Amsterdam, Part II: Tyranny On Two Wheels

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almost made it

Amsterdam is a city of bicycles.  A green dream.   Bicycle lanes parallel the streets and sidewalks.  You’ll find bikes, stacked and chained everywhere.  The kudzu vines of the mechanical world.  Whole families ride down the street, happy, smiling, scaring the crap out of pedestrians.  People use bicycles for shopping, for baby carriages, and going back and forth to work.

What a beautiful idea.  Why don’t all cities integrate bicycles into the transportation grid?  Before you wet your pants, hold hands, and belt out Kumbaya, let me give you the real skinny on bicycles in a big, bustling city.

You want the truth?  Can you handle the truth??? Grab my handlebar, baby, and let’s get to the stark naked reality of this two-wheeled menace.  Rats of the road. 

In Amsterdam besides bicycles, swarms of pedestrians, cars, trucks, streetcars, buses, motorbikes, scooters, and motorcycles make their way along the crowded thoroughfares.  Add the bikes and a knotty problem becomes a Gordian knotty problem.  They all have to share the same space and in most cases the space is narrower than a spinster’s view of rough sex.

Bicycles, having no natural enemies, roam at will, day and night, rain or shine.  They crowd the bike paths, and scurry down the sidewalks like the vermin they are, to claim the debris laden streets.  Pedestrians beware.  Cars beware.  Anyone who values life and wants to live long enough to down another next Heineken, beware.

Streetcars are the only imperial modes of transport.   Bikes have to grudging yield an inch or two, their riders sneering at the injustice of it.

To walk across the street, pedestrians search long and hard for cars, trams, buses, but most of all for bicycles.  The latter do not observe stoplights, walk signs, pedestrian crosswalks, or laws of physics.

I observed an older English woman, walking calmly before a bike sideswiped her.  Fortunately, with the alacrity of a septuagenarian trampoline artist with explosive diarrhea, she bounded away.  “Nasty bugger!”

The cyclist stopped and backed up.  “Stay out of the way!”

The lady’s husband tried to calm her, pretty much like pleading with a bull to ignore the waving red cape and the guy with the sword.  “The little shit almost hit me. And as for you,” she said, going nose to nose with the biker, “I’ll stick that bike where the sun don’t shine.”  She evidently had a pretty good idea of where that was and how to wedge a bike into a very small space.

In Amsterdam, no matter what care you take, as a walker, you will come close to death and disorder two to three times a day.  Bicyclists will run your ass down and shout rude things if they miss.  The disease is spreading.  Motor scooters and motorbikes are beginning to use bike paths and sidewalks to spread their version of pedestrian panic.  

I stood on the sidewalk, waiting for the light to change. A Vespa, with a passenger hanging on and legs flapping, came at me from behind. I jumped to the side, just in time.  His handlebar caught the edge of my coat, but didn’t rip it.  I uttered loud and earthy oaths about self-copulation and his mother and her wicked ways.  By that time he was deaf and already speeding through a red light.  Cars honked, brakes squealed.

Maybe next time, he'll overdose on his own ego and take on a streetcar.  Ah, happy thoughts.

Outside the Rijksmuseum

Note the pedestrian crosswalk

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sidewalk cafe

Stacked everywhere

Not immune to graffiti

Another close call

On one of the restaurant streets