I really don't have the car because I don't like cars. I hate cars. I love my bicycle.
It's very easy to go all around.
All my shopping is in my pit stop.
How much does that weigh, do you think?
Well, I think 20 kilos.
Well, distances are short, so that makes it very easy.
Especially here in the town, it's easier by bike than by car.
Okay, well, now we are in Groningen. I live here from 1979, so quite a long time.
It's a town with 90,000 inhabitants and 50,000 of all the people here are students.
So we've got a lot of young people in this town.
This is, or was, a fortress town for a thousand years.
This was the town that guarded the roots into Germany.
It's the fortress of the north.
Consequences of that, and the city was contained within the military fortifications
until very late in the 19th century.
So there is no sprawl. It didn't expand outwards, which meant, of course,
that now we say, hey, we've got a wonderful compact city
and we can reach everything by foot or bicycle or whatever.
Well, in 1972, Groningen got a left-wing local government.
And that's the start of, I think, the bicycle culture.
A small group of young, enthusiastic, left-wing, ideological people
and said, right, we're going to change everything radically.
One of the things they picked on was transport.
In September 1977, they introduced the traffic circulation plan,
which means that the city centre was diverted in four different quarters.
And that means that cars couldn't go from one quarter to the other quarter.
They have to go around the city centre.
But cyclists, buses, pedestrians, they can go through.
You put a ring road around the inner city.
You prevent traffic crossing the inner city.
You divide it into sectors. You pedestrianize the centre.
You move all your car parking out to the edge.
You have park and ride schemes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But if you're making a journey inside the city,
then you can start and finish in a different part of the city
and take a direct line between the two.
But if you go by car, you have to take a detour.
This is not really an anti-car measure.
What this is is making the neighbourhoods where people live more pleasant
and making cycling into a viable option.
And everyone said, it can't work. This is impossible.
The shopkeepers said, we'll leave the city immediately.
No, everyone must park in front of our door.
Otherwise, we will lose all our business.
And then wonder of wonders, the world didn't collapse.
The shops didn't leave the city.
The police found, yes, people could learn how to handle this plan.
People adapted to it. And that was, as I say, 1977.
In the last couple of years, the area of calming traffic has increased.
So nowadays, it's just normal that you go on the bike to the city centre.
In Groningen, the average person cycles 1.4 times a day.
So that's how it goes.
Ten times a week, people ride a bike somewhere.
It's very comfortable of transportation.
Above everything, it's very, very economical.
So you don't have to pay for buses or trains.
With the bike, I go through downtown.
I'm in the centre of Groningen, and then I'm at my work.
When I use my car, I have to go through the Ringweg, they call it here.
It takes about, I think, half an hour.
And with my bike, it's 10 minutes.
You need your bike here, definitely, because you needed to go to university.
You needed to go to a party.
You can transport everything on the bike, so you see people here riding like you.
You can even transport the fridge if you want to.
Then you put the fridge on the back of the bike, and you just push the bike.
Somehow, somehow.
We are at the central station of Groningen.
We call it Hofstation, the main station.
And we've got three different places where you can park your bike.
Now, we're just in front of what we call Stadsbockhorn,
a town, a balcony, you can call it,
with a free parking place for around about 5,000 bicycles.
It's free, you don't have to pay, but people are looking after it.
So, it's kind of a guarded bicycle park.
All the places have got a sensor.
The Stadsbockhorn is diverted in different areas, A, B, C, D, E, F, G.
When you see the sign over there, it shows you how much places are still free.
But the one over here on the right-hand side, that's the formal bicycle parking,
which is a guarded one.
You have to pay for it, just for a day ticket, a month ticket.
And it's open until the last train arrives in Groningen,
around about two o'clock at night.
And then, we've far back, we've got what we call a bicycle flat,
which is free, but is nobody who looks after it.
And on the south side of the station, there are also parking places.
So, the total amount of bike parking facilities is around about 10,000.
And in the weekend, it's all full.
That's an Ovei Feeds.
That's the shared bicycle system in the Netherlands.
And you can pick up those bicycles at, I think it's 340 stations now around the country.
And so, it's probably the biggest bike share system in the world now.
It's intended for people who've used public transport.
So, the idea is that if you have cycled through the railway station in your own town,
and then you've taken the train, and then you can use one of these bikes at the other end,
as the other part of your commute.
Why ride a bicycle?
Because it's much easier than taking the bus,
and the car is way too expensive to have in the city.
I mean, the infrastructure is great there, so bicycle lanes everywhere.
So, yeah, that's basically the reason I ride my bike everywhere.
But I have to go, so good luck filming.
You're not going to get a cycling revolution by having a few 30kmh streets.
You're not going to get it by building just a few cycle paths.
And you're not going to get it by traffic calming just a few streets either.
You have to do everything, and you have to do it everywhere.
You never have to ride more than a few hundred metres from your home in the Netherlands
in order to find yourself on a facility of such quality
that you will be happy to cycle on it, and you'll be happy for your children to cycle on it.
We've tried to make new areas around the town
within a boundary of, say, five to seven kilometres.
And not that we've spread all the new areas far away from the town centre.
Out of a point of compact city and mobility aspect,
it's much better taking the bike or walk into the town instead of using the car.
And this bridge is one of the projects which gives you the opportunity to use the bike
or go on your feet towards the shops which are on the other side.
So it's a very easy and quickest way to go from the new area over here
and to go to the area down there.
Not using your car, but go on the bike.
Employers must submit to the local authority a plan, a scheme, a set of ideas.
What are they doing in order to encourage their employees not to use motorcars?
And this can come in all sorts of forms.
It could be they do no more than put in some covered bike parking
and some showers or lockers.
But some places have offered free public transport.
Others have offered a bonus to people that say they're not using their motorcars.
So the idea is to discourage parking.
This site here is one of the largest in the world.
It's the largest this side of Berlin.
So there is also a lot of car parking.
But the cycle parking here is still quite generous.
Here you can see there's a special cycle path just right into the entrance.
We go straight on and we cycle just right into the shop.
Although it's summer, as you can see how much people using the bike go into the Ikea.
So I presume that maybe in the next couple of years they will put some more.
This is the parking place for the employments of Ikea.
You can see that most of them are coming on the bike and use the bike place to park the bike.
Yeah, I think it's great.
Because when you save room for the customer, because we don't park there.
And if you have a private selling place, it encourages people to go on the bike.
It's quite common to see students moving house with these.
Because there were 50,000 students in Groninger.
And you can hire these for just 250 an hour.
And so people will hire one of these to move house.
So you'll see students riding through the town with all of the worldly goods on the back seats.
We're growing up with the bicycle.
When you are three years old in Holland, you learn how to bike.
And it's easy, you are quick everywhere.
I used to go on bicycle.
It's cheap, it's good for the health, for your movement.
And handy.
Greetings, bye.
In the car you're always alone.
And on the bike it's funny you interact with other people.
When you talk, you laugh.
You can even study for an exam on the way to the campus if it's necessary.
You can go all the way with the bicycle.
You can go there, you can go there.
With the car you can't do that.
You can't park here, you can't park here.
All the way you can get fine with the police.
Oh, it's an or.
So one thing you'll find that's very apparent when you're here is that it is almost completely silent.
This is the quietest city that I've ever ridden a bike in or been in.
On the street you could stand in the roadway for minutes at a time without seeing a car.
The reason why it's pleasant to cycle here is because the infrastructure removes conflicts.
And so you don't have people cycling in close proximity to fast cars or large trucks.
Not terribly often anyway.
We have to have deliveries to a centre like this.
But we don't have through traffic in a place like this.
And so this is relatively peaceful.
And by having the street as a street mainly for bicycles as this is,
we have enormous numbers of people using the street to be able to get to the shops.
We can make the whole place look more attractive.
So the first thing you see when you come out of the train station is this massive bike parking structure.
The taxi stand is located away from the front of the station.
Over there, that very small parking lot, that's where you can get a taxi.
You don't have taxis jostling for customers.
If you want a taxi, you have to go and seek it out.
Okay, well we are here in the northwestern part of Groningen.
The Korrewegwijk. It's built in the 1930s.
And behind me you will see the canal, which is the van Starkemborg canal.
It's the canal which leads from Amsterdam to Germany.
So it's an important canal.
A lot of ships are here the whole day and the whole night.
It's open 24 hours, 6 days a week.
Behind here is a suburb area with a lot of young people with young children.
They all have to go to work, go to school.
They have to pass the bridge.
13,000 cyclists each day will pass this bridge.
It's an old bridge, it's a swing bridge.
It will open sometimes 10 minutes.
So it will take a long, long time when you can pass.
That means that we have made these separate bridges which you can use when the bridge is open.
So you never can say when you have to go to school, well I'm late because the bridge was open.
It gives you options, some people will wait, some people take the bridges just behind the swing bridge.
In the morning hour you might see that a lot of people will use the separate bridge to go to their work.
But when you go home and you think well I've been working for a long day, I will wait.
Woo!
There are so, so many things that have been done to improve livability here in Roanigan.
As you have seen, everything is attainable by bike.
Through smart transportation planning, all obstacles have been removed.
And the result is a beautiful city that's quiet and healthy and fun and pleasant.
Like say if you want to go to the movie theater, there are hundreds of bike parking spaces out front
and hundreds more protected in a garage out back.
But that's just something that's not remarkable in the Netherlands.
Look at the quality of the pathways throughout the city.
The brick pavers are flawless in spots.
It's hard to find a defect anywhere or a spot where it's uneven.
Maintenance is a priority because they want people to have a smooth ride.
That's because the city does not encourage traveling by car.
And that's the money they save.
They can continue to build beautiful places that you can walk on and bike on and take transit on.
And yes, even drive your car when you need to.
And a bicycle isn't considered to be a strange toy.
It's not a sporting object.
It's a simple method of transportation.
You no longer, you don't think about cycling any more than you think about your feet when you're walking.
Well, we came here because we looked for the best place in the world to cycle.
And therefore we ended up looking into the phony.
Because when you've looked everywhere that there is, there is simply nowhere quite like this.
So because using your bike you can go in the town, have a drink, like the students behind me.
Go to the town, go to the market, go to your work, go to see your friends.
So it's a mode of transport that keeps you alive.
