Our Prague Blog

Last week we spent a few days in Amsterdam. Like many other Americans, the first thing I noticed about the city was the bike culture.

Amsterdam’s transport is a diverse and complex web of car lanes, bus lanes, bike lanes, sidewalks, tram tracks, train tracks, subways, and, of course, canals. But there’s just no contest…the bike reigns supreme. I spent hours looking at bikes while I walked around the city, taking photos of bike traffic during rush hour, and marveling over the massive three-storey bicycle parking garage at the building where Galen’s team was holding meetings all week.

The advantage of being a tourist is that you can hang around in the parking garage taking photos and marveling over the beauty of morning sunshine on hundreds of bicycles while other folks are locking up their trusty steeds and heading to the office.

As impressed as I was with the sheer size of this garage and the cute personalization of some of the bikes, the real show is rush hour. There’s something about feeling the breeze of a woman in a business suit zipping by you on a beat up bike, using one hand to chat on her cell phone and the other to grip a briefcase and a handlebar simultaneously. Words and photographs are powerful, but the adrenaline rush of seeing this chick headed straight for you is lost on the page.  We’ll have to make do with a shot of heavy traffic.

Do you ever get bored with taking the kids to school in the car?

It would be easy to judge this mom because her son isn’t wearing a helmet or sitting on a proper seat.  But here’s the thing…the reason values differ from place to place is because life differs from place to place. I will use Houston’s car culture as an example. If I told a random Czech person that in my old neighborhood in Houston we drove 150 meters to the grocery instead of walking, he would think we were lazy (and he would also wonder why I was talking to him). If that same Czech lived in my Houston neighborhood for  a couple of weeks in July, he would see that carrying home 20 pounds of food from the grocery store in 100-degree heat is a terrible idea, particularly on high-traffic streets where there are no sidewalks and the asphalt ends where the steep drainage ditches begin.

See? Context is everything. What I know about life in Amsterdam is almost exactly zero, save for the fact that I observed fantastic infrastructure for biking. There is a lot less interaction between cars and bikes than there would be in any American city. From conversations I had with a handful of people during my visit, I got the impression that Dutch people learn to bike approximately ten seconds after they learn to walk. In a country where everyone bikes as naturally as they walk, are biking accidents only as frequent as walking accidents?

Anyway. I’m not judging this mom.

One thing that absolutely blew me away about this whole bike thing was the modesty of the bikes. I didn’t get the feeling tha there was a race to outdo one another with the shinier, faster, more advanced bike. Quite the opposite. It really appeared that functionality was primary, with an occasional dose of cute on the side.

You may have noticed massive locks on the bikes. Theft for resale is a problem. But tossing bikes in the canals is a also bit of a local sport. Every year, the city fishes thousands of bikes out of the water. Whatever the reason for the disappearance of a bike, imagine the feeling of walking out of a store with your toddler and 25 pounds of purchases, a mile and a half from home, only to find your bike gone missing. Whether your bike was brand new or worth less than your shoes, you’d still miss it equally. That’s why people put giant locks on total beaters. And maybe it’s why they don’t care what the bike looks like. They just value what it does for them.

For fun, here’s a trip to the other end of the transpo spectrum.