On almost every shot of road spaghetti I could spot a safe and separated bicycle path, which is amazing to me. The Dutch have the right idea: don't treat these places as only for cars; give people multiple options for going longer distances (car, train or bicycle).
Being Dutch I'm always amazed at how pedestrians and bikes are treated elsewhere, either having bikes compete with pedestrians for sidewalk space, or with cars. This leads to aggression and a general vibe "it's not safe to bike, so I'll take the car everywhere" which then adds to the problem. Kids here typically bike to and from school without adult supervision from when they are about 7-8 years old and people tend to keep on using bikes for shorter commutes (like upto 20-30 mins) until they are well into their 70's. It just makes sense once you see it in practice and Never get why other countries are having so much trouble adopting this logic. Surrounding countries are starting to pick up on it but it's stil nowhere near where it can be.
@@arjankroonen4319 Kids sometimes bike to school in North America as well but usually only if the school is within walking distance. This usually isn’t the case, especially in the US. Lack of sidewalks isn’t the issue, crime is usually the reason why parents don’t always let their kids bike to school.
In the Dutch countryside you often see underpasses for bikes under highways. They are not the most pleasent places to be and not build to currect code (I have a hard time cycling up some of them). Though weirdly most don't smell like weed.
What I find so peculiar in Germany, despite you guys have far more space for Highways are the very short and tight on and off ramps. You really have to slow down to 40kph to make sure not to fly out of the corner. While here in the Netherlands, and take the off ramp at "Scheemda" on the highway A7 coming from the direction of Groningen (intersection number 45), the off-ramp there has a total length, and I measured it straight with Google Maps, of 750 meters, probably even slightly more due to the curves. Why are these on and off ramps in Germany so freaking tight?
@@Snowwie88 kind of is a safety feature: when travelling at high speeds for a long time, you really need sth to force you to slow down because you kind of forget how slow you really have to be there. Otherwise tons of people would literally race into the next intersection, and maybe wouldn't even slow down if they saw that the traffic light is still green. So slowing traffic down to 50 to 60 kph makes it much safer for all traffic at the upcoming intersection.
@@Snowwie88 You find straight on and off ramps almost only on freeways in major cities where low speed limits like 80kph are in effect, e.g. at (almost all) exits of the A100 and the inner-city exits of the A113 or A 115 in Berlin. While Wikipedia says that exits with tight curves are preferred in Germany to force drivers to slow down, it may also just be a bit cheaper when purchasing land as you have less "no man's land" in between the motorway and the on/off ramps, perhaps.
@@Snowwie88 To be fair, had the reverse experience while driving near Amsterdam 2 weeks ago. An off ramp just doing a 90° bend without any warning. But otherwise pretty neat to drive in the Netherlands(except maybe how the traffic lights work).
@@Snowwie88 Yeah u really have to watch out in driving school they tell you to not go faster then 50 when exiting or entering the Autobahn, especially " K motorways" that were converted into Autobahns have tight curves.
Finally - an unbiased video that shows the Netherlands as is actually is - indeed, not all cobblestones and bikes! There's also the recently built A2 double level tunnel built in Maastricht - one level for the A2 itself one for a local bypass.
in fact Rotterdam has the interchange with the highest capacity of Europe. The Netherlands didn't abandon the concept of cars, but we have made good alternatives for people who do not want to drive a car.
I think this is the right approach. People will always need cars, and so will industry and the economy. So why should we needlessly punish them, instead of working on a large selection of well built and funded transportation methods.
in sweden: "we want less cars" okay so improve biking or buses? Nooo Lets make parking 10x expensive, remove road lanes and add speed bumps every 10 meters instead
the car lobby quietly is taking over again, as i see some neighbourhoods become car centric again. i thnk we need another kindermoord, to make people aware to add more asphalt everywhere is not the solution.
Thanks for making this video. I've seen so many videos that paint the illusion of there being no cars in the netherlands when that is clearly not the case. (That said, I'm not a car-advocate)
But as you can clearly see from the shot of the A10 Zuidas, there is way more room for trains than cars, and when I was there (during rush hour like last week), the trains were also way more full than the A10
As long as our national government isn’t investing in extra rail capacity and rail infrastructure or other public transport, I use my car for commute. My commute is 22 km which costs me about 20minutes by car, 70minutes by e-bike, 100minutes by regular bike and 110minutes by public transport (including the walk to the nearest busstop which is 15minutes and I live in a town of 20,000!). The public transport is door-to-door: a walk 15min, bus 40min, transfer 10min, train 10min, transfer 10min, bus 20min and walk 5min). The cause of the long commute by PT is the fact that I live at the edge of a PT concession area and the provincial government had the opinion that we needed regional hubs (train stations) and bus feeder lines to these hubs, which costs our town a direct bus route to the city of only 40minutes. We now need double the time to get to central station, because of the transfer to the train. Almost everyone I know in my town bought a car and the two busses an hour to the regional train station are half empty, while it used to be four very full busses an hour to the city center. The provincial government shot itself in the foot with this one but is too stubborn to reverse their mistake. After 8 years they still think passenger numbers on this bus route will rise eventually.
The Netherlands is a small country with nearly 18 million inhabitants, and especially the Western part, also called the Randstad (Rim City) which is a large ring of cities containing the 4 major cities Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrechts and dozens of smaller and intermediate cities is actually one large conurbation or mega city of by now (and depending on how you draw the boundaries) about 8 million people. You can never move that many people with only bikes. And in the context of the Netherlands it is also not possible to widen the roads that you see in this video, and that are already quite wide, often 10 to 12 or 14 lanes, to double the width again. So the Dutch solution is to combine all these modes of transport, so that people can choose the most convenient method to reach any destination. Therefore most people have both one or more cars in the house hold, but also bikes for all. Most people like to take the bike if possible and to take the car where necessary, when a destiantion is too far and/or not well reachable by bike or public transport.
In America people think putting a bike lane in is a "war on cars". It's not so much a war on cars, as much as road design in the past several decades have destroyed possibilities for other options. We want more options. But I'm shocked as to scale of road widening in the Netherlands. Honestly even in the US most widening projects only add one lane per direction (at least in Virginia, where I live).
2:03 fun fact: if you look closely at the (partial cloverleaf) interchange you can see the track of the former A9 motorway which used to run straight through the town of Badhoevedorp. They moved the highway outside of the town in 2017. It's really astonishing how much effort has been put into upgrading the road networks between 2009 and 2020. I think most Dutch people take it for granted until they drive on highways in countries like Belgium and Germany.
Well, every large Belgian city except Liege and Namur for geographical reasons have a highway ringroad and smaller cities that dont need the same volume have ring road boulevards that connect to the highway. If you ignore Brussels, which like Paris has just too many drivers in one place, the rings do their job nicely. Also ignore the road quality😂
@@gorgonzola8084 Im from Luxmbourg and drove to Brussels every week last year, I know every pothole by heart lol. You have to if you want to keep your tyres, wheels, suspension etc😂 luckily that particular motorway was already being and still being upgraded one section after the other. The only truly disgusting bits left are around Namur and Arlon, the rest is either perfect asphalt or in good shape. Honestly if you only drive Belgian motorways and not their country roads, or god forbid a national road like N4😳, you can say you are lucky because their motorways are in great condition compared to the rest
I just came back from Amsterdam and had to get a train home in England, that was the most upsetting train ride I'd ever had with the knowlege that such a better and cheaper system exists. You're completely right about it feeling superior.
It's also impressive how easy is to drive here even if so many lanes may seem intimidating. As someone who comes from a country with highways with only 2 lanes in each direction.. but since I started my OTR job I've driven here plenty of times. Whenever one of my friends/family sees my dash cam videos and they ask me "Aren't you affraid to drive here? This is A LOT of lanes" I just laugh.
Fun fact. To get into amsterdam city center from most smaller towns and cities takes around 1-1.5 hours. (Around 35km) Taking a car into amsterdam is for most surrouned cities and villages the best option. (To P+R area's)
"all aspect of transport were far superior to the UK and all worth emulating". The UK only emulates the things are cheap and easy and don't look at the context. Two examples, shared space in places with too higher traffic and speed for it to work, and secondly the dutch cycle roundabout in cambridge which has higher levels of collisions again because the dutch would not use that type of roundabout with the traffic levels at the cambridge one.
The issue with the Cambridge roundabout isn't the traffic level, the Dutch have plenty of them on similar roads. I think the problems are that there isn't traffic calming on the surrounding roads, so drivers approach the roundabout much too quickly, and because it's unique in the UK, most drivers don't know how to deal with it and may be confused about who has priority.
An interesting read would be about the roundabout at Gieten which intersects with the N34 and N33, however I don't know if there are many English sources covering it. It's a notoriously bad roundabout due to high traffic in rush hour and they've tried for decades now to solve the traffic problem there but collisions keep happening quite frequently. The easy solution would be building flyovers but space and money are limited. Sometimes people from different countries like to put our traffic solutions on too high of a pedestal so I like that this video briefly addressed the shortcomings of our infrastructure.
@@timbrust9739 The roundabout at Gieten is an old-fashioned roundabout designed for far less traffic that it is handling today. There are more crossings is The Netherlands that can't cope with current traffic. Designing a good crossing involves a lot of study and planning. Crossings in main roads are evaluated every 10 to 15 years and redesigning is done every 30 to 40 years.
That's why the Netherlands is a perfect country for every mode of transportation. You want to drive a car? You have massive highway infrastructure. You want to ride a bike? You have dense bike lanes network in every city. You want to take public transit? You can go to every small town in a bus and also use a train for a fast and punctual connection between major cities!
The highways cost a lot of money and make almost no money in return, widening a highway only makes people more excited to drive instead of taking any alternatives.
@@miles5600 you also have to factor in transiting, more cars are going on the road all across europe, and more people are travelling all over europe, the car still being the main mode of transportation for families going on holiday in europe. A lot of French people drive north through the netherlands, and a lot of people from the north go through the netherlands to go south, on top of cargo trucks, it still makes as much sense to widen the roads while also offering an excellent public transport alternative for locals or low budget travellers
@@miles5600 yea and then more people driving causes more traffic, so it just gets widened again, which makes more people want to drive, so it gets widened again, and so on
@@stalker5299If the car is currently the main mode of transportation in Europe, maybe the Netherlands should finally bully the adjacent countries into adopting their standards when it comes to all sorts of traffic
Of course. The Netherlands isn't just a haven for cycling and walking; the driving experience is also phenomenal there! Very balanced and put-together for all forms of transport.
Nonsense, it’s highly congested every single day. Car ownership is among the highest in the world, the public transport is expensive and lacks capacity, resulting in large traffic jams daily.
@@EGO0808 price isn't the same as experience. I agree public transport is becoming quite expensive, especially trains are expensive. But that's more or less the fault of the government.
@@EGO0808 Everything what you mention. All more or less the consequences of a lower budget that the government has for public transportation. For example NS, they have a shortage of train operators, which means fewer trains are able to run and thus logistically fewer long trains during rush hours.
Uggh to me it is insane that a 10 lane road needs to be widened. Our government should really incentivise more people to take public transportation instead.
There's no shortage of infrastructure investment in the UK. The problem is London gets an unequal amount. Remember the Netherlands is 6x smaller than the UK. HS2 phase 1 is 140 miles and only gets you from London - Birmingham. The Netherlands is only 180 miles long!
@@cameroncook2048 The UK has only 3.7km of motorways compared to the Netherlands' 2.5km, even though the UK has four times the population, is less dense (meaning greater distances between major population centres) and has fewer lanes per km of motorway on average.
If only transport & urban planners and folks on the left & right in America, Australia, and UK can get away from the "Motor Vehicles OR Public Transit & Bicycles" mindset.
The problem is money. Places like the US and UK refuse to spend enough money to fix infrastructure, and everyone is always in a fight for limited funds. The real answer that no one wants to hear, is you need to fix everything, not just some things.
It would cost WAY more to create a railway system that could actually justify having 3 lane rails. U would need stations as big as schiphol terminals to fill all of it. That would be a logistical nightmare...
THe Dutch love tunnels and underground car parks and underground supermarkets! All the material dug out goes to a polder to make new land. I hope that not all the new land is not covered with 14 lane highways!
As a Dutch person I can only say it's a work in progress and will always be a work in progress. We compliment the work that has been done and in the same time we criticize it too (typical Dutch thing to do). We might accept that something is good enough for the time being taking in consideration of things like budget, technology and time. But a typical Dutch way of thinking is that it can always be better especially looking long term. Knowing that infra has maybe a 20 to 40 year lifespan so their will be new plans with lessons learned.
The name of the game is: Integrated transportation networks. Not one or the other modes of transport in a 0-sum game. Synergistic transport that works together instead of against one another. For example: urban car usage has its place and is not a bad idea in general so instead of banning the cars cities should encourage car sharing, which only some companies pioneer in places for a few years now but very few governments actively incentivize them to the point that you would not need to own one in order to drive one when you need to pick something up.
I think that's the fascinating thing about it: the Dutch motorways are great. Also compared to, for example, German roads and motorways. Above all, I noticed the low speed limit. There are far fewer speeders and tailgaters in the Netherlands compared to Germany. And that makes driving in the Netherlands very pleasant. Whether you take the car, public transport, train or bicycle - everything is well interconnected. I wish that each and every German tourist visiting the Netherlands would appreciate the great examples presented there and bring the ideas back.
The problem in germany is that people dont follow certain unwritten rules. Like moving ontime to the right for faster cars. Its becouse of the sheer amount of people driving there compared to the Netherlands. They built their highways to be able to drive fast on. Here you see that the roads are narrow, people will drive slow becouse of that. U don't have space to drive 150km/h safely most of the time. Germany is also way WAY larger and way less dense. Its a whole different cookie tbh.
@@casperairsoft without the automobile industry and it’s lobby, I’m sure we could have similarly well designed infrastructure here in Germany, too. But that is it’s own issue. I was talking about the speed limit and it’s evident that a lower speed limit can cause better traffic flows as everyone’s driving at a similar speed and there are less lane changes and overtakes.
When cycled to the camping ground in Landsmeer, I had to cross the nordern A10. 2 things pretty much blew me away: 1 the border between city and nature reserve is incredibly obvious. 2 compared to any other place, this highway has unbelievably low noise pollution
'Rijkswaterstaat organised the building of a surprising number of autosnelweg on behalf of the Netherlands government around the Amsterdam area' would be a terrible video title though
This is what people need to understand, walkable cities don’t ban cars, instead they add many alternatives to driving. A free country is where you can choose how to commute, not one where your only option is to drive.
Fun fact: at 2:09 you can see 'NAP - 3,8 M' written in white letters on top of the viaduct. This refers to the location (and most of the country) being under the sea level, in this case 3,8 meters. At least as nice: the grafitti on the electric house on the left side refers to my football club.
Great video. I don't like how other youtube videos ignore that the Netherlands also has lots of roads. Yes, it's great for bikes, but that doesn't mean they banned cars or something.
Well, except for bunches of residential streets, and a bunch more that narrow roads, add chicanes, remove parking, and are generally more circuitous than the cycling routes provided
Of course, what do you expect? Amsterdam is still a city with almost a million citizens and a lot of neighboring towns. But it is great to see how cars and bicycles are combined everywhere.
Yep, this is what happens when you leave the car party in charge for 13 years. Meanwhile the public transport, especially trains, is declining because all of the investments were deemed to expensive.
Exactly. Many bus and tram lines are being deleted or changed because they are privatized and "don't cover the costs". Also the cheap P&R ticket prices in A'dam are raised significantly and some parking locations deleted to cover costs. It looks like they don't look at the possible reduced investments in car infrastructure.
Thanks for making this. As has been chronicled by others, car usage actually continues to rise in The NLs and the driving conditions there are often considered the best in the world. (I personally have driving in The NLs and vastly prefer it to driving at home here in America.) What's different about them is that they make other opportunities viable options for many more people and not just assign them second-rate (or what realistically even feels like third-rate at best) provision to make those journeys.
If you're going to build highways anywhere, then they are doing it in the right place, and it's great that they are investing lots into the transport networking, but given what we know about induced demand, it is somewhat surprising how much widening they've chosen to do, vs. for example, building more/faster railway lines. They only have 1 high speed line and that ended up being very controversial. The other thing that amazes me is how come they're able to find the money for all this construction, when in the UK our government doesn't seem to be able to rub 2 pennies together for things like HS2, and yet they have half of our population and tax payer workforce. Do they just have high taxes or perhaps they're better at not wasting money like we do?
I do think more high speed rail does nothing for regional traffic. As the Netherlands is very small, high speed rail is only useful for international trains. The Netherlands already has one of the densest railway networks in the world. But more lightrail would be a great, to reach Amsterdam's satellite towns.
@@robeleco1 True, but international traffic is not a zero amount. How many cars are travelling across the border that could be going by rail instead? And if you build high speed lines, people could get from Amsterdam to Groningen, Arnhem, Eindhoven and Maastricht faster, and it would free up some capacity on the slower lines for more frequent regional services. More trams and light rail would also be very helpful.
In that regard you can consider the Netherlands as being one big city.. So every big city could have a dense network if they invested in infrastructure like we have... In other big countries they also have infrastructure and less people will travel by car to the other side of the country, so those long roads that will cover the whole country don't have to be as densely designed, as most would either use a highspeed train to cover long distances or an airplane.
Sorry to correct you , this was filmed on a bank holiday , normally they are filled to the brim . Dutch motorways in this area have one , if not of the highest traffic volume in Europe. That said it is important to have alternatives to the car . There are viable alternatives, but still we need more
The "tunnel" beneath the Vecht you mentioned is actually a aqueduct. The water flows above the road in a concrete construction. From the viewpoint of the regular driver there isn't much difference. From an engineering perspective there is definitely a difference. None the less, great content from a viewpoint i rarely get to see.
Motorways aren’t bad, they’re bad when they break up city centres and act as an alternative to public transport which is not the case in The Netherlands.
I am an 'Amsterdammer', a native born and bred. What's more my father was chief building inspector for Amsterdam west and ended up as a whistle blower on political corruption when it came to wrongly awarded government contracts on a) building a square on top of a garage with high (foot) traffic and bridges on the Amsterdam ring road that used equally poor foundations. He was bullied out of his job for his troubles to the point of a stroke. My grandfather, in turn, was 'opperheemschutter' an old Dutch word I had to look up myself, but means as much as chief city planner and architect. I never got to meet or know him save for some newspaper clippings of him throwing a party in April 1945. Supposedly for his jubilee as city architect, but I can think of different reasons. (I don't know my family to be 'party people'). In any event, your video is a weird one to me. Obviously I don't have - that - high an opinion of the city, public officials etc. Not sure if this is heart warming or a sad testimony how other places are if it's even worse.
Thank you for covering this, it's not about one particular mode vs the other, there's a type of trip and scale for every kind of transport mode, and it's nice to see it put in to practice pragmatically instead of based on ideology.
Notice too that the road quality in the Netherlands is better than in the USA (on average). Every shot of the road in this video is high quality asphalt and not a single pothole was found. Even if you absolutely love cars and throw up at the thought of cycling or public transit, why wouldn't you want a better driving experience for yourself?
@@admrotob might I add that the USA has to maintain so much more roads, and it's interstates are older, one city that has created motorways pretty recently and they have hq asphalt is phoenix. They also have a larger variety of climate to deal with, it's pretty impressive if you think about it how high quality all the interstates are across the USA.
@@poshmalosh14 Sadly the other side of that coin is the neglect on literally every other mode of transportation. Don't get me wrong having good highways is great but having other options is important too.
This shows one thnig: give cars enough space outside the city (transit is here much more expensive anyway), but in the city centre reduce the amount of cars as much as you can.
yes, the randstad gets excellent motorways. In Arnhem in the east of the country the A15 that nearly goes from the port of Rotterdam to Germany stops at Ressen, and the solid wall of lorries that go there every day have to plough trough Arnhem zuid to get to the A12, to continue on to Germany. The A15 wasn't lengthened to connect to the A12 in 1962 when the motorway was finished, because the funds were needed in the west, and ever since, some reason has stopped it. nearly 60 years later, the work still hasn't started. What has been done is that the DRIP (Dynamic Route Information Panel) before the junction with the A50 now lies about the time it takes to get to the A12 by the Arnhem route or via the A50, to make them about the same. In all fairness this does seem to work a bit. As the A15 goes, which again, is the most direct route for lorries going from Rotterdam to Germany, it is 2 lanes. Which means every time a lorry driver thinks he's faster than the one ahead, and ignores the prohibition on overtaking, there is a concertina jam. This happens a lot given the amount of lorries. If only looking at the randstad, traffic engineering in the Netherlands seems grand, but get into the less populated areas and it quickly goes downhill. Zeeland has 2 motorways (and one of them is only 1.5km long), and one passenger railway, paralleling that. If you live on another islands, it's busses for you, and those have been getting less frequent over time, and usually stop after 19h. Now I don't expect a metro service in rural areas or anything, but bare in mind even the least populated areas of the Netherlands are usually still well above 100p/km2, so it's not like they're empty.
I will note, the purpose of the ringroad is to cater for all throughtraffic, and highways inbound from it into the city may not be newly widened or constructed. The point here is to make traffic into and out of the city easy, while heavily discouraging traffic through the city by car
Excellent video. Didn't realize the Netherlands had such a sprawling and impressive motorway network. You get a very biased view when you only watch not just bikes and bicycle dutch.
The Netherlands builds their infrastructure and gives option to every mode of transportation to be available to the highest standard. No one does it better than the Dutch...
A great city should give people lots of options. The different modes of traffic should compete for riders. Each mode should pay for its own externalities. In the end, we should have a system where the right mode is chosen for each trip. None of this is incompatible with building great roads, railways, canals, sidewalks, or bicycle paths.
Let's remember a couple of things. First, The Netherlands historically IS a transport country. It's interesting that for such a small country, it's absolutely laden with ways to get around. Second, for the most part, it's not easy to use a car in Amsterdam. It's meant that way. They also don't have a lot of snow in the winter.
Would be interesting to not only have a look at our well-engineered motorway and bike network but also at our inland shipping network. The inland terminals we build to link inland shipping shuttles to the deep sea terminals in the port of Rotterdam. Over the years, the volume of inland containers handled in these inland terminals has risen to 100,000 units per year. This has significantly cut back the number of trucks on the region’s roads.
Most Dutch people have good access to a bike, a car and public transport. We are free to choose the mode that fits with our journey and I don't know any Dutch people who only use one mode. All three have upsides and downsides. But since they are all viable, well supported options we remain free to choose and are not forced by the situation to only choose one. Bikes take pressure off roads and public transport. Public transport takes pressure off of roads and roads take pressure off of public transport. They all support each other. In a sense, the bike can be seen as walking on steroids in most cases. This makes our cities extra walkable. My own neighborhood has a small center with 3 supermarkets and some supporting shops like a toy store, bakeries, a butcher, some restaurants, library etc. It supports 40k people of which only about a third can reach the center on foot within 5 minutes. However by bike, all 40k can reach it within 5 minutes. Everyone has a bus stop within 5 minutes walking, and the busses go from our small, local train station into the city itself ending at the central station. That means we are both connected to the city, a regional and national transit and never have to walk more than 5 minutes to connect to it. And thats not unique to us. Nearly everywhere in the Netherlands has this, except for maybe the remotest villages which are seeing trouble with infrequent bus lines connecting them. But even then local politics usually works to keep even those bus lines running so people are always connected in multiple ways and not purely reliant on the car.
And still on a normal weekday there are around 400-600 km. of traffic jams. In a country of 200 km by 300 km. From 12 million to 17 million inhabitants in 50 years, up to 20 million over a decade… and no future vision in our government how to prevent or manage this.
How about just doing both? Even with the shown example the Netherlands has some of the lowest asphalt per capita in the world. Why is that? Because while highways should ensure flow over longer distances within cities the limiting factor isn't number of lanes but intersections. Which is why you won't find massive multi lane roads anywhere. Sure, roads fan out right before intersections to ensure each direction gets their own lane, but that's the sane thing to do.
I think the US should do a lot of this. All forms of transportation should be supported. It so happens that a dollar in bike or pedestrian infrastructure goes a lot further. No one should feel unsafe to move and travel because of some other people using other transportation *cough cough cough cough US with mud for pedestrians in the middle of my city right next to 5 or more lane roads with no cross walks and not even level grass to walk on cough cough cough cough*
Nice video. But we do not have 10 lanes motorways in the Netherlands. Those maybe the places where interchanges happen to different places and those are rather short parts of the whole motorway.
Usually we call a 3 metre (or so) wide strip of road surface marked as allocated to one linear stream of road traffic a 'lane' unless I'm missing something? @@therealdutchidiot
Hello Dutch viewers, and thank you for the comments about plans to put the A10 southern section underground and expand the railway. I didn't know you were supposed to pronounce it 'Mowden'. Also thank you for telling me that gopro shot was of the wrong motorway. The time on the gopro got messed up (the phone app set the time on it to UTC+2 unknown to me) and it made figuring out where each shot was harder. Yes, I know the national government built the motorways and not the city of Amsterdam, the title of the video is shorthand to work as a video title on UA-cam and not a detailed discussion of how infrastructure projects in the Netherlands are organised or funded.
@@forkless I should have *checked* pronounciations before recording, but I thought the video would get a couple of thousand views max, all from Brits...😅
Funny how they pioneered hard shoulder running then decided to continue widening and expanding the network, we have the tories that say they aren’t safe so are pausing construction of new “smart” motorways with no plans to re instate the hard shoulders or widen anything, only just to create some watered down single carriageway link roads… feels like we live in a joke of a country sometimes.
Hard shoulder running is still done with expansions to provide support for sudden traffic outbursts or extra safety for rush hour. Also may prevent further expansions if traffic levels won't quite justify itforthe foreseenable future
@Jack L SitsAtTheGroup We did try that once, it was called Autoloze zondag (car free sunday). Back then it was mostly because of the oil-crisis, but cities can still participate if they want to, even to this day!
These highways are not built by Amsterdam. They are built by contractors, on order of, and paid for, by the national government. The only thing Amsterdam has to do, is to adapt its infrastructure to that national infrastructure.
definetly; Munich has 1.8 million inhabitants and doesn't even have a complete highway ring road, and only a minor network of a highway triangle to the north of the city
2:40 The southern A10 in this section along the RAI and the Zuid Station is actually being widened by building it under the ground (just like the A9). The train station on top will be expanded in this project. The complete project, called 'Zuidasdok' will last until at least 2037.
Unfortunately the station will stay way too small. Just the NS Part alone would need 8 tracks to become the new main Intercity station. 4 tracks is way too small
On almost every shot of road spaghetti I could spot a safe and separated bicycle path, which is amazing to me. The Dutch have the right idea: don't treat these places as only for cars; give people multiple options for going longer distances (car, train or bicycle).
How they cater for everything was extremely impressive, much better than we do here
Being Dutch I'm always amazed at how pedestrians and bikes are treated elsewhere, either having bikes compete with pedestrians for sidewalk space, or with cars. This leads to aggression and a general vibe "it's not safe to bike, so I'll take the car everywhere" which then adds to the problem. Kids here typically bike to and from school without adult supervision from when they are about 7-8 years old and people tend to keep on using bikes for shorter commutes (like upto 20-30 mins) until they are well into their 70's. It just makes sense once you see it in practice and Never get why other countries are having so much trouble adopting this logic.
Surrounding countries are starting to pick up on it but it's stil nowhere near where it can be.
@@arjankroonen4319 Kids sometimes bike to school in North America as well but usually only if the school is within walking distance. This usually isn’t the case, especially in the US.
Lack of sidewalks isn’t the issue, crime is usually the reason why parents don’t always let their kids bike to school.
In the Dutch countryside you often see underpasses for bikes under highways. They are not the most pleasent places to be and not build to currect code (I have a hard time cycling up some of them). Though weirdly most don't smell like weed.
You can bike everywhere if you're brave enough :)
Far better than the UK
I think this is so interesting: We in Germany think if we build good cycle paths we can't drive cars anymore. But in the Netherlands you can do both.
What I find so peculiar in Germany, despite you guys have far more space for Highways are the very short and tight on and off ramps. You really have to slow down to 40kph to make sure not to fly out of the corner. While here in the Netherlands, and take the off ramp at "Scheemda" on the highway A7 coming from the direction of Groningen (intersection number 45), the off-ramp there has a total length, and I measured it straight with Google Maps, of 750 meters, probably even slightly more due to the curves. Why are these on and off ramps in Germany so freaking tight?
@@Snowwie88 kind of is a safety feature: when travelling at high speeds for a long time, you really need sth to force you to slow down because you kind of forget how slow you really have to be there. Otherwise tons of people would literally race into the next intersection, and maybe wouldn't even slow down if they saw that the traffic light is still green.
So slowing traffic down to 50 to 60 kph makes it much safer for all traffic at the upcoming intersection.
@@Snowwie88 You find straight on and off ramps almost only on freeways in major cities where low speed limits like 80kph are in effect, e.g. at (almost all) exits of the A100 and the inner-city exits of the A113 or A 115 in Berlin.
While Wikipedia says that exits with tight curves are preferred in Germany to force drivers to slow down, it may also just be a bit cheaper when purchasing land as you have less "no man's land" in between the motorway and the on/off ramps, perhaps.
@@Snowwie88 To be fair, had the reverse experience while driving near Amsterdam 2 weeks ago. An off ramp just doing a 90° bend without any warning. But otherwise pretty neat to drive in the Netherlands(except maybe how the traffic lights work).
@@Snowwie88 Yeah u really have to watch out in driving school they tell you to not go faster then 50 when exiting or entering the Autobahn, especially " K motorways" that were converted into Autobahns have tight curves.
Cool video
Finally - an unbiased video that shows the Netherlands as is actually is - indeed, not all cobblestones and bikes!
There's also the recently built A2 double level tunnel built in Maastricht - one level for the A2 itself one for a local bypass.
in fact
Rotterdam has the interchange with the highest capacity of Europe.
The Netherlands didn't abandon the concept of cars, but we have made good alternatives for people who do not want to drive a car.
I think this is the right approach. People will always need cars, and so will industry and the economy. So why should we needlessly punish them, instead of working on a large selection of well built and funded transportation methods.
in sweden: "we want less cars"
okay so improve biking or buses? Nooo
Lets make parking 10x expensive, remove road lanes and add speed bumps every 10 meters instead
@@user-wq9mw2xz3j this I don't understand, like improve the quality of other transportation methods first...
the car lobby quietly is taking over again, as i see some neighbourhoods become car centric again. i thnk we need another kindermoord, to make people aware to add more asphalt everywhere is not the solution.
@@user-wq9mw2xz3j There are a lot off speed bumps in the Netherlands!But only to slow down the speed of traffic in the towns.
Netherlands makes the best balance between walkability and cars
I'm a Canadian who has lived in Holland for 15 years and the UK for 5 years. Both Canada and the UK suck at infrastructure budget allocation.
Love how this counters the absurd amount of bike propaganda from other channels
Nope, it doesn't "counter" it. But it does put it in a broader perspective.
Don't worry, NJB also has a video about why The Netherlands is also great for drivers. 😉
I don't think explaining how biking in the Netherlands works is 'propaganda'. No-one is saying we are anti-car.
@@MonsieurRaki yes y'all are
Thanks for making this video. I've seen so many videos that paint the illusion of there being no cars in the netherlands when that is clearly not the case. (That said, I'm not a car-advocate)
Take that, NotJustBikes!
The Netherlands also has speed limits of 100kmh which is depressingly slow.
We also have limits of 30, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 110, 120 and 130, what’s your point?
it was 120 before weird climate change laws, after 7 a clock in the evening its 120/130 again.
But as you can clearly see from the shot of the A10 Zuidas, there is way more room for trains than cars, and when I was there (during rush hour like last week), the trains were also way more full than the A10
As long as our national government isn’t investing in extra rail capacity and rail infrastructure or other public transport, I use my car for commute. My commute is 22 km which costs me about 20minutes by car, 70minutes by e-bike, 100minutes by regular bike and 110minutes by public transport (including the walk to the nearest busstop which is 15minutes and I live in a town of 20,000!). The public transport is door-to-door: a walk 15min, bus 40min, transfer 10min, train 10min, transfer 10min, bus 20min and walk 5min). The cause of the long commute by PT is the fact that I live at the edge of a PT concession area and the provincial government had the opinion that we needed regional hubs (train stations) and bus feeder lines to these hubs, which costs our town a direct bus route to the city of only 40minutes. We now need double the time to get to central station, because of the transfer to the train. Almost everyone I know in my town bought a car and the two busses an hour to the regional train station are half empty, while it used to be four very full busses an hour to the city center. The provincial government shot itself in the foot with this one but is too stubborn to reverse their mistake. After 8 years they still think passenger numbers on this bus route will rise eventually.
This is the way
more motorway yes yes yes
The Netherlands is a small country with nearly 18 million inhabitants, and especially the Western part, also called the Randstad (Rim City) which is a large ring of cities containing the 4 major cities Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrechts and dozens of smaller and intermediate cities is actually one large conurbation or mega city of by now (and depending on how you draw the boundaries) about 8 million people. You can never move that many people with only bikes. And in the context of the Netherlands it is also not possible to widen the roads that you see in this video, and that are already quite wide, often 10 to 12 or 14 lanes, to double the width again. So the Dutch solution is to combine all these modes of transport, so that people can choose the most convenient method to reach any destination. Therefore most people have both one or more cars in the house hold, but also bikes for all. Most people like to take the bike if possible and to take the car where necessary, when a destiantion is too far and/or not well reachable by bike or public transport.
The A10 at Zuidas will be put into a tunnel in the future to allow the railway station in the middle of the carriageways to expand.
It's also widening to six lanes on each side, yay!
@@BeatsByYari More traffic! Yay!
oof that sucks, driving trough the Zuidas at night is always the most beautiful part of Amsterdam
@@Mgameing123 Who doesn't like the VVD? So nice to have the vroom vroom party in power for 13 years now.
@@Mgameing123 AT least we're getting more railway capacity! Although with that they could just build 4 lane tunnels
Options are key. Cars and highways are great, but they shouldn't be the only option. This is what the Netherlands does so well
In America people think putting a bike lane in is a "war on cars". It's not so much a war on cars, as much as road design in the past several decades have destroyed possibilities for other options. We want more options. But I'm shocked as to scale of road widening in the Netherlands. Honestly even in the US most widening projects only add one lane per direction (at least in Virginia, where I live).
2:03 fun fact: if you look closely at the (partial cloverleaf) interchange you can see the track of the former A9 motorway which used to run straight through the town of Badhoevedorp. They moved the highway outside of the town in 2017. It's really astonishing how much effort has been put into upgrading the road networks between 2009 and 2020. I think most Dutch people take it for granted until they drive on highways in countries like Belgium and Germany.
Well, every large Belgian city except Liege and Namur for geographical reasons have a highway ringroad and smaller cities that dont need the same volume have ring road boulevards that connect to the highway. If you ignore Brussels, which like Paris has just too many drivers in one place, the rings do their job nicely. Also ignore the road quality😂
@@blanco7726yes your last sentence is right. Those Belgium roads are in horrible state. Zigzag between those sinkholes on the highway.
@@gorgonzola8084 Im from Luxmbourg and drove to Brussels every week last year, I know every pothole by heart lol. You have to if you want to keep your tyres, wheels, suspension etc😂 luckily that particular motorway was already being and still being upgraded one section after the other. The only truly disgusting bits left are around Namur and Arlon, the rest is either perfect asphalt or in good shape. Honestly if you only drive Belgian motorways and not their country roads, or god forbid a national road like N4😳, you can say you are lucky because their motorways are in great condition compared to the rest
@@blanco7726 hahaha I feel you. It’s horrible
@@blanco7726 except for Brussels ánd Antwerp... Antwerp is the worst
The Dutch are not against cars. We just provide options to all and try to make the more efficient mode of transportation easy.
I just came back from Amsterdam and had to get a train home in England, that was the most upsetting train ride I'd ever had with the knowlege that such a better and cheaper system exists. You're completely right about it feeling superior.
Cool
I have never seen so many lanes in Europe the motorway between Amsterdam and Utrecht is insane ! The quality is from another world stunning
Madrid is pretty impressive too.
It's also impressive how easy is to drive here even if so many lanes may seem intimidating. As someone who comes from a country with highways with only 2 lanes in each direction.. but since I started my OTR job I've driven here plenty of times. Whenever one of my friends/family sees my dash cam videos and they ask me "Aren't you affraid to drive here? This is A LOT of lanes" I just laugh.
Amsterdam is the model every country should follow.
America's way ahead of them with the highways.
@@REAL-UNKNOWN-SHINOBI Way ahead how? Your highways are poorly maintained and financially unsustainable, with traffic jams nearly all day long...
Fun fact. To get into amsterdam city center from most smaller towns and cities takes around 1-1.5 hours. (Around 35km) Taking a car into amsterdam is for most surrouned cities and villages the best option. (To P+R area's)
"all aspect of transport were far superior to the UK and all worth emulating". The UK only emulates the things are cheap and easy and don't look at the context. Two examples, shared space in places with too higher traffic and speed for it to work, and secondly the dutch cycle roundabout in cambridge which has higher levels of collisions again because the dutch would not use that type of roundabout with the traffic levels at the cambridge one.
I think you're exactly right
The issue with the Cambridge roundabout isn't the traffic level, the Dutch have plenty of them on similar roads. I think the problems are that there isn't traffic calming on the surrounding roads, so drivers approach the roundabout much too quickly, and because it's unique in the UK, most drivers don't know how to deal with it and may be confused about who has priority.
An interesting read would be about the roundabout at Gieten which intersects with the N34 and N33, however I don't know if there are many English sources covering it. It's a notoriously bad roundabout due to high traffic in rush hour and they've tried for decades now to solve the traffic problem there but collisions keep happening quite frequently. The easy solution would be building flyovers but space and money are limited. Sometimes people from different countries like to put our traffic solutions on too high of a pedestal so I like that this video briefly addressed the shortcomings of our infrastructure.
@@timbrust9739 The roundabout you just mentioned is the interchange used in 99% of the UK. Terrible design
@@timbrust9739 The roundabout at Gieten is an old-fashioned roundabout designed for far less traffic that it is handling today. There are more crossings is The Netherlands that can't cope with current traffic. Designing a good crossing involves a lot of study and planning. Crossings in main roads are evaluated every 10 to 15 years and redesigning is done every 30 to 40 years.
This is the cool thing about the Netherlands over cities like London or Paris. Amsterdam is cycling friendly. London is car hostile.
Properly framed, the transport infra in the Netherlands is "perfectly balanced"
That's why the Netherlands is a perfect country for every mode of transportation. You want to drive a car? You have massive highway infrastructure. You want to ride a bike? You have dense bike lanes network in every city. You want to take public transit? You can go to every small town in a bus and also use a train for a fast and punctual connection between major cities!
The highways cost a lot of money and make almost no money in return, widening a highway only makes people more excited to drive instead of taking any alternatives.
@@miles5600 you also have to factor in transiting, more cars are going on the road all across europe, and more people are travelling all over europe, the car still being the main mode of transportation for families going on holiday in europe. A lot of French people drive north through the netherlands, and a lot of people from the north go through the netherlands to go south, on top of cargo trucks, it still makes as much sense to widen the roads while also offering an excellent public transport alternative for locals or low budget travellers
@@miles5600 yea and then more people driving causes more traffic, so it just gets widened again, which makes more people want to drive, so it gets widened again, and so on
@@stalker5299If the car is currently the main mode of transportation in Europe, maybe the Netherlands should finally bully the adjacent countries into adopting their standards when it comes to all sorts of traffic
@@BortoYT right, induced demand which has been shown to fail big time in the US and everywhere else.
Of course. The Netherlands isn't just a haven for cycling and walking; the driving experience is also phenomenal there! Very balanced and put-together for all forms of transport.
Nonsense, it’s highly congested every single day. Car ownership is among the highest in the world, the public transport is expensive and lacks capacity, resulting in large traffic jams daily.
@@EGO0808 price isn't the same as experience. I agree public transport is becoming quite expensive, especially trains are expensive. But that's more or less the fault of the government.
@@N3v3r_S3ttl3 what experience are you referring to? No availability of seats, delayed or canceled trains?
@@EGO0808 Everything what you mention. All more or less the consequences of a lower budget that the government has for public transportation. For example NS, they have a shortage of train operators, which means fewer trains are able to run and thus logistically fewer long trains during rush hours.
Uggh to me it is insane that a 10 lane road needs to be widened. Our government should really incentivise more people to take public transportation instead.
True, we’re heading into the wrong direction right now.
The Southern part of the A10 with all the Metro / Train lines is going to change its all going under ground. Hugeeee project!
It's nice when a country invests in any infrastructure, if only the UK would.
There's no shortage of infrastructure investment in the UK. The problem is London gets an unequal amount.
Remember the Netherlands is 6x smaller than the UK. HS2 phase 1 is 140 miles and only gets you from London - Birmingham. The Netherlands is only 180 miles long!
@@cameroncook2048 The UK has only 3.7km of motorways compared to the Netherlands' 2.5km, even though the UK has four times the population, is less dense (meaning greater distances between major population centres) and has fewer lanes per km of motorway on average.
Taxes are very high on almost everything in the Netherlands.
If you think your roads are bad, take a look at your healthcare.
If only transport & urban planners and folks on the left & right in America, Australia, and UK can get away from the "Motor Vehicles OR Public Transit & Bicycles" mindset.
UA-cam urbanists seething rn
Why?
The problem is money. Places like the US and UK refuse to spend enough money to fix infrastructure, and everyone is always in a fight for limited funds. The real answer that no one wants to hear, is you need to fix everything, not just some things.
imagine how many people a railroad that big could've moved
It would cost WAY more to create a railway system that could actually justify having 3 lane rails. U would need stations as big as schiphol terminals to fill all of it. That would be a logistical nightmare...
My God, looks worse then Los Angeles. Who knew the Dutch had so many highways?
Highways are not the problem, it becomes a problem when these highways goes through the city instead of around it..
Nederland is a great country.
THe Dutch love tunnels and underground car parks and underground supermarkets! All the material dug out goes to a polder to make new land. I hope that not all the new land is not covered with 14 lane highways!
I guess you misunderstood the concept of a polder
As a Dutch person I can only say it's a work in progress and will always be a work in progress.
We compliment the work that has been done and in the same time we criticize it too (typical Dutch thing to do).
We might accept that something is good enough for the time being taking in consideration of things like budget, technology and time.
But a typical Dutch way of thinking is that it can always be better especially looking long term.
Knowing that infra has maybe a 20 to 40 year lifespan so their will be new plans with lessons learned.
this was somehow really calming
thanks for a great video
The name of the game is: Integrated transportation networks. Not one or the other modes of transport in a 0-sum game. Synergistic transport that works together instead of against one another. For example: urban car usage has its place and is not a bad idea in general so instead of banning the cars cities should encourage car sharing, which only some companies pioneer in places for a few years now but very few governments actively incentivize them to the point that you would not need to own one in order to drive one when you need to pick something up.
I think that's the fascinating thing about it: the Dutch motorways are great. Also compared to, for example, German roads and motorways. Above all, I noticed the low speed limit. There are far fewer speeders and tailgaters in the Netherlands compared to Germany. And that makes driving in the Netherlands very pleasant. Whether you take the car, public transport, train or bicycle - everything is well interconnected.
I wish that each and every German tourist visiting the Netherlands would appreciate the great examples presented there and bring the ideas back.
The problem in germany is that people dont follow certain unwritten rules. Like moving ontime to the right for faster cars. Its becouse of the sheer amount of people driving there compared to the Netherlands. They built their highways to be able to drive fast on. Here you see that the roads are narrow, people will drive slow becouse of that. U don't have space to drive 150km/h safely most of the time. Germany is also way WAY larger and way less dense. Its a whole different cookie tbh.
@@casperairsoft without the automobile industry and it’s lobby, I’m sure we could have similarly well designed infrastructure here in Germany, too. But that is it’s own issue.
I was talking about the speed limit and it’s evident that a lower speed limit can cause better traffic flows as everyone’s driving at a similar speed and there are less lane changes and overtakes.
When cycled to the camping ground in Landsmeer, I had to cross the nordern A10. 2 things pretty much blew me away:
1 the border between city and nature reserve is incredibly obvious.
2 compared to any other place, this highway has unbelievably low noise pollution
FYI: In fact, Amsterdam hasn't built a single highway. The client for these highways is Rijkswaterstaat. And that's part of the national government.
'Rijkswaterstaat organised the building of a surprising number of autosnelweg on behalf of the Netherlands government around the Amsterdam area' would be a terrible video title though
@@martinalooksatthings 🤣 Good point...
@@martinalooksatthings Using the Netherlands rather than Amsterdam would be more appropriate then... Because this has nothing to do with Amsterdam.
This is what people need to understand, walkable cities don’t ban cars, instead they add many alternatives to driving. A free country is where you can choose how to commute, not one where your only option is to drive.
The Netherlands has a lot of highways to connect cities.
Just no highways running right through the cities themselves.
Fun fact: at 2:09 you can see 'NAP - 3,8 M' written in white letters on top of the viaduct. This refers to the location (and most of the country) being under the sea level, in this case 3,8 meters. At least as nice: the grafitti on the electric house on the left side refers to my football club.
Great video. I don't like how other youtube videos ignore that the Netherlands also has lots of roads. Yes, it's great for bikes, but that doesn't mean they banned cars or something.
Well, except for bunches of residential streets, and a bunch more that narrow roads, add chicanes, remove parking, and are generally more circuitous than the cycling routes provided
Of course, what do you expect? Amsterdam is still a city with almost a million citizens and a lot of neighboring towns. But it is great to see how cars and bicycles are combined everywhere.
Yep, this is what happens when you leave the car party in charge for 13 years. Meanwhile the public transport, especially trains, is declining because all of the investments were deemed to expensive.
Exactly. Many bus and tram lines are being deleted or changed because they are privatized and "don't cover the costs". Also the cheap P&R ticket prices in A'dam are raised significantly and some parking locations deleted to cover costs. It looks like they don't look at the possible reduced investments in car infrastructure.
Everytime I drive to holland, it is amazing and never have issues. Very well designed roads
I can see the point of this video: "There's more life and prosperity outside the UK than you think, Brits".
There's something aestethic to Dutch infrastructure and disign in itself
From Vermeer to Mondriaan...
Say what you want but the roads are one of the best.
Thanks for making this. As has been chronicled by others, car usage actually continues to rise in The NLs and the driving conditions there are often considered the best in the world. (I personally have driving in The NLs and vastly prefer it to driving at home here in America.) What's different about them is that they make other opportunities viable options for many more people and not just assign them second-rate (or what realistically even feels like third-rate at best) provision to make those journeys.
i love this and the music!
If you're going to build highways anywhere, then they are doing it in the right place, and it's great that they are investing lots into the transport networking, but given what we know about induced demand, it is somewhat surprising how much widening they've chosen to do, vs. for example, building more/faster railway lines. They only have 1 high speed line and that ended up being very controversial. The other thing that amazes me is how come they're able to find the money for all this construction, when in the UK our government doesn't seem to be able to rub 2 pennies together for things like HS2, and yet they have half of our population and tax payer workforce. Do they just have high taxes or perhaps they're better at not wasting money like we do?
I do think more high speed rail does nothing for regional traffic. As the Netherlands is very small, high speed rail is only useful for international trains. The Netherlands already has one of the densest railway networks in the world. But more lightrail would be a great, to reach Amsterdam's satellite towns.
@@robeleco1 True, but international traffic is not a zero amount. How many cars are travelling across the border that could be going by rail instead? And if you build high speed lines, people could get from Amsterdam to Groningen, Arnhem, Eindhoven and Maastricht faster, and it would free up some capacity on the slower lines for more frequent regional services. More trams and light rail would also be very helpful.
This really only works because of Netherlands unique geography/population. Small, flat and dense!
In that regard you can consider the Netherlands as being one big city.. So every big city could have a dense network if they invested in infrastructure like we have... In other big countries they also have infrastructure and less people will travel by car to the other side of the country, so those long roads that will cover the whole country don't have to be as densely designed, as most would either use a highspeed train to cover long distances or an airplane.
Are you calling the Dutch small, flat and dense ?
Great video and great choice of soundtrack!
So surprise it is mix of policies which gets us the results.
Most shocking is that those 10 lane motorways are mostly empty. Dead space.
Sorry to correct you , this was filmed on a bank holiday , normally they are filled to the brim . Dutch motorways in this area have one , if not of the highest traffic volume in Europe.
That said it is important to have alternatives to the car . There are viable alternatives, but still we need more
The "tunnel" beneath the Vecht you mentioned is actually a aqueduct. The water flows above the road in a concrete construction. From the viewpoint of the regular driver there isn't much difference. From an engineering perspective there is definitely a difference.
None the less, great content from a viewpoint i rarely get to see.
its both true
Motorways aren’t bad, they’re bad when they break up city centres and act as an alternative to public transport which is not the case in The Netherlands.
In Sweden we go from 2 lanes to 1 lane. And no, we don't even have good biking ways. Or parking.
I am an 'Amsterdammer', a native born and bred. What's more my father was chief building inspector for Amsterdam west and ended up as a whistle blower on political corruption when it came to wrongly awarded government contracts on a) building a square on top of a garage with high (foot) traffic and bridges on the Amsterdam ring road that used equally poor foundations. He was bullied out of his job for his troubles to the point of a stroke.
My grandfather, in turn, was 'opperheemschutter' an old Dutch word I had to look up myself, but means as much as chief city planner and architect. I never got to meet or know him save for some newspaper clippings of him throwing a party in April 1945. Supposedly for his jubilee as city architect, but I can think of different reasons. (I don't know my family to be 'party people').
In any event, your video is a weird one to me. Obviously I don't have - that - high an opinion of the city, public officials etc. Not sure if this is heart warming or a sad testimony how other places are if it's even worse.
If only th UK could follow suit. N. Circ, M25. AAaargh Piecemeal construction. Untold bottlenecks. Great video.
Thank you for covering this, it's not about one particular mode vs the other, there's a type of trip and scale for every kind of transport mode, and it's nice to see it put in to practice pragmatically instead of based on ideology.
Notice too that the road quality in the Netherlands is better than in the USA (on average). Every shot of the road in this video is high quality asphalt and not a single pothole was found.
Even if you absolutely love cars and throw up at the thought of cycling or public transit, why wouldn't you want a better driving experience for yourself?
@@admrotob might I add that the USA has to maintain so much more roads, and it's interstates are older, one city that has created motorways pretty recently and they have hq asphalt is phoenix. They also have a larger variety of climate to deal with, it's pretty impressive if you think about it how high quality all the interstates are across the USA.
@@poshmalosh14 Sadly the other side of that coin is the neglect on literally every other mode of transportation. Don't get me wrong having good highways is great but having other options is important too.
They expand the roads, yet traffic continues to worsen. There's no winning this.
This shows one thnig: give cars enough space outside the city (transit is here much more expensive anyway), but in the city centre reduce the amount of cars as much as you can.
yes, the randstad gets excellent motorways. In Arnhem in the east of the country the A15 that nearly goes from the port of Rotterdam to Germany stops at Ressen, and the solid wall of lorries that go there every day have to plough trough Arnhem zuid to get to the A12, to continue on to Germany. The A15 wasn't lengthened to connect to the A12 in 1962 when the motorway was finished, because the funds were needed in the west, and ever since, some reason has stopped it. nearly 60 years later, the work still hasn't started.
What has been done is that the DRIP (Dynamic Route Information Panel) before the junction with the A50 now lies about the time it takes to get to the A12 by the Arnhem route or via the A50, to make them about the same. In all fairness this does seem to work a bit. As the A15 goes, which again, is the most direct route for lorries going from Rotterdam to Germany, it is 2 lanes. Which means every time a lorry driver thinks he's faster than the one ahead, and ignores the prohibition on overtaking, there is a concertina jam. This happens a lot given the amount of lorries.
If only looking at the randstad, traffic engineering in the Netherlands seems grand, but get into the less populated areas and it quickly goes downhill. Zeeland has 2 motorways (and one of them is only 1.5km long), and one passenger railway, paralleling that. If you live on another islands, it's busses for you, and those have been getting less frequent over time, and usually stop after 19h. Now I don't expect a metro service in rural areas or anything, but bare in mind even the least populated areas of the Netherlands are usually still well above 100p/km2, so it's not like they're empty.
I will note, the purpose of the ringroad is to cater for all throughtraffic, and highways inbound from it into the city may not be newly widened or constructed. The point here is to make traffic into and out of the city easy, while heavily discouraging traffic through the city by car
They may not have eliminated traffic, but they sure made it less of a drag
Excellent video. Didn't realize the Netherlands had such a sprawling and impressive motorway network. You get a very biased view when you only watch not just bikes and bicycle dutch.
The Netherlands builds their infrastructure and gives option to every mode of transportation to be available to the highest standard. No one does it better than the Dutch...
A great city should give people lots of options. The different modes of traffic should compete for riders. Each mode should pay for its own externalities. In the end, we should have a system where the right mode is chosen for each trip. None of this is incompatible with building great roads, railways, canals, sidewalks, or bicycle paths.
I agree completely
Highway widening is still a bad practice, even if there are bike lanes alongside.
It would be nice to see better transport in the U.S.
A roads, like the A1 or A10, are not the responsibility of the city or municipality, they are designed/funded/managed on a national level.....
2:09 - the white line with the letters NAP above it indicates sea level.
Let's remember a couple of things. First, The Netherlands historically IS a transport country. It's interesting that for such a small country, it's absolutely laden with ways to get around. Second, for the most part, it's not easy to use a car in Amsterdam. It's meant that way. They also don't have a lot of snow in the winter.
Amsterdam center was never designed for cars to begin with
Would be interesting to not only have a look at our well-engineered motorway and bike network but also at our inland shipping network. The inland terminals we build to link inland shipping shuttles to the deep sea terminals in the port of Rotterdam. Over the years, the volume of inland containers handled in these inland terminals has risen to 100,000 units per year. This has significantly cut back the number of trucks on the region’s roads.
Was mind-boggling to read that Rotterdam's port is as long as SIngapore although the latter's ports handles even more cargo
So the Netherlands is both a better place to drive and a better place not to drive. I like it
Not Just Bikes literally did a video on the subject and the statistics confirm it as well.
You should start by driving on the right side of the road.
He is
Metro isn't a train
Most Dutch people have good access to a bike, a car and public transport. We are free to choose the mode that fits with our journey and I don't know any Dutch people who only use one mode. All three have upsides and downsides. But since they are all viable, well supported options we remain free to choose and are not forced by the situation to only choose one. Bikes take pressure off roads and public transport. Public transport takes pressure off of roads and roads take pressure off of public transport. They all support each other. In a sense, the bike can be seen as walking on steroids in most cases. This makes our cities extra walkable. My own neighborhood has a small center with 3 supermarkets and some supporting shops like a toy store, bakeries, a butcher, some restaurants, library etc. It supports 40k people of which only about a third can reach the center on foot within 5 minutes. However by bike, all 40k can reach it within 5 minutes. Everyone has a bus stop within 5 minutes walking, and the busses go from our small, local train station into the city itself ending at the central station. That means we are both connected to the city, a regional and national transit and never have to walk more than 5 minutes to connect to it. And thats not unique to us. Nearly everywhere in the Netherlands has this, except for maybe the remotest villages which are seeing trouble with infrequent bus lines connecting them. But even then local politics usually works to keep even those bus lines running so people are always connected in multiple ways and not purely reliant on the car.
And still on a normal weekday there are around 400-600 km. of traffic jams. In a country of 200 km by 300 km. From 12 million to 17 million inhabitants in 50 years, up to 20 million over a decade… and no future vision in our government how to prevent or manage this.
How about investing the money spent on those giga-highways into building an actually good (and clean) railsystems
How about just doing both? Even with the shown example the Netherlands has some of the lowest asphalt per capita in the world. Why is that? Because while highways should ensure flow over longer distances within cities the limiting factor isn't number of lanes but intersections. Which is why you won't find massive multi lane roads anywhere. Sure, roads fan out right before intersections to ensure each direction gets their own lane, but that's the sane thing to do.
I think the US should do a lot of this. All forms of transportation should be supported. It so happens that a dollar in bike or pedestrian infrastructure goes a lot further.
No one should feel unsafe to move and travel because of some other people using other transportation *cough cough cough cough US with mud for pedestrians in the middle of my city right next to 5 or more lane roads with no cross walks and not even level grass to walk on cough cough cough cough*
Nice video. But we do not have 10 lanes motorways in the Netherlands. Those maybe the places where interchanges happen to different places and those are rather short parts of the whole motorway.
So you don't have 10 lane motorways apart from the ones shown in the footage? 🤔
@@martinalooksatthings Actually, no. You're including lengtened on and off ramps, which is actually a pretty scummy thing to do.
Counting the lanes is scummy? @@therealdutchidiot
@@martinalooksatthingsYou're not counting lanes. You're counting things that aren't lanes, and claiming they are lanes.
Usually we call a 3 metre (or so) wide strip of road surface marked as allocated to one linear stream of road traffic a 'lane' unless I'm missing something? @@therealdutchidiot
Hello Dutch viewers, and thank you for the comments about plans to put the A10 southern section underground and expand the railway.
I didn't know you were supposed to pronounce it 'Mowden'.
Also thank you for telling me that gopro shot was of the wrong motorway. The time on the gopro got messed up (the phone app set the time on it to UTC+2 unknown to me) and it made figuring out where each shot was harder.
Yes, I know the national government built the motorways and not the city of Amsterdam, the title of the video is shorthand to work as a video title on UA-cam and not a detailed discussion of how infrastructure projects in the Netherlands are organised or funded.
still wrong
The 'ui' (or [œy] in IPA rather) diphthong is a hard one to pronounce. It's close to the 'uy' in Guyver.
@@baseskaas Very constructive of you. Pannekoek.
@@forkless I should have *checked* pronounciations before recording, but I thought the video would get a couple of thousand views max, all from Brits...😅
@@martinalooksatthings Any UA-camr worth their salt knows it is good UA-cam practice to put innocuous errors in their content, it drives comments.
Great video and very informative as a resident of Amsterdam.
Funny how they pioneered hard shoulder running then decided to continue widening and expanding the network, we have the tories that say they aren’t safe so are pausing construction of new “smart” motorways with no plans to re instate the hard shoulders or widen anything, only just to create some watered down single carriageway link roads… feels like we live in a joke of a country sometimes.
Hard shoulder running is still done with expansions to provide support for sudden traffic outbursts or extra safety for rush hour. Also may prevent further expansions if traffic levels won't quite justify itforthe foreseenable future
I think dynamic hard shoulder running (DHS) were supposed to be converted to a running lane between 2023-2025 before it got cancelled
@Jack L SitsAtTheGroup We did try that once, it was called Autoloze zondag (car free sunday). Back then it was mostly because of the oil-crisis, but cities can still participate if they want to, even to this day!
These highways are not built by Amsterdam. They are built by contractors, on order of, and paid for, by the national government. The only thing Amsterdam has to do, is to adapt its infrastructure to that national infrastructure.
Amsterdam has only 820k inhabitants but its highway infrastructure looks like one of a city of 2-5 million.
definetly; Munich has 1.8 million inhabitants and doesn't even have a complete highway ring road, and only a minor network of a highway triangle to the north of the city
That's because the highways around Amsterdam don't just serve Amsterdam but also the rest of the greater Randstad area.
Now wonder Western Europe has become so dependent upon Russian oil.
2:40 The southern A10 in this section along the RAI and the Zuid Station is actually being widened by building it under the ground (just like the A9). The train station on top will be expanded in this project. The complete project, called 'Zuidasdok' will last until at least 2037.
Unfortunately the station will stay way too small.
Just the NS Part alone would need 8 tracks to become the new main Intercity station.
4 tracks is way too small
@@nicolasblume1046 There will be 6 train tracks and 4 metro tracks
@@hoi264 still 2 less than needed