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The Bikes of Amsterdam
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Foreigners who visit
Holland are often surprised by the omnipresence
of bicycles and the almost deadly acrobatics performed on them. An
American
woman who lives here found this aspect of Dutch culture hard to master
and wrote the following note:
The Stages of Dutch Bike-Riding Proficiency
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- Learning to ride a bicycle at
all
- Learning to ride it in public
- Learning to ride it in the only
part of the country that ISN'T as flat as a pancake (optional, only
applicable
in Nijmegen or the extreme south of the country)
- Learning to ride the bicycle
in traffic
- Learning to ride the bike in
traffic while being passed by a semi/bus
- Learning to ride it while carrying
groceries/talking on the cellphone and while being passed by a semi/bus
- Doing two or more of the above
activities in the snow/ice
- Getting to the place where you
aren't being passed by little old ladies and children
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If you
master all eight
stages, you'll be as close as is possible to riding your bike like a
Dutchman/woman…
though don't EVER expect to meet or exceed native cloggies in bicycle
riding
prowess.
This is a bit exaggerated, but indeed, in the Dutch
cities, one
is quite helpless without a bicycle.
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The Dutch
word for bicycle is fiets, a word that may be
derived from the sound fts
that is sometimes used to express that something happens really fast.
Imagine
a nineteenth-century gentleman saying something like "I saw that
vélocipède
arriving and fts it had already passed along". The
bicycle shown
here is of a rather common type, called omafiets,
"grandma-style
bike" (its user is my friend Jolanda).
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More loving expressions
are karretje, "little chariot", and stalen
ros, "iron horse". This is a vouwfiets, a
bicycle that can be
folded, which is easy when you have to commute to another town.
The common fiets has no gear and a
simple back-pedalling break.
Handbrakes and gears make a vehicle much more expensive, and are quite
useless in the cities. On the other hand, if you live on the
countryside,
or want to make a tour out of town, gears are useful. Many people own
two
bikes.
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Cycling is still the
easiest and healthiest way to go to your work.
Unfortunately, you need big locks to protect your bike. Many drug
addicts
earn their money by stealing and selling bicycles. Of course, by buying
a stolen bike, people encourage the junkies, and most people who settle
in Amsterdam say they will never buy a stolen bicycle. After their
means
of transport has been stolen for the fourth or fifth time, they will
usually
decide that they can better join than the fight the system. |
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Reportedly, the number of
stolen bikes is diminishing every year, but
the common wisdom is that people simply no longer bother to go to the
police.
One way to prevent theft is to put your bicycle somewhere inside, which
means that you can nearly always find bikes in an Amsterdam staircase.
This is the iron horse of one of my neighbors. Another solution is to
paint
it in an outrageous color, so that it will be hard to sell. (Still,
someone
took away my ugly orange bike.)
A problem is the increase of the number of cars. This
has changed traffic,
and new rules were necessary. They are very hard to maintain, because
most
Amsterdammers think that the police has no moral right to fine cyclists
until they have been able to reduce the number of stolen bikes.
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A related problem is that
the traffic rules are designed for people
who think whereas cycling is a process that is done
subconsciously.
A cyclist is in dynamic balance and moves his weight from left to right
automatically, without thinking. When an experienced rider arrives on a
busy crossing, he will concentrate on the most important, potentially
deadly,
objects: moving cars. This means that he will not focus on non-moving
objects,
like traffic lights. I have often heard people say that they find it
easier
to approach a red light than a green light, because they feel they can
predict the movement of a moving car, but not of a car that is waiting
until it can accelerate. This is also my experience. In other words,
traffic
regulations are somehow incompatible with the way people cycle. |
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To prevent theft, there
are cycle racks. This one is in front of my
home. The yellow "mountain bike" is owned by one of the visitors of a
nearby
gym; the pink-and-black omafiets is the property of
the girl next-door.
It was painted and decorated for a spoof of MTV's "Pimp My Ride" that
was
broadcasted earlier this year by a local station called AT5. The Dutch
show was called "Freak Me Fiets". |
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How much the Dutch like
their bikes, can be shown by two anecdotes.
In 1940-1945, the Germans occupied Holland and confiscated the
bicycles.
Until quite recently, when a Dutchman wanted to say that he was still
angry
because ot the occupation, he'd say Me fiets terug,
"Give back my
bike". Another story is about the American novelist Donna Tartt, who
expressed
her surprise that the Dutch cared so much about their bicycles, which
were,
after all, soulless objects. To which someone replied: "Who says bikes
have no soul?" You may infer that I was very unhappy when the fork of
my
bike broke (left) - it's indeed as if I was hurt myself. |
©
Jona Lendering for
Livius.Org,
2006
Revision: 8 April 2007 |
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