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.