Fietsen in Amsterdam

It is perhaps apocryphal and in any case hackneyed but it is stated that Amsterdam is home to more bicycles than people.

Just browsing around Amsterdam city centre, which most tourists are wont to do, it’s easy to conjecture something similar, as wherever one looks - aside perhaps from along the frontage of the Anne Frank House - bicycles seem to line the roadsides and canals like some sort of makeshift fencing, mostly locked to themselves or locked to each other or locked to some element of fixed infrastructure, clearly outnumbering by a comfortable margin the visible human co-inhabitants.

At first the strings of bikes might seem to outsiders like visual clutter to an otherwise beautiful city: “why are they allowed to store their private property in the road … roads that are meant for cars?”.

And that’s the thing. In fact it’s two things.

First, wherever you’re reading this from, you’re probably quite accustomed to at least occasionally storing your private property in the road without even a jot of a thought. Maybe it’s never your piano or your aspidistra or your lawnmower, but aside from your house it’s likely the most valuable asset you own – your car. And it’s quite likely that you have some expectation that somewhere sometime again you will be permitted without question to store it in the public road next to the kerb near to your destination.

Second, in Amsterdam (and to some extent this likely applies where you live too, even if you don’t know it), roads are not meant simply for cars, nor ever were they. Sure, Amsterdamers can (and do) use their roads for their cars, and there is provision for on-street parking as well as some automated innovative parking solutions in evidence. But all but the most arterial of roads are shared by a multitude of transport modes with trams, bikes and pedestrians generally further up the food chain than cars. And drivers drive accordingly.

So it goes without saying that Amsterdam is up there on a podium with Copenhagen as one of the most bike-friendly cities in the world. Provision for bikes is ubiquitous throughout, connected from the hub at Amsterdam Centraal and reaching far far out into the suburbs. And that’s the fundamental part – according to Chris Bruntlett at the Dutch Cycling Embassy:

"If you want cycling for the masses, then you have to make sure that it's not just possible, but it's actually delightful... that it's attractive to people. That there's a cycle path on virtually every street, connecting all the origins and destinations in your city".

Lastly it’s also a truism that there’s no such thing as bad weather – just wrong clothing. It couldn’t be more true for the population of Amsterdam, where around six in ten days (217 across a year) are expected to produce some form of precipitation. So when it rains, Amsterdamers ride their bikes anyway, generally in more appropriate clothing.

Although sometimes they just break out an umbrella.

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P.S. In October 2023, not one electric scooter shared or otherwise did I see in Amsterdam, although I was overtaken in bike lanes by all manner of other micromobility: What the…