Oliebollentocht 2012

At the start

Last Saturday, the 29th of December, was the day of the Oliebollentocht. This is an annual social ride for velomobilists, around 60 km in length. This year it the circular route started from Zwolle and it attracted 157 velomobiles which was enough for a new world record. 157 is about 1/10th of the total number of velomobiles in the Netherlands, though quite a lot of participants were not from the Netherlands but from Germany, Belgium and France. One guy rode his velomobile all the way from Austria to take part.

I started making a video, but several other people made better videos than mine. I've picked out two of them.

Harry captures the fun in part by playing around with speeds and mixing up the order of the event:


The Questchen's video also shows the ride well and because he was in the same group as me (we rode in four groups of about 40, meeting up halfway and at the end), I appear in this video at about 7:20:

Going home, lighting up the cycle-path
Almost the entire distance between here
and Zwolle was covered on cycle-paths
of this quality.

Zwolle is 70 km South from Assen, I rode there on my own on the morning of the ride and rode back again afterwards with Peter. Quite a lot of the riding was in darkness at both ends of the day, and I again supplemented my inbuilt B+M light with a Philips headlight which lit up the road very well indeed. Roughly half of the total distance was covered on cycle-paths, and the other half on minor country roads which mostly don't function as through roads for drivers.

Wide, smooth cycle-path in Zwolle
with priority over the road. Zwolle,
like all Dutch cities, has a
comprehensive network of
good quality cycle paths.

By the end of the day I'd covered a total of 202 km at an average speed of 27.5 km/h, including all the slow-downs which occur when riding in a large group, wheeling the Mango through parking areas, slowing down and stopping to read the map on the way there and back etc. Such an average doesn't break any records, but it's a perfectly respectable touring speed and as I've pointed out before, providing another example how it's perfectly possible to keep up a good speed on Dutch cycle-paths.

Traffic stopped, crossing as a group

The entire day was a pleasure, and as ever, the infrastructure helped to make it so. Where else in the world could such a mass ride take place with a lot of people riding rather larger than average bicycles, often two abreast, at a good speed, with no problems due to motor vehicles ?

Finally, thank-you to all those involved with organising the Oliebollentocht, especially Paulus den Boer who hosted the event and the many volunteer verkeersregelaars who gave up a day to direct traffic and by doing so made things go very smoothly indeed.

How efficient is it ?
I calculated a while back that a strong person doing a manual job probably generates about 1 kWh of energy in an eight hour working day. I cycled for less than eight hours, so this journey was probably made on less than 1 kWh of energy. It's remarkable how efficient cycling is, and a velomobile is even more efficient than a normal bicycle.