Fiet Fleet

As Vince, one of my instructors, said, it’s not a trip to the Netherlands unless you get hit by a bike (or fiet in Dutch). Cycling has become almost as important to Dutch culture as windmills and dairy cows, which quickly became apparent to us on our first day in the city.  As we exited the train station when we first arrived in Utrecht, we confronted a sea of hundreds of bicycles, stacked vertically two or three high, in a labyrinth of bike parking.

It looked like the Mall of America on Black Friday.... (Photo credit: Spencer Bauer)

Rush hour looked like a well-dressed Tour de France, as a steady current of students and businesspeople flowed down the bike lanes through the city, spilling out into the streets.  In fact, the cyclists pose more of a danger than cars when crossing the streets as a pedestrian, and the pleasant ring of the bell does not match the panic you feel when you realize that you are in one’s path.  The Dutch have an enthusiastic bike culture, to say the least.

How to be Dutch - Step 1: Find a bike. Step 2: Dress impeccably well. Step 3: Eat chocolate for breakfast.

Touring the polders around the Markermeer made it clear how the landscape is cyclist’s dream.  Without major hills and valleys to tire one out, it’s easy to see how a bike could keep going forever once it hit the pavement.  Probably even more flat that the prairies of the Midwest, you can travel for kilometers without gaining more than one meter in elevation.  One of the road signs we passed along a trail warned bikers of a measly 5% slope. It’s that flat.

Be careful of the steep slope. (Photo Credit: Alex Hill)

Outside of Dugerdam.

The bikes and flat land were a similar flavor to what we have at home in Minneapolis, but what made it interesting, and very Dutch, was how the bike infrastructure intersected with the water infrastructure.  With dikes and canals crisscrossing the polders, it seems as if this would render a lot of surface area unusable.  Much of the water system, however, has been seamlessly incorporated into the transportation.  When a road encountered a dike along a canal or larger body of water, the bike trail peeled off from the road and ran along the top of the dike.  Polder land lay to one side, the car traffic below at the base of the dike, the bikes on top, and the expanse of the Markermeer lay to the other side.  This specific typology causes dikes to be almost integral to the experience of a cyclist, and form a strong relationship between water and recreation

A section and section-perspective from my sketchbook from our stop in Dugerdam. And poorly drawn cars.

Section cut showing/perspectivey thing showing the relationship between the road, dike, bike path, and Markermeer.