Missing Dutchs in the US

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Dutch style bicycles are the results of decades of good biking culture and intelligent design: they are durable, they allow to bike in an upright, ergonomic posture, they provide racks for your panniers, and their chainguards prevent your pants from getting stained while also reducing maintenance on the transmission system. As a matter of fact, Dutch style bicycles are great for rainy weather.

But here in the US, and specifically in rainy Seattle, they are nowhere to be found. People don’t ride them, stores don’t sell them, and even some components like chainguards are missing altogether.

Why is so? In my opinion, the social fabric that would use them is missing. Here in the US there are two sides when it comes to biking: the sunny-weekend-only, recreational riders (which ride a good looking bicycle, heavy and with fat tires); and those who ride it daily for ethical or healthy reasons (which usually aim for a speedy and lightweight bike).

So who is missing? John Doe. John Doe isn’t yet using the bike to commute to work or go to the supermarket. And although bike usage keeps growing little by little in the cities, one wonders if in 20 years John will by riding his Dutch bicycle, or he will sitting on a self-driving electric car.

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Infamous laws

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Laws are written by politicians. Politicians do not need to know about everything to develop their job and advisors with specific knowledge help them. Sometimes malfunctions happen. This is the case when one tries to understand controversial laws. One of them is the Valencian mobility law. The implementing regulation has several nonsenses when comparing the treat on bikes and cars. Just one example. Driving a car at 70 km/h (43.5 mph) in a street with speed limit 50 km/h (31.07 mph) is fined with 100€. The same amount is fined to a cyclist riding a bike without bell. The preposterous sum is discredited if you think about the potential consequences of both actions. On the one hand, driving a car at 70 km/h can cause a fatal accident with deaths, injured people and material damages. On the other hand, lacking a bell is substituted by shouting in order to avoid a crash. Again, bad laws are present in every country and absurd laws should also be banished.

Street users pyramid

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Every day you share the street with other people who walk, use a wheelchair, ride a bike or drive a motorcycle, a car, a van, a truck, etc. There is a myriad of ways of moving from one point to another. I like to think it as a pyramid regarding the protection each group should have. On the bottom of this gradation, there would be walking people and wheelchair users since each and every person belongs to this group and are the most vulnerable. Next, bikers and skaters would take up the second step. They go faster than most of walkers. This fact determines they should ride in a different, separate space in the street in order to avoid accidents and troubles. Then, we have the motorcycle drivers. Obviously, the speed they reach is the higher up until now, but they are fragile compared with car drivers. It is no difficult to imagine who would be worse off in an accident between a motorcycle and a car. On the top of this pyramid I put car, van and truck drivers. Since they move in the heaviest machines, the potential damage they can cause in road accidents is the most important. Indeed, it is common that most of deaths in road (at least in Western countries) are car drivers.

Sidewalks and bikers

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One of the main problems when surveys are done regarding urban mobility is the conflict between bikers and pedestrians. Riding on sidewalks (outside bike-lines) is fined in a lot of countries. The bike is logically considered as a vehicle and thus it should move on pavement or bike-lines. Bikers who ride their bikes on sidewalks probably do it because:

– They act as pedestrians, following the same paths and mental schemes as if they were walking. But not, they are riding and this can cause problems due to the higher speed than human step and/or the potential accident caused by the fact that it is an almost noiseless transport.

– This kind of bikers also can present fear to ride on pavement. This fear is understandable in some cases specially in avenues in which cars and motorcycles do not usually respect the speed limit. This reason makes it difficult to convince those bikers to move to the pavement since the more bikers on it, the more calmed traffic we will enjoy. In order to avoid going around in circles, government actions on sustainable mobility should calm traffic and, at the same time, bikers should take the pavement.