990s that the netherlands passed some some very important policy called systematic safety or sustainable safety we're standing at one of these such examples of sustainable safety so sustainable safety there are three main principles of sustainable safety and i like to talk about them because i think that it's sort of revolutionary but sustainable safety is revolutionary for its time one principle is that humans make errors in traffic it's the way uh that humans are right we make errors the second one is that the government is responsible for making sure that the design of the street minimizes impact from those errors and the design of the street should reflect this to reflect uh safety and allowing for these errors to happen right think about a child on a bike my seven-year-old can bike but you know she's looking around she's she's kind of swerving a little bit right we want to make sure that the bike paths are wide enough for that type of movement or an elderly person who also needs a little bit more space to maneuver and we want to make sure that in a in a shared traffic environment like a residential street that there can be slow speeds and safety to allow for these types of errors right the netherlands implemented this policy which means that there are four different classifications of roads we've been on several of them residential roads neighborhood arterial roads which we'll also see and then a little bit of higher up ulterior arterial roads and then a highway right and so throughout the netherlands you know exactly what street you're on by the feel of it and by the the the design characteristics of it and that's really unique can you i mean in america in california if you go from one city to another the design of the streets are all different but but here it's very clear as a driver what the expectations are so here's one example this is a lower grade arterial road that is a connector road to that arterial right it's a connector you'd go from this street to this street you physically are going up onto this i call it a welcome mat right it's a it's a it's a physical uh speed table and then you're going into the public space this is where people are walking and bicycling and then you're going down into the residential area there are no signs it's an intuitive feature that you will see across the whole country in every city and every part of the city it's it's there for cars right for car drivers to know hey this is an area where people are walking people are biking i'm a guest here i need to slow down and look around once these policies were implemented the the safety increased drastically in the 70s there were you know up to 1500 deaths a year of cyclists and and people in the street and now there's i think six two in amsterdam there's about two deaths a year you could say that it's it's it's very safe but on the other hand should shouldn't zero be the goal right and it is it is so you know in places like the us where a hundred a day i mean it's it's it's awful it's really it's a silent epidemic as it's been called it's not just the u.s i mean it's worldwide it's the number one cause of death of of uh young adults in the world it's traffic injuries so many urban arrows so crazy you're going there oh thank you all right don't get run over thank you all right so i really like filming these tours because i think it's good for us to be able to see different infrastructure and think about how can we apply us to our own cities not always so easy to think of these ideas or to read about this in a book or that sort of thing but to actually see it and to be able to visualize it and think about how this might be similar to your own city and how we can bring these ideas home to us i mean that's something i've been actively trying to do on my own and then trying to bring these similar sort of ideas to the videos and sharing with you here certainly interested to know if more people are interested in seeing these videos these types of videos maybe you have other ideas of how to share these things or or really bring these ideas to light because uh for my side i'd love to see more cities like this now you might have noticed as we went around this roundabout that cyclists actually have priority there's these little shark teeth as they're called these uh little triangles that show who's supposed to yield at times people on the bike are supposed to yield oftentimes for pedestrians and different things like that and sometimes we just yield when we're not supposed to like that people walking a baby in a stroller as i just waved them on but cars they have to yield to cyclists and there's no traffic lights it just goes around around about bikes can continue to go around and it's interesting but it works really well something i think most people wouldn't really think about and i don't know i wonder do you think that will work with our culture or your culture pretty amazing when you give people some autonomy what's actually possible this is pretty over here on the right wow so cool [Music] so it feels a little bit even different now right we're we're we're just there is the is the heart of the the city the uh the historic core so your feel much more energy much more city life here right but what we were just riding on is one of the busiest routes for bicycling in the city and the city of amsterdam now has this new challenge cycling is increasing in the city so how do we make space for more cycling given the limited space that uh that we have so it's a new challenge how do we keep cyclists flow without delaying cars and delaying car traffic and one way that they're going about it is experimenting experimenting with public space and with with streets and intersections and here is uh one example that was actually a replication from an experiment across town because the experiment was successful they they replicated it here but what do you what do you this is a very busy intersection what do you notice there's no traffic lights there's trams there's people walking it's one of the busiest bicycle paths in amsterdam and yet there are no traffic lights so across the city they did an experiment where they shut off the traffic lights for a period of two weeks to see if bicycle traffic flow would increase and if it wouldn't delay the tram it wouldn't delay cars other effects and that's that's the experiment they did two weeks but it wasn't it wasn't guaranteed to work people were very nervous the city was nervous about it the engineers oh let me tell you the engineers were very nervous everyone came together finally in the end and said okay we'll test two weeks and we'll see what happens not only did a flow of bicycle traffic improved about four times so they it definitely worked in that but it also did not delay any other mode so that was also very important for the success so it's not that it's a anti-car strategy because they've actually increased the speed on other streets so they're sort of focusing car movement on certain streets and allowing cyclists to have priority on other streets so yeah you can sort of watch here there's a there's a car coming you see how they interact with with cyclists here slowing down there's people walking eye contact that's what i mean two years ago yes yes very very good point is eye contact did you also experience that when we were going around the roundabout did you experience some eye contact with drivers bit yeah there's a bus there's a police as a fire truck there's lots of urban arrows so there here we go here this is some uh the traffic situation here is of course different because of liability laws and that has a big impact on the flow and the level of vigilance because as a car driver you have a lot of responsibility you are driving the more heavy vehicle the the more dangerous vehicle written into liability laws here as a car driver you are responsible the vehicle with the most mass and the most speed capacity will be at fault it's a very serious thing here to drive a car that shows in traffic situations where car drivers yeah we get this a lot but car drivers respect cyclists here right well they're sort of forced to but there's also safety in numbers right there are so many cyclists that they've we've reached a threshold of of safety too just because there are so many cyclists all right and this is the reichs museum look at that beauty we got uh some opera situation going on here on the right it's good stuff but this is the you know historic site of the reichs museum the most one of the most famous museums in the world hosting all of the the famous dutch painters behind us here is also is called the museum plain so this is also a historic space for demonstrations for free speech and what we rode through actually coming into here is probably one of the most famous bicycle paths in the world but it wasn't always here as you can see here this this is what we're standing in the same spot this is from the 70s and it used to be a highway going right through the reichs museum sort of unbelievable right to think that only a few decades ago was a totally different mindset you know a totally different way of thinking the city was planning for cars about a decade ago the museum was under huge renovations the head curator really wanted to keep this bike path for private museum use and it spurred a huge contestation with the the bicycle advocacy groups here of course with the city uh with the public a lot of different public organizations they said no we want to keep it open as public space and even as a bicycle path so this is just to say that these you know these tensions are still coming up today it's not like you know that that um amsterdam is the bicycle capital and will always be it there really needs to be still this this fight fortunately the the advocates won and what we see now is this this really iconic bicycle path through the museum i think the lesson here for me i'm not an activist or an advocate but i deeply appreciate and have benefited from the hard work of these individuals and groups who have fought this good fight right to continue the fight for for public space for bicycling and we see the benefits today i mean this is one of the most visited places in the netherlands if not the the world and maybe in in your cities too you can imagine what are those iconic places that that can sort of be representative of the culture and inspire us and yeah and representative of cultural values i mean to me this also does represent this dutch ideal around sharing space and public space and public life is this thing on we're going to switch it up a little bit and tara is actually going to ride the bike i haven't really done this too much i'm a little bit nervous but i guess the tables have turned take the jacket off tara get ready you can do it you can do it all right i don't know what i'm getting myself into here turbo mode okay all right all right so far how we doing tara we're good i mean even if i do dump you out you i know you'll do you'll do your best to save me just like you saved that camera the other day all right here we go so what do you guys think is this the is this a new angle you could do it tara you could do it this is when you really appreciate electric assist it's super windy right now all right all right so here we are back at the outskirts of amsterdam i remember i said that cycling rates are some of the lowest here right but there's more car use so actually these are competing right these competing modes here we have fewer people living out here uh less density but also what about services what about alpha did you see any grocery stores along the way did you see any surfaces any no right so that we've got distances we've got much longer distances between places people where they live people where they work grocery stores and people who would like to drive this is where they're going to live because it's you can have a car there's no uh there's no permits right you can have two cars if you like was cheaper but on the other hand you still have access to a train station that's what we're at right now this is one of the one of the five major train stations in amsterdam and what do you see around us lots of bicycles so in fact 50 percent of train passengers arrive to the station by bicycle and so the bike train system public transit high capacity high efficiency reliable transit so bike sharing systems are also increasing in prevalence the train company has their own bike sharing system literally every train station in the netherlands you can get a bicycle and finish your your trip by bicycle a way to replace car driving could be this combination of bike and train right because you can you can really expand your radius so i'm closing it here we're gonna ride back but i'll be around for lunch i'm happy to keep the conversation going and keep discussing if you want to want to talk okay so we'll just ride back and we'll park the bikes where we found them and um and yeah thank you sweet thank you yeah thank you bye

Channel: Propel

Views: 78,886

Keywords: dutch bikes, urban planning, dutch culture vs american culture, traffic calming, urban planning 101, not just bikes, Amsterdam biking, Amsterdam, Urban arrow, Biking in Netherlands, Bike infrastructure, Bike traffic, Bike commuting, Bike vlog, Bike tourism, Ebike, EBikes, Electric bikes, Not just bikes, Biking city, Dutch biking, Urban planning, Urban design, Open streets, meredith glaser, vision zero, Dutch streets, amsterdam

Id: mAmlI0mYFu0

Length: 22min 16sec (1336 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 01 2022