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riding in the Netherlands

The bicycle country par excellence of course, bikes are everywhere. In most towns there are often serious bike parking problems at least during weekends, and also in many ways the bikers rule the road or at least the bikepaths. Cars usually yield for bicycles when there is a possible conflict at roundabouts or other crossings.

Somewhat surprising I found the Netherlands a somewhat difficult country to bicycle in; at least that was the case for long distance cycling. This may have something to do with my first day spent mostly in the very built up area of the Amsterdam Randstadt, the whole area from Alkmaar down to Vlaardingen is basically one big city with large green areas in between. This leads to two problems, one is the preferred method of the Dutch when building bikepaths in cities/towns, they systematically use brick and not asphalt, most certainly because bricks look a lot nicer. The bikepath surface when built with bricks is however more often than not extremely uneven, and slows down the bike significantly, at least is that the case with a heavily loaded bike with 27 * 1 [pi] tires.

The other problem is that the paths wind all over the place, and are all the time marked with the nearest (very close) next place, usually not more than one or two kilometres away. At least in the Randstadt area one will not find bikepath signs pointing out that Delft may be 40 kilometres away in that direction. The first sign for Delft one sees when only a 3 [^]4 kilometres away. Because of this map reading all the time is a must. I used the standard Dutch bikemaps [Smulders Kompas, 1:200000], one for the north and one for south, they functioned well enough and had enough details. The few times, in particular during the first day, when I found myself going off course, it was always because I had neglected proper map reading at one point or another.

The second day through Nederland, on the islands south of Rotterdam, I encountered some different problems. I eventually found fietsroute #1, and all was happy going for a while. Then, at a critical point when I should have turned right and crossed over on a dyke to the next island, all signs disappeared. My general assumption when there is no sign is to keep going straight ahead, and because of that I spent something like 30-40 minutes fooling around looking for the right directions.

The above may sound a bit negative, however when you find the right long distance bike path in Holland, things usually work very well. The paths are almost without exception very well built and also maintained very well, which definitely is not the case in many other countries. The photograph at the top of 7th June; N51°19 E3°29; Oostburg, between Belgium and a windy place is an example of that. Also bikepaths in Nederland are built with the understanding that bicycles are used for transport, and that some bicyclists may travel fast, and they avoid dangerous crossings and let the bikepath more or less go along with the flow of the rest of the traffic. This may be neglected or not understood elsewhere. I remember some bikepaths outside Oslo Norway where crossings are made in such a way that bicycles are almost certain to smash into each other if moving at anything faster than walking speeds.