Hey that’s me! I see myself cycling xD
Hi Me!
Hi This Guy!
It’s so quiet. 🥹
As NotJustBikes pointed out multiple times, we have the idea that cities are loud, but it’s actually cars that are loud.
i hear people talk and laugh. That is what i want a busy street to be like.
Kind of eerie
Thats the thing with biking, at that speed you dont need signals or anything. People will just figure it out.
And accidents are rarely fatal.
As long as you wear a helmet.
Helmets are promoted in North America so that when a car kills a cyclist they can blame it on the cyclist if they aren’t wearing a helmet instead of blaming it on the shitty cycling infrastructure.
Nah im not gonna carry a liter of foam around to cut a 10^-5 chance in third, you do you of course, but this risk is small enough and the inconvenience of carrying around a helmet is large enogh for me to not care for cycling as transportation.
I find the fear mongering around this topic to be supremely annoying. Just let adults ride their bikes however they want. If you try to get your child, employee, or participants in a sporting event to wear a helmet, that’s completely reasonable. But assuming the vast majority of dutch cyclists to be idiots for cycling without a helmet is just asinine.
Everyone seeing cycling as a normal mode of transport is never gonna work if everyone is scared of cycling to the point of never considering it without a helmet. Mandatory helmet laws seem to be one of the most effective measures to discourage cycling, so don’t try to make a bike culture that effectively acts like one.
See what happens when you don’t wear a helmet?
These are bikes only, very low speed interactions. The sort where if you do bump into someone, it’s just a foot on the ground at worst.
Landing on your head at low speeds is still very dangerous. A helmet is not a bad idea.
Doesn’t even have to be low speed. David Hookes took a fall in an altercation with a bouncer and hit his head, leading to his death. It was used as a warning to guys like me of how easily a ‘minor’ head injury can be deadly. Not to mention the horror stories I get from my mother, a nurse, of kids receiving life long head trauma because they were too cool to wear protection.
Wear a helmet.
Times are changing though. These days there are loads of annoying kids on fatbikes. Often they go faster than allowed while these kids are even a danger to themselves and others while walking. There’s a step rise in accidents but due to the laws they can’t do much about it as they fall into the category of bike instead of scooter or moped. Now there’s a minimum age (14 I think?) for fatbikes but that barily works preventing accidents. Now with the rise of e-bikes the average cycling speed is also increased which is something everyone needs to adjust to. Drivers too, as cyclists are sooner at an intersection as they used to be. This also causes accidents. This is how I broke my collarbone because a driver thought he had enough time to cross the cycling path but this caused me to crash into him with 25km/h. Without helmets the chance of serious head injuries is greatly increased with speeds of 25km/h. And there are many fatbikes going 45km/h.
Not really that necessary in NL. Most people are cruising the city at 18-20kph. The fietsers on the ebikes obviously go faster, but in heavy traffic, you’re not gonna go full speed anyhow.
This is just wrong, head injuries are very common in the Netherlands. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/16/the-brain-is-very-vulnerable-dutch-cyclists-urged-to-wear-helmets-as-road-deaths-rise
Just wear a fucking helmet, looking like a dweeb is better than brain damage.
They actually found that both cyclists and drivers tend to take more risks when helmets are abundant, which in turn leads to more serious accidents instead of fewer.
Moreover the Netherlands don’t have comparatively more head injuries each year than more car-centric countries, suggesting that cycling doesn’t contribute that much overall.
And most injuries tend to happen to old people. Drop the 60+ bracket and suddenly head injuries from cycling drops to an inconsequential number.
Like the commenter you’re up against, most Dutch people are very feral when wearing a helmet on a bike is concerned. Everyone considers themselves a master of biking and therefore impervious to damage.
Opinions claiming otherwise are very toxicly brushed aside. Even though numbers increase, specially with electric bikes becoming more common.
It’s the darker side of our bike prowess.
My experience when wearing a bike helmet in NL is that car drivers seem to take more risks with my safety, they drive closer to me than I normally experience, and I feel less safe than when I’m not wearing a helmet.
But yes, dain bramage would be worse. And yes, an accident hides in small corners, but I’m not sure if wearing a helmet makes me safer, even on our streets.
FTA:
Even the Fietsersbond cyclist association is changing its tone, while stressing that there is no excuse for reckless drivers or poor infrastructure. “We have the position that helmets don’t prevent accidents but it can be a wise decision to wear one on a voluntary basis,” said its director, Esther van Garderen. “Emphasising too much that you should wear a helmet would discourage people from cycling sometimes, though, and has the air of victim-blaming. I think it’s coming slowly, although there’s no such thing as a society with zero danger and we value our culture where you can cycle safe and free.”
Seems like a soft position from Fiestersbond and for good reason. I read your article and then followed the sources and looked up the actual numbers. And you need to STFU with your helmet opinion and actually think about the articles you read/link and their sources. According to the same links sourced in the article(!), the CBS says in 2023, people here in NL over the age of six (roughly 15-16m people) traveled over 1000km each by bike in the year. So just shy of 3km a day by bike. Millions upon millions of trips per fucking year. How many of those millions of trips resulted in a crash? 120k. Wow, that seems like a lot doesn’t it? How many people cycle on any given day? According to wikipedia, which cites a EU travel report, 36%. So 5.4m-ish people, making at least one trip per day makes it almost 2 billion trips over an entire fuckin year (5.4m * 365 == 1.97b). So, of those 2 billion trips, we have 120k crashes. Which is… hold on, let me paste it from the calculator because it has so many fucking zeros: 0.000060882800609.
Now, let’s do some math. How likely is it that you will be in a crash in a given year?
No-crash probability per trip:
1−0.00006=0.99994.Annual no-crash probability (365 trips):
(0.99994)^365≈0.9783.Annual crash probability:
1−0.9783=0.0217 or 2.17%.So a 1 in 46 chance of being in a crash in a given year from cycling one trip every day and of those crashes, less than half are serious. Over my 1000km I cycle. Get the fuck outta here with “very common” from your shit article.
Firstly your numbers are wrong, you need double the number of trips (it’s at least 2 just for commuting). So let’s say 5% chance over your lifetime. And that number is increasing because of the reasons mentioned in the article.
Secondly just cause it’s more likely than not you’ll never get a crash doesn’t mean you have to be a dumbass and not wear a helmet. Is it really that difficult to take a little bit of precaution for something with a 5% chance of happening sometime in your lifetime? Seems like a no brainer to me.
So you get out of here with your self-destructive attitude. Wearing helmets saves lives.
Wearing helmets saves lives.
encouraging people to ride bikes with or without a helmet saves more lives. Cars are the real danger, even with a helmet.
I don’t live there, but I’ve often heard that the common rationale for not wearing a helmet is that bike-bike or bike-human accidents usually don’t result in head injuries. Usually, it is a bike-car accident that can result in head injuries, and if you get hit by a car at speed then you have other issues.
You are correct either way, but the problem wouldn’t be as bad if bike lanes are completely separated from cars. I do not have a source, but I’d assume that places like 's-Hertogenbosch, Houten and Utrecht have less head injuries due to the better (completely separated from cars) bike infrastructure compared to Amsterdam or Rotterdam.
At least my hair will look good while I have brain damage
There are probably more people moving unhindered through this short video than you see in an average traffic jam photo.
yes, people counted and compared. This plus trams has waaay more throughput than a usual car intersection. Check out not just bikes video on that topic with various combinations and graphs, and get mad at car infrastructure with us!
Oh yeah no I’ve been in that camp for a long while. I’m actively furious that my state had an approved plan for high speed rail like 15 years ago connecting all the major cities in the area, and connecting to the national line. And then some asshole republican came in and scrapped it even though it was already fully funded and ready to go.
It would be active right now if that hadn’t happened. Instead I have to drive 2.5 hrs to see my friend, 2 hours to go to my specialist doctor, and the same 2 hours in the opposite direction to get to the national line. All of those trips were supposed to be under 45 min on the train.
So so fucking salty about it. I fucking hate driving. I hate having to pay to maintain a vehicle. I hate that car infrastructure means walking is almost impossible. I’d love to ride a bike or bus locally, but the infrastructure doesn’t sufficiently exist for either to be practical in my area (I’m not riding my bike on the road. People here would actively try to kill me.)
I am sorry about that. My place isn’t perfect either and we get a couple of deaths every year. Cycling isn’t accepted by all car drivers, but it is a normal concept anyway.
But i am happy not to live in the USA for example.
Thanks :) I see other countries and how they accommodate people who can’t or won’t or don’t want to drive, and I seriously die a bit inside because solarpunk could be everywhere, it could have, and should have, been here! And instead it’s only places I can never live (too disabled and/or unskilled to emigrate) with the places I can live being wildly opposed to making life even the slightest bit better.
At the same time, I’m genuinely thrilled that that’s a thing at least somewhere. Jealousy notwithstanding, I’m intensely happy for areas that aren’t actively hostile to non-car transit. It all has to start somewhere to prove it works. Trickle-down solarpunk :p
And many more mildly hindered, but in a way which is easily and safely resolvable while maintaining flow
Can we have this everywhere please
Cyclists are the worst where I live, they have zero respect for pedestrians. The city spent millions on bike lanes and these fucks will zip past you and your toddlers on the sidewalk, they never wear helmets, they don’t know any road laws, anyways this would be a nightmare in my city
this is exactly anti-bicylce-propaganda. There are by far more deadly accidents involving cars and trucks than involving bikes and pedestrians. You are afraid of the wrong thing. Also you are describing the results of car focused infrastructure, that hasn’t been effectively planned for cyclists nor pedestrians. The dutch people are not much different than you or me, they just made the infrastructure right and assimilated it over the years. The close calls you are describing look harmless in the video, when you realize that even if there were an accident, not much would happen. But we still get many car-related deaths. Do you see what i mean?
Which city are you in and what does the car infrastructure look like in the street you are describing?
Telling people that their personal experiences are propaganda is the fastest way to make them hate your cause even more
Some people put those fears into your head to create a divide between us. They want you to see close calls with cyclists and be mad about it. So that you don’t see this:
If you hate my cause because i called out that your feelings are fueled by propaganda, the die was loaded from the start. Propaganda uses hate. I bet you are not telling me the city you are describing because it is a car infested hell with one ineffective bike lane.
Vehicular Cyclists, or Middle-Aged Men In Lycra, or MAMILs, will set that standard.
These aren’t MAMILs. These are people who just want to use the most convenient way of getting around in a place where cycling is considered a valid answer to that question.
there will always be bad and good examples in all the groups. You can’t blame an entire group. I know a couple of MAMILs and they are all very careful, friendly riders.
- Anecdotal evidence is merely evidence of an anecdote.
- Just because those people are decent (or maybe seem decent when they’re around you) does not mean that assholes do not exist.
- The point still stands that MAMILs cycle in spite of infrastructure, not thanks to. This is not the case in the vid, but probably is the case for the above commenter.
Would you be comfortable sharing the lane with things that outweigh and outrun you by two orders of magnitude, where a forgettable bump for them would probably be your death, and where at best there’s a chance they might not notice or see you in a decent frame of time, at worst they’ll actively try to hurt you. I’d hate to cycle in such an environment.
Vehicular Cycling is the Dark Souls of cycling. Dutch cycling, or Practical Cycling as I’d prefer to call it, is more the Animal Crossing of cycling.
See, this is why you shouldn’t encourage bikes. That street looks totally unusable! 😤😤😤🚗🚗🦅🇱🇷
classic public service inefficiency. If they made the lanes a little wider cars could drive here too. But of course they forgot that.
With so many bikes it’s going to make it impossible for cars to go through quickly! reeeeee!
True Liberian here
Leave Liberia out of this :)
It’s so beautiful.
Fairy sure that you’re seeing a bicycle only intersection. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but zero cars is not plausible, not even in Holland.
Source: I lived there for a decade and I’ve also been watching Not Just Bikes on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@NotJustBikes
Obligatory pedantic correction: this is in the Utrecht region in the Netherlands (same name as the city). So neither South nor North Holland in this case.
Er is er altijd wel eentje …
Had to ^_^
This is one of the busiest bike intersections in Utrecht. It is right by the central train station. When the camera pans right, you can see the exterior of the amazing bike parking structure that sits under the plaza in front of the station and shopping mall.
Just 100 meters further this same traffic has to cross with public transport and cars, it’s mayhem there. But hardly any accidents. Just a lot of impatient cyclist. Source: It’s on my daily commute
This looks hilarious but its real. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. By the way, you see a red colored sidewalk, you get off of that thing unless you want to get run over by bikes.
What’s hilarious about it?
To an outsider like me. Its hilarious because you’ve never seen so many people trying to get somewhere on a bike. Specially when its winter and they get icicles on their face. But also when many are dressed like executives at some large corp while riding comfort bikes in the sitting up straight position.
Here in the us people ride bikes to exercise and have absolutely no heading or reason other than that. In Mexico people side their bikes from work if their old or poor or both. They ride slowly for pleasure, just to not have to walk after a long day. Whistling, looking at women walking because women don’t ride bikes, machismo. Its traditional. The bikes are old and are quickly becoming replaced by 2cycle mopeds, which women do ride a lot. Tons and tons of mopeds along with tons of moped accidents. So a bunch of people riding bikes, not wearing spandex or helmets, or wearing helmets and a suit, on special roads to get somewhere useful that’s on the hilarious end of things. Because its weird and different.
To me, an european but not Dutch it’s uncommon to see so many people on bikes, but other than that it’s perfectly ordinary. I’m just a bit jealous of the fact that there’s no snow on their bike paths
Or nails…bikes remove nails.
bikes? eww. That sounds an awful lot like communism to me.
Every bike in The Netherlands is automatically equipped with a radio locked on a communist radio station frequency with a loud speaker which cannot be turned off. If the police find you with the radio off or not loud enough, you will be sent to the Gulag called Urk where you will be forced to produce stroopwafels for the glory of the workers!
Oh my. Must suck living in a socialist hellhole. Free healthcare that doesn’t send you bankrupt if you have the misfortune of becoming sick. I’ll stick with crippling debt for life thank you very much (not really. I’m in Australia)
Oh. Don’t forget about the mass shootings every day
Healthcare isn’t free sadly. I pay 180 insurance fees monthly and have to pay max 385 own-risk per year when I need care. Which I go through every January. But at least most is covered and it includes basic dental (add-on, not standard).
The only thing the Dutch shoot is Marijuana directly into their veins.
Oh wooops. Told the joke the wrong way around haha
And kaas (cheese)
Are ebikes not a thing in the Netherlands?
You can see some people riding ebikes on the video.
Edit: originally stated that lots of people riding ebikes, but on closer inspection they’re less than I originally thought.
They are a thing. But most people are gonna ride a beater that if it gets stolen, no big deal. ebikes in particular are a big target for theft, especially the shitty fat tire ones. In fact, ebikes are becoming a bit of a nuisance because of the speed difference between them and regular bikes. In Amsterdam, we already force the mopeds (ICE or electric) to be on the street with the cars. And the city will vote soon to ban the fat tire ebikes from Vondelpark because of the nuisance they cause among heavy mixed traffic. There have been complaints to the city that older people don’t feel safe on the fietspad any more because of the big speed difference and I agree with them. The fietspad should be for everyone, not only the fastest.
That makes sense. I never understood the popularity of fat tire ebikes. They are much heavier than regular bikes and therefore don’t hold a charge as long.
The people who ride them don’t want to ride a bicycle. They want to ride a motorcycle that can bypass jammed roads, without license or registration.
Ebikes are less important when you don’t have hills to deal with.
