In the Dutch city of Utrecht, kids start learning about traffic safety long before they prepare for a driver’s license. And they pick up a lot more than just “look both ways before you cross the street.”

The school curriculum includes regular field trips to the local “traffic garden.” The City of Utrecht has used this facility, a streetscape in miniature, to teach kids the rules of the road since the 1950s. Students take turns as cyclists, pedestrians and car drivers, learning how to take other types of street users into consideration. The hands-on experience navigating the traffic garden gives kids the skills and confidence to get around the city under their own power as soon as their early teens.

At this intersection on the main ring road around Groningen, cyclists get their own green phase. When the bike signal says go, cyclists at any point in the junction can travel in any direction. Engineer Hillie Talens explains how it works in this short video, which kicks off a series of Streetfilms we made on a trip to the Netherlands with a delegation from Bikes Belong.

Last week, a team of Dutch experts led a series of Think Bike workshops in four U.S. cities to help advocates and planners design the bike infrastructure of the future. Cities across the globe continue to look to the Netherlands for inspiration, and guidance, and that demand is being embraced by a unique organization known as the Dutch Cycling Embassy.

The embassy is comprised of bike ambassadors from non-profits, private companies, bike manufacturers and local and national governments in the Netherlands. It recently released a new video that beautifully tells the story of how the bicycle became a part of everyday life in the Netherlands. Cycling has always been popular in the Netherlands, but as the video illustrates so well, there was a time when cars ruled and the transformation to bike-friendly streets didn’t happen overnight. It’s an inspirational seven minutes by Amsterdamize‘s Marc van Woudenberg and a must-see for elected officials and planners in the U.S.

The goal of the embassy, which has also launched a new website, is to “to support, facilitate, contribute to and inspire international cycling projects and policies helping countries, cities and its people to move forward in a safe and healthy way.” In addition to the video, you can download this great brochure [PDF] from the embassy, which has a lot of important and fun facts about bicycling in the Netherlands, “where 16 million inhabitants own 18 million bicycles.”

The designers explain that their slide is meant to be a nice gesture to the travellers. They brilliantly foresaw that such a playful urban intervention can generate large-scale positive spin-off for a disadvantaged neighborhood like Overvecht, and that’s exactly what happened.

Frivolous fun, or ingenious solution to the MTA’s escalator maintenance woes? (In Utrecht, of course, they don’t get 106-degree scorchers like today, so this slide will probably stay usable all year round.)

The Dutch like their bike lanes continuous, two-way, and separated from traffic so "bikes flow like water." Image: Planet Green

I know, I know, Euro-envy can get a little old. So the Dutch are trying to give us a little less to be jealous of. What if our streets were as bike-friendly as theirs?

We could get there. Our trip patterns aren’t dramatically different from theirs: most trips in this country are under four miles, or 20 minutes by bike. But here, people drive those short distances. What would it take to get more of us to go by bike?

In September, the Dutch embassy facilitated collaborative workshops between Dutch and local planners and engineers in Toronto and Chicago, evaluating bike facilities in those cities and making recommendations for improvements. This week, they gave their report card to Washington, DC. Next year: Miami and San Francisco; possibly Baltimore and Memphis.

They give specific recommendations for specific intersections and corridors, guided by principles of continuity and bi-directionality. Bikes, the Dutch like to say, flow like water. In DC, their suggestions included two-way cycle tracks (even on one-way streets) with buffers separating them from traffic, expanding public plaza areas, installing bike signals, bike-only connections where roads cut off, sharper turns at intersections, colored bike lanes and more.

As Cor van der Klaauw, a Dutch cycling planner, said, “I think most of the bikers from Holland, when they will cycle in your country, will think, ‘well, there are no facilities.’” But he also said he found some impressive bike innovations in DC – “We learned a few things which we can take back to Holland.”

On a national scale, there are things we can do to boost bike ridership. They’re not necessarily as sexy as cycle tracks but the Dutch visitors say they make a difference.

They say we make it too cheap to drive. Getting a driver’s license is cheap. Gas is cheap. Parking is cheap. Excise taxes on car purchases: cheap.

And we get our kids started off wrong by driving them to school every day. The Dutch planners say the U.S. doesn’t invest enough in school buses, and our streets often aren’t safe enough for kids to bike to school. In the Netherlands, 50 percent of trips to school are made by bicycle.

Rep. Tom Petri (R-WI), a co-chair of the Congressional Bike Caucus, told DC workshop attendees, “We are engaged in a bipartisan war against couch potatoes here in the United States. I think it’s been won for some considerable time, for a variety of reasons, in the Netherlands.”

From Infrastructurist by way of Buzzfeed comes this video of bike commuters in Utrecht. With a population of around 300,000, Utrecht is the fourth largest city in the Netherlands, and has a 33 percent bike mode share. According to the write-up accompanying the YouTube post, this intersection handles "no less than" 18,000 bicycles and 2,500 buses per day.

Entrancing as it is, we did manage to wonder what this scene would look like if all these people were driving. Probably something like this:

Yesterday we highlighted a Bob Mionske column that eloquently lays out inherent biases common in U.S. traffic codes and proposes measures we can take to start correcting them. One of them is strict liability, which generally assigns responsibility for a collision to the operator of the vehicle likely to do the most damage (just as motorists are expected to look out for cyclists, cyclists must look out for pedestrians).

This video, via Copenhagenize, explains. Says narrator Hans Voerknecht:

We say in the Netherlands: Car drivers should be aware of the situation, that they are in the machine that could kill, and that they should behave responsibly.

As reader Mitch alluded to yesterday, strict liability as applied here is primarily a civil law concept. But its value in establishing a culture of equity on the roads, as Mionske writes, is hard to dispute.

In [a] sense, the law is helping Dutch drivers to see cyclists. "Reasonable human beings in other countries see the cyclist," [SF Bicycle Coalition's] Andy Thornley notes. "How can we help drivers here to look harder?" Through laws that send the right signals when drivers fail in their duties to others.

Streetsblog San Francisco's Bryan Goebel attended the NY400 event yesterday, where Dutch Cabinet Minister Frans Timmermans presented Deputy Mayor Robert C. Lieber and NYC & Company CEO George Fertitta with 200 orange commuter bikes as part of a year-long commemoration of "four hundred years of friendship between the Netherlands and the City of New York." To mark the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival, the bikes arrived in Manhattan via a water taxi on the Hudson River.

The bikes will be used for special events throughout the year, then will be donated to Recycle-A-Bicycle. 

Bryan reports that the event, which included a tour of the Hudson River Greenway and a ride to the Museum of the City of New York, was tempered by the pedestrian injuries and deaths at the hands of a motorist during a Queens Day parade in the Netherlands.

See more of Bryan's photos on Flickr, and visit City Room for more NY400 coverage.

Alan Durning has a lengthy essay discussing the infrastructure and culture that makes a city "bike friendly" in the environmental news blog, Gristmill:

Good bicycling infrastructure is something few on this continent have seen. It doesn't mean a "bike route" sign and a white stripe along the arterial. It doesn't mean a meandering trail shared with joggers, strollers, and skaters.

Bike friendly means a complete, continuous, interconnected network of named bicycle roads or "tracks," each marked and lit, each governed by traffic signs and signals of its own. It means a parallel network interlaced with the other urban grids: the transit grid on road or rail; the street grid for cars, trucks, and taxis; and the sidewalk grid for pedestrians. It means separation from those grids: to be useful for everyone from eight year olds to eighty year olds, bikeways on large roads must be physically curbed, fenced, or graded away from both traffic and walkers. (On smaller, neighborhood streets, where bikes and cars do mingle, bike friendly means calming traffic with speed humps, circles, and curb bubbles.)

Picture a street more than half of which is reserved for people on foot, bikes, buses, or rail; on which traffic signals and signs, street design, and landscaping all conspire to treat bicycles as the equals of automobiles. This is what bike friendly -- what Bicycle Respect -- looks like.

Such "complete streets" are common in Denmark, the Netherlands, and other northern European countries.

What does bike friendly look like? It looks like a 60-year old and her granddaughter on two wheelers, getting the green light at each intersection they approach, while drivers brake to stay out of their way.

We don't understand a word of it, but in this video compilation from the Netherlands, we see what a well-funded television ad campaign to encourage cycling might look like. Or not. Check out the ad about three minutes in: It appears to show an Al Qaeda operative a Saddam Hussein-like guy on a bicycle with a machine gun strapped to his back chasing three Western politician businessman types. It's probably not the best sales pitch for the US market but you get the idea.