Of all things Dutch, the windmills, the canals, the colour orange, the steep narrow staircases and the habit of eating raw herring, nothing quite says local, like a fiets, the Dutch word for bicycle. These contraptions are everywhere. Everyone rides one here, from the kids to the grannies on every kind of bike that you can imagine.
Fiets was one of the first Dutch words I learned because of the fietspad, the cycle path that dominates the landscape. Even a day-long tourist will know what a fietspad is as the chances of getting knocked by a Dutch cyclist while innocently ambling along one, looking for a coffee shop are high. The hyper vigilant Dutch must decide daily whether to use the bell or shout in order to clear the fietspad of ignorant tourists who treat them as walkways.
The Dutch cycle smoothly, efficiently and many times handsfree because, well, people text. This is a country with road signs that read, do not text while cycling.
The iconic Dutch bike, the omafiets, impressed me when I first laid my eyes on it for the wrong reasons. I was struck by its ordinariness, and it reminded me of the sturdy Black Mamba bicycle, those status symbols that ruled Kenyan rural landscapes in the 70s and 80s. I have since seen cranky relics on the Amsterdam streets that look like they survived a World War with no dangling cables on the handle bars to squeeze. Instead, they have a back pedal brake, an innovation from the generation of the rear-engined Volkswagen Beetle.
My maiden attempt was traumatic and almost landed me in a canal. I didn’t think it would be that difficult to adapt to but in the heat of the moment, working the pedals backwards is the most unnatural way to stop a bicycle.
In the early months, I could not keep up. It surprised me that old ladies rode past me.
What, in the cheese is going on here? What kind of stamina do Dutch grannies possess, for I see no hills in sight to the horizon?
Then I learned about e-bikes, which are essentially scooters with pedals that give the riders this zen-like cadence. There is now an explosion of fat bikes, a kind of motorized bicycle that the young Dutchies prefer. It has its own style protocols. You must wear black hooded jacket and have a passenger riding pillion.
Cycling is a culture deep in the bones of the Dutch. The Netherlands is one of the most bike-friendly countries in the world. It is commonly stated that the Netherlands has more bicycles than people, approximately 23 million bicycles for 17 million people. It is the one thing that creates a distinction from other countries with an infrastructure that prioritises the cyclist on top of the transport chain. There are 35000kms plus of dedicated cycle lanes across the country, clearly marked in red asphalt with a separate traffic light system. It is so well organised, it forces one to reconsider their relationship with the bicycle.
Dutch city cycling is an acquired skill. Near misses are common, because Dutch cyclists have a sixth sense.They ride fast, on rickety and clanky bicycles with urgency. They cycle with an upright posture, the height of otherwise tall people creates an imposing sight, often grimacing in the face of a head wind or light rain. They ride alongside each other, maintaining perfect distance while conversing along and there is hardly any bell ringing. Sometimes in the centre of Amsterdam, riding the peloton, non verbal communications, hand signals are so subtle they form a separate sign language. On the cycle path, it is a cluster of unwritten rules that you can only learn from experience. It is okay to ride through the red bike light if the road is clear, speed and purpose determine the position on the cycle path and when you hear the sharp ting of the bell, treat it as a declaration to move out of the way, not a request.
Bicycles are something of a status neutralizer. Yes, you can tell apart the expensive e bikes and the slim fancy road racers of the Lycra clad weekend riders but the majority ride cheap bikes, with single shift gear speed. The status play here is in ordinariness, a timeless Dutch ethic summarized as “ doe maar normaal” (Just act normal). So normal, the PM cycles. So normal that no one bothers to wear a helmet, not even the kids. So normal, that it is not unusual to find tons of bicycles fished out of the city canals as disposing of a bike in a canal is a curious custom. So normal that people drink and cycle and the only way you can tell they have been drinking is because you can be awakened by a loud conversation out on the streets as they cycle past at 2 am in the morning.
All this cycling is obviously good for the citizens’ health and you hardly see any overweight people. The Netherlands is probably cycling prone because it is a flat and small country so covering distance is not as daunting if you have an entry level of stamina and the ability to ignore a sore butt. But for what they lack in elevation in these lowlands, they make up for headwinds blowing over from the North Sea and schizophrenic weather. Yet, Dutch doggedness means, they will cycle in any weather, come wind, hail or snow even as many whine persistently that the wind always maliciously shifts direction to work against them.
Cycling here is not seen as exercise or a lifestyle. It is transport, simply about getting from point A to B. The Dutch have incredible recall and I have witnessed the sheer miracle of someone identifying their bicycle in the black hole of an industrial scale parking lot with thousands of identical bicycles.
When I looked up the history of this cycling nation, I was surprised to learn that the Dutch weren’t born on two wheels. In the 70s, they were car-obsessed and headed in the trajectory of all modern cities of the time, but a dramatic rise in fatal accidents in the early 70s forced the society into a reckoning. The turning point was 1971, a year that saw the death of 400 children through traffic related accidents and ignited a movement against cars.
The event was known locally as kindermoord (child death) and the campaign became known as Stop de Kindermoord. It was compounded by the Oil crisis of 1973: the OPEC embargoes provided the economic and political leverage for the government to promote cycling as some kind of antidote to dependency on foreign oil and instituted a car free Sundays. In addition, There was also a plan to destroy historic neighbourhoods like Amsterdam’s Jordaan to make space for highways. Protests attended by thousands turned the tide, policy followed and the culture set in.
The average Amsterdamer rides an old and cheap bike for the simple reason that it will be stolen. In fact, if you really want to flex status and feel culturally superior in this city, it helps if your bike looks like some scrap metal you fished out of the canal.
Amsterdam is the most dangerous city in the world for bicycles. Theft is so regular it supports a chain industry. The kind we use to secure iron gates at industrial workshops in Nairobi.
It is good business for the bicycle insurance industry, who also strongly advise on the two-step security protocol. For the public, it is a ritual of resignation. Lock your bike and chain it to something immovable. Buy the insurance if the bike costs more than 50 euros, wait for it to be stolen, file a claim online and don’t even bother reporting.
You have no street cred if your bike hasn’t been stolen at least once, leaving you outside a restaurant after an evening meet up, lingering with the frustrating query, “Where is my fiets?”
This is a society where a 50 Euro rusty wreck shares the same infrastructure with a high end 7,000 Euro cargo bike and both are equally targets of the nation’s most prolific crime.
The theft numbers are astonishing: 600,000 to 800,000 stolen annually in a rules based society. Yet, it is viewed as a mild inconvenience, like a blast of rain during a picnic. Law enforcement designates this as a low risk, high-volume crime. You could leave your front door unlocked but never forget to chain your bicycle.
Bicycle thieves are rarely caught and Amsterdammers generally do not take it personally.This is ironic as the city is full of surveillance cameras. Thankfully, the thieves are stealthy. There are no bicycle-jackings, where you expect to be waylaid on the road by a gang of rogue young men in dark hoodies brandishing pliers. “Borrowing” a bicycle after a drink to get home and abandoning it once you reach your destination is not considered stealing in the public mind.
It appears to be a tidy unwritten pact. The insurance companies profit from the fear, the thieves profit from the scale of bikes, the citizens value the orientation to benign urban crime and the city saves up police manpower to deal with the embedded narco industry.
To my foreign eyes, it is systemic and the efficiency is staggering. This is a city that has chosen to look the other way and the collective silence and tolerance around bicycle theft intrigued me.
I wondered if there was any historical correlation, that one of the wealthiest nations on earth, master dam builders who fought back the sea and forged a prosperous country out of reclaimed land, couldn’t resolve a rather rudimentary problem like bicycle theft.
I began to trace the nature of this silence and it led back to the war, World War II. I stumbled on this nugget during a casual evening, watching Germany play in the Euros, when my Dutch colleague suddenly declared, “Bring back our bikes”, an odd insult that piqued my curiosity.
During the occupation, the Nazi regime systematically confiscated Dutch bicycles for their war machine in a methodical humiliating pillage. I came across estimates of hundreds of thousands to two million in the occupation years of 1942 to 1945. It was a crippling blow to daily life, making the hustle for food and livelihood much harder. Consequently, the bicycle became a symbol of oppression and resistance, amplified in the slogan, “My Bike is Mine” .
Holding onto your bike was a symbolic act of defiance. This was an era when bicycles were seized during house raids, at random street checkpoints or as collective punishment for acts of resistance. There was even a punitive bicycle permit system.
The post war resentment towards the German theft lingered and I suppose, the lesson imprinted on the national consciousness was something deeper: That since something so beloved can be casually stolen, it left the masses with an enduring ambivalence and fluidity to bicycle ownership.
The bike, after all, is not yours. It is only your turn to ride it.
This makes this theft scenario unusual. It is not a breakdown of civil order but a kind of a cultural trauma response, recast as a daily, tolerated inconvenience like the weather.
The Dutch are known for iconic bicycle brands like Gazelle and Batavus but with all their industrial ingenuity, they seem uninterested in competing in the mass produced passenger car market. And perhaps, that is part of the puzzle I was missing. The choice of bicycles over cars is a statement of utilitarian,communal action in a society that fights the impulse for individualised status-chasing encapsulated by the automobile.
Bicycles enforce meaningful social interaction in a city of strangers who share the unspoken bond of suffering under daily crappy weather. So for the holy fiets, the Dutch built a cycling paradise with village-scale intimacy into a modern national state. It is a cultural choice cemented in red asphalt that can tolerate the trauma of a million inconvenient thefts.
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Loved this! Thanks for explaining this phenomenon from a Kenyan’s eyes!