June 6, 2010

The Netherlands has the highest car density in the world

Filed under: Automobiles,Bicycles by Branko Collin @ 11:00 am

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.)

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November 22, 2009

Roundabouts of the world

Filed under: Photography by Branko Collin @ 1:50 pm

A rotonde is a roundabout in Dutch, so when Tijs van den Boomen and Peter Jonker set out to create a website about roundabouts and the often ugly art that is in their centres, they of course called it rotondologie.nl. (The Flemish say rondpunt.)

Rotondologie.nl has pictures, videos and stories about roundabouts from all over the world, but you can hardly blame them for paying extra attention to the Netherlands. The website is clunky at times—rather than showing you a whole story at once you get little Javascript arrows with which to scroll, even if there is nothing to scroll towards—but if you click the big Collectie button, you get a nice big site map listed by country, province and so on.

Trendbeheer unearthed a quote from the site about a Doesburg roundabout that exemplifies the wrongness of moral rights (a part of copyright):

“I thank God that [the centre piece] is not art,” alderman Fred Jansen told De Gelderlander. “If it had been, we would not have been allowed to touch it for sixty years. Everybody thought it was garbage, citizens, entrepreneurs and visitors.”

(Photo of a roundabout in Venray by Google Streetview, immortalised because this is presumably the location where the Streetview car made an infraction that caused a police car to stop it two blocks further)

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June 13, 2009

Successful TV ad remade 25 years later

Filed under: Film,Literature by Branko Collin @ 10:29 am

A TV ad made 25 years ago by Veilig Verkeer Nederland (traffic safety association) was apparently so successful nationally and internationally that the makers decided to create a remake. The old ad was broadcast until a couple of years ago and had started to look more 1980s than Michael J. Fox sipping a 7-up on a skateboard. The new and the old commercial—both in which a young child flying a kite running backwards and a car rushing on see each other only very late—show an interesting contrast in storytelling now and 20 years ago, although the differences probably derive from goals that changed over time.

Old:

New:

(Link: VVN. Via: Sargasso, where they wonder which is the best.)

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February 22, 2009

Ball, bikes and bridges

Filed under: Architecture,Automobiles,Bicycles,Sports by Branko Collin @ 7:54 pm

No news this weekend about the record attempts of Edwin van der Sar, the Dutch keeper playing for Manchester United who hasn’t conceded a goal for more than 1,300 hours. There’s nothing to report, because Van der Sar was rested during yesterday’s league game. His replacement promptly let a ball past, so that if Van der Sar keeps his net clean for at least one more minute he no longer has to share his league record with the rest of his defense.

The Flyswatter bridge we wrote about has been getting quite some attention in the blogosphere. Popular Mechanics talked a bit longer with architect Van Driel than we did and discovered some more flyswatter bridges in the Netherlands and France. But why, when mentioning in passing Dutch bicycle paths, do they link to a website about biking in Copenhagen?

Speaking of bikes in the Netherlands: people from Amsterdam use their bicycles more often than their cars. Worldchanging.com reports:

Between 2005 and 2007, Amsterdam residents rode their bicycle 0.87 times a day on average, compared to 0.84 trips by car. It was the first time on record that average bike trips surpassed cars, the research group FietsBeraad reported last month.

The ‘box of pixels’ at the top of this posting is not the lazy work of a photoshopper, but an actual office building made in 2007 by Dutch-Austrian architects Splitterwerk, and forms the headquarters for a firm called Prisma Engineering in Graz, Austria. Link: Bright.nl.

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October 3, 2008

Students give back 300 traffic signs

Filed under: Gadgets by Branko Collin @ 8:04 am

No student house is complete without a traffic sign lifted without permission during a drunken late-night ramble. Or so I have heard.The Groningen police seem to think that traffic signs belong on the street (not everyone in the North agrees with them) and started a campaign to get the signs back. The result: 300 traffic signs were returned by “students and other citizens,” and 23 shopping carts to boot.

The campaign is now over, and the police say that they will hold checks in the near future based on tips and their own information, and will fine the owners of any traffic signs they might unearth. It’s not clear from the article how they will do that without search warrants.

Photo: Politie Groningen.

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August 23, 2008

The man who disliked traffic signs

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:

Via BoingBoing. Photo by Jerry Michalski, some rights reserved. (See also my adventures with traffic wardens, and this bit about letting people choose their own paths.)

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