Who cycles in the Netherlands ? Everyone cycles in the Netherlands !

Average number of bicycle rides per person per day for the entire Dutch population for all seasons combined broken down by age and sex

To a first approximation, everyone cycles in the Netherlands. The graph above shows how cycling rates vary with age and sex within the Netherlands, expressed as the average number of cycle journeys per day made per person.

It shows a number of things: that cycling is very popular with school age children, for instance, and that it drops off a bit for working age adults as for some the commute is "too far" by bike. Males between 20 and 50 years of age cycle the least. This is because they're most likely to have a job requiring a long commute. Women follow a similar pattern, but there is a jump in cycling between "25 to 30" and "30 to 40" as this is the age at which women have children, and having children allows women to return to cycling. This first happens with children on their mother's bike and later with women accompanying their children on their own bike before at eight years old they are able to ride unaccompanied to school. Men don't get this chance so often so men cycle less.

This is due to women being more likely to be at home looking after children than their male partners. As a result, they more often cycle with young children to school, or make shopping and other utility trips by bike. This is what leads to the Netherlands uniquely having 55% of trips overall by women. Men cycle less on average than women because they are more likely than women to be making the longest commutes in Europe, and doing so by other means of transport.

Cycling stays with people through their entire life. Even the over 75s are predominantly still active. They make an average of around 0.3 trips per day by bike, or more than two trips each week.

The Dutch use their bikes for exactly the same purposes as people in other countries use their cars

Here we see the reasons for bicycle journeys. Only 16% of all cycle journeys are commutes. The largest percentage, 22%, are shopping trips, 18% are school journeys, 14% are social, and 11% are to go visiting.

This level of cycle usage, across both sexes, all ages, and for all purposes, requires infrastructure which has a high level of subjective safety.

But let's go back to that figure of just 16% of cycle journeys being for commutes. In all too many places, commuting rate figures are touted as "modal share". Actually, commutes make for just a small percentage of total journeys in any country, and that should be the case for cycling too. However, in many countries there is not the required subjective safety for everyone to cycle. In these countries, promoting cycling as just something for commuters and ignoring the other 84% of potential cycle journeys removes the need to make conditions suitable for everyone to cycle. This can never be the route to mass cycling on the scale that it is seen in the Netherlands.

I am not impressed with people touting "commuting" modal shares because they have missed out the big picture. What is important is that everyone should be able to make every type of journey by bike. We should be cautious of figures designed to impress which emphasize the easier demographics to attract to cycling - one of which is the confident young adult, often but not exclusively male, riding to work and back.

These figures came from the same source as last week's post, the Fietsersbond. Marc has also written about these statistics.

Beauty and the Bike - what happened next

Last year I blogged about the Beauty and the Bike movie. Now there is a summary film from the project giving a little information about what has happened since the film was released.

From the Beauty and the Bike blog: "The excitement of the film premiere is over. Back we go to “normal” life in Darlington. We’ve managed to keep the beautiful dutch bikes – in fact we’re going to buy 40 more this year and expand the bike hire scheme. But how many girls will keep on cycling? We know that cycling is still “uncool” for many UK teenagers – perhaps because it feels so unsafe on our meagre infrastructure? Here, one of the girls from Beauty and the Bike, Lauren Pyrah, comes behind the camera to ask what is happening to the Darlington girls now. Kate, one of the original group, is joined by Francesca to shout the praises of everyday cycling. But Ashley has stopped. Why? And will politicians listen?"

The film and its accompanying book (which explains from the point of view of Beatrix Wupperman about the difference between her youth in bike friendly Bremen in Germany and the experiences of teenagers in bike hostile Darlingon in the UK) are essential reading and viewing for campaigners, especially in English speaking countries, all of which share much the same problems as the UK.

Between them, they offer an exceptional insight into why it is that teenagers in the UK predominantly don't cycle. Teenagers who don't cycle mostly turn into adults who don't cycle. And of course while girls and women in Britain are even less likely to cycle than boys and men, the same issues also prevent males in Britain from cycling to any significant degree.

The book and video are both available from the Beauty and the Bike website. These are exceptional pieces of work and I really can't recommend them highly enough.

As they say on the website: "It's the infrastructure, stupid."

I'm in the film for a few seconds and so is one of my daughters.

Why do Sydney's drivers hate cyclists ?

The Sydney Morning Herald from Australia recently reported that Sydney is "the city that hates bikes." Cycling rates are low all across Australia, but Sydney is the city which has "the lowest rate of bicycle ownership of any major city in Australia as well as the lowest proportion of people who cycle every day." Melbourne has double the cycling rate of Sydney, with 2.1% of commutes by bike vs. 0.8% in Sydney.

John Pucher, who I wrote about previously, spent a sabbatical year researching ways to boost cycling in Sydney, and wrote a detailed report which looks into the reasons why Sydney has so little cycling, making comparisons with Melbourn and with the rest of the world.

The graph shows the relationship between the bicycle modal share for commuting and the proportion of bike trips which are by women for various areas of Melbourne. Women are typically more cautious than men, and where subjective safety is lacking, fewer women will cycle. It is noted in the article that cycling rates for women are very low in Australia, while the highest rate of cycling by women is here in the Netherlands where 55% of all cycle journeys are made by women.

Normally I would note here that the commuting rate is usually a lot lower than the modal share for all journeys. This is true in most instances because children, parents with children and the elderly are even more affected by subjective safety issues.

However, Australia's cycling rate is so low that other effects come into play. In Sydney, fully 53% of cycle journeys are made for recreational purposes. This is quite an unusual situation. Conditions are such that utility cycling by "normal people" who don't identify themselves as "cyclists" has almost been eradicated.

Pucher's article (please read it) spends a lot of time looking at the factors which make cycling particularly unattractive in Sydney. Topography and climate, population density and urban form, trip distance, socioeconomic and demographic factors. I've covered most of these issues before, and none really add up to a reason for no-one to cycle.

I've covered these excuses before, so I won't go over them again, except for one. The problem of trip distances is so commonly over-stated that I will write about that. The average work trip length in Sydney turns out to be 16.9 km. That's quite a high figure. However, 32.9% of work trips are actually under 10 km, and 15% of trips to work are under 5 km. Even with such a large number of short commutes, only 0.8% of all these commutes are being made by bicycle. Journey distances may put off some potential cycle commuters, but they are clearly not the real reason for the cycling rate of Sydney being so extraordinarily low.

It is often believed by people from low cycling English speaking countries that the Dutch only make short journeys. That of course is not the truth. Across the whole of the Netherlands, 35% of all trips for all purposes that are under 7.5 km are made by bike. So are 15% of journeys between 7.5 and 15 km and 3% of journeys over 15 km. The Dutch have the longest commutes on average of any nation in Europe.

So what is the problem ? Why do Australians cycle so infrequently ? Section 5 on page 14 of the article gets down to it:

"Concern about the danger of road cycling is a serious deterrent to getting more people to cycle—especially for children, the elderly, and women, but also for anyone who is risk averse (Bauman et al, 2008). A recent survey of 1,150 Sydney residents living within 10 km of the CBD suggests that perceived traffic danger is the primary reason why non-regular cyclists do not cycle more often (City of Sydney, 2006). Thus, improving cycling safety is an important approach to encouraging more cycling among a broader cross-section of society. Of course, reducing cyclist injuries and fatalities is an appropriate public health goal in itself, but the potential impact of improved safety on people’s willingness to cycle is yet more reason to pursue this goal."

There you have it. There is a lack of Subjective safety.

It doesn't have to be like this. In the Netherlands we have infrastructure which supports cyclists by giving them direct journeys with a high degree of subjective safety making cycling easily accessible to all. The result is not only an enormous difference in the number of short and slow journeys made relative to other countries, but increases interest in all types of cycling. You also see it reflected in the very high rate of participation in racing, and the resulting success in international racing vs. other countries, and the high rate of long distance cycle commuting. The latter particularly benefits due to infrastructure specifically designed to support it. The quality of Dutch provision has made a great difference to my own commuting speed. For keen cyclists, there is no down side to the type of infrastructure which exists in the Netherlands.

The story about Sydney came to me via the Crap cycling and walking in Waltham Forest blog.

Beauty and the bike

For some time now I've been aware of the Darlington Media Group's production Beauty and the Bike, which is to have its premier on the 9th of December in Darlington in the UK.

In this project, investigating why it is that British teenage girls don't cycle in the same way as their German counterparts do, a group of British girls from Darlington were taken to Bremen in Germany.

The British girls ride bikes infrequently. The German girls ride a lot. Even from this short from the film you can see why this is. The infrastructure in Germany supports and encourages cycling as a means of transport, while the infrastructure in the UK does not.

From the Darlington Cycling Campaign Blog:

"Why do British girls stop cycling? By simply asking this basic question, the film reveals the damage that has been done by 50 years of car-centric transport policies. Whilst we fill our lives with debates about risk assessment, cycle helmets, cycle training and marketing strategies to try to persuade people to cycle more, the basic barriers to cycling remain untouched - generous urban planning towards the car, and the resultant poor motorist behaviour towards cyclists. Is it any wonder that most people find cycling unattractive in the UK, but attractive in cycling-friendly towns and cities? It's the infrastructure, stupid!"

In other words: it's all about subjective safety

Darlington is one of the "Cycling Demonstration Towns" in Britain. They have recently produced a report on the effectiveness of what has been achieved so far.

After the cycling demonstration town initiative, 2.9% of Darlington pupils have cycling as their usual mode of travel to school. Just under 23% of the adult population of the town have used a bicycle in a typical week in the previous year.