Amsterdam is a relentless bike culture. It's a small, flat city, so biking is usually quicker than driving. Roads are made with bicycle lanes to small for cars to fit in. Most sidewalk space in Amsterdam is a bicycle lane. There's a bike rack at every corner, crosswalks just for bikes at every intersection.
If you don't have a car in America, it's a perpetual pain in the butt. Public transportation is expensive and will take exceedingly long. Malls, grocery stores and pharmacies have closed down in the center of town by where you live, and are now on the side of a highway three hours' walking time away.
If you have a car in Amsterdam, it's a perpetual pain in the butt. Most parking spots are on a meter system, so you have to pay for a ticket to stick under your dashboard, or else face an expensive ticket. And that's if you can find a spot. Parking lots are ridiculously expensive, and sparse. And when you do drive, you've got half a million bikes in your city that have the right of way. (American drivers also have to share the road with bikes, but that's more of a theoretical, since very few cyclists would be crazy enough to bike on Route 1.)
Everyone drives in America. We want to go three blocks away, we drive. We want to go to the a treadmill at the gym, we drive (and then take the elevator to the second floor of the gym). If we don't have a car, we need to arrange every aspect of our life around this fact.
Everyone bikes in Amsterdam. There are 600,000 bikes in Amsterdam, almost one for each person. Priests bike. Old people bike. Businessmen bike. People on cell phones bike. Businessmen on cell phones bike. If you don't have a bike, it's only because you're a tourist.
Civil architecture can't take all the credit for Amsterdam being full of bikes. Gas in Europe is taxed to the point of being three times our cost. As much as we bitch about gas being two bucks a gallon, the rest of the world is paying six. (The prices look the same initially when you look at the pumps, but the price you're seeing advertised is per liter, not per gallon.) Fuel taxes have been very high in Europe - and most everywhere else in the world - to cover the environmental damages that a billion gasoline engines have brought to the world. Europeans don't think they're paying more per gallon, they just think we're getting away with environmental murder.
Cars in Amsterdam start small and go smaller. The smallest car in America seems to be the Toyota Echo, which looks like Scrappy Doo next to a Corolla's Scooby. The Echo is an enormous car in Amsterdam. Four doors? A trunk? An engine that's not salvaged from a lawn mower?
I knew some European car models, like Mercedes, VW and BMW, and one or two that weren't around in the States any more, like Fiat and Alfa Romeo. But when I was in Amsterdam I walked through streets filled with Citroens, Opels and most notably, Smart cars. The Smart car is coming to the U.S. in the next two years, if it doesn't get laughed out of the dealership when it arrives. It's built by Mercedes, although it might have been built on a dare. The Smart car has a tiny engine, two front seats, and that's it. No back seat, no trunk. Your headrest is an inch from the back window. It looks like the front half of Herbie the Love Bug.
It's hugely popular in Europe. Someone in a Lincoln Navigator could probably pick up a Smart car and stash it in the cargo space of their aircraft hanger on wheels, but there aren't a lot of Lincoln Navigators in Europe. Do the math: six bucks per gallon times 12 miles per gallon equally not many Dutch Lincoln Navigator sales.
There is one car smaller than the Smart car, but it's so small it legally doesn't qualify as a "car." It's a moped engine with a shell around it for two seats (or one seat for big American asses). You don't need a driver's license to drive this.
The European philosophy is that most of the time you're in the car by yourself, so why do you need all the unused space? The one time a year you need extra space, rent a moving van.
The American philosophy is that maybe once in your life a football team will need to be driven up Mt. McKinley, so better have the car for the job today. That cavernous empty space in the car makes for interesting stereo opportunities.
Gas prices have something to do with this. Fuel efficiency becomes a lot more important when a gallon costs as much as lunch. Most Europeans are happy with this idea, since it forces you to act in favor of the environment. OK, not happy, but they sure want Americans to pay the same amount of tax.
I've been in Amsterdam twice, both to attend conferences for work. After the first conference was over, there was a bit of business in Germany to attend to, so we rode in our European associate's car (an Alfa Romeo: about the size of my Camry but fairly big by European standards) through the Netherlands and into Germany.
The Dutch don't particularly like the Germans. The sentiment seems to be that the Germans have more money, and show it off through big inefficient cars. Just because they have the biggest economy on the continent, it gives the Germans a mandate to take over the continent with their culture and language. Essentially, the Germans are Americans, and the Dutch are Canadians.
Somehow the Dutch don't toss Americans out on our ears when we come to visit. Maybe because we keep their coffeehouses and sex shops in business. We're just an annoying visitor: Germany's an annoying neighbor.
The philosophy behind the Euro has made one united continent, and most border crossings have been wiped out. There weren't even big signs when we crossed from Holland into Germany, just a small sign saying Nord ... something. (I wasn't taking notes.) The signs announcing U.S. state crossings are so big you'd think they were trying to get you to switch long distance providers. So we were on the world-famous Autobahn. It's not one road, but the entire German highway system. Wide lanes, three and four of them at some points, and no speed limit.
You use the left lane only for passing in the Autobahn, and never pass on the right. That's true for America, too, theoretically. Some people stay in the left lane in Germany, but they're going 200 KPH.
The traffic on the road looked like it was imported from the Garden State Parkway. They were mostly German cars, but in terms of size they matched up with average American sedans. American brands tended to just be the bigger luxury cars: no one's importing a Ford Festiva. There were even a couple SUVs.
We drove by rest stops and billboards. We pulled off the road and found gas stations, convenience stores and lots of restaurants. Except for the umlauts, this looked a lot like America.
We conducted our business with the Germans (I'm making it sound like we were selling stolen diamonds: all we did was visit a supermarket) and then drove back to Amsterdam.
I had a little bit of time left in the trip, so I went to see if I could rent a bike. This happened to be during the long Ascension Day weekend, which is a holiday in Europe. The streets were flooded with German tourists, on rented bikes. I got to the rental shop too late: every bicycle was checked out. And all the tricycles. And the unicycles. OK, I'm exaggerating: there were some unicycles left.
I spent the rest of my trip walking, hearing lots on conversational German (which sounds just like Dutch). Reason 73 why the Dutch don't like the Germans: they're constantly being mistaken for German. Similarly, most Canadians abroad get asked if they voted for Bush.
After the trip, I tried renting a bike one day, but by the time I got to the rental agency, all the bikes were gone. I'd have to wait a year for my next chance to bike.
I waited a year. This time, after the conference, I got to the rental agency early. I had my choice of bikes (I picked one with two wheels), took my map of the area, and started pedaling. I decided to go to the north, rather than the south. I was tempted to see if I could bike southwest all the way to Belgium and back (half an hour in a car each way) but I hadn't ridden a bike in about ten years, so I wasn't going to try for an endurance record just yet. Also, I didn't want my view all day to be a highway, even a foreign highway.
Amsterdam's winding streets and countless canals go by very quick in a bike. I spent plenty of time wandering around them lost on foot, and you make much better time on a bike. Plus you get to use the red brick road that's reserved just for bikes. (It might be related to the red brick road that spirals off from the yellow brick road in Munchinland. The Munchins didn't promote that road nearly as well as the yellow one.)
I made it to the Het IJ, the big port of Amsterdam, which I think was named after a typo, and crossed the Amstel river. No, it's not a river of Amstel beer (although the canals empty into it, and the canals are full of urine that at one point used to be Amstel beer). The huge Central Station stretches out by the water, with a parking garage by the trains made just for bikes. Thousands of bikes are parked in concrete slabs every bit as ugly as auto parking garages. A free ferry takes people to the north side of the Amstel. I was not the only bike on the ferry: there were only a few people not with bikes.
I had my doubts about just how magical a bike ride through suburbs would be. But north of Amsterdam is not suburbia, it's time travel. Small roads - barely big enough for one bike, much less a car - stretch through peat bogs and fields and hundreds of shallow canals. Geese and ducks live in the canals, and hiss when you get too close to their babies. Sheep nibble at hay. I was back in time 300 years. The only plastic for miles was on my digital watch.
My map had listings of restaurants in the area. I mostly ignored them, assuming they were recommendations of the best restaurants in each town. Amsterdam had sidewalk cafes every couple blocks, and I could just pick one that wasn't too crowded when I got to a town. But when I got to the first towns, I realized those map dots were the ONLY restaurants. I didn't bring any water, so I was getting thirsty, and these towns didn't even have a single store. Not even vending machines. Most were just seven houses and a church. I'd have to pedal several kilos to get a soda.
These country people did have cars, but it was disconcerting to see modern cars parked on cobblestone roads next to churches older than the Declaration of Independence. Aside from the cars and some wires running into each house, nothing else had been touched by the 20th century, much less the 21st.
I got good and lost, since several of the farms roads I were on weren't on the map. My reference point was Amsterdam to the south, which was just a gray mass on the horizon. After numerous breaks to consult the map, I came to a steep hill with a path on top of it. This was supposed to be the end of the land mass. I biked up the hill (or maybe pushed the bike - there was no one around), and sure enough, there was the sea right in front of me.
I was on one of the huge earthen dykes set up to keep the farmland dry. Maybe there was so little development because of potential flood damage. Or maybe because Holland has history it needs to knock down every time it clears space for a McDonalds.
I rode the path on the dyke south, eventually finding a "big" town with one single restaurant. They didn't have English menus, so I got brave, pointed to something, and hoped it wasn't pickled eyeballs. Pork kabobs with peanut sauce. Not bad, although I think the chips they've served were made of blubber.
The path became bigger, then joined with a road, and soon I was on a big drawbridge heading back into Amsterdam. The barrage of little cars welcomed me back to the 21st century, European style. The one Chevy Blazer in the mix reminded me that tomorrow I'd be going home, to the land of the free and the home of cheap gas. Even at two bucks a gallon.