Staying in a small town 10 kms from Groningen, I borrowed my host's bike and rode in to town to see how it managed to become the place with the greatest modal share of cycling in Holland. I had been there five years ago and discovered that it was not just happenstance,but a deliberate result of keeping cars out of the city.
Riding in, it was noticeable how car traffic thinned out as I got closer to the rather badly reconstructed main square, which had been badly damaged by heavy fighting in the war as the Canadians chased out the Germans in 1945. The inner ring road has virtually no cars and, of course, lots of space for cyclists. Inside that ring, there are virtually no cars. Indeed, the crucial decision to encourage cycling rather than cars had been made in the 1970s when that ring had become chock full of traffic.
The reason for the town's success in achieving a modal share of over 50 per cent for cycling is nothing very complicated. The crucial point is not only being pro-bike but to some extent being anti car. That is the stumbling block for policymakers in this country. You need both the carrot and the stick.
John Whitelegg made that point in a critique of the Lancaster Cycling Demonstration Town about which I have written previously on this blog. There's no getting round it - policymakers have to start putting the squeeze, ever so gently at first, on car users in order to encourage a modal shift. Sadly, I don't think they will ever do it here.
While Groningen is famous in transport circles, Utrecht is a town best known for its once powerful bishops and for having the largest tower in the Netherlands but there too the number of cyclists was really striking, even more so than in Groningen. People say, rather dismissively, that its because Utrecht and Groningen are student towns, but that is to underestimate the sheer ubiquity of cycling.
In Amsterdam, too, jogging round the Vondelspark at 8am, the streams of cyclists in all directions, sizes, ages and speeds using it as a short cut on their way to school, college, business or leisure.It was the sheer variety that was so wonderful - kids with their dads pushing them on gently, mums with two toddlers in a front trailer, besuited gents on their way to their accountancy firm and old age pensioners off to look after their grandchildren. Oh God it made me feel wistful and wonder where we went wrong...

The Dutch train system is little more than the size of the old Network SouthEast with more major towns connected by services called Intercity but which trundle along principally at 100 kph. The trains are pretty basic, the seats hard, no creature comforts, fairly surly ticket inspectors but as a way of moving lots of people around reasonably quickly and efficiently, it works.
In my Dutch travels, I have so far taken half a dozen trains and they have all been on time. I even made a 4 minute connection with ease, not something that the National Rail Enquiries timetable would suggest.
Lots of people seem to get on and off at every stop, which suggests that the average distance travelled is quite short. Oddly, not many people carry bicycles, which is somewhat discouraged by the authorities. They prefer people to have cycles at each end of their journeys and judging from the astonishing number of bikes at every station, lots do.
Like with all train systems, it is not all that easy to manage if you are not sure where you are going. The information on the panels is all in Duch, with no translations other than at the really big places and sometimes a train will indicate a destination implying it is a direct service when, in fact, a change is required.
The service is all clockface, the same time past the hour, every hour, and are timetabled so that you can get from any town to any other with a quick change. It is noticeable that the trains stop at the main stations for quite a few minutes which is presumably padding in the timetable to ensure that the timetable is adhered to. Apparently, there were major problems a few years ago when the track company was separated off, but these have been resolved and certainly I have had no trouble at all. And one final thing - all the trains are electric which is extremely pleasant and something that the Department for Transport could come and observe.

I am in Holland for a ten day speaking tour to local groups of the Anglo-Dutch friendship society and I plan to post regular items on the blog on my thoughts. Whenever I go to Europe and spend a bit of time there, it amazes me just how different each society is from Britain, and indeed from each other. I hope that the growing dominance of the European union does not change that.
I went for a run this morning in the suburbs of a small town called Hengelo, in the Eastern part of Holland, near the German border. It is remarkably suburban, the houses are small and built to very tight specifications demanded by the Dutch authorities. My host Giles, tells me that this extends to ensuring that everyone has the same type of roof on their houses, the same colour front doors and does not work in their gardens on the Sabbath.
Just on this short run, it became so apparent the way that life is organised around the bicycle.
I ran along a Fitspad, a bike path, for a couple of miles, and when I ran outwards, there were just a few students and the odd youngster on their bikes, but on the way back, the cycle path was full of kids, parents with kids on bikes, parents with kids on the back, and groups of teenagers. It was cycle rush hour just before school was starting and it was so nice seeing all these children cycling to school, from rather stern looking little blonde girls, maybe just 8 - 9 pushing determinedly to teenagers larking about and waiting for each other on corners.
And of course none were obese. Nor did any have flash bikes and not a helmet in sight - why would you need one when you had cycle paths all the way. It was such a heartening sight. This is so good in so many ways: the kids are learning independence in a way that ours are not allowed to do. How many British parents would allow eight year old girls or boys for that matter, to cycle to school on their own? Or even walk there? You could see what the arguments would be about in Holland: some parents were accompanying their five year olds, pushing them along a bit, and you could imagine that soon these kids would be demanding to go on their own.
But it is a win win situation in so many other ways, too. The environment, of course, but also these children's fitness and wellbeing. Just cycling a mile or two to school every day, and, as my host told me, also to school outings - going by bike to swimming lessons or the local museum is apparently compulsory - ensures these kids are far healthier than they would be if driven in their parents' cars. There were far fewer cars on the road at that time in the morning than there would be in an equivalent suburb in Britain.
These advantages are all so obvious - but why is Britain so different, so reluctant to see these advantages? Your thoughts would be most welcome

Next entry will be on the train service, which, surprisingly perhaps, is not all good news!

One of the great ironies of rail privatisation is that the rail industry is under far stricter control from outside forces than it ever was when it was a nationalised industry. Recent events, such as the fines imposed on both Network Rail and First Great Western have reinforced that view.
Yesterday, Chris Bolt rail regulator announced the way that Crossrail paths would be allocated once the scheme is completed some time at the back end of the next decade. Broadly, he accepted the application by the Department of Transport and Network Rail for most of the paths, though he reserved his decision on two daily paths at each end of the new line as there was no business case for so many trains.
This though is the madness of the way that the industry is being micromanaged by outside forces. Frankly, it is nigh on impossible to judge what the London commuter market will look like in 15 years time. The impact of just a few factors – say, growth patterns, the use of technology, the impact of global warming, possible terrorist attacks – shows that such calculations are based on wholly contestable assumptions.
The words ‘business case’ send a shudder down my spine every time I see them used. It is a pseudo science that pulls the wool over the eyes of politicians and business people alike. You only have to look at the ex post facto results of previous ‘business cases’ to show that they are largely a convenient fiction to mask a series of value judgement. For example, the case for the PPP for the London Underground was built on precisely this type of assumption and look what happened to Metronet. How do we know that will not be the case with Crossrail?