09/10/2026
Been thinking the same here, we spend years getting one or two separated paths when we should be doing much traffic calming and reduction and street redesign. “The best bike plan is a car plan”- anon.
One of the most important—and perhaps counterintuitive—lessons from decades of Dutch cycling history is that cities didn’t start with protected bike lanes. Instead, they began with making streets safer, calmer and more inviting to ride a bicycle; implementing lower speeds, parking restrictions, traffic filters, narrower lanes and reduced through-traffic to first create an environment in which cycling could flourish.
Yet planners and advocates elsewhere often reverse this sequence: building segregated cycle tracks assuming people will use them and support will follow. When those projects are expensive, disruptive, isolated or lightly used, they become easy targets for opposition; creating a vicious circle of low ridership and support.
The more successful approach is to create the conditions for cycling first: build demand; then invest in the high-end infrastructure where the numbers and needs justify it. Not every street needs a protected bike lane, and sometimes the most important intervention is simply a street where cars have been slowed, filtered or removed.
Therefore, the main takeaway from a visit to the Netherlands shouldn’t be to just build more beautiful bike lanes. It should be to make the act of getting on a bike easy at first, and let the network grow from there. After all, as Dutch planners learned long ago, the most important part of your city’s bike plan is actually the car plan.
