Someone on the radio back home says a bike lane is only a bike lane if an eight year old can use it. Probably true. It would be hard to move through this city and not see a six your old pedaling along at some time or another. Which means that this place is a few light years ahead of the states.
Tourists rent bikes here. Outsiders pay to do it. The commute is fun. But America is anti-bike. This is not smart.
On top of the biking, there are trams, cars, sidewalks, buses, and a subway all sort of going the same places. When it comes to getting licensees or fighting through rules, redundancy blows. But when it comes to services like transport, redundancy is much better than efficiency. At home, efficiency is getting in the way of freedom. It's efficient to only have one way to get to work until that way gets jammed up. The 8:55 train may be great, but not if your kid needs an extra five minutes of your time or you misplace your keys. That kind of thing is rarely a crises here and while you do see people hurrying, you rarely see them in a rush because getting pretty much anywhere pretty much any time is pretty do-able. It's a kind of freedom too many at home refuse to imagine.
And all the ways of getting around mean that in the location, location, location dictum of business, no place is too terrible to set up shop. Small businesses can always count on some good local trafic.
Yes, big multi-nationals are here, but these are kept outside the city ring. And yes, places selling fast food and its ilk are perfectly accessible, but the city does not feel corporate owned in part because you see so many people, rather than just so many cars, moving through it. It does not make you a commie, it makes you feel as though you won it, your city.
Quick: count the number of times you exchanged money for goods today? How many of them were with the boss of the place that sells the goods? Or someone who knows the boss well? The percentage is far higher here.
Getting F's is good. Only fifty percent of all trips here are done on
back, so that's an F in any school. But it does mean that the trams and
roads and platforms are all a little less busy than they would
otherwise be.
Picking the right tool, even if it means going backwards technologically is O.K. A chainsaw is great, maybe, but not for making a piece of decent furniture or spreading butter. Over small distance, bikes are better individual people movers than cars and that is always going to be true, so it might be time to accept the future that includes them.
You can say this is a vacationer talking, but the transportation in Amsterdam is just a whole lot better than in American cities. It is a fact. For locals it may be a sign too big to see, those at home should not fear seeing it.