Bolton & Menk is proud to present the Brown Bag – Bicycle & Pedestrian Innovations from the Netherlands with our outstanding Transportation Project Engineer, Abby Williams.
The City of Amsterdam is known as the World’s Cycling Capital, but how and why did this occur? This session will feature case studies of multimodal corridors in both urban and rural areas of the Netherlands. We will analyze several roadway typical sections and innovative intersections, comparing and contrasting with best practices in the US. This session will also discuss the history, policies, funding mechanisms, and culture that have enabled the Netherlands to become a haven for safe active transport for people of all ages and abilities.
Grab your lunch, get ready to learn, and enjoy the show!
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Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for coming. This is bicycle and pedestrian innovations from the Netherlands. My name is Abby Preston Williams. A little bit about me. I am a Transportation Project Engineer in Charlotte. I studied at Davidson College, where I got a B.S. in Environmental Studies where I focused on
A lot of geology and water resources, and I also started an interest in climate science. So I had an opportunity to study abroad in Denmark for a semester, my junior year of college. And there I was able to do a field study in Greenland, where I studied the ice core data
And the way that we use that to project carbon emissions in modern times. And I had this epiphany of the relationship between multimodal transportation design and carbon emissions, and just how transformative that could be in the US. So, came back from Denmark, I went to University of North Carolina at Charlotte,
Where I got my master’s in Civil and Transportation Engineering, and while there, I did my thesis on protected intersections, which is also sometimes referred to as Dutch intersections and I did a lot of research in bike and pedestrian safety and design in the US. And I also designed an intersection in Charlotte
And then modeled the way that the traffic would operate in Vissim. And some interesting takeaways from that research is that it’s really important for us to have separated facilities between bikes and cars. For example, if an individual is conscious of their carbon emissions and wants to make more sustainable choices
And switch a few trips a week to riding a bike, it’s really important that they are removed from the traffic flow because they can just increase congestion and increase those emissions for the whole intersection. So that being said, it’s important for us as planners and designers and engineers
To provide those separated bike and pedestrian facilities not just for safety but for also the traffic operations. So why do we care about the Netherlands? I mentioned I studied abroad in Denmark. They, the city of Copenhagen is well known as a bike culture city. But just up the road a little bit
In the country of the Netherlands has a really broad bike infrastructure network across the country. So, a few examples of this culture, they are the only country in the world that has more bikes than people. They have a dense network of 22,000 miles of fully separated bike infrastructure,
And they have great traffic calming. So 75% of urban streets have a speed limit of less than 19 miles per hour. And that really creates a different environment for cyclists to feel safe and comfortable. And they also support this network with funding, about $35 per person per year,
Which equates to over 600 million USD per year in bike infrastructure. Some other reasons why it’s important to look at what they’re doing in the Netherlands is because of safety. So in the US we have roughly three times the number of traffic fatalities
That they have in the Netherlands, and expanded for the US population, this accounts to roughly 20,000 Americans who lose their lives each year on our roadways. So if we can learn from other countries that are doing things differently, it can really make a difference.
And this graph on the left is, shows a statistic about pedestrian death rates at night. The Netherlands isn’t included in here, but Australia, Britain, Canada and France all have relatively similar land uses and transportation systems as the US. But you can see that they’re not having the same safety issues that we’re having.
Another reason why biking is important is public health. So it’s not a secret that we have some obesity issues in the US and Dutch citizens take 4.5 billion bicycle trips per year, which equates to the average person cycling over 600 miles a year, about two miles a day, and teenagers cycling twice that.
And a study by Utrecht University in the Netherlands estimated that the current cycling rates prevent 6500 premature deaths per year in the Netherlands and save the economy about 3% of their GDP. And if these rates were projected to the US, we would save roughly 125,000 lives each year.
I also have a personal connection to the Netherlands. I went on a trip in November right after our holiday party with my family. My sister in law was born there and her family is still there and she and my brother had a baby last year.
So we were taking the baby to meet his family there and his great grandmother. So that’s, while I was there, I was really excited to come full circle and be back in the European environment and kind of apply the stuff that I’ve been learning for the past
Ten years since I lived there and share that with you all. If you don’t know where the Netherlands is, it’s a small country next to Germany and we’ll discuss just how small it is. But the four cities that I visited that will be included
In this presentation are Amsterdam, Leiden, Voorschoten and Den Haag. Just a scale of how big this country is. It’s roughly 200 miles across, which is roughly equivalent to the distance between Cedar Rapids and Minneapolis or Greenville and Raleigh. And this being said, we can understand that the US is not the Netherlands,
Two different countries, two different cultures. And it’s not necessarily important to say that one is better than the other or to look at this as an all or nothing thing. But rather I wanted to share with you all some of the nuances that they incorporate
Into their culture and their design and see if we can just influence or inspire you all to for a different approach to transportation. Another big difference between the US and the Netherlands is population density, and this has a really big impact on the transportation system, especially regarding bike and pedestrian usability.
One example is the town of Voorschoten, where my sister in law’s grandmother lives, is a small town. It’s very rural. It’s about 25,000 people, but the population density is roughly twice that of Charlotte where I live. And you can see from the aerials the way that that impacts land use.
But the, having the smaller or the tighter population density allows cyclists to have about a, you know, half a mile trip to the grocery store and it makes things walkable. So that’s another thing to consider in this discussion. so AASHTO has different roadway classifications. This isn’t new for us.
The difference between the roadway classifications and the Netherlands is slightly different design speeds. So I’m not going to try to pronounce all of these, but their highways or stroomwegens are over 60 miles per hour. Bikes aren’t allowed on them, which, you know, is understandable.
And then there arterials are 30 to 40 miles per hour, which is slightly lower than how we typically see them here. They also, in this example, have one lane in each direction with the median separating those two those two travel lanes, which creates a traffic calming effect.
Bicycles are still mandatory to be separated from cars. Their access roads are about 75% or more of their transportation network, and these are below 20 miles per hour. And their’s are shared, signed as a shared space. And then another thing that we also don’t typically see here is, they call it a woonerf,
It’s a living street. It has speed limits of ten miles per hour, which is a little bit slow even for a bicycle. And this is interesting because it’s considered an extension of the living room and it’s a shared space for recreation, socialization, and it’s really the pedestrians realm.
Sometimes there are trucks or cars that can go through here, but it’s really not designed for them. Parking is not really made very accessible, so it’s only typically used as needed and instead preference is given to the pedestrians. So that’s a little overview. We’re going to go through one mode at a time
And just review some of the designs that I thought were interesting and worth sharing and compare and contrast some of the differences between the US and the Netherlands. I also so for my list, we’re going to talk about multimodal pedestrian design, bicycle design, cars and trucks and trains.
You can see on the right there are also a robust canal system going through the Netherlands that works for both conveyance and for drainage. But we’re not going to dive into that. So here is an arterial in Amsterdam, and this is an example of multimodal design. We have a 150 foot cross-section
And roughly 50% of that space is allocated for pedestrians. In the lower left hand corner, you can see all the street trees. There’s also retail in this space and it’s just another extension of livability for the citizens. And beyond that, 13% of this cross-section is just for medians and separation of different modes.
Then there is a signal on each of these medians creating for pedestrians to a pedestrian signal. And then there is also transit going through here as well as one traveling in each direction for cars Here are some examples of some multimodal streets. You can see that we have sidewalks,
Bike lanes, vehicle lanes and metro lanes all in the same area. And there is some placemaking details and also the canals going through the system. And continuing with multimodal design, here is a protected roundabout. We briefly touched on protected intersections, but this roundabout has separation between pedestrians,
Bike lanes and travel lanes for cars. There’s two different roundabouts shown here. One is separated with vegetation or, as our Midwestern friends say, boulevards. And there’s on the right curb separation between the modes. I also had a fun video that I would like to share with you guys
About the way that this operates, but I couldn’t get that work. But basically, the crosswalks are shared between bikes and pedestrians when needed and when you’re in the crosswalk, you have the right of way. And cars are good about yielding to the people on the crosswalks. Moving on to some pedestrian design,
There’s several different features that are added for safety and that separation between modes in the upper left, you can see that there are bollards that protect the sidewalk from the travel lane. Despite being a relatively small low speed roadway and in the upper right you can see that this gate helps
To block people from driving into the alleyway or even block bicycles from speeding through here too. They can probably fit through the gate, but they have to slow down and probably get off their bike. In the lower left, this is outside of the royal palace,
And you can see from all these pictures that the Dutch like their bricks. We don’t typically see that very often in the US, but here they were able to create a interesting decorative pattern for some place making outside of the royal palace, on the sidewalk. And in the lower right,
This was a pretty common cross-section for an alley or one of the small pedestrian roadways that we discussed. And I thought it was interesting because the bricks are oriented in the direction of drainage. So instead of having a big gutter system, they have the swale in the middle
And then the bricks help just increase that flow a little bit more. Obviously, they don’t have ADA in the Netherlands because it’s Americans with Disabilities Act. And so here in the US with bike and pedestrian design, pedestrians in particular, we spend a lot of time and energy designing to strict ADA standards.
So I thought it was interesting to see if other countries include those standards as well or something similar. So here in the upper left there is a sidewalk with a cross slope that is much steeper than 2% that would not fly here. And similarly in the lower right, there is a curb ramp
Without any truncated domes that also would not fly here. And tactile strips and truncated domes can be used in some intersections. It seems like they’re not particularly a requirement. And another way to escape the whole curb ramp design issue is to raise the intersection
To curb height like they do in the town of Voorschoten. And while this can sometimes cause some drainage concerns, a raised intersection works to calm traffic because it becomes a speed table. And it also allows designers to get away from designing the curb ramp and it allows users to just flow
Directly on there. Here’s some crosswalks. So on each of the medians that are separating the different travel modes, there is a pedestrian signal. These, when they come on, occur in a progression, which is sometimes interesting to see. And there are again median separation between bikes and cars.
And the on the far right is a crosswalk in Amsterdam that is much wider than we often see. They still have their domes and the tactile strip, but it just adds additional comfort and capacity for pedestrians crossing here. Moving on to bicycles, in the US, it’s not uncommon
To talk about different bike users, but in the Netherlands they actually have two different words. So one is wielrenner, which is literally translated to wheel runner, and that’s more of cycling for sport. And another word is a fietser, which is a cyclist who is going about their daily lives.
They’re just going to school or work or whatever. They’re not doing it for a sport, they’re doing it for transportation. And having those differentiations can show us how they might have different preferences in terms of comfort and safety. And those the fietsers would fall into what AASHTO has qualified as the interested
But concerned group in the US. So all of this goes into designing for people of all ages and abilities. And in the upper left corner I have a picture of my sister in law’s grandmother, Oma Else, and she is 84 years old and she lives independently and she can barely walk,
But she is able to get around town just fine because she has this electric tricycle and it really gives her a sense of independence and agency and mobility and she has the facilities in her town to get around safely. On the other end of the spectrum
In the upper right, this was also a fun video, but there was a group of students riding home from school. Instead of having a school bus, they had about 30 kids, all wearing their safety vests and biking home from school together. And then there’s different vehicles
That can be used for biking for different purposes. So in Amsterdam, there is an E-Cargo Bike Share which allows people who don’t have a car and if need to grab something bulky from the store, they can just rent this for the day and get around
And have the e-bike to help assist if it’s something heavy. And another type of a cargo bike that’s pretty common are these covered ones you can see in the lower right and you can put three, four children in there and they stay out of the weather
And get a nice little ride around town with their parents. I wanted to briefly discuss the new bike markings from MUTCD that came out last month. Some of these are similar to what we see in the Netherlands. The the pavement markings are pretty different and you can see the bike,
The green markings are used for bicycles to increase visibility. Although those are optional. And in North Carolina, the NcDOT won’t pay for that green marking. So this is just a little bit of background onto our best practices here in the U.S. And then comparing this
Same figure to an intersection that we see in the Netherlands, geometrically, it’s pretty similar. You have the separation between the motor vehicle travel, the bikes and the pedestrians. The pavement markings are different and the signals are different. But it’s just helps give you a little context as to
What the MUTCD is projecting us to be designing for in the future. When you have all these bicycles, you need to have a place to put them. And also because of the population density that we discussed before, part of this is achievable because bikes take up less space than cars.
So in the upper left corner, this is a grocery store parking lot. There’s a couple hundred bikes here, but you probably wouldn’t even notice them if you weren’t looking out for them. It’s not a giant parking lot like we tend to see here. And another feature that is for storing
Large amounts of bikes are these stacked parking racks. This is outside a train station, so there are probably ten rows of these. So several hundred, if not over a thousand bikes are parked here. But you can pull out these racks. They’re kind of like a drawer
And then mount your bike onto that and then slide it back up. So kind of heavy is kind of tricky, but it’s still a pretty cool idea. Then people, normal people at their houses will have a little bike parking garage. This garage helps keep the bikes out of the elements,
But it’s not necessarily protecting them from your neighbors. And that’s kind of a a very Dutch thing. They are all about sharing and trust. And so while this is a cool structure, it’s still open. There’s another covered stall at a train station with several bikes and then some on street parking for
In Amsterdam for more people as well. Here’s an example of a bike box. Again, MUTCD versus what is already existing in the Netherlands. A bike box allows cyclists to get ahead of the motor vehicle traffic and this increases visibility. So the cars know that they’re there and gives them a chance
To clear the intersection before the cars can start moving through it. Again, we’re not seeing the same green paint, but that’s okay. Some interesting geometric design features. A lot of times in the US we don’t necessarily think about those transitions of how are we going to end this bike lane.
It often just stops where the project stopped or the budget. And so I thought it was interesting to see this transition on the left of the cycle track, the curve ending or the median ending and then tying into the roadway. And then obviously there’s a barricade there
So that the cyclists can’t just continue on to the sidewalk. Here in the middle is a greenway where bikes and pedestrians are separated. When you have a higher demand or higher traffic volume of bikes using these facilities and the differences in speed between bikes and pedestrians,
It becomes important to separate your different modes. So they have some signage and some pavement markings just indicating where people are supposed to go. And then they also keep speed limits down on these access roadways, sometimes with traffic calming measures. Here is a speed bump on a residential street
And then bikes are allowed to go around the speed bump. So it really is geared more towards the cars. Another point about this is that by having on this residential street few cars and a few cars in the town, it’s really quiet. And you don’t necessarily, or you’re not necessarily aware of the
Noise pollution of traffic and cars until you get away from it. So among all these things, the Netherlands tends to rank as one of the best countries in the world to drive. And while congestion levels are slightly higher than the US, the road quality is a little bit better,
The safety is much better and part of the reason for this is that by giving people alternatives to just traveling by car, you have less demand on the roadways and people are only really driving when they need to or they choose to.
You have less wear and tear on the roads and you have less people who are driving impaired or maybe doing something that they’re not supposed to because they don’t have another choice. You might be curious what the gas prices are over there. So a regular unleaded
Will set you back about 8 USD for a gallon. And then diesel is about seven and a half. Here is some design features of the motor vehicle travel lanes. Trucks still do exist there. They still have deliveries to make to businesses and residences, but the roads aren’t necessarily designed for them.
So you can see this on the left. There is a truck that’s on that access road. It’s small, it’s one way, but he’s still able to get to where he needs to go. And then also, I thought it was interesting just to see the turning radiuses that were used
On some of these streets that I saw in Amsterdam. And this is significant because you don’t see radiuses that are this small, typically in the US our vehicles are a little bit larger. So our curves have to be a little bit larger. And then again, looking at that density
That we talked about earlier, all of these geometric constraints add to the amount of land that needs to be used for each project. So where do we put these cars? There are delivery vehicle parking in Amsterdam, and there are still parking for people with disabilities. But for everyone else,
You’re going to have a hard time figuring out where to park your car. And I had my brother stand next to this micro car on the bottom because I needed him for a scale to show how small these cars are. But I don’t know if this is where they’re supposed to be,
But they were there, and in Amsterdam, parking is typically only available to residences. And then once you become a resident, you need a parking permit, and these are a paid thing. And then even beyond that, there is a waiting list to get a permit.
So it’s not going to be fun or easy to have a car in Amsterdam, but you also don’t necessarily need one. Another point about this is that those parking fees are all go to the municipality for their transportation and their infrastructure. And so all of the paid parking in towns are owned
By the local government as opposed to a private entity. And then those funds go to make the system better. So lastly, we have our rail network. There’s trains all over the Netherlands. It’s operated mainly by a state owned company NS, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, not to be confused with Norfolk Southern.
With a track length of almost 3200 kilometers covering some 401 stations, there are up to 750,000 passengers normally using the train every day. That equates to 2000 miles of commuter rail over a country that’s only 12,000 square miles in size. And this is important because not every trip can be made by bike
Or by walking for those longer distances. You still don’t necessarily have to drive a car. You can get on to the train and easily get around. That’s what we did most of the time. Here’s some examples of some train stations in the upper right was Amsterdam and there you can see
There’s cool architectural features. On the other side of the spectrum, there is a small shelter in the rural town of Voorschoten where it’s nothing fancy, but it’s still provided to keep people out of the wind and the rain while they’re waiting for the train to come.
There’s a more modern station in the town of Leiden and it’s a larger city and there’s quite a few trains coming through here. And then I thought it was interesting to see in Voorschoten there is just this field next to the train station with cows and sheep.
And so even in the rural areas, they can still get around by train. Here, some streetcar or metro or tram platforms, whatever you want to call them. On the left, you can see some tactile strips that are separating the pedestrian area from the train area.
In the middle there’s a kiosk with a banner, with the train schedule and then also ticket vending for several different modes. Lastly, for our landscape architects, we wanted to include some fun pictures of some green spaces. And on the upper left, this is an urban garden in Amsterdam.
It’s kind of surrounded by some apartments and it adds a nice shared living area. And this is significant because even in a town like Voorschoten, which is more rural, most people don’t really have yards, they have dogs, they love dogs, but instead they have shared spaces
Where these are assigned as off leash areas. So there is no fence. It’s just some well-behaved dogs who can run around in public spaces. There’s a cool plant wall in Amsterdam on some apartments and then a little Parklet in Den Haag with some benches and some placemaking features.
So that’s all I have for you guys today. Thanks so much for listening and Thanks, everyone, for coming, appreciate it.