This morning, we biked from Delft to Den Haag (The Hague).
The ride was approximately 45 minutes due to construction. What I found quite interesting was that a detour route for the bikes was well marked to get around the construction, they really do care about their bicyclists here in the Netherlands! The majority of our ride was along bike paths as depicted below.
Our group arrived at the “Stadthaus” (city hall) which was quite the impressive structure, very cool architecture!
There at the “Stadthaus”, we were treated to an amazing lecture by one of the transportation urban planners, Frans Botma. He started off his lecture discussing some key figures of the city of the Hague; 500,000 jobs/population inside the city and 7 million in the urban area(s) around the Hague. In Dutch, the urban population is referred to as the “Randstad”. The Hague is known as the international city of peace and justice as the court of international justice is in the Hague. In addition, the Dutch parliament (national government) meets in the Hague in the “Binneoff”. Mr. Botma also talked about the fact that one third of the city is green space even though Den Haag is the most dense city in the Netherlands. He stressed the fact that their city likes to focus on integrated transportation systems, making it easier to transfer between bikes, busses, trams, trains, and vehicles. The bike system that was developed in the Hague looked quite impressive and user friendly from the map that Mr. Botma showed us. He stated that these paths have been planned within a radius of 7.5 km from the city centre (about a 30 minute bike ride). Since the Hague is very dense, this system works really well here, especially since the vast majority of the citizen’s homes were within the 7.5 km circular radius of the centre. This would make biking very appealing to me as a resident of the Hague. Unfortunately, Kelowna is very spread out and not dense at all. This got me thinking that it would be wiser to promote bike paths for within a community like Glenmore, Rutland, etc. since it would take more than an hour to cycle from the university to the H2O fitness centre and in my opinion, having to cycle more than an hour to get somewhere, makes it very unattractive to bike. I think in Kelowna, more focus should be put on public transport for longer distances, but for inter community transportation, biking should be encouraged. For example, if I want to get to the H2O from my house in Glenmore, I should be able to hop on a bus that can take me there. However, if I need to pick up some groceries from IGA or Coopers, then I should be able to follow a bike route from my house to the shopping area and get there in 10 minutes instead of driving or taking the bus such a short distance.
In the presentation, Mr. Botma also showed us a bunch of pictures depicting streets, both the before and after various renovations had been completed. There were a lot of really inspiring transformations of streets that were formerly heavily congested with vehicle traffic and limited room for bicyclists and pedestrians that had been changed into streets that had more room for pedestrians and bicyclists. Often, a 4 lane street was converted to a 2 lane street with a separate bike path and a larger sidewalk. Through skillful traffic calming techniques as well as encouragement of the citizens using transportation methods other than vehicles, they relieved much of the congestion in the streets.
Personally, the most impressive street transformation that happened in the Hague was the “Grote Marktstraat” (Big Market Street). In this amazing transformation, they converted what was a heavily congested street just for vehicles which ran through the city centre into a street only for bikes and pedestrians. They this by building a street and parking for vehicles beneath the Grote Marktstraat (on the -1 level). Then, beneath the car street/parking level, on the -2 level, they built a tram line with underground stops. Below is a picture I took from our tour when we went into the underground area beneath the Grote Markstraat.
The above picture was taken on our tour of the centre of Den Haag. Two of Mr. Botma’s colleagues took us for a nice tour, explaining the various redevelopments the city made to make transportation by bicycle better. Below are a collection of pictures from our tour.
What I thought was really cool was that later in the afternoon, when we were walking through the grounds near the Binneoff, we actually got to see the prime minister of the Netherlands, I believe he was walking to his office. What amazed me was that he was just walking around without any security around him, wish I would have had the time to snap a quick picture with him, but by the time our tour guide explained who it was, it was too late. Below are a few pics of the Binneoff area.
On the tour, we also made a stop at the central train station in the Hague. There was a very impressive bike storage facility at the train station. Really cemented the idea of integrated transportation for me. It was so easy to get to the train station by bike and the fact that covered parking for my bike is available, just makes it that much more attractive for residents to bike to and from the train station.
