Cycling Facilities 1

The Netherlands is a very bicycle-centric country, but there are still a large number of cars occupying the roads and they both need a place to park and can provide a very real danger to cyclists under the wrong circumstances. As such, there is a lot of roadway infrastructure to allow both of these requirements to coexist. In this post are two examples: the first is a fietsstraat and the second is a dedicated bike route.

This is an example of a Dutch fietsstraat, literally a "bicycle street". This particular road runs for about 0.4 km next to Lessenaar along the NW-SE direction. The defining characteristic of a fietsstraat is that although cars are allowed to drive along it, cyclists have the right of way along the whole thing, and the design of the roadway is typically such that it is undesirable and difficult to drive a car through in the first place, typically having only just enough room for one-way traffic and little to no curbside parking.

These images depict a dedicated bike route passing near the Kattenhotel in Delft, and they are fairly representative of such routes in general. Cars are explicitly disallowed on these roads, generally being about 3m (9ft) wide to allow two-way bike traffic with a decent buffer. They are typically paved in red as that is the standard "bike priority" color here (black is for cars and grey is for pedestrians), but in some cases they are also paved in black asphalt, generally only when they can't be mistaken for car paths. These are also present in America, albeit not with as much frequency and generally without any actual traffic markings. Notably, unlike their American equivalent the bike paths here do often allow motorized scooters so long as they are only able to attain a maximum speed of (if I recall correctly) 30kph (18.6mph). These routes tend to be fairly long and straight, and can be differentiated by those designed for maximum utility and those that are more scenic (this one seems to be among the latter). 

These are only a few of the facilities available to cyclists here. There are many more that are integrated into the infrastructure to allow for effective, safe transportation of both people and goods by bike! I'm looking forward to seeing and learning about even more before my time here ends...