Originally Posted by
nuxx
But back to the imagery, without having been there myself (even though my sister lived there for 2 years, shame on me), I think Utrecht is a bit of an edge case given a relatively small urban centre with a fairly large metropolitan catchment area... and thus presumably relatively few (the station being one) urban traffic nexi. Copenhagen as an example yields a larger urban centre with several traffic nexi and therefore a comparatively lower concentration in terms of parking (and basically every workplace has dedicated bike parking space). But taking it a bit further... seeing that this location is the central station (though knowing practically nothing about Dutch commute patterns across cities) - perhaps Utrecht also serves as a gateway for people continuing their commutes by train to Amsterdam and Rotterdam, merely 20 and 40 minutes away respectively? Considering this hypothetical bike->Utrecht->train to major city pattern - this "hub" can indeed be presumed to replace at least some amount of car traffic which would otherwise head directly into either of those major cities. I have a Dutch friend whom I've visited in the past - I certainly remember the highway queues on the inroads to Amsterdam and her muted road rage
...would love for someone from the area to confirm or reject this theory?
Utrecht is the railway hub. It's in the centre of the country anyway and only a few trains pass it by, it's by far the biggest train station in the country. The only thing special about Utrecht is it's litte 'centre of a region' function and it's size. It's remarkably populous because basically it's just a city like Nijmegen, Tilburg, Groningen, Eindhoven etc. which are about half te size. There's nothing special about the cycling there either, other than they seem to be more infrastructure beeing build than already finished. They got a lot to recover from because the central station area was victim to the GM model for car friendly cities and got a mall and central station building that was a famous failure.
There's not more cycling in Utrecht than in cities one size smaller and less than in my hometown of Groningen. But all these cities want to profile themselves as the cycling city and Utrecht has the numbers to show off because of it's size. Eindhoven's got the most spectacular cycle path, Den Bosch the best cycling bridge and Groningen has little recent achievements to show for because it has always been ahead and there's little room for improvement left. So they are more into cycling logo's and stuff like that lately. Amsterdam can't compete and wouldn't anyway, national acclaim is below them. But it is a cycling city, it has made the city to what it is and the people kept cycling no matter how bad the infrastructure and the traffic got or gets. It can't function without it.
Originally Posted by
nuxx
That's a lot of cars. How do enjoy a beer on a sidewalk cafe like that?
