Inside the Bicycle’s Conquest of Amsterdam
To make way for pedal-powered mobility, the Dutch capital embarked on a decades-long campaign to design streets around the needs of cyclists, not drivers.
The humble black bike is the undisputed king of urban mobility in Amsterdam.
Photo: David Dudley/Bloomberg CityLab
In a city where bicycles outnumber humans, the omnipresence of the machines can be overwhelming. The bikes of Amsterdam cluster at every curbside, line canals and bridges, and sweep silently around you when as you stroll. The urban fabric is saturated with cyclists, flowing through a complex network of bike-optimized lanes, paths, fietsstraten and woonerfs in numbers that can astonish — and intimidate — newcomers.
“You are here in the bike capital of the world,” Meredith Glaser announced to a gaggle of attendees at the Bloomberg CityLab conference in Amsterdam this week. More than 60% of trips in the city center happen on bicycles, she told us. As the director of the Urban Cycling Institute at the University of Amsterdam, Glaser helped develop an online course called Unraveling the Cycling City, which aims to explain how the Dutch transformed their transportation infrastructure to bring the bike to the top of the mobility food chain.