Tripping on bikes in Amsterdam with Not Just Bikes

all right pull this thing out of the bushes what are we just gonna do this we're gonna go meet jason from not just bikes for those who don't know he's got a popular youtube channel and it's pretty exciting to meet with them we're meeting all these like special people of the netherlands i feel special that people special people want to be special with us that sounds weird all right i couldn't even hold the camera this is this is a very special experience i appreciate you taking your time out at night with us but we're going to ride south and go through the residential areas and some of the areas that tourists wouldn't get to and it'll be a little quieter then but the night time ride around the amsterdam and say why not try it out so right now we're in the franz halsberg and this is interesting because they removed most of the surface parking here yeah so this used to be lined with cars on either side of the road like you'd see on almost any other street to be honest and now it's been replaced with bicycle parking with planters with trees so you can see over here to our left we've got planters that they're they're going to be growing some trees in there like this is still relatively new so not a lot has grown in yet but yeah it's really nice and here is the franz halstrad and you can see it's like it's it's beautiful it's like a jungle as you go down here with trees all over the place and it's a lot nicer than when it was full of cars this is a this is a trend you're seeing more and more huh yeah absolutely and i think this was a little bit of a trial for the city to see how this went they built a an underground parking garage for the cars over there it's actually underneath the canal but in general it's been quite the success and there's significantly fewer cars coming through here too although here at night it's a it's a little bit busy but the only people who will be driving through here will be local traffic because there's no through traffic at all for this neighborhood how do they limit that i i saw some ways they limit that in delft where we were earlier today yeah in here it's relatively simple it's mostly one-way streets that just make it amazed so that it's impossible to go through um over here on ferdinand ball strat that is blocked off on on either side to two cars blocked off up here rather so you can't come through so you can come through only from the south side and then you can go to these neighborhoods and then you have to exit again from that side so where we were just back here a little while ago um is uh you cannot go through with a with a car you can only go through with walking cycling and public transit wow that's pretty cool i'm sure it definitely creates a different vibe i mean here at night there's definitely a little bit of activity but but as you said during the day and i'm sure early in the morning so that's absolutely silent yeah so we'll take a little ride down here down to the frontal and um and we'll see some of this and then uh we'll we'll talk together let's all right let's do it [Music] and you see it's actually not that complicated it's just you know remove the cars and yeah and then give the space back to the people and it's great it's true i mean people will come out i think that's one of the things i try to talk about on my channel too like when amsterdam became bicycle friendly uh after the 1970s they didn't do it to become bicycle friendly they actually um did it to make the streets safer right like bicycles was not a consideration and even in the 80s people were still fighting just to get like a painted line on the road what really happened was they made the streets safer and then in doing so people started cycling and then as people started cycling they're like we should build some cycling infrastructure right so here and the reason i brought you out here this is actually a relatively busy road hoba makata and this is what's called the hofnet auto so this is where cars are supposed to be this was a painted bicycle gutter here up until uh like last year built in the 90s so you see a lot of this in amsterdam where there's still some bad infrastructure around because it hasn't been this great for that long and the infrastructure sticks around for you know 30 years right so this was just a painted line on the road on a busy road for cars until literally last year and now we've got your fairly standard feats pad here i guess so people can be fooled by that i mean even talking about you know the 70s and stuff like that i would definitely love to delve into that a bit more because you know people always assume that yeah you know the bike infrastructure has always been here the culture has always been here and actually you know speaking about that you know how people were fighting back in the 70s and such and yeah that's something i i've talked about before there was that there was a bit of an element of luck here like when you look at the decisions that were made here in the 1970s to make this place less car infested let's say um it's not like it was unanimous or something and right and or anything like that i mean a lot of these plans like even the plan to run a highway right through the center of amsterdam it won in city council by like one or two votes i heard it was not like it was an overwhelming consensus like this was not something that everybody was on board with so i think there was an element of luck here um there was the um the oil crisis in the 70s and then at the same time there was a road safety campaign called stop the kinder mort that kind of happened around the same time i would never come down here before now i come through here quite regularly because it connects to several destinations but this is all new these traffic lights up here are new um they've actually got uh bicycle priority and what's uh interesting is that they have those push buttons but you don't really ever need to use them they're only there in case it doesn't detect your bike there are loops in the ground that are calibrated to pick up a bicycle maybe if you're on a carbon fiber bike right i was going to say that so then you can press the button but i've seen people could play oh you know they make you press the button across the street this is inhumane and i'm like you don't have to press the button it's there only if it doesn't detect you for some reason if there's some system fault like you ever seen someone lay their bikes down on the ground in an automobile intersection they're trying to get it to register the metal right your bike all right we're gonna turn uh right here um this is the intersection i showed in my traffic lights video and the reason i made that video is because i would come from that direction quite often sure and that light there turns green almost all the time when you're cycling it's remarkable actually i don't know if we'll get to see it here it depends on the traffic because it will detect if the cars can be stopped and then if they can it makes it green for the cyclists so they can go through and it's it's remarkable how well this intersection works now because this is the latest and greatest the smart uh traffic lights that kind of gets back to some of the stuff you've spoken about before too about you know the prioritization of moving people not moving vehicles as a lot of laws are developed around that sort of thing in other places not necessarily here but they actually understand that detail that let's focus on the most effective way to move people well that wasn't as many people we saw this one intersection and dealt earlier about 30 000 bicyclists will pass every day and you know certainly nowhere near that many cars but they have the same sort of prioritization without the smart lighting system i love that you're showing us some of this new infrastructure because i think that's the challenge a lot of people have like wrapping their head around yeah like what's possible and can you actually implement this and how quickly can you actually put these sort of things in so i don't think people would appreciate this at all if they came down here this was a painted line with four lanes of car traffic incredibly busy and it sucked this stuff wasn't always like this and it was not very long ago that in the 90s it was still considered acceptable to paint a line along the side of the road and say you know cyclists go there in the in the painted bicycle gutter there's infrastructure here all the time that's left over from those days something that i also talk about fairly often because i really want people to understand this that when they talk about you know the bicycle infrastructure be expensive if we did it you know we can't afford to do it i mean bicycle infrastructure is the cheapest infrastructure you can build really for but the way that they did it here was not that they just went and redesigned the whole city overnight they they put in good quality bicycle infrastructure design guidelines for the traffic engineers so that when a street was due to be resurfaced and that happens about every 25 to 30 years they would bring it up to the the latest standard um and you see that here in amsterdam you'll see it as maybe even as we ride we'll see it a bit you'll see that things the infrastructure will change because it may have been built 20 years ago when when the guidelines were different but i think this is why it's so absolutely critically important that cities get the design guidelines correct now because everything they're building now is going to be around for 30 years so for instance in the u.s if you look at the design guidelines of massachusetts they're actually pretty decent and you're starting to see lots of separated bicycle infrastructure being built there simply because when a traffic engineer comes and has a project to redesign the road based on a resurfacing project they're just going to go and they're going to check yep check this check this check this we're supposed to do bicycles okay this is the thing we put in for this size of street and they just plop it in the design and that's it these people don't have to be experts they don't have to be cyclists they just have to have good guidelines that they work from right that's where all of this comes from design guidelines are difficult to change because the whole point of them is that you've made them to be safe you know which in the case of 1960s traffic engineering means big wide straight roads you've made these guidelines for good reasons and now you're supposed to follow them in order to make the best streets possible and so there's quite a lot of resistance to having them change but if if those can be changed that's where that's where all of this gets easier because like if you look over here this is a pretty standard design here right we've got a two meter wide feeds pad just behind us then you've got the way that the the turn lanes here happen for for cyclists turning left versus those going straight it's got the the curb that's slightly different than the sidewalk it's got the red asphalt like this is the latest design guides right here on this street and it you know it's tough to really fully explain the experience but you just feel safe you feel protected you feel like somebody gives a crap about you you know like it's absolutely not you know and i'll tell you when when that traffic light over there turns green for me and i know it changed for me it's such an unbelievable feeling and that's why i made that traffic lights video because i'm like this is incredible right that traffic light literally turned green just for me because i was here on a bicycle and just be just before if you don't mind sharing so you have two kids right and they're eleven and eight eleven and eight yeah and they at times ride on they ride on this every single day every day every day every school day they will ride on on these streets so a lot of people would say hey amsterdam's a big city like how do you let your kids ride on this but the reality is it's it's perfectly safe yeah our 11 year old i mean he does this all on his own like he he goes to school on his own he'll come home on his own he'll go to his friend's house actually a friend of his just lives around the corner from here so he'll cycle through this very intersection and it's perfectly safe that's great and actually in the morning here this is incredibly busy there's a hell of a lot of bicycles coming through here and so they have to learn how to deal with that but that's simply going to make them safer road users too because they're going to be trained from an early age to deal with other people being around so we're going to ride on a little bit uh farther i think we should swing by zaodas the financial district because that's another place that a lot of people don't see oh there's so much we yeah let's keep on rolling because this can go never ending [Music] so this is fascinating to me too because look at how freaking wide this street is right and this is again like old street that just um needs an upgrade and just hasn't had it yet it's got speed bumps but that's all we've got so for those that don't understand what you're just talking about about a street being wide and how a wide street is largely unsafe in a lot of ways right if you look back at photos of roads in the 1950s and into the 1960s they had very narrow lanes and what would happen is that cars would bump into each other you move slightly in your lane and you take the side mirrors off of the car next to you right right and then what was thought is that okay well we need to make this safer because this is generally a good idea that you say we should allow people to make mistakes and not make those mistakes be fatal right that's that's a good logic and that makes sense here too and that was the same logic in the 1960s but unfortunately it was only looked at in terms of cars and the end result of it was that people feel more comfortable going quickly when the roads are wide and what you have then is you have a situation where people will drive faster naturally on on wide roads yeah which is a huge problem in the united states because a lot of roads are insanely wide way wider than they need to be this road here actually is again another old road and if you look at the infrastructure on it it's not very good it has here like a painted bike lane right next to parked cars right in the dooring zone it's a 50 kilometer per hour speed limit which is just too fast but exact this is this is exactly my point this was considered acceptable in the 1990s like this is not good infrastructure now i imagine that this will come up for a redesign at some point in time and it will look totally different but now this is not a very safe road at all there are lots of alternatives to this like hardly anybody is going to be cycling on this road because you could be up there where there was a protective bicycle path you could be where we're going to go down here which is a path through a park and it's amazing how people in north america would be like grateful for some of the as i think they probably were here in the 90s right they would be very grateful for this because they actually acknowledged that there would be bicycles here sure all right we can cross here all right um this intersection has gone through a few changes since i've lived here it is not particularly by dutch standards this is considered not particularly safe because it is a 50 kilometer per hour road oh watch it i'm in the i'm in the bike lane oh yeah so now we've entered here into beatrix park that has this bike path it's about four meters wide two-way this gets very very busy during the day and it's a major through fair this is like a bicycle highway effectively one of the things i've talked about in my videos before is that they have this concept of separating car traffic from bike traffic but what they also do is they separate the routes taken by cars and the routes taken by bicycles completely so you can't get hit by a car if there's no cars so i'll come through here quite regularly to go to places like say if i'm going to a reverend bird or something like that it actually has like different routes that you can take you can go this way but where we just turned you and that path there leads to it as well you'll see we'll get up to another junction up here you don't need traffic lights when you're using bicycles so there are no traffic lights here which also makes travel extremely quick because the bicycle routes are designed so that you don't need to stop so here another junction obviously no traffic lights required because traffic lights are for cars you see these islands right that so you can cross one lane of traffic and all you need to worry about is this one car is coming from this direction you'll see there's a speed bump here so they're going to be slowed down before they get to this intersection you only need to think of that one direction then you go here and then you only need to think about the the tram and bus lane you've got another area to wait and then you only need to wait again for one lane of car traffic so let's take a left here [Music] [Music] you got into this couple years ago yeah um but you're not a civil engineer or urban planner or i have a degree in electrical engineering actually okay but you're you're uh you're a fast learner so i'm i'm fueled a little bit differently so in part i'm fueled by my experience in iraq driving fuel trucks and getting shot out i think we should try to not be dependent on oil so much and maybe bikes there's a way that we can do that so well the thing that really opened my eyes is that i had a job that required me to do a lot of business travel like excessive amount of business travel i had gold status on three separate airlines at the same time wow which is like that's not a normal amount of business travel so in doing these trips i would go to all of these cities yeah and i'd see the difference in the way that they were designed and i you know never thought about it that much like i think most people do they think oh yeah that's the culture in asia and that's how they design their cities that's a culture in europe that's the way they design their cities but when i started digging into it some more i realized like these are all conscious decisions that these cities make in order to design things this way and when i started learning some history of urban planning in in north america it was really sad because i realized just how many great places we bulldozed to put highways and parking lots and it's really disturbing we did all these things and we thought were progress but now we got to figure out how to reverse it yeah when you read the history of it like 1960s people looked at the the automobile and thought geez nobody's gonna walk anymore so let's just build everything for cars then this is why you see neighborhoods in the us and canada built in the 60s that have no sidewalks because they literally thought you'd be crazy to walk when you can drive that was the thought at the time which you can't necessarily blame them at the time they thought that they were bringing the future right even here in the netherlands you read stuff from the 60s and they talk about cycling as this thing they have to get rid of like they literally talk about it that way as in it's like a stain on the country that there's all these people on bicycles and we need to improve our situation here after world war ii catch up to the rest of the world put these people in cars like that was the messaging that you saw from people that's the economic future of the city right and without that we're behind so my channel was originally quite popular in the early days because of dutch people seeing it and having no idea that this was special like they saw all this stuff and they're like that isn't normal to do that what so that was where the first success came from the the second level uh the second big spikes that i got in the channel is when i started talking about strong towns which appealed to the americans which is a non-profit organization in the us started by a traffic engineer who i find it fascinating because he came to many of the same conclusions i did but from a totally different point of view he did it by looking at the financials of these roads and strodes that he was building right and saying like geez who's paying for all this stuff like like i know that i know how much this stuff costs because i'm building it especially when american drivers tell you know that the cyclist should start paying their way or something like that like it's it's absurd because there is no country in the world where the drivers pay for their infrastructure that closest is probably denmark because of their whatever it is 180 tax on cars right but when you analyze any of the finances of car infrastructure in the united states in any place in the country people who don't drive are overwhelmingly subsidizing people who do and that's just the way it is but what's interesting about strong towns is i got to call this out because you know you really got to dive into this guy's channel on some of these topics it's it's kind of crazy i don't think you called it this but if you think about it like a lot of the economics be behind roadway developing it's kind of like a ponzi scheme yeah definitely and it's it's kind of mind-blowing so strong towns has this concept of the growth ponzi scheme and i made a video about it um that was one of the big successful videos of the last year but even today people believe that suburban development brings prosperity like this is a this is this is the american dream right the idea that you build these new suburbs and that makes our country prosperous and it's simply just not the case yeah it's really really not in fact what strong towns have shown is that it's exactly the opposite it's that these places are making americans poorer i respect the truth i respect like getting down to the to the reality of it and i think that we can often just brush it aside and get just caught up in social media and whatever else and not think about you know this existing world around us and how it's it's making us unhealthy and unhappy really when i started talking about this stuff it's talking about the cycling stuff the way it is here it it's not just that it's better for the environment or cheaper or whatever it's a better quality of life too it's like legitimately a better quality of life so i think this really is a win-win for everybody if we could just get through preconceptions about these things like we live a better quality of life here than i ever did in any other city i've lived in yeah dutch people are largely some of the happiest people in the world right and they say the happiest kids in the world yeah and also the happiest drivers in the world is this literally arguments working on a video on that as we speak well my editor is literally right now um driving here is awesome but it really boils down to these cities here have viable alternatives to driving that means the only people who are driving are those people who want to drive or those people who need to drive right and that makes a massive difference not only in lower traffic congestion when you think about road rage and you think about people just being pissed off in their cars you're basically designed a city where everybody has to drive all the time to do everything like they can't even feed themselves without getting in a car right and so everybody has to use a car for literally everything and driving in traffic sucks like even if you like cars driving in a long some strode and hitting a ton of red lights it's a crappy experience right and what you end up doing is you end up with a city full of people who are forced to do something miserable every single day all the time and have no choice and that makes a bunch of angry miserable people you know it's funny um if you look at any um condo development yeah and you look at the renderings that they make they'll be all these happy people walking and cycling right right and then when it actually gets built there's hardly anybody walking and cycling because it's along the side of a busy strode and there's no bike lane and everything else but this is again where when you look at the history of amsterdam they weren't building a cycling city right they were just making the streets safer and once the streets were safer people came out walking people came if you build it they will come to a certain extent yes but it has to be safe you know you build it safe so like when we were out here on the on the road to get here there's no bike lane uh it's just a safe street and people will absolutely cycle on on those kind of streets if it's safe so here we are 50 years later from the 70s and such when this was uh you know really being developed in a lot of ways and some other cities in north america have begun this process years ago but the thing is if you look at the pictures of amsterdam from the 1970s the roads were jam-packed with cars sure like absolutely packed with cars so the direct route was there but then everybody took it and then there was a ton of traffic so when they cut those those uh paths and made it only for walking cycling and sometimes public transit yeah it was less convenient but then a whole bunch of people suddenly found their trip was more convenient by walking cycling or taking public transit which reduced the number of cars in the road which makes it easier so in the 1970s you might have been able to just drive there when we where we started out on ferdinand bowl strat it used to be just straight through for cars and it was a car sewer it was full of traffic all the time now the cars have to go around but you're going to get there faster by going around today than you would have straight through in the 1970s and that's again why driving here is awesome because i do have to drive here if i get a car share car and i drive it's great because there's not that much traffic outside of rush hour especially and the roads are in great shape because the amount of asphalt per person is much smaller and the taxes are more reasonable so you're driving on great infrastructure there's less traffic and it's super comfortable and convenient to drive now sometimes i have to drive yeah that's fine you're going to have to drive sometimes but i don't drive that often people don't want to be in traffic people don't want that necessary that's not necessarily their first choice as you said that i'm i generally just pick the best option to to get where i'm going and i personally would like it if cities provided more options i think that that's just better for everybody overall including myself yes all right speaking i'm speaking to the choir here yeah i know right so there's a couple of things that are interesting here um this here stravinskyland parking garage this is a very new bicycle parking garage put in i think 2018. uh it was brand new when we moved here um and is this this is uh free for 24 hours free for the first 24 hours yeah so this is actually the third underground bicycle parking garage at this train station uh there's two over here uh but they were not enough so they built this one this is a stunningly beautiful parking garage and then it's all underneath here every everything you see here is new because this is the financial district for amsterdam this is called zoudas this is also fascinating to me i love this because if i think about the financial district in toronto or i think about it in new york or any other north american city it is nothing like this like the financial district is full of cars you know everybody's driving their luxury cars in stuck in traffic and everything else in here but you see people here coming in to their finance jobs and they're riding a bicycle now they might be riding a nice e-bike if you were to come to a place with a equivalent financial district in the 1970s i don't think you would have seen that the people would not have been riding bicycles right right so there is an also an element here of people a lot of people ride bicycles here because it's quick and efficient like why would you not like you could drive your car here and people do there's an underground car parking garage i think it's just over here but if you do you're going to take longer you're going to sit in traffic like why wouldn't you just ride your bike but it's really challenging you know to be in in other places where it's the other way around where it's why are you riding your bike you know did you get a dwi do you not have enough money to buy a car i mentioned this generally those two things right like i mean i mentioned this in my i am not a cyclist video where my wife was working in finance in toronto and she would have worked with a lot of suburbanites who would drive in um and when they found out she rode a bike they'd be like why right like what is wrong with you are you some kind of tree hugger or something like why would you are you concerned about how people are going to look at you more people are going to ride bikes as more people ride bikes it becomes normalized and as i said in my i'm not a cyclist video it's really hard to be anti-cyclist when you know half your co-workers and your sister and two of your best friends all right good luck with that one yeah right suddenly you're not so anti-cyclist when half the people you know ride bicycles right because then it's not about being a cyclist it's just another way to get around let's go through in here because i want to show you the financial district because what's interesting about the amsterdam financial district is that it's entirely pedestrianized wow which is remarkable so there's a station here let's let's take a uh yeah we'll ride so this is a major train station and they're going to expand it to many more tracks wow but you see here this is all pedestrianized this is the financial district right can you imagine if the new york or toronto financial district looked like this right like they've got shops here they've got patios people are out having their drinks on friday night and these are their office buildings right here what i like about amsterdam's out is that this shows you how you can do this in a modern way like this is not your 17th century canal ring right this is all shiny condo buildings and office towers and everything else and this shows you how you can build this around a major train station so you can see how lots of the people who work here come here by train and in the netherlands it's almost 50 percent of people who take the train arrive by bicycle um we can stop just up here take a little look around but again financial district most people when they think of amsterdam don't think of this condo towers and office towers this is all new and this is how you can build good urbanism that's new again this is all pedestrianized right we just exited that train station on the north side and the south side there isn't some road right that's full of taxi drop-offs and full of people driving through so here we are at the first time we encounter cars so speaking about making that way on purpose a lot of cobblestones a lot of yes noisy roads if you will where a lot of people would probably think like hey this is not a modern road this is an old cobblestone road yeah but this is by design and it's interesting entirely by design they put it's raised up you'll notice the crossing here right pedestrians don't go down to the road level cars go up to the pedestrian level so it's like a built-in speed bump then they've got the cobbles which will make more road noise which makes people subconsciously slow down it's a much safer way to go [Music] so you see here we're totally separated from the traffic so that is a relatively busy car road by amsterdam standards that's where a lot of the cars are meant to be but we're totally separated from it and again when the highway and the rail line come up here we go under it we stay at ground level and it's raised up and they try not to do uh bridges for bicycles because bridges are more difficult because you have to cycle your way up and then you cycle down the preferred tunnels because with a on a bicycle and a tunnel you get speed going down which helps you on the way up right which makes it easier to cycle but even better than a tunnel is to keep the cyclists at ground level and then make the cars go up i think we're about to finish up here but yeah here is a situation where you've got this major route for bicycles and then a very major route for cars and here they do not have an underpass or something like this and this is funny because i very often come here i have to cross through here yeah and it drives me crazy because this will be the only traffic light i encounter wow this has been amazing i really enjoyed nerding out with you hopefully you guys enjoyed this we kind of went into some deeper stuff than we generally do on our our channel and and i know you get into a lot of this stuff and i really have enjoyed and admired your work it's great to meet you in person and nice to meet you too i'm sure other people are appreciating seeing your face too and and this has been great i hope that we get a chance to do it again yeah i'm sure others would like to see it again again check out not just spike's youtube channel i'm sure you've probably seen it already if you're into this sort of stuff but if you're not i mean you watch a little and it's just it's it's all over yeah people have said like they see things in a totally different way the like you my young audience calls it getting orange peeled so once you've been orange filled you can't go back but really a pleasure thanks for coming out at night with us i'm up late all the time you're a night owl but i appreciate it nonetheless i'm not always a night out um but but definitely for this occasion it's a pleasure to be out this is awesome so yeah thanks again and uh we'll see you guys soon [Music]

Channel: Propel

Views: 250,924

Keywords: urban planning, city design, urban design, car dependency, equitable cities, affordable transportation, Netherlands, cycling, bicycles, cities, walkability, Dutch, Dutch cities, public transport, town planning, Amsterdam, cycling infrastructure Amsterdam, cycling infrastructure Netherlands

Id: xMzCp00nrE0

Length: 33min 22sec (2002 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/24024-43]

Man I was kinda hoping they would take truffles and actually trip