Many bicycle planners and advocates would like to suggest that increases in bicycle use lead to a decrease in motor vehicle use. The Netherlands is often held up as an example. The reality there is different.
Here’s a quote from a recent Time magazine article:
The Netherlands may be known overseas for its cycling culture, but outside the country’s city centers, gridlock is the more dreary reality. Vehicle use has risen sharply over the years, but road capacity has yet to catch up — in part due to lack of space.
Dutch people like their bicycles, but evidently they also like their cars. Despite the highest bicycle mode share of any industrialized country and high fuel prices, motor-vehicle use has been, as the article says, rising sharply. Here is a slide from a presentation given in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA in the fall of 2008 by Hans Voerknecht of the Dutch government’s Fietsberaad (bicycling research institute).
Dutch feelings about motoring, bicycling and public transportation
Also, and rather surprisingly to this author, the Dutch are much less happy with public transportation than with either bicycling or motoring — not very good news as far as bicycling is concerned, because the bicycling and public transportation complement one another.
There’s a lesson here somewhere. What is it? What keeps public transportation from being more appealing in the Netherlands, a rather small and wealthy country which ought to be able to afford high-quality service? What would succeed in making public transportation more appealing there? What would succeed in reducing use of private motor vehicles, or at least its societal costs in lost time, use of space, and environmental degradation? What lessons does the situation hold for the USA?
