‘Klaas’ from Zwolle does everything right. His car has a handicapped parking card clearly visible under the window, valid and dated, and yet the police keep ticketing him for illegal parking in the lot in front of his house. Since April of this year he has received over 40 parking tickets with a combined worth of nearly 3,000 euro.

Rather than paying his tickets, he has decided to stick it to the man. He has been decorating his car with the tickets, and with drawings, post cards and a real pirate flag.

In an interview with newspaper De Stentor the man who wishes to remain anonymous—even though everybody in Zwolle probably knows who he is by now—explains how it all started: “The first guy who ticketed me treated my like a little dog. That’s when I turned my back on him. Since then the big boys have been coming over here daily to book me.”

“I own more than one car. As somebody confined to a wheel chair I like things on wheels. [...] I will have every ticket contested in court, one by one. That way the city will have to pay tons of court costs.”

The city of Zwolle responded to the newspaper, but considering they would have towed his car away after the third or so ticket if they actually were in the right, I don’t think printing their answer here is going to tell you much.

(Photo: Zaltbommel.nl)

First there was our world-famous story about a man causing a blackout in a hospital, thinking he was playing horror video game Silent Hill, now there’s a 17-year-old boy in Veenendaal who re-enacted the movie ‘The Fast and the Furious’ by driving his mom’s car into someone’s yard.

Legal driving age is 18 here, so he borrowed mom’s car illegally. Not only did the boy trash someone’s yard, he also drove the car home, parked it, and pretended nothing happened. He got caught by the cops because a licence plate fell off in said yard. Damn. His excuse to the police was that he had watched ‘The Fast and the Furious’ and wanted to try out drifting, a driving technique “where the driver intentionally oversteers, causing loss of traction in the rear wheels through turns,” and “make smoke come out of the tires”.

Watch how it’s done on British television show Top Gear with cool Japanese guys:

(Link: gelderlander.nl)

An eensie-weensie spider startled a 43-year-old woman from Oostvoorne so much last Monday that she drove her car onto the shoulder of the road, upon which the vehicle made a double somersault and landed on the other side of the road.

The woman and her children of seven and nine got out the car unharmed, Trouw reports. This took place on the Schrijversdijk (‘writer’s dike’) in Brielle, and the time was 9.45 a.m.

No one knows what happened to the spider.

(Via Moors Magazine)

IBM just published a survey they did called the Commuter Pain Index, which measured how bad traffic actually is in major cities around the globe. Lo and behold, it’s not as bad in the Netherlands as we thought. It always sucks to be in traffic, but hey, the Netherlands has not yet heard of flexible working hours – I kid you not.

My dad use to have to travel from the South shore of Montréal to the island of Montréal. That meant taking a tunnel or one of the many bridges. My dad left to go to work around 6 am with light traffic to get to work at 7 am, work his 8 hours and head home on an almost empty road. By working those hours, he didn’t spend his last working years in traffic. And Montréal has less traffic than Amsterdam. Coincidence?

On a list of 20 major cities around the globe, Amsterdam, with its congested A10 ring road, comes in quietly at 13.

Here’s the list:

1. Beijing
2. Mexico City
3. Johannesburg
4. Moscow (I’ve seen this in 35 degree weather, it’s insane)
5. New Delhi
6. Sao Paolo
7. Milan
8. Buenos Aires
9. Madrid
10. London (scary but calm enough)
11. Paris (1 km took 1.5 hours last Christmas)
12. Toronto (nasty, all those 4-5 lane highways)
13. Amsterdam (it feels worse than it is)
14. Los Angeles
15. Berlin (not that bad, but that was once)
16. Montreal (avoid the Lafontaine Tunnel!)
17. New York (avoid the Holland Tunnel!)
18. Houston
19. Melbourne
20. Stockholm

(Link: rtl.nl)

At the height of a fight between a 22-year-old man from Leiden and a 31-year-old taxi driver in The Hague last week, the former jumped onto the bonnet of the vehicle. The taxi driver then got into his car, and drove to the police station with the 22-year-old still on it.

Charges were entered against both men when they arrived. On the way over, the man from Leiden also managed to punch the windscreen so hard it cracked, AD reports.

(Photo by Ben Fredericson, some rights reserved)

Last week I linked to a video by Mark Wagenbuur that showed what bicycle rush hour looks like at Utrecht Central Station. If you watched that video you may think that the Netherlands is a relatively car-free country, but the opposite is true (as anyone acquainted with Dutch traffic jams can attest).

If you look at cars per square kilometre, The Netherlands, Japan and Belgium (in that order) lead the world by a wide margin. Not surprisingly, these three countries are both densely populated (skip the microstates for a second, and the Netherlands becomes the most densely populated country in the world) and fairly rich (positions 4, 14 and 19 respectively, again after discarding microstates).

If you look at the number of cars per household, the Netherlands is somewhere in the middle of the pack (400 cars per 1,000 people). Here, the US leads with 92% of the households owning a car (but in New York City less than 50% of households own a car).

It would seem that car ownership is both a function of income and available space and parking, but income is also a function of space, with high population density going hand in hand with low incomes.

Local governments try and find a balance between letting people own their cars and having a liveable environment. As we’ve reported before, some Dutch cities are trying to reduce the number of cars in the enviroment (others try to get rid of bicycles too) by cranking up parking fees.

What it means to be a country of car lovers is shown by the second entry of author John Scalzi’s list on Being Poor:

Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they’re what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there’s not an $800 car in America that’s worth a damn.

In the Netherlands, if you own a car you are not poor, unless you live in your car. On the other hand, like in New York, plenty of well-to-do Dutch people do not own a car simply because they have no use for one.

In case this posting has just wet your appetite for more of Mark Wagenbuur’s mesmerizing videos, here is his latest:

(The video is of a road frequented by cyclists in Utrecht. Note the foreigner at 1.41. The photo is of the traffic jam in Zoetermeer, at around 6 pm. The traffic jam there starts around 4 pm.)

Woonerfs are streets where the boundaries between the areas for drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians have been eradicated on purpose, making them true shared spaces; and Toronto wants one.

Says National Post:

Waterfront Toronto said yesterday that, thanks to CAN$ 5.3 million from Ottawa [federal government], it will turn the one-hectare stretch of city and provincially owned land [near the Don Valley Parkway on/off ramps ] into a park, complete with ball hockey and basketball courts, community gardens, ‘ribbon’ benches and climbing structures for children.

Waterfront Toronto also attempted yesterday to slip a Dutch word into the local vernacular, promising to build “woonerf” to bisect the new residential buildings north of Underpass Park. Designers say “woonerf” are streets, popular in Holland, that are cobbled in pavers. Woonerf do not have sidewalks or lines painted on them, and favour pedestrians and cyclists over cars.

(more…)

Here are some interesting updates of past 24 Oranges stories.

* Lucia de Berk, the serial killer seemingly convicted on the basis of flawed statistics, received some good news today. Now that her case has been re-opened, the public prosecutor has asked the court to free her and drop all charges against the former nurse.

In 2004 De Berk, nicknamed Angel of Death, received a life sentence for seven murders and three attempted murders of patients under her care. Rather than proving murders had taken place, the prosecution shopped for natural deaths that could pass for suspicious, and if it turned out that De Berk had been working when the alleged victims died, added them to its list. After statisticians brought their objections to this method to public attention, the supreme court decided to let a lower court re-open the case.

The verdict has been announced for April 14.

* Minister Donner of the department of Social Affairs has been told by parliament to re-open the cases of unemployed entrepreneurs who were accused of fraud and sometimes prosecuted for it by UWV, the same organisation that had been feeding them false information that led to this ‘fraud’ in the first place.

The accused were participating in a work re-integration programme that allowed them to set up their own companies while still receiving benefits during the incubation phase. They received benefits for the difference between hours worked and hours available for work, where UWV initially defined ‘hours worked’ as ‘hours billed.’ However, the law says that non-billable hours also count as ‘hours worked.’

UWV (formerly known as GAK) is a private institute that is tasked with distributing unemployment benefits under the supervision of Donner’s department. When the minister pointed out that opening dossiers of already convicted felons was ‘impossible,’ that only seemed to rub parliament the wrong way, according to NRC.

* The Delft students that designed the eco-friendly Superbus are currently building a working prototype. In 2009, after extensive testing on a track, the chassis was built (see image).

The Superbus is a 15-metre-long vehicle that fits 23 passengers. It drives over a dedicated, cheap, concrete lane and doesn’t use bus stops. Instead, prospective passengers indicate where and when they want to board, and presumably the driver caters to these wishes. The Superbus is electrically powered, using lithium polymer battery packs and regenerative braking. Its top speed is 250 kilometres per hour (155 mph). Top Gear, are you reading this?

(Source photo: Superbus)

The snow keeps coming down in the Netherlands, something that has not happened for at least 15 years according to my Dutch neighbourg who uses winter tires on his car. In fact, anyone who drives to Germany, Italy and France is obliged by law to have them on their car.

Winter tires are not obligatory in the Netherlands. With serious snow falls once every decade or so, it seems logically. However, this year, with an increase in accidents, all kinds of organisations are realising that saving money has come first and safety comes second.

“Not enough buses use winter tires” claims newspaper De Gelderlander. The biggest bus company Connexxion has none and they believe it doesn’t make a difference. Arriva, a smaller bus company, uses ‘all-season’ tires, which are really good for three seasons — not snow fall or a slippery road.

All-season tires were designed for wet and dry driving, while snow tires were designed for slippery conditions and very cold temperatures. And yes, we have had both from one day to the next here.

Touring cars use winter tires because they drive to countries like Germany, and taxi and transport companies switch to winter tires as well. Both of them can’t afford accidents.

Mini-vans that transport handicapped and mentally challenged children to school in the region of Utrecht don’t use winter tires, as their bosses apparently can’t afford them and they aren’t obligatory anyways. The story on telly was that parents were upset, drivers felt bad and the municipalities said the van companies should pay for the tires and the van companies said the municipalities should subsidise them. The cheapest van company wins the transport contract, so including winter tires is a big no-no. And saving money comes before safety again.

Recap: winter tires are good when the road is covered with snow and is slippery. All-seasons are good in many conditions, but don’t have the grip of winter tires and braking takes longer, which is dangerous. Ordinary tires are cheaper, but much more dangerous altogether in winter conditions. Winter tires are rarely needed and aren’t obligatory, but it is risky.

For days on end, when the snow kept coming down, the Dutch automobile association and Dutch road safety association told people to stay home altogether, which gives you an indication of how dangerous they thought the road was no matter what tires you had on your car.

(Link: gelderlander.nl)

The city of Etten-Leur in Noord-Brabant has purchased 18 tonnes of bath salts to sprinkle roads with, in an attempt to keep the roads from freezing.

Salt lowers the temperature at which water freezes. Municipalities and Rijkswaterstaat keep about 100,000 tonnes of coarse ‘strooizout’ (lit. sprinkling salt) ready to keep roads clear from snow and black ice at temperatures of about -10 degrees Celsius or higher. Because of this year’s wintry conditions, some municipalities have already run out of stock.

Etten-Leur’s bath salt stems from a batch condemned by its producers. Some of the salt already had perfume and colouring added. The city expects to not have to use its bath salts, as new shipments of regular road salt is expected to arrive this weekend. According to Radio Netherlands, “the coloured bath salts smell of lavender, green tea and mango.”

The minister of internal affairs, Guusje ter Horst, has given the green light to produce more road salt than usual, despite environmental concerns. Strooizout is a very aggressive product that can rust cars faster, changing the selection of fauna along roads, leading to maritime plants growing inland.

(Photo by Flickr user sburke2478, some rights reserved)