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Amsterdam a model for a bike-friendly town

Five days in Amsterdam is all it took to convince Tom Roper that bicycles can coexist with other modes of transportation.
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Telkwa resident

Five days in Amsterdam is all it took to convince Tom Roper that bicycles can coexist with other modes of transportation.

“It was just fantastic,” Roper said of his experience exploring Amsterdam and the surrounding countryside by bicycle with his brother.

Roper, 61, remembers his first bike when he was about four, complete with training wheels and later as a teen when he put his bike to good use to cover his paper route.

“My bike was very important,” he said.

A heavy duty mechanic and millwright by trade, Roper left Amsterdam with an appreciation for well-planned and designed infrastructure for cyclists.

“I was a little bit shocked at the amount of bicycles and the diversity of people riding bikes in Amsterdam,” Roper said.

“What struck me was riding a bike was like breathing.”

People of all ages, shapes and sizes, in suits and work clothes traveled by bike, Roper said.

From the inner city to the countryside, bikes were the main mode of transportation.

“It’s just part of their lifestyle.”

Most of the bikes, Roper said, were of some vintage and as such didn’t represent a status symbol.

With bikes everywhere, motorists were very courteous to the cyclists and very aware of their presence.

A key component to the popularity of cycling in Amsterdam, Roper said, is the design of the bike lanes.

The bricks used to designate the bike lanes, Roper explained, are a different colour than that typically used for roads and the bike lanes are especially wide, about three metres.

“There was obviously some forethought put into this, the roads are very old,” Roper said.

“I really feel the system was designed for bikes.”

This, Roper said, was in contrast to the design of most North American municipalities, designed primarily for vehicular traffic, such that bicycle traffic takes a back seat to motor vehicle traffic.

The key to developing infrastructure for bikes, is to give bikes more meaning or more power.

Nonetheless, Roper conceded, the topography and distances involved in traveling between communities were different in northern B.C. compared to Holland.

The terrain here is much more mountainous and the distances between communities are longer and the roads aren’t designed to facilitate bike travel between municipalities.

Another important difference, Roper said, was the number of people riding bikes.

In Amsterdam, a city of 750,000 people, roughly half of the residents use their bikes to commute, which makes investment into infrastructure for bike lanes a reasonable consideration.

By comparison, municipalities in northern British Columbia are sparsely populated, make it more difficult to secure funding to develop infrastructure for bicycles.