In 2006, I moved to Utrecht, the fourth largest city in the Netherlands, eager to join the cyclists on the streets of cobblestones. For the previous two years I was commuting from Bussum, a village of 10,000, by train to Utrecht and by foot to Utrecht Conservatory.
The cyclists in Utrecht whisked by me at lightning speed. Until I joined the anonymous cyclists, it seemed dangerous to be a pedestrian or a car driver.
In the following video my friend Anna in Utrecht shared on her Facebook page, there’s an interesting statistic — that 99% of people in the Netherlands own a bicycle. I think it’s less than 1% on Maui.
It is said that every resident in the Netherlands owns 2.5 bikes: one for the daily commute, one for the weekend, and one that’s fallen into a canal. Some people cycle from home to the train station and then pick up their second bike at the destination where it’s permanently parked.
The friends who visited me in Utrecht are always shocked when they see the bicycles packed and parked at “Utrecht Centraal” — the central station of trains, trams, and buses in Utrecht.
I owned a purple hybrid Dutch bicycle for daily travel from my home — a turn-of-the century Dutch monument house next to a peaceful canal that fed into the Amsterdam Rijn Canal which fed joined the Amstel River and the Rhine in Germany. I eventually bought a vouwfiets — a Brompton folding bike to save time for the travel between Leiden Centraal and Webster University where I taught. My friend in Leiden “sold” me her mountain bikes. So technically, I owned three different kinds of bikes.
In 2014, CNN voted Utrecht as one of the best cities in the world for cyclists. I agree. Without a bicycle, you are left out. I went grocery shopping with it. I cycled to concerts. My bicycle lock was more expensive than my bike. That’s how important it was.
So important are bicycles as the main mode of transport that even musicians cycle with their instruments to their next gig. See the first video in my blog post.
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