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At 6 foot 4 inches with long blonde hair, Job Oort, a bike messenger in Amsterdam, stood out among the typical Dutch bike commuters with his chrome sling bag and his built-for-speed, not-totally-neglected bike. He was clipped in, wearing a white helmet, atop a cyclocross or gravel Cannondale frame, on which he was running tan sidewall 700c by 44 millimeter tires. I learned about Oort and Amsterdam during his workday, as he rode through the city while I followed along on a rented bike. He had started working as a messenger three years ago in The Hague before moving back home to Amsterdam. We pedaled fast through some of the Netherlandss 22,000 miles of bike lanes. We picked up a laptop from a childrens school, went way out west of the city through canal-lined parks with old wooden windmills just like I had imagined the Netherlands would look. We kept entering grade schools, which were much nicer than the ones I had seen in New York. At one of the schools, Oort made note of a small-wheeled electric bike, saying spoiled kids ride them like jerks.Really, I dont think about our bicycle infrastructure much only when I go to other cities, he responded when I asked his thoughts on Amsterdams world-famous, human-centered, cycling-inclusive urban design.Job Oort is a bike messenger in Amsterdam. (Quinn Gregory)A Personal Quest to Understand Urban Bicycling ChallengesAs a college student in New York City working a job as a bike messenger, I was exposed to urbanism in an unorthodox way. I witnessed coworkers suffer horrible collisions because of bad street design. I was eager to learn about the built environment and enrolled in a master of architecture at Pratt Institute. At Pratt, long hours spent outside as a messenger were followed by lamp-lit nights at my desk looking at project sites on Google Maps. I became fascinated reading news about McGuinness Boulevard, a notoriously dangerous street where cyclists have been killed by drivers. Cyclists and advocates formed Make McGuinness Safe, which epitomized the challenges I had seen as a bike messenger: how to reclaim streets designed for cars and turn them into spaces for people. Last spring, I applied to, and won, the Bill Menking Travel Award, with a self-made project that sent me to Europe to study how messengers, planners, academics, and architects have impacted progressive street designs in big cities. I wanted to look at cities that faced opposition in their redesign efforts for safer streets and see if I could learn anything from the similarities between European approaches to solve for the types of problems I encountered on McGuinness Boulevard. Amsterdam, a global cycling capital, was an essential stop and case study. Through my time in Amsterdam, I saw a mix of promise coupled with signs of a more challenging future to come for streets in New York City and beyond.The Route to Amsterdams Bicycling RevolutionTo understand Amsterdams redesign successes, it helps to consider how far the Netherlands has come. According to a 2021 study, the countrys traffic fatality rate decreased 90 percent from a high in 1970, when its rate of 245 traffic fatalities per million people nearly matched that of the U.S. at that time, with 257 deaths per million.A map of Amsterdam indicating the areas Gregory studied as part of his research. (Quinn Gregory)The revolution that launched Amsterdam into a design-forward city made for pedestrians and cyclists was partially in response to the work that American urban planner David Jokinen was doing in The Hague in the 1950s and 1960s. Jokinen had written a book with a central idea of expanding highways through Dutch cities. The 1967 Jokinen Plan would have created six-lane highways cutting through working class neighborhoods, similar to the model used by Jokinens contemporary, Robert Moses, in New York. While the Dutch were fending off massive infrastructural projects that would puncture the citys urban fabric, New Yorkers drove their first trips on the newly erected Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Jokinen even wanted to fill the picturesque Singel Canal with concrete to create a highway. The Dutch people refused to accept this outside authority carving up their cities and ramped up a long-existing resistance to car-prioritized urban redesign. Even before Jokinen, in 1924, Dutch politician Alexander van Sasse van Ysselt added an amendment to the new Motor and Bicycle Act proposing that drivers of vehicles should be liable for the damage caused to persons injured by collision, removing the idea of burden of proof on the pedestrian. Simultaneously across the Atlantic, the U.S. was developing laws around jaywalking, largely due to campaigns by the automobile industry, shifting blame for accidents from drivers onto pedestrians. The Dutch later pushed even further, saying that regardless of the degree of responsibility, if a collision involves a child 13 years old or younger, the motorist is liable.The protection of children became central to the Dutchs urban design revolution. By the late 1970s, an anti-car organization was well established and winning over public sentiment. The Stop de Kindermoordor Stop Murdering Childrenmovement was working to change the future of childrens lives in Amsterdam, distributing posters and holding die-in protests attended by thousands. The group was organized by journalist Vic Lagenhoff of the national newspaper De Tijd, who lost his 6-year-old son to a speeding driver in 1971. Lagenhoff questioned why 500 children were dying each year in the Netherlands and concluded that no civilized nation could let this be a marginal issue. Lagenhoff and his readers demanded an end to the dangers imposed by cars. By the 1980s, public sentiment had turned; even the Dutch royal family supported the idea that the Netherlands had been remiss in not accounting for children in the modern era of the automobile, condemning what Lagenhoff had referred to as the massacre of children.The Netherlands is a classic textbook example for street design that manages and accommodates biking. (Quinn Gregory)How to Build a Bike-Friendly CityBack on our bike tour, rain came and went, drenching Oort and me as we pedaled along exposed bike lanes. To make matters worse, my camera stopped workinga serious concern because I had four more cities on my itinerary. Oort suggested we stop and share a sandwich hed packed for lunch, in part so I could inspect my camera. Oort kept me distracted as I realized that the camera would require repairs; he shared a note about my project in a group message with Amsterdams local messenger scene.Ken Eby-Gomez has worked as a bike messenger for 12 years.(Quinn Gregory)Soon, I had arranged to meet Ken Eby-Gomez in the hip De Pijp neighborhood. He looked to be about 35 years old and had been working as a messenger for 12 years and now running a small messenger company of his own. He grew up in San Diego and earned a masters in urban affairsgiving him an informed view of Amsterdams bike infrastructure.Amsterdam is prescriptive in how you can ride, Eby-Gomez said. People have to ride in their lanes at the speed-of-travel, and cant really ride any other way.The Dutch goal was to make the streets safe and accessible for everyone ages 8 to 80, and in Eby-Gomezs view, the country has succeeded. He continued: The Dutch approach [to street safety] has been very design oriented. It has three pillars of Vision Zero: Design, Enforcement, and Education or something like that. The idea is if we design for it to be very hard for cars to hit people, we can limit deaths. (Vision Zero is a movement that began in Sweden in 1997, with a goal that no person should die or be seriously injured in a traffic crash. According to Smart City Sweden, Vision Zero has been very successful, halving the number of deaths on Swedish roads since 2000.) Even despite radical success in improving street safety in the Netherlands, reducing the fatality rate on roads to 70 percent that of the U.S., newly available technology has introduced a pressing challenge for Amsterdams planners.Eby-Gomez continued, E-bikes and scooters sort of throw a wrench into the design. While the Dutch had achieved 8-to-80; designed separation for cars, trams, cyclists, and pedestrians; the very recent prevalence in these fat-tired e-bikes really changes the dynamic of the streets and poses new challenges the infrastructure must accommodate.The Challenges of E-Bikes and Motorized ScootersMopeds, e-bikes, and bicycles have been categorized separately in Dutch law since 1976. Through the 1980s and 1990s, speed limits were assigned according to engine size, noted on license plates. This helped determine which roads and bike paths that mopeds could and could not access. Theres a light moped, with a top speed of 18.6 mph, and a heavy moped, with a speed of 31 mph. At first, a light moped could operate both as a bike, in bike lanes, and as a motor vehicle, in traffic. In 2019, light mopeds were officially banned from bike paths, and immediately, collisions involving them plummeted. The streets became safer.But still, despite updated laws and categorizations of the newly ubiquitous technology, complaints among cyclists in Amsterdam about mopeds, light mopeds, and e-bikes have continued. Job Oort had complained about it; Eby-Gomez voiced his concerns too. It reminded me of a similar debate taking place in New York City, where complaints about delivery workers on mopeds weaving around streets and even onto sidewalks had been ongoing for years, with conflict ramping up since the pandemic delivery industry explosion. Then the CitiBike bike-share program increased its supply of pedal-assist e-bikes, creating new quandaries related to street design.E-bikes and scooters complicate street design and can compromise safety. (Quinn Gregory)The debate in New York graduated from observations and small talk to legislation brought before the City Council. Council Member Bob Holden, a conservative democrat from Queens, with the support of 27 members of the City Council, introduced a bill that would require all e-bikes be licensed and registered at the city level with the Department of Transportation (DOT), after a beloved Chinatown teacher, Priscilla Loke, was killed by a rider of an electric CitiBike in September 2023. The law would require the DOT to register and license all e-mobility devices not under regulation by the Department of Motor Vehicles. Queens Assembly Member Jennifer Rajkumar introduced a state bill in support of Priscillas Law in March.The Council bill has lost support from two legislators after a contentious public hearing. While these bills in the City Council may signify a desire to tame the streets, experts, including the DOT, argue that Priscillas Law wouldnt make streets safer. Cyclists (electric and otherwise) are already ticketed by the police for riding on the sidewalk and running red lights, and license plates dont make reckless drivers more accountable. Instead, the DOT argued, the city needed better design.Can Streets Be Shared?Current and future technologies have made design solutions tricky in Amsterdam, New York City, and in many urban environments. While data may not show that there is an inherent danger to e-bikes, the feelings of chaos and disorder will persist. Its worth looking at Amsterdam to see that there may not be a clean design solution, and that accepting a level of uncertainty about the conditions of our streets may be required of us.Perhaps instead of neatly categorizing each vehicle and either designing or enforcing our way out of the situation, we can look at street design from another perspective. Some in the Netherlands have criticized street and bike lane design that tends to let the fastest user get priority.The challenges of traffic and urban design extend further than the categorization of vehicles and technical design solutions. (Quinn Gregory)What if the future of street design wasnt merely answering the question of how we can get from A to B the fastest, but how we could redesign the streets to improve our daily quality of life? What if children could safely roam unsupervised, and street design prioritized the interaction with community?Many urbanists I met with before and during my trip talked about the hopes they had during the pandemicthat measures like work-from-home and outdoor dining would inspire a generation of activists who realized the value of public space.The challenges of traffic and urban design extend further than the categorization of vehicles and technical design solutions.Quinn Gregory is an architectural designer and urban researcher based in New York City, a recipient of Pratt Institutes William Bill Menking Travel Award, focusing on reimagining public spaces and advocating for safer, more equitable streets. He will graduate in May.
