Biking in Nijmegen

 For the most part this trip we have been biking in either large cities with well-established networks or in rural areas. Nijmegen and Odense were good opportunities to see what good bike infrastructure looks like on a slightly smaller scale. With these smaller cities it is easier to envision how we could implement what they have into American cities. Not everything is as crazy as it seems in Utrecht or Copenhagen. 

The most surprising insight I have gleaned from our meetings with city officials and planners has been that the citizens in Denmark and the Netherlands can be just as resistant to cycling infrastructure implementation as they are in the US. This fact alone is enough to give me hope that we could potentially have something similar bike-wise to what they have here. It is easy to look at places like Denmark and the Netherlands and decide that the US could absolutely never have anything close to what they have here because it is "just different", but from what I have learned so far, this is not the case. Even here it is an uphill battle to implement the bike infrastructure that makes life more pleasant for everyone. 

I think the most important takeaway I will gain from this experience is the idea that in order to get everyone on board with building a bike network, you have to learn how to sell the idea in different ways to the different interested parties. No one cares about the same things, but biking can help with a huge variety of issues in an urban environment. Don't like all the noise pollution? Bike lane. Too much traffic? Bike lane. Want more people to be able to access your business? Bike lane and bike parking. For a lot of the issues that cities face, creating a bike network can be a one stop shop to solve them. The problem is that most people do not see it this way. 

When a bike lane goes in, cars inevitably lose some space. Whether that means a lane of traffic or a parking lane, most drivers see it as a bad thing and as something that will cause more problems than it will solve. However, when a city is well connected with bikeways, then anyone and everyone can bike and this means that there are fewer people using cars as their main mode of transportation, freeing up space on the street. 

While in Nijmegen, the planner that we met with was telling us that with their traffic projection models they were able to determine that building a new bike lane on a bridge would mean that the city wouldn't have to think about expanding the bridge for more cars for at least another five years. So by building bike infrastructure you can encourage fewer people to drive, therefor making the traffic more bearable for everyone! Hooray.