Year of the Bike
Written by Martina Hrgović, Somesh Jha, Amanda Kaster, Samme Kors and Julienne Raboca
The Danish government declared the year 2022 as Denmark’s ‘year of the bike’ – the same year as the Nordic country hosted the opening stages of Tour de France.
As a part of the plan, the Danish government will invest €54 million in 2022 to convert cycling pools into paths, which will be followed by more cycling projects in the coming years.
But how does Denmark’s biking infrastructure and culture hold against its most competitive European peer – the Netherlands? After all, Denmark and the Netherlands are the top-ranked cycling-friendly countries in the world.
Both Denmark and the Netherlands have similar histories when it comes to adopting biking culture – cars threatened to displace bicycles in the 1960s but it wasn’t enough to change people’s imagination who fought for giving priority to bikes. But, the biking culture and infrastructure in the two countries has evolved in its own ways over the years.
We decided to immerse ourselves into the biking scenes of Denmark and the Netherlands to find answers to which country fares better.
Both countries are very proud of their biking traditions…
…here are some numbers to illustrate just how important biking is in their daily lives:
Nine out of ten Danes own a bike in Denmark. On average, Danes bike 1.4 km a day and cycling accounts for more than 15% of all trips. In the capital city of Copenhagen, there are 5 times more bikes than cars. The first bike lane of the country was established more than a 100 years ago in 1892 in Copenhagen.
There are more bikes (23 million) than people (17 million) in the Netherlands, the highest biking ownership in the world. On average, the Dutch bike 3 km a day, twice as much as the Danes, and more than one-quarter of all trips are made by bicycle. Cycling accounts for 44% of all trips to work and study in the Netherlands. The Netherlands' first official cycling path opened in 1885 in Utrecht.
This is why we decided to talk to the Danes in the Netherlands and the Dutch in Denmark…
…and ask them about differences and similarities in their biking cultures.
This heat map shows the areas with the densest concentration of cyclists
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