My Bike(s)

Friday, August 30, 2024

My bike isn’t really fancy. It’s a lot better than the first one I got when we moved here, but that only cost €50 from a charity shop. One time both pedals fell off at once when I had just left the apartment, so I parked up, locked the bike and just left the pedals resting on the back pannier rack. Incredibly when I got back after a few hours, the pedals were still there so I had to get it fixed. A few weeks later during the middle of moving house it was stolen. Maybe it was the stress of moving, or maybe it was the achievement of a sort of Rotterdam right-of-passage, but I was kind of glad to see the back of that first bike. By the time it was stolen I’d put more money into fixing it than I’d spent to buy the damned thing.

My new bike is a Union Flow, and I got it second-hand after a life spent as part of a fleet for a now defunct bike rental company. It’s a kind of retro-modern take on the classic Dutch “Oma-Fiets”. Six of the seven gears work really well, and it’s the first bike I’ve ridden with an internal gear mechanism. It’s really cool being able to shift through the gears whilst stationary, and I can see why even though they’re heavy and really tough to work on, they make for amazing city bike transmissions. It’s a really ugly colour, and it’s still covered in the stickers from the rental company that used to own it, but I love this bike.

Having a bike opens up the city in a way that I haven’t experienced before. Have a look at the map below, it shows how far you can cycle in 20 minutes from the city centre. If you’re really eagle eyed you might have noticed that the area covered includes the airport! Granted, there are no regular flights in or out of RTM that I’d be taking, so the cycle access is a moot point, but the fact that I could is amazing.

There are a few things at work that make cycling in the Netherlands uniquely wonderful. First, and there’s no way around this, the place is really, really flat. The tallest mountain in the entire country is only 322 metres tall. That doesn’t even reach the Irish definition of mountain at all (a peak above 500 metres). Being flat makes the physical act of cycling a lot easier, but what makes it so accessible is the incredible infrastructure and societal acceptance. Cyclists are not second class citizens here, with well maintained, separated cycle lanes everywhere and are treated with patience by other road users on the occasion that there is not a dedicated lane. I actually dread the thoughts of cycling around somewhere like Dublin or Cork, as I will almost certainly be likely to at least try when we move home.