Everytime I see parents with unprotected small children on their bikes, sometimes two, or when I see small children riding hard and recklessly in traffic without helmets, I cringe. And everytime single time I have brought this up at parties, the Dutch tell me to shut up because they know better and that no one gets hurt since they were all born on bikes.
If that really was the fantasy world we lived in, then handing out 35,000 free helmets to children in Zeeland would be a total waste of money, right? Over the next five years, the Zeeuws Coördinatiepunt Fiets (ZCF) in the province of Zeeland will be doing just that, handing out free bicycle helmets to stop children from getting injured or killed.
Last year, the emergency wards in Zeeland treated 4,000 children up to age 17 for head injuries. On an annual basis, 10 to 15 children under age 13 die in traffic riding bikes. About 20,000 children between age 0 and 12 get treated in hospitals as a result of a traffic acccident.
Imagine your cute kid dying because you think no one gets hurt on bikes. Blame all the cars? Write off Zeeland as a ‘different’ part of the country?
And then, the best argument of them all: snowboarders and mountainbikers use cool, hip helmets, what’s wrong with doing so on your bike? It’s not ‘tradition’? The statistics are wrong? Kids just don’t really get hurt?
Bravo Zeeland!
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.
Dicycles are nothing new, and if you count styrofoam treadmills neither are floating dicycles. But I have yet to see something like GBO’s bike path hogging concept, amazingly called 
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 
Ella Vogelaar, Minister for Housing, Neighbourhoods and Integration, wants to force builders to produce an outdoor space (balcony or garden) and bike shed for every apartment built. An earlier obligation to do so was dropped in 2003. Vogelaar claims the market insufficiently provides the need for outdoor living space and bicycle storage, and so she is making the provision of this part of the building code, the complex set of rules governing the construction of buildings.
As any European can tell you, nothing says “Dutch” more than caravans … except bicycles. And so it was bound to happen that somebody would try and combine the two. That somebody was design agency Reggs’ Thijs Bouman, whose Fietscaravan reached the final round of design competition Het Beste Idee van Nederland last year. Two of these trailers can be connected to form a double bed. For something so small this looks mighty comfortable to me, although I could use some pockets for books and a reading light at the head end.