July 25, 2010
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)
July 1, 2010
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)
Tags: Amsterdam, traffic jams
June 20, 2010
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)
June 6, 2010
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 $800 car in America that’s worth a damn.
In the Netherlands, if you own a car you are not poor, unless you live in your car. On the other hand, like in New York, plenty of well-to-do Dutch people do not own a car simply because they have no use for one.
In case this posting has just wet your appetite for more of Mark Wagenbuur’s mesmerizing videos, here is his latest:
(The video is of a road frequented by cyclists in Utrecht. Note the foreigner at 1.41. The photo is of the traffic jam in Zoetermeer, at around 6 pm. The traffic jam there starts around 4 pm.)
Tags: traffic
March 29, 2010
Woonerfs are streets where the boundaries between the areas for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians have been eradicated on purpose, making them true shared spaces; and Toronto wants one.
Waterfront Toronto said yesterday that, thanks to CAN$ 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.
Tags: Canada, pedestrians, shared space
March 27, 2010
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)
Tags: buses, economic crisis, law, Lucia de Berk, murder, serial killers, TU Delft, unemployment, Wubbo Ockels
February 16, 2010
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)
January 10, 2010
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)
Tags: Etten-Leur, roads, salt, winter
January 5, 2010
The fire brigade got tipped twice that smoke had been spotted along motorway A4 in Hoofddorp, North Holland and both times, it was just a smoking advert. Car insurance company Ditzo had a big billboard advert with a time-clock giving off a lot of smoke, as if the Audi in the advert had car trouble. Motorists called 112 (the Dutch emergency number), as apparently the ‘joke’ was not very obvious. The marketing people probably thought this was brillant and it is a cool idea, except when in actual practice it fails and causes problems.
Allow me to show you what it looks like when you do this right, and by right I mean without causing panic and maybe even up for yet another award. Cossette Communications in Canada had a steam machine built into a bus shelter giving off periodic burts to announce that coffee was ready, which you can read straight away and which doesn’t make you want to call 911 (North American emergency number). I file this one under ‘zo kan het ook’, which means ‘it can also be done this way’.
(Link: webregio.nl)
Tags: advertising
December 21, 2009
I just got back from walking down my street at 7 am in the dark (Happy Winter Solstice) with bikers negotiating the snow and cars taking the onramp to the motorway near my house at 30 km/h like well-behaved cars.
So far, buses are generally not running. I’m guessing they don’t sport winter tires or radials (aka four-season tires). Putting winter tires on your car once every 10 years is not practical or good value for money in the Netherlands. Yes, they are tons of accidents, literally piling up (pardon the pun). My neighbour goes skiing every year in Austria and just switched tires because they are mandatory in winter in Germany, and has to drive through there.
Trains are running minimally, so I bet the delays are really nasty. Many taxis won’t be driving around and so people trying to get to work are going to have to come up with dog sleds or walk. Speaking of trains, while I whine about not being able to woosh to Paris at a proper speed, the famous Eurostar train that runs in the Chunnel between Britain and France has been cancelled for days now, never mind the people who were trapped in it Friday night.
And then there’s the airplanes. North American and European airports all have tons of delayed flights, as well as airports just closing shop all together like in Belgium, as seen on Dutch telly. Picture stranded passengers off to visit friends and family for Christmas, tired and sleeping on airport benches.
I still don’t understand why the Netherlands can plan for terrorist attacks that will probably never happen, but plan so little when it comes to serious snow, a more realistic situation. In real Northern countries like Norway and Canada, sure we’re having problems getting around too, but if we were to shut down the country for a bit of snow at just -1 Celsius, we might as well dismantle all Scandinavian countries, Russia, Canada and the Northern United States.
Granted, de-icing planes is international and trains can’t deal with autumn leaves properly (I still don’t understand why), but winter tires on buses, cars and taxis would have avoided many problems so far, methinks.
Again, we really seem to stink at planning ahead realistically. I’m loving all this snow, but then I have a home office. This was the view outside my window yesterday. And just as I finished writing this, it started snowing again.
