Bike Country

We were told that Copenhagen is the best biking city, but the Netherlands is the best biking country. That is something that really struck me on our ride to Houten, and then again the next day when we biked from Utrecht to Amsterdam. Biking isn’t just a city activity, it is a mode of transportation and that should be able to get you from city to city. The Netherlands has a connected bike network that allows bike riders to get around town, out of town, and to any other town around. When we did our country rides, I got to see a lot more than just dense urban cores. It got me thinking about the relationship between density, neighborhoods, and farmland. After biking just 15 minutes from the city center, all on comfortable and safe bike lanes, we started seeing sheep and farms everywhere. The notion that you could live on a farm, and still be a quick and easy bike ride from all of the amenities of the city is really cool to me because I want to live in a dense city with good bike infrastructure and lots of urban life, but I also can’t deny that I’d like to keep chickens and bees and have a big garden. There are ways to make this work in most cities with community gardens, but I still thought it was cool to see that you could have it all. It was also interesting that in the case of many of these areas, there wasn’t an extreme lack of density. I saw a good handful of small farms that were just across the road from bunches of row houses with smaller gardens. Denser residential neighborhoods build a strong sense of community, and by reallocating space from private yards to public spaces. They are, in my opinion, a more pleasant place to call home.