Fietspad
A Journey Through the Netherlands Documenting its Bicycle Infrastructure
Fietspad, or bike path in English, documents a trip across many parts of the Netherlands to document it’s bicycle infrastructure. With only a loose plan in place, the intent was to just ride from city to city, stay the odd extra day in some and document what we saw.
It wasn’t a trip just to see the highlights frequently shared on social media, although there are some. The hope was to document the real bike infrastructure that people use every day, from big cities to smaller towns, urban to rural environments, the good and the bad.
I took photos as we travelled and recorded my thoughts at the end of each day. Fietspad provides over 400 pages of examples, and considers what elements of the bicycle infrastructure I would and wouldn’t bring back to North America, as well as a few we’re not ready for yet.
Cities visited included Utrecht, Gouda, Delft, Rotterdam, Eindhoven, Nijmegan, Arnhem, Zwolle, Groningen, Amsterdam, and Zandvoort as well as many places between. Fietspad shares what we encountered.
A few example pages are shown below. Each day of the trip is documented with an opening image to set the scene, a narrative of the day, and then more images and descriptions of the bicycle infrastructure we came across. Finally, I was delighted to include a foreword by Melissa and Chris Bruntlett to introduce the book.
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Protected bike lanes, they create so much controversy, yet provide so many benefits. When bike lanes were just paint lines at the side of the road, only the fearless used them. Then a few cities started separating and protecting the bike lanes from motor vehicle traffic, and as the network of protected lanes expanded, more and more poeple began to ride a bike, and more and more cities began to build protected bike lanes.
Bike Lanes is a bit different from most urban cycling books. Photographs are central to the book, with each conveying an important principle of bike lane planning or design. Each photograph is accompanied by a short narrative that stands on it’s own, or combines to form the larger narrative in the book. Some photographs feature bike lanes I’ve helped design as a Professional Engineer working in British Columbia, Canada. Some others helped tell the story. All are examples from the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Hopefully you learn something and are inspired to plan, design, build, advocate for, or simply just try out some protected bike lanes for the first time.
Except Bicycles follows on from my previous book Bike Lanes, this time focussing on neighbourhood bikeways. A neighbourhood bikeway is generally a local street with low traffic volumes and speeds making it a safer route option than most. What makes it a neighbourhood bikeway though, are the design features that contribute to lowering those traffic volumes and speeds. There are many local streets that might be considered safe to ride a bicycle, but a neighbourhood bikeway will be a specially selected route considered to be an important corridor and part of a larger overall network, providing meaningful connections between other bike routes, origins and destinations. Neighbourhood bikeways provide an excellent opportunity to build some key parts of a network at relatively low cost and impact. Except Bicycles could best be described as a photo essay taking you on a journey through many examples of the typical features you will find along a neighbourhood bikeway.
fietspad, or bike path in English, documents a trip across many parts of the Netherlands in September 2022 to document it’s bicycle infrastructure. With only a loose plan in place, the intent was to just ride from city to city, stay the odd extra day in some and document what we saw. It wasn’t a trip just to see the highlights frequently shared on social media, although there are some.
The hope was to document the real bike infrastructure that people use every day, from big cities to smaller towns, urban to rural environments, the good and the bad. I took photos as we travelled and recorded my thoughts at the end of each day. The book wraps with things I’m interested in seeing done in the North American context.
Cities visited included Utrecht, Gouda, Delft, Rotterdam, Eindhoven, Nijmegan, Arnhem, Zwolle, Groningen, Amsterdam, and Zandvoort as well as many places between. fietspad shares what we encountered, providing approximately 400 pages of Dutch bicycle infrastructure.