bikes more than cars.
(Photo: Tom Miller)
Industry news publication Bike Europe reports today that, in Amsterdam, people use their bicycles more per day on average than their cars:
“The bicycle is the means of transport used most often in Amsterdam. Between 2005 and 2007 people in the city used their bikes on average 0.87 times a day, compared to 0.84 for their cars. This is the first time that bicycle use exceeds car use.”
City of Portland officials and planners have often said they want Portland to become the “Amsterdam of the West,” so it’s always interesting to see the trends coming out of Amsterdam.
Here’s more from Bike Europe:
“The infrastructure department of the city registered approximately 235,000 car movements in both directions at the city centre in 1990; by 2006 this had fallen to 172,000, a decrease of over a quarter. Over the same period the number of daily movements by bicycle rose from 86,000 to over 140,000 (+60%).”
Read the full article here.
[Thanks to Ron Richings for the link.]
[Editor’s note: The original title of this post was, “In Amsterdam, bicycle use exceeds car use for first time ever”. I have dropped the “first time ever” part after reading feedback in the comments. I assume the Bike Europe story was referring to the first time since they’ve kept these stats.]
awesome. would be nice if we could get even sorta close to this!
This can’t be right. According to the Dutch Bicycle Master Plan, bicycles were the dominate mode (by far) until sometime in the late 50’s. Still very impressive.
Link to the aforementioned Master Plan (10.2MB PDF):
http://www.fietsberaad.nl/library/repository/bestanden/The%20Dutch%20Bicycle%20Master%20Plan%201999.pdf
If Portland is so bad, why do you live here? If the Netherlands is so good, why don’t you move there? Comparing an American urban area, even one as small as Portland, to Amsterdam is a misnomer. Luddites.
Um… i’m pretty sure that cars were invented after bikes, so i have to believe historically this has happened before, given that amsterdam has been around longer than cars and bikes
Who said anything about Portland being bad?
Vance, I don’t see any reference to opinion in this article. The Luddites were ahead of their time, they destroyed machines which replaced their hand-crafted work with mass produced drudgery. And what that has to do with comparing metro areas of relatively similar sizes (500k – 1mil) is beyond me… Personally, I like that a major city in this planet has more trips by bike then by car in 2009. Wish the same could be said for Portland, or any urban area in post-suburban blighted America.
folks. i have edited the story headline and dropped the “first time ever” part.
I assume Bike Europe reported it was the first time bike use had exceeded car use since they’ve tracked this specific statistic.
thanks.
While this is great news, and I was extremely happy to be in a cluster of almost 40 bicycles this morning waiting for the light before the Hawthorne bridge – I would caution readers to remember that statistics are very easy to manipulate.
Lies, Damned Lies, and statistics.
Those who chose to present the data can shape it however best suits their needs.
Not that it isn’t great – just that the way it is being presented is very favorable to bikes.
And I am not talking about BikePortland’s presentation – I am talking about the original sources…
For example, the “vehicle movement” numbers show that there is still more auto use than bicycle use. But the “times per day” numbers show that bicycles are used more than autos.
Tricky Tricky!
‘Amsterdam of the West’? The Netherlands isn’t considered a Western nation then? Interesting.
What percentace of funding has Amsterdam spent on bike projects over, say the last 10 years? I would imaginge there is a direct correlation between what we sepnd for bikes and what we get. So when are we going to raise the bar?
funny you should ask.
check out my story from March 2008:
Spending on bikes: We get what we pay for
Poor me. I’ve been cursed to spend two weeks a year in Amsterdam for the last four years. It’s been a rough haul. I think this statistic may have a lot to do with the huge subway project underway there. They had most of the main streets torn up and fenced off last year. It was even more stupid than usual to try to get around the city center by car.
We’ll get there – when Portland spends 30x the amount on bike infrastructure as they do now, becomes 3x as dense and taxes the hell out of cars. We can dream, right?
I love this video from the Netherlands:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n_znwWroGM&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Egoogle%2Ecom%2Freader%2Fview%2F&feature=player_embedded
Not only do a lot of people not drive in Amsterdam, when they DO drive, it’s likely to be something like this: http://tinyurl.com/kw9xer
Admittedly, that’s small even for a Dutch car, but restaurant delivery vehicles, commercial trucks, etc. are usually about the size of a those tiny blue Datsun pickups from the late 70s. And a majority of personal vehicles are much smaller. It makes an astonishing difference to traffic interactions when cars are closer in scale to their human users. It also is more sane.
We spent a couple of weeks in Holland and Belgium in 2007, and one of my favorite moments was when I realized the car horn I’d heard honk outside the Van Gogh museum was the first car horn I’d heard in three days. There is very little noise from traffic, and the air is incredibly fresh and clean smelling compared to all of the major American cities I’ve been to. There are other great and worthwhile benefits to decreasing car traffic, aside from the awesome biking it allows.
Comments 11 and 12. See my comments at the end of the March 2008 article about per capita spending. That article presents no data to support a contention that higher per capita spending will result in a greater mode split. Amsterdam spends twice what its neighbor Groningen spends per capita, yet sports hardly a few percentage points more bicycle usage. I am fully in support of greater funding for bicycle infrastructure here and everywhere in the US. However, we can spend much more per capita and not change the dominance of our automobile-oriented culture and development patterns.
Another possible explanation is that it is very difficult and expensive to drive there.
Highest standard of living and highest net worth per capita are always questionable. But by any standard measure Denmark is always near the top, and ahead of the US — maybe because they’re not just blowing it all out their tailpipes.
Actually I have read somewhere (or heard during our briefing by their city transport planner) that even with near bicycle dominance the local government struggles to spend proportionally as much on bike infrastructure as it does on auto infrastructure. Much of this is due to the lower cost of bikeways.
Another reason that bikes are often more prefered than cars for local trips is that many cities here do not build 300 or 500% more parking than the number of vehicles that exist. So outside of the suburban cities or highway office parks/big box retail areas it can be very difficult to find a legal parking space for ones car. (Kinda similar to bike parking in most US cities…hmmm interesting.)
And the great network if regional trains helps to keep other cars at home too.
Though many folks here have cars and drive. My host here was just sharing with us the story of one of his younger neighbors (35) who was protesting the reconversion of a parking area back into a public square at the waterfront because he parks there. He drives even though by bike it is a 5 minute ride and finding parking can take longer. This driver is a Dutchman too.
Hi from Vlissingen NL
Jonathan thanks for correcting the title.