Going Dutch

What if people on bicycles ruled the road? Not truck drivers. Not motorhome highway hoggers. Not even the galactically mindless males driving their dad’s pick-up trucks around Anchorage. But people like you and me — on bicycles.

Well, I’m thinking that world might look a lot like Amsterdam.

Bicycles in the Dutch capital easily out-number cars. They even outnumber people. According to the latest city-sponsored study, there are about 1,000,000 bicycles shared by Amsterdam’s 820,000 residents and, on average, each household owns about four.

All that digital information became real for me last weekend as I stepped outside an Amsterdam train station and saw assembled there the largest collection of bicycles I’ve ever seen parked in one spot.

These weren’t abandoned bikes, though a majority of them looked pretty beat-up (as if they were all competing for the honor of being “least desirable bike to steal in The Netherlands”). No, these were bicycles that were very much owned and loved and waiting for someone to finish work and ride them back home.

And when Amsterdam bike riders want to go somewhere, they aren’t marginalized off the real roads onto some cute, winding, asphalt strip in the trees. They have their own serious super-highways (or so it seems) and cars and pedestrians better steer clear. Sometimes that’s hard to do — when the sidewalk for pedestrians narrows down to next-to-nothing and the adjacent bike lane is undiminished.

Walking around Amsterdam for a couple of days, there were at least a dozen times I accidentally stepped into a bike lane and nearly got vivisected. But here’s the thing: No one ever hit me, or yelled at me, or even looked frustrated. Instead the rider would merely make some slight adjustment to his or her course and whiz on past, having already anticipated the encroachment.

These guys are good. And they aren’t dressed in bike-riding gear like American cyclists usually are. They wear their professional work clothes, oftentimes suits or casual clothes for the men and breezy summer dresses for the women. Hardly any of them wear helmets. I counted only about one in twenty with head protection. And that was true as well for the children being chauffeured around by their parents.

I desperately wish I had my camera ready when a mother with a newborn baby tied to her bosom in a Snugli soared past. Or when a father rode by with a kindergarten-aged boy standing absolutely upright on the back-rack (holding onto his dad’s shoulders) and behind the boy also standing upright a small girl holding on to her brother’s shoulders.

But on the last Saturday in August — with polished blue skies and tree-lined canals interspersed every few blocks — Amsterdam was pretty nice for walkers too. Especially in the huge park-like Museumplein, where sidewalk food, playgrounds, Heineken stands, cultural booths, free entertainment and some of the world’s finest museums all blended together into one big Dutch picnic.

I’ll let you guess, from the slide show images below, exactly which museum I decided to visit there that features the work of exactly which native son. As a bonus, I’ll save you all the awful ear jokes.

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