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Why we don’t bike like the Dutch — yet

Entrevista com Rosa Félix. Publicado no GreatLakesNow, em https://www.greatlakesnow.org/2025/07/why-we-dont-bike-like-the-dutch-yet/, a 30.07.2025.

Jonah Brown

From the greenways of Detroit to recent court battles in Toronto, cities across North America are trying to become more bike-friendly. What will it take to catch up to Amsterdam?

How did you get to work today?

Maybe, like 14% of Americans, you didn’t have to go anywhere because you work from home. But most people do need some form of transportation to earn a living. By far the biggest group is the 69% of people who drive to work alone. In contrast, only one out of 200 Americans bike to work. In Canada, the rate is still small, but it’s twice as high as it is in the US.

However, both of these countries are huge, diverse places. In Victoria, British Columbia, nearly one out of ten residents bike to work, but in Mississauga, Ontario, it’s more like one in 300. What leads people in different places to make such radically different decisions? And is asking how people usually commute even the right question?

Great Lakes Now spoke with cycling advocates and experts about the state of bike infrastructure in three cities: Chicago, Toronto and Detroit. According to census data, 0.4% of Detroiters bike to work, as well as 1.6% of Chicagoans and 2% of Torontonians. However, not everyone agrees that these census questions produce the most informative data.

As urban areas face escalating crises, whether in climate or affordability, can building bike-friendly cities help residents save money and reduce greenhouse gas emissions? And what does a “bike-friendly” city even look like?

“On roads with a lot of cars, and on roads with a higher car traffic volume and speed, let’s say above 20 miles per hour, you need separated infrastructure, that’s separated not just with a painted buffer, ideally, but physically separated,” said Ralph Buehler, professor of urban planning at Virginia Tech.

One North American city known for its high rate of cycling is Davis, California, a college town of approximately 66,000 residents. Nearly 12% of Davisites bike to work. Jamey Volker, a researcher at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California-Davis, describes the city as “the birthplace of biking in the US.”

According to Volker, it was a confluence of things. He said, Davis’s transition “from cow town to university town” gave local leaders the ability “to experiment with different street designs, different active travel treatments, different bike lanes, different sidewalks, different bike intersections.”

That doesn’t mean that larger, more established cities can’t also make significant changes to their infrastructure. Take Amsterdam, for instance. With 477 miles of bike lanes and paths, and 58% of people riding daily, the Dutch capital is generally considered a kind of cycling nirvana.

It wasn’t always this way. After World War II, local leaders built additional car infrastructure, like  parking and wider streets. However, traffic deaths surged, inspiring advocates to successfully lobby for policies that were more friendly to bicyclists and pedestrians. One of these movements was called Stop de Kindermoord, or “Stop the Child Murder.”

Detroit certainly isn’t Amsterdam, but the city is still working to improve its cycling infrastructure. Take the still-under-construction Joe Louis Greenway, which will one day be a 27-mile path connecting various parts of the city.

While the city describes this greenway as a “recreational pathway,” Todd Scott, executive director of the Detroit Greenways Coalition, doesn’t think there needs to be a conflict between biking for leisure or exercise and biking for transportation.

“You fulfill both purposes,” he said. “You design for transportation, and then the recreationists will figure it out. But it does irk me that sometimes, recreational bicycling is discounted. If I ride my bike to the park, that might be seen as recreational. But if I drove my car there, that’s transportation. So I think that’s a bit of a double standard. I think all biking is important.”

Getting more people on two wheels isn’t just about infrastructure. It’s also about culture and belonging. Jason Hall is one of the co-founders of Slow Roll Detroit, a cycling group that intentionally takes things at a slow pace. Today, Hall manages a Trek bike store in Midtown Detroit and runs an organization called RiDetroit.

“We just wanted to bring our community together to show Detroit off in a positive light,” said Hall. “I think definitely there’s been an increase in the biking culture over the last couple of years. Not to toot our own horn, but I think Slow Roll had a lot to do with it. At our peak, we were bringing between 7,000 and 10,000 people a week down to Detroit.”

According to Hall, both infrastructure and culture are important for getting people to try cycling. 

“We can try to put people on the streets, but we’ve learned that if we don’t give them safe pathways to feel comfortable on, then it’s just not going to work.”

On the other hand, Hall said, planners should pay more attention to the needs of local residents. 

“A lot of the neighborhoods that I go in, no one’s ever gone into that neighborhood to ask the people what they need,” he said. “A lot of these people in these neighborhoods don’t understand why. When we come through and I ask them, they’ll say, ‘I don’t own a bike. Why would it benefit me in any way?’ And then when you explain to them that, really, we’re creating a path for you to get to your grocery store or your pharmacist as easily as a bicyclist. It’s a co-path.”

Inclusivity and infrastructure sometimes go together. According to Rosa Félix, a researcher at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, infrastructure improvements helped increase the rate of women cycling in Lisbon, the Portuguese capital. 

“When we started counting, there were 15-17% of women riding bikes in Lisbon. Then, with the cycling network expansion and the new bike sharing, it increased to 25-26% of women. It’s in line with the European average,” she said.

Gender gaps in cycling come from a variety of factors, according to Félix. 

“Safety is a huge deterrent,” she said. “But also some cultural things. The role of women is taking care of kids, bringing kids back from school, things like that. It’s not that flexible to ride a bike.”

People for Bikes is a trade group for the bike industry that produces reports on many North American cities, including Detroit. Their scores are based on multiple data points, such as how easy it is to bike to shop, work or play. One component is how well bike infrastructure is connected throughout the city. 

“It seems like there is a higher density of infrastructure in the downtown area, but it doesn’t necessarily connect out to some of the further-out parts of the city,” said Grace Stonecipher, a researcher at People for Bikes. “Building in those linkages and making sure that it’s not just folks who live downtown who have access to places, but also folks who maybe live a little bit further away.”

Another issue with the current bike infrastructure in Chicago is its concentration in certain areas, according to Nik Hunder of the advocacy group Bike Grid Now

“You see a lot of infrastructure concentrated on the North and the West Sides,” he said. “Basically, there is none of that infrastructure south of the south branch of the river here. It’s been very unevenly distributed, which makes it very hard to get across town. It’s becoming more connected, but currently it’s very fragmented.”

Christina Whitehouse said she was nearly run over while biking in Chicago, which inspired her to create Bike Lane Uprising, a website where people can report vehicles that are illegally blocking bike lanes. She said greenways, like the Joe Louis Greenway in Detroit or the Lakefront Trail in Chicago, “are such a fundamental resource to growing biking as a mode of transportation.”

And while only 1.6% of Chicagoans told the Census Bureau that they mainly bike to work, data from the city shows that work trips account for only 14% of bike trips in Chicago.

“The other kind of metric that we look at is safety, and how many people are being hurt or killed while biking,” said Jim Merrell of the Active Transportation Alliance, which is based in Chicago. “What we’ve seen in Chicago, what we think is an indication that we’re seeing a real transformation and positive growth for biking, is we’ve seen those crashes remain flat. The number of crashes haven’t gone up, while the rate of cycling has more than doubled over the last 5 or 6 years.”

Chicago does get dinged by People for Bikes because much of the city has a relatively high residential speed limit of 30 miles per hour. 

“Especially for roads where there’s no bicycle infrastructure and bikes are just sharing roads with cars, if the speed limit is above 25 miles per hour, that becomes a high-stress street,” said Stonecipher.

Our third Great Lakes comparison city, Toronto, has had the greatest recent controversy over bike lanes. Last year, the provincial government of Ontario passed a law giving the province the authority to remove three major bike lanes in Toronto and requiring cities to ask the province for permission before replacing a car lane with a bike lane. 

The law “would bring a common-sense approach to installing bike lanes on city streets to ensure they don’t impede the flow of traffic,” according to the provincial Transportation Minister, in an interview with CBC.

An advocacy group called Cycle Toronto challenged the law in court, arguing that it violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. On July 9, a provincial court rejected the province’s attempt to appeal a previous court order that temporarily stopped it from removing the bike lanes. This is only the latest development in a complex legal saga.

“While we respect the court’s decision, our government was elected with a clear mandate to get people out of traffic by restoring driving lanes,” a spokesperson for the transportation minister told The Canadian Press.

According to Michael Longfield, the executive director of Cycle Toronto, this is fairly unprecedented legislation.

“Arbitrarily ripping out bike lanes that have been put there to improve the safety of all road users and have gone through multiple levels of consultation and have been fully approved by city council, in some cases under two different mayors,” he said. 

Longfield thinks the province’s claims that they’re doing this to help ease traffic congestion just aren’t borne out by the facts.

As for Toronto’s network as a whole, “similar to Detroit, it does seem like there’s a much higher density of infrastructure right downtown. Toronto actually also does have a higher residential speed limit, although I think there are a lot of streets that have been specifically lowered,” said Stonecipher, of People for Bikes.

Even with the best infrastructure, though, most people will only bike somewhere if it’s actually within biking distance. Even in the Netherlands, the average person only bikes about three-quarters of a mile per day. This raises the issue of land use. If our homes are far away from our jobs and from other places we need to get to, like grocery stores, will anyone actually bike?

“We do see the most successful bike lanes in the denser parts of the city,” said Albert Koehl, of the Toronto Community Bikeways Coalition. If you live in a denser area, then you could be closer to where you need to go.

“Density is absolutely critical, and it doesn’t mean that everything has to be super high density,” said Scott, of the Detroit Greenways Coalition. “There’s opportunities to do things in the suburbs and still increase the density of destinations so walking and biking make much more sense.”

According to urban planner Buehler, what might be even more important than density is the mix of land uses.

“So allowing stores, offices, doctors’ offices, daycares to be close to homes,” Buehler said. “And in the U.S., zoning, at least compared to Europe, is particularly strict at separating things.”

Buehler also said that building bike infrastructure for everyone is key to its success. 

“Not only build it for sports cyclists,” he said. “But thinking about everybody who may want to ride a bike. And if people ride a bike in the evening and they want to chat with their neighbor, that should be possible on that infrastructure as well.”

According to Hall, he and his colleagues tried to imbue a similar spirit of inclusivity into Slow Roll Detroit. 

“We just wanted to create something, in its inception, that everybody could feel comfortable doing,” he said. “When you come on this ride, you’re going slow. And part of that slowness is, you’re going to take the time to not only see the environment around you, but you’re going to take the time to talk to the person next to you.”