And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
In summer of 2024 I made my inaugural pilgrimage to the Netherlands to visit the holy sites of urban design. After years of citing studies about the country’s forward-thinking urban planning techniques, showing videos in class of Groningen’s world class cycling infrastructure, and studying “woonerf” (living streets), I was thrilled to finally make a trip there. 1
At the top of my list of places to visit was Vredenburg Crossing in Utrecht 2 – the world’s largest cycling intersection. Estimates on the number of cyclists per day here range from 33,000 to 44,000.
I had long fantasized about dismounting my bike in that intersection and falling prostrate on the bare asphalt to pray, but the moment I arrived, I couldn’t even bring myself to take a picture of it. It was not extraordinary. It was not unlike other parts of Utrecht I had cycled through earlier that day. In fact, I wasn’t 100% sure I was at the correct spot, and once I confirmed through Google Maps that I was indeed there, I was simply struck by the lack of people (and cyclists) that I had long anticipated seeing. While I was wasn’t there for the weekday rush hour, I certainly wasn’t there for the graveyard shift either; my first visit was on a sunny Saturday afternoon (and I would subsequently visit on a Sunday and Monday as well). During various visits through the intersection, I’d usually count 20-30 cyclists waiting to cross at any given time; it’s a non-trivial number, but certainly not extraordinary.
Vredenburg Crossing doesn’t invoke feelings of grandiosity or attempt to overwhelm you with its magnificence.3 At the same time, I never felt that it was overly crowded nor did I feel a vacuum of people. I never felt unsafe nor did I feel my speed wasn’t inhibited by the other cyclists present.
This is urban design done well.
It is also the polar opposite experience of traversing the United States’ busiest highways by personal automobile. Visit Kansas City’s Grandview Triangle even at off-peak hours and it’s obvious this highway was designed to create an excruciating experience of bumper-to-bumper traffic at its worst times. My recent trip to Los Angeles involved taking an agonizingly overpriced Uber on a stretch of I-405 where we averaged less than 20 miles per hour and could barely see due to the smog. This felt much more like my experience driving through the slums of David, Panama than what would be expected from the second largest city in the richest country in the history of the world. But I digress.
The beauty of great cycling infrastructure is that you can facilitate 35,000 cyclists per day through a space that looks like it’s designed for orders of magnitude less than that. Vredenburg Crossing is indeed spectacular, just not visually. It’s spectacular for what it does and how it can do it in such a benign way. Many of the sacred urban sites in the Netherlands feel this way, yet this does not make a visit there disappointing. The architecture and canals are beautiful, and these elements combined with sound, modest, and human-scale urban planning make for a tremendously enjoyable space to inhabit.
On the other hand, some urban infrastructure characteristics of Utrecht are magnificent; the number of bicycles parked throughout the city centre is chaotically overwhelming in all of the best ways.
Bicycles parked throughout Utrecht. Photographs by author.
The takeaway for US cities is this: good urban design does not necessarily have to look impressive or cost an exorbitant amount of money. Small changes can bring about many of the positive changes that we desire to see in our communities. In a different vein, another takeaway is cycling infrastructure that looks empty is probably facilitating the movement of people much better than it appears; bicycles take up far less space on the roadway as compared to cars, and people can operate bicycles safely while being literally inches away from others.4 An intersection with 30 bicycles can look sparse, but 30 cars at an intersection makes a traffic jam. And further, while people’s subjective experiences navigating cities are important, empirical counts are crucially important in determining true mode-based traffic flow.
10/10 would pilgrimage in Utrecht again.
Footnotes
The blog Bicycle Dutch was incredibly helpful in planning this trip, and I can’t recommend this resource highly enough.↩︎
I actually stayed in Utrecht despite Amsterdam having the superior reputation. I did visit Amsterdam for an afternoon, but Utrecht has arguably more holy sites than Amsterdam. Plus, lodging there was cheaper, it was close to the airport, and I like staying in overlooked cities, off-the-beaten-path rather than the most popular places.↩︎
Leave that type of work to the architects. If I could embed a footnote within a footnote, I’d do it here. Sidenote: this is partially why architects and urban planners often clash, as brilliantly elucidated by Jeff Speck in his book Walkable City. Architects intentionally make their work “stick out,” whereas urban designers work to create infrastructure that meshes well with the surroundings.↩︎
I can safely push my wife up a hill while we’re both riding.↩︎