Monthly Archives: April 2018

Dutch cycling

Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. —World Health Organization

Cycling culture is universal in the Netherlands. It is part of the national consciousness. They embrace all things bicycle. In a country with less than half the population of California, they have many of the worlds top cyclists including Chantal Blaak, winner of the Amstel Gold Race and World Road Race Championship, and Tom Doumalin, winner of the Giro d’Italia and World Time Trial Championship. Just as Norway’s love for winter sports was on display in the Winter Olympics, the spirit of the people of the Netherlands expresses through cycling, in sport and everyday life. Cycling is a principle value the Dutch have built their communities around. [I usually use my pictures for this blog, but the photos in this post are from the public domain, mostly of the Amstel Gold women’s race which takes place every April in the Netherlands]

The bicycle was the traditional vehicle for transportation in the Netherlands in the early part of the 20th century, accounting for about 80% of trips in Amsterdam. Car technology changed that in the 1960’s, just like it did here in the U.S. The Dutch decided in the 1970’s to comprehensively plan for providing service to people cycling, and that has made a big difference. Cities are built for people on bicycles. 75% of secondary school children bicycle to school. The Dutch educate their children to travel by bike with a traffic certificate program, which most kids complete by age 12. This is part of the planning process, to instill confidence. There is a public expectation that kids will be cycling. The urban planners work with the traffic department and local communities to ensure that the roads, paths, and trails are safe for bikes. This is very similar to the travel culture that I experienced in Japan–bikes and walking are thought through and planned as completely as other modes such as trains, buses, and cars.

The results are pretty incredible. By no means perfect, but they go a long way towards a happy, healthier and more sustainable society. We have all the seeds in America we need for this. Our Safe Routes to Schools programming started as a safe streets movement in a country nearby the Netherlands, Denmark. We have many assets we can leverage including wide streets, space and our hallmark of ingenuity guided by science and a high regard for all people. Our Constitution seeks to form “a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”. Bicycling aids with all of these things, the American way.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

When we celebrate cycling, I like to remember how it brings together the highest aspirations for our healthiest possible future. It is about justice, equity, inclusion, freedom, equality, and building strong and responsible communities. We can tell our young cyclists when they push those pedals the possibilities are unlimited. You very well could end up on top of the world.

BERG EN TERBLIJT, NETHERLANDS – APRIL 15: Arrival / Chantal Blaak of The Netherlands and Team Boels Dolmans Cyclingteam / Celebration / Lucinda Brand of The Netherlands and Team Sunweb Women / during the 5th Amstel Gold Race 2018 a 116,9km women’s race from Maastricht to Berg En Terblijt on April 15, 2018 in Berg En Terblijt, Netherlands. (Photo by Dan Istitene/Getty Images)

Photo Credits, and References:
http://www.cyclingnews.com/races/amstel-gold-race-women-2018/results/
http://www.tdwsport.com
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/gallery/2016/may/18/cris-toala-olivares-netherlands-tulip-fields
http://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/racing/world-champion-chantal-blaak-wins-2018-amstel-gold-race-376513

Santana Adventures

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bicycle-capital-world-transport-cycling-kindermoord
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands

Waterworks in Albuquerque

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If I had sought counseling, I might have become a more mature, emotionally well-adjusted human being. But I preferred becoming a writer. —Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Don’t Call Me a Genius”, New York Times, April 14, 2018

I read a Robert Frost poem this morning, and it reminded me of my bicycle rides in Albuquerque. The North Diversion Channel multi-use trail is a main cycling connection across town. It runs along a big concrete ditch that’s been engineered to control the water shed from the Sandia Mountains. Sometimes I close my eyes and try to imagine what this landscape looked like before we built up this city. Water, which is often used by poets as a metaphor for memory and justice, is a primary shaping force in the landscape. Water has a voice.

The situation, now and in the past, is that the minority and marginalized communities of this or any other country are often not voiceless. They’re simply not heard. –Viet Thanh Nguyen, NYTimes

On Saturday’s ride I made a point to stop by the Mill Pond Refuge at the Sawmill Community Land Trust. Keshet, a local dance company, performed a water dance there at 2pm. It was part of the 3rd biannual National Water Dance, where communities renew their connections to the life giving world of water. In the arid Southwest, during this drought, it was especially poignant. The Sawmill location represents our community’s changing relationship with water. Below is the poem from Robert Frost, and then a few photos from the Water Dance that I saw Saturday.

A Brook in the City, by Robert Frost

The farmhouse lingers, though averse to square
With the new city street it has to wear
A number in. But what about the brook
That held the house as in an elbow-crook?
I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength
And impulse, having dipped a finger length
And made it leap my knuckle, having tossed
A flower to try its currents where they crossed.
The meadow grass could be cemented down
From growing under pavements of a town;
The apple trees be sent to hearthstone flame.
Is water wood to serve a brook the same?
How else dispose of an immortal force
No longer needed? Staunch it at its source
With cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown
Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone
In fetid darkness still to live and run–
And all for nothing it had ever done,
Except forget to go in fear perhaps.
No one would know except for ancient maps
That such a brook ran water. But I wonder
If from its being kept forever under,
The thoughts may not have risen that so keep
This new-built city from both work and sleep.
–1923

References:

http://keshetarts.org “Founded in 1996, Keshet is an Albuquerque-based nonprofit which exists to inspire and unite community by fostering unlimited possibilities through dance, mentorship and a creative space for the arts. Uniting the arts, the artist and the audience, Keshet invites you to engage, experience and be inspired through bold explorations of movement and celebrations of community.”

Keshet’s Water Dance: http://keshetarts.org/join-national-water-dance-2018_dancing-for-water-in-nm/

Cycling and walking to get our bearings

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Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health–and create profitable diseases and dependences–by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. –Wendell Berry, “The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture”, 1977, Sierra Club Books

If I can bicycle there, then I can live there. This was the mantra I came up with after my visit to Japan last year. It was my sixth time in Japan, but the first time I bicycled. What a difference it makes! I felt at home on my bicycle. Cycling has been an essential way for me to get my bearings in places since I took it up in earnest over twenty years ago. But feeling at home in Japan was different since it had felt so foreign. Cycling is an activity that creates connections.

Wes Jackson of the Land Institute said Wendell Berry’s book on culture and agriculture “launched the modern movement for sustainable agriculture”. The cycling and walking movements today are doing the same thing for sustainable transportation. There is tremendous enthusiasm in the cycling and walking communities. We need to support that by setting up our cities and villages, and the roads connecting them together, to encourage walking and cycling. This is what I call structural encouragement.

Structural encouragement means that we design for those travel modes. It would naturally occur to people that we are not only welcome to bicycle and walk, but it is part of the shared experience of living in the places we make our homes. The infrastructure we design connects people to our own capacity and powers for creating movement. It makes a woven world.

Human movement is the most fundamental form of human action. That is why we call “movements”–such as civil rights, women’s marches, conservation efforts–movements. When we march together, it symbolized the power of collective community action. We let our legs do the talking. It is the language that preceded language. An invisible thread connecting us.

Cycling and walking are not only a ways of moving forward, they are ways of living in place. They allow us to tune in more to what is going on with our bodies, and the places we live in. It is a way of paying attention. Designing transportation systems that facilitate human powered transportation (clean, renewable, healthy, sustainable, fun human movement!) is a direct solution that creates benefits now, and future dividends. It’s a transformative economic idea, one worth investing in. Check out the nonprofit I founded to learn more how we can accomplish this change together and how you can help. https://bikeinitiative.org

Man is made of the same atoms the world is, he shares the same impressions, predispositions, and destiny. When his mind is illuminated, when his heart is kind, he throws himself joyfully into the sublime order, and does, with knowledge, what the stones do by structure. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Worship” from the “Conduct of Life”.

Blog posts on my Japan trip 2017:

https://bikeyogiblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/25/cycling-japan-lights-my-fire/
https://bikeyogiblog.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/travels-in-japan/