How bike-friendly are the two countries in terms of infrastructure? We take a look at how their governments have organised themselves in the last 100 years to create environments conducive to cycling. We discover how the rich cycling cultures are shaped by strong partnerships between society and policy-makers to integrate cycling into the fabric of public life.
Cycling paths
The Netherlands…
has 37,000 kilometers of bicycle paths
The number of kilometers of roads with bicycle lanes is 4,700 kilometers.
Denmark…
has thousands of signposted and mapped regional cycle routes – a total of over 12,000 km of cycle routes.
— Tessa, Dutch living in Aarhus
— Sofie, Dane living in Amsterdam
Innovative infrastructure
The Dutch have many innovative bike-inclusive traffic designs, such as the Hovenring – held above the highway on a series of cables, this cycle track allows riders to pass above the vehicular fray.
Meanwhile, one of Denmark’s newest icons is a bicycle bridge called Cykelslangen or “the Bicycle Snake“
— Jochem, Dutch living in Aarhus
Bike sharing systems
Bikesharing today is a multibillion-dollar industry that now extends to over 3,000 cities worldwide. It shouldn’t be surprising that this corner of the sharing economy had its roots in Amsterdam and Copenhagen. In Europe, two of the biggest players with completely divergent yet successful models are the Dutch Swapfiets and the Danish Donkey Republic.
The Netherlands
In mid-1960s Amsterdam, a counterculture movement with a small fleet of bicycles pioneered a transportation model that’s swept thousands of cities around the world. In 2019, that has grown to up to 30,000 shared bicycles in Amsterdam alone. 18,000 of those were Swapfiets bicycles, making the commercial B2C bike sharing platform much more popular than the public OV-fiets (Public Transport Bike).
Denmark
The world’s first city bike was born in Copenhagen in 1995 with 1,000 cycles. The project was the world’s first organized large-scale urban bike-sharing scheme. Unlike its Dutch predecessor, it featured what are now considered basic elements of bike-sharing such as coin deposit, fixed stands and specially designed bikes with parts that cannot be used on other bikes. The project was financed by advertising and managed by a fund backed by the City of Copenhagen, and became a model for other cities.