Two suspected car thieves were caught yesterday when they tried to escape their pursuers by swimming from the province of Gelderland to the province of Flevoland across the 500-meter-wide Nuldernauw.
At 9:15 am police noticed a stolen car on the A28 motorway, but drivers got wind of smokey bear and put the pedal to the metal. Near the town of Horst, the stolen car hit the shoulder at high speed and careened into some trees 30 metres off the road. When the police got there, they found that the driver and his partner in crime had fled the scene towards the nearby water.
A little later, the police discovered the men in the water, swimming towards Flevoland. When two officers dived in to continue pursuit, the suspects turned around and themselves in. The men were taken to a hospital for hypothermia. The police will question them as soon as possible.
The headline may be a little misleading, because when the police stopped Simon de Bruin at an unknown date in Amstelveen and fined him 150 euro, it was for sticking a finger in his own ear. To be even more precise, the police thought he was making a phone call while driving a car which is only allowed if you do it hands-free. When De Bruin protested that he had just showered, that he was merely removing the last bit of water from his ear and that the police could check his phone logs, the officers were unimpressed and uninterested. “Tell it to the judge,” they told De Bruin.
Somehow this bit of news managed to crawl all the way to De Telegraaf (Dutch), where it doesn’t say whether De Bruin will indeed “tell it to the judge.” The only reason we found it is because we run a side-business turning the bones of old news into glue.
Litte over a year ago, we reported on a driver in Schiedam who was fined EUR 75 for not driving over a cat, or technically, ignoring a green light. The man was trying to avoid running over the cat by waiting until it got out of the way.
The story goes that after going to court over the matter, the driver got his money back, as he was given the benefit of the doubt. The police’s argument is that they did not see a cat crossing the road.
I can’t imagine someone making that up and purposely stopping at a green light. Good news.
Filed under: Architecture by Branko Collin @ 9:25 am
This bridge, which looks likes a huge flyswatter, is in Leeuwarden. It was designed by Bruggenbureau Van Driel and built in 2000 by Ballast Nedam and BSB Staalbouw. The way I figure it, it works as an ordinary drawbridge, except when you’re in a hurry, then it’ll flip you like a pancake (which is what you’ll look like afterwards).
This is the Slauerhoffbridge, named after a local poet. I translated his “Voor de verre prinses” once, but not very well, so I’ll just link to it.
Biking to work can net you 5 euro a day from 22 to 26 September, if you live along one of the five designated routes of the Fiets Filevrij campaign. The organizers, local and national governments and cyclists’ unions, hope to call attention to the use of bicycles as a means to reduce the rampant traffic jam problem. After registration participants have to print out their own bar code which they must then scan at booths along the bicycling routes. The routes are all between cities, and therefore longish.
Filed under: Bicycles, Design by Branko Collin @ 8:48 am
Earlier this year, at age 62, traffic engineer Hans Monderman died of cancer. The Wilson Quarterly profiles the man behind Shared Space, the counter-intuitive idea that dissolving the artificial segregation of pedestrians, cyclists and drivers can make traffic safer.
And Monderman certainly changed the landscape in the provincial city of Drachten, with the project that, in 2001, made his name. At the town center, in a crowded four-way intersection called the Laweiplein, Monderman removed not only the traffic lights but virtually every other traffic control. Instead of a space cluttered with poles, lights, “traffic islands,” and restrictive arrows, Monderman installed a radical kind of roundabout (a “squareabout,” in his words, because it really seemed more a town square than a traditional roundabout), marked only by a raised circle of grass in the middle, several fountains, and some very discreet indicators of the direction of traffic, which were required by law.
As I watched the intricate social ballet that occurred as cars and bikes slowed to enter the circle (pedestrians were meant to cross at crosswalks placed a bit before the intersection), Monderman performed a favorite trick. He walked, backward and with eyes closed, into the Laweiplein. The traffic made its way around him. No one honked, he wasn’t struck. Instead of a binary, mechanistic process—stop, go—the movement of traffic and pedestrians in the circle felt human and organic.
What I assume to be Monderman’s own Youtube videos are still up. In them, he explains what Shared Space is:
We’re in the middle of the six week school holiday period, so Dutch travel trailers have once again spread out across Europe. Not only do we have a reputation of traveling with trailers but also of bringing along our own food—what do you mean, we have to integrate too?
According to a study by insurance company Fortis though, bringing along your own food is in decline. “Only” a quarter of the Dutch still bring along foods (quote-unquote both by Z24 and me). Legend has it that we like to bring along our own spuds, but the study shows that the most popular caravan comestible is cheese, followed by chocolate sprinklings (hagelslag) and black liquorice (drop). Somewhat embarrassed I must admit the latter two make sense to me: hagelslag just goes well with French bread, and liquorice and iPods can help while away the long hours on the road.
Photo by Jon Sullivan, released into the public domain by its author.
Filed under: Bicycles, Design by Branko Collin @ 11:07 am
The Netherlands is a country of bicyclists but by stark contrast (or perhaps because of that) helmets are not obligatory here. Designer Bastiaan Kok tries to remedy a distaste for helmets by coming up with a helmet that doesn’t make you look like you’re wearing a helmet. Covered to look like a cap or a hoodie ornament, the helmet quietly disappears against the backdrop of your backpack when not worn.
Kok’s design won first prize in a road safety contest by Vredestein, a Dutch tire manufacturer. Second place went to saddle bags with safety wheels for the elderly by Flip Ziedses Des Plantes, and third place to a dashboard cutesy animal by René de Torbal that tells you when you’re driving your car safely and when not.
John Körmelings’ house on rails was unveiled yesterday in Tilburg. The artwork is an actual, yet uninhabited house on rails that travels along the inside of a roundabout, the Hasseltrotonde. Originally the speed was planned at one round per hour, and currently it is turning at that speed for testing purposes. However, the city council thought that was too fast and the house will be slowed down to 0.000758 RPM (or 1.09 rounds per day) later on.
Körmeling’s idea behind the house was to reverse roles: at a roundabout the cars tend to run circles while the background remains static.
Filed under: Animals, Weird by Orangemaster @ 6:02 pm
A driver in Schiedam was fined EUR 75 for not driving over a cat, or basically, ignoring a green light. The man was trying to avoid running over the cat by waiting until it got out of the way.
“If I had hit the gas, I would have killed the cat and gotten a fine for ‘destruction of property’. So I waited and because I did, I got a fine for ignoring a green light.” The driver says he’s usually calm, but this got him pissed off. “I wrote to the the mayor and told her that her fining policy makes me sick and then I wrote to every member of parliament.”
Two suspected car thieves were caught yesterday when they tried to escape their pursuers by swimming from the province of Gelderland to the province of Flevoland across the 500-meter-wide Nuldernauw. 
The headline may be a little misleading, because when the police stopped Simon de Bruin at an unknown date in Amstelveen and fined him 150 euro, it was for sticking a finger in his own ear. To be even more precise, the police thought he was making a phone call while driving a car which is only allowed if you do it hands-free. When De Bruin protested that he had just showered, that he was merely removing the last bit of water from his ear and that the police could check his phone logs, the officers were unimpressed and uninterested. “Tell it to the judge,” they told De Bruin. 
Biking to work can net you 5 euro a day from 22 to 26 September, if you live along one of the five designated routes of the 
Earlier this year, at age 62, traffic engineer Hans Monderman died of cancer. The 
We’re in the middle of the six week school holiday period, so Dutch travel trailers have once again spread out across Europe. Not only do we have a reputation of traveling with trailers but also of bringing along our own food—what do you mean, we have to integrate too?
