The Dutch roots of Vancouver’s urban cycling boom | With Chris Bruntlett

Over the past decade, Vancouver has undergone a bike renaissance.

But these big changes didn’t come from thin air. This kind of bike boom, which is happening in many North American cities, was inspired by the lessons learned in the Netherlands. 

In their new book Building the Cycling City: the Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality, Vancouver residents Chris and Melissa Bruntlett of Modacity examine how Dutch design has made the country the world’s best for everyday cycling, and how ideas honed there are inspiring cities all over the world.

In this video, Chris Bruntlett takes me around Vancouver for a look at how those Dutch ideas have been implemented, and how they are turning Vancouver into a bike haven. 

Buy their book: https://islandpress.org/book/building-the-cycling-city

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Hi everybody. We are in Vancouver today. I’m here with Chris Bruntlett. He and his wife Melissa are the authors of this great new book Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality and today he’s going to take me around

Vancouver a bit and show me some of the spots in the city that have been inspired by this sort of Dutch approach to building a bike-friendly city. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me. So maybe you could just tell

Me first: Vancouver has come a long way in the last 10 years when it comes to bike infrastructure. How does that relate your book? Was that inspiration for your book? Was the city you live in part of what motivated you? Yeah, well

The book is broken down into ten lessons, ten themes or takeaways from the Dutch experience, but also finding examples of North American cities that have implemented those ideas. And the theme around the chapter discusses Vancouver’s political bravery. And to us, you know, it’s the story of a mayor that

Was elected on a pro-bike platform, he came in and started implementing changes, fully separated bike lanes in the city, to the ire of a lot of people in the in the business community, in the in the political community, in the media.

There was a lot of noise made, a lot of predictions that this would be the beginning of the end of his political career but, to his credit, he stuck to his guns, him and his city counselors. They expanded the bike network and they’ve been

Glowingly re-elected on two more occasions, and here we are 10 years later with a rather robust bike network that spreads from one side of the city to the other. All right, we’re going to go check out a few more spots around Vancouver, and we’ll let Chris step out of the bike lane now.

The Burrard bridge was the the first project of Mayor Robertson built shortly after being re-elected and it was in response to critical mass rides that were protesting a lack of safe bike infrastructure, and the number of injuries and fatalities that were taking place on the bridge. There was no safe

Crossing from the West End of Vancouver into the downtown peninsula. But if he thought it was going to be easy addressing those safety concerns he quickly found out that everyone was going to lose their minds and that the media had a heyday. They sent helicopters in the sky to document the impending

Traffic Armageddon, but none of it materialized. And here we are ten years later this bridge is the most popular bike route in the city with a million crossings per year. So where are we? We are currently riding on the Hornby Street cycle track which was basically one of the first projects that was

Installed by City Council and Mayor Robertson so it’s a bi-directional cycle track on a on a one-way street, again with the with the early bike infrastructure projects on a one-way street, there was a lot of vocal opposition the business community in particular the downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association vehemently opposed the

Project. But we’re we’re pleased to report that a decade later it’s seeing record numbers and the the business community has learned to embrace it and have done a complete public 180 on on the cycling infrastructure, and has now started supporting new projects. Where are we now?

We are on the Dunsmuir cycle track which was built again in the very early days of Mayor Robinson’s tenure. It’s probably one of the most popular east-west connectors into the downtown. I think this bike lane proves that if you take a context-specific approach, and that’s definitely what the

Dutch subscribe to, you can find solutions that work for your city. That’s kind of the underlying message of the book is the Dutch really, in a lot of places, built into the dream of car-centric development and they they changed their land-use zoning codes and and built the wide streets and and

Demolished a lot of parts of their cities to make way for the car, and later in the 70s and 80s, realized how it was a destructive pattern of development and started reversing those those patterns and started building for bikes.

OK, I don’t know if this will work or not but I want Chris to show some of the practical bits on this bike because this is about as Dutch as you can get for a bike in North America. Yeah, it comes down to two things: It comes down to comfort and

It comes down to the completeness of the bicycle. So they they ride very utilitarian machines that are designed to be used in an upright riding position. So, yeah, very straight back. It’s like you’re sitting on a stool and they’re not designed for speed or for sport. They’re designed for transport.

So what have you got on the back here? So there’s a fully integrated back rack which is literally built into the bike frame, so there’s no weight limit, so we’re able to throw a 100-pound child or even a 200-pound adult

On the back of the bike for short trips if if need be. Or any kind of large items that you want to carry with bungee cords and the like. And this is important too, you never see these on North American bikes

Very often, the chain guard. Yes, a fully enclosed chain casing which means the chain kind of remains in immaculate condition, through rain and sleet and snow. It also means you don’t have to worry about your your pant leg getting chewed up by the chain. And one last

Thing is, you have the world’s most popular front rack, which is the milk crate which I remember seeing in Europe a lot too. It’s very practical. Yeah, exactly. It’s a a kind of a $10 job from Home Depot that mounts to the front rack of the bicycle

And you know it fits a couple bags of groceries or my laptop or whatever I happen to be rolling around with. We have a great public transit system here and and do walk and car-share from time to time, but we’ve been

Living without, our family’s been living without, a car for eight years now. There’s hope. Yeah I mean the Dutch maybe have a 50- year head start on us, but not only can we do it, but we we are doing it here in North America.

There we have it: some great examples of Dutch-inspired bike infrastructure here in a great bike city of Vancouver. Thanks very much Chris, and make sure go out and buy his book. See you next time.