The Long Way Around

[00:00:01] - [Speaker 0]
It wasn't a long ride. I was going from my place in the Glebe to a ballgame at Brewer, and I was running late. I was pushing maybe 80%, which is the pace where you crest the hill, see the next light, and start doing the math. Can I make it? So I go.

[00:00:19] - [Speaker 0]
I bomb down the hill, the light stays green, the path begins curving right, and the pavement starts giving me instructions. 90 degrees left across the right turn lane. Yield to pedestrians on the island. And I'm finally crossing University Way. Another island.

[00:00:38] - [Speaker 0]
Another turning lane. Yield again and one last 90 degree left. All of that for what used to be a straight line. I didn't know it at the time, but I just experienced my first Dutch intersection on a bike. My name is Brian.

[00:01:03] - [Speaker 0]
You are listening to Save the Parking, a podcast about the city you live in reporting from Ottawa, Ontario. Joining me is my cohost, Meza.

[00:01:21] - [Speaker 1]
As a kid, I loved to bike. It was freedom for me. But now that I have my own children and we go at cycling, I don't cycle with them too much because of the traffic. It really makes me nervous. And there's a name for people like me, the ones who own a bike, but won't ride in traffic.

[00:01:36] - [Speaker 1]
Researchers call us the interested but concerned, and apparently we're not a niche. We're about 60% of the population. It's a core idea in the urban planning and act of transportation advocacy. The small number of people currently cycling on dangerous streets is a poor indicator of how many would cycle if safe infrastructure existed. The streets are not measuring demand.

[00:01:56] - [Speaker 1]
They're measuring tolerance.

[00:02:00] - [Speaker 0]
A planner named Gil Panalosa has a simple test for whether a street is actually working. Would an eight year old and an 80 year old feel safe on it? If the answer is no, the street isn't for people, it's for cars moving through them. And the Dutch intersection passes the Penalosa test. So I wanted to talk to someone who didn't learn Dutch cycling culture from a documentary or a conference, but someone who grew up inside it.

[00:02:26] - [Speaker 0]
Someone for whom this was in a policy position, it was just a Tuesday. So I called Hans.

[00:02:35] - [Speaker 2]
Cycling is very important in the Dutch culture. It's not a left wing thing. It's not an elitist thing. It's not an houseless thing. It's just something that everybody does.

[00:02:47] - [Speaker 2]
I would say what they probably call a utilitarian cyclist. So somebody who takes the bike to go to the grocery store or to the library or to France. Sunday morning and the sun is out and I tell my wife, let's go for a bike ride, I'm all of a sudden a touring cyclist or whatever you call it. On that exact same bike, I don't have cycling shorts. I don't have cycling shoes.

[00:03:11] - [Speaker 2]
My my my bike pedals don't have click in type things. I've never had that. So I don't think I see myself as a sports cyclist, but it doesn't mean that I sometimes try to cycle really fast on the farm when I have a tailwind and I have Strava on, and I can see if I can improve my personal record on cow lane. I'm just a person who just goes from a to b.

[00:03:34] - [Speaker 1]
Hans Morg grew up North of Rotterdam. He learned to ride a bike the way most Dutch kids do, which is to say nobody really remembers teaching him. His mother doesn't know, and his father doesn't know. It just happened. He came to Canada in 1998, got a job at the Dutch Embassy in Ottawa, and for the first few years, cycling was just how he got to work.

[00:03:54] - [Speaker 1]
Nothing more than that. Then a federal agency, the National Capital Commission, needed someone to help them understand why cycling works so differently in The Netherlands. They called the Dutch embassy. The Dutch embassy looked around the room. Hans was the guy who bikes work.

[00:04:08] - [Speaker 1]
He's not a planner. He's not an engineer. He reads Dutch design manuals for fun. He also owns a car and drives it when he needs to. He still rides the same upright Dutch bike.

[00:04:18] - [Speaker 1]
Three gears, dynamo headlight. He's been called the nutty professor.

[00:04:24] - [Speaker 0]
The nutty professor has a point, though. Those extra turns I complain about aren't there to slow me down. They're aimed at the most dangerous few seconds of any ride, the moment a car turns across your path. According to UC Berkeley's Safe Transportation Research and Education Center, improper turning is a factor in fifteen percent of serious bicycle crashes, and a failure to yield right of way accounts for another sixteen percent. Combined, that's nearly one in three crashes at the exact moment the Dutch intersection design intervenes.

[00:04:57] - [Speaker 2]
So the Dutch say, you know what? We'll we'll veer these bike lanes away at the intersection, intersection, and and then then the driver starts to turn, and now you have much better eye contact because the cyclist is kind of standing there or starting to cross, and the driver sees you in a different angle than next to him. Now it's kind of in a in a in a basically, in a 45 degree angle. So it's done for visibility reasons. The Copenhagen intersections don't have that, and I was very surprised to see that.

[00:05:24] - [Speaker 2]
So basically, what Copenhagen does is that you arrive on your bike lane. It might even be a separate bike lane with some bushes between you and the and the driver. But all of a sudden, you're thrown into this right turning lane for drivers, and now you're mixed in one lane with drivers and cyclists. So you're in one big space, and I'm sure the Copenhagen drivers are used to that, but I I was a bit surprised to see that the bike lane actually stops about twenty, thirty meters before the intersection. And as a cyclist, you're on your own now.

[00:05:56] - [Speaker 2]
So that's probably the big difference. And and the city of Ottawa and maybe a lot of Ontario, but especially the city of Ottawa, has pushed for those designs where where you kind of separate from traffic the last twenty, thirty meters, the car traffic, so that the drivers who's turning actually sees the cyclist passing in front of them.

[00:06:16] - [Speaker 1]
The difference between Dutch and Danish isn't just philosophy. It shows up in something as small as how you get onto the bike path.

[00:06:23] - [Speaker 2]
But imagine you approach a t intersection on your bicycle. You can turn left, and you can turn right. But you may wanna actually cross that t intersection because at the top of the t, there's probably an erased separate bike track. The city would cut a stretch of concrete out, so you cross that intersection on your bike, and you enter that bike track very smoothly. The Danes just take a shovel and some asphalt and toss some asphalt against that curb.

[00:06:51] - [Speaker 2]
So you go clunk clunk, and you're on that bike track. So that's kind of the difference. And and The Netherlands cuts that curb out and makes it nice and smooth, and they probably put some fresh asphalt in there or some pavers. Ottawa does that too as much as they can. The Danes says, you know what?

[00:07:06] - [Speaker 2]
We take a bag of asphalt, toss it in in ten and in ten minutes, all of a sudden, have an access to that bike track.

[00:07:12] - [Speaker 0]
The Danish model fits the way I ride, and Hans admits that at a quiet intersection with no turning lane, if it's safe, he'll sometimes go straight through. But Denmark doesn't cut corners on cycling itself. Every two years, Copenhagen publishes what it calls a bicycle account, a public report card on how many people ride, where they go, and how safe they feel. Its headline number, sixty two percent of residents get to work or school by bike. In Ottawa, the best estimate is somewhere between two and four percent.

[00:07:48] - [Speaker 0]
And where drivers are turning across his path, Hans doesn't take chances.

[00:07:54] - [Speaker 2]
The only thing is that drivers don't always expect you, and that's the problem. And then you can say, well, that's the driver's fault. Well, that's great, but I am buried, and the driver just has a scratch on his car. So I'm not gonna run that risk. I just...

[00:08:09] - [Speaker 2]
For my own safety, I prefer to wait at the traffic light for cyclists, and then see what the driver is gonna do. And everybody knows there's still, despite those lights, there's still drivers who just don't stop for traffic that goes straight. So for me, it's my own choice.

[00:08:25] - [Speaker 1]
That pragmatism, waiting at the light, reading the driver, is what happens when infrastructure doesn't protect you. Hans spent five years trying to change that as president of Bike Ottawa, a volunteer run nonprofit advocating for cycling as a safe everyday way to get around the city. His biggest fight was the Laurier Avenue segregated bike lane, the first downtown separated bike lane in Ontario. It removed 122 parking spaces and used concrete curbs, plastic poles, and planter boxes to physically separate cyclists from traffic. The pushback was immediate.

[00:08:59] - [Speaker 1]
The Bank Street Business Improvement Area commissioned a report arguing against it. And in a twist that surprised most people, a faction of cyclists in the community opposed it too.

[00:09:08] - [Speaker 2]
There's a group of people called vehicular cyclists who strongly believe that bike paths and bike infrastructure in general is a bad idea, other than maybe pathways in the forest. But you should always cycle on Bronson and just take the lane. Well, that probably worked in the nineteen seventies, but it is so full now that you cannot not expect that somebody is biking in the lane in Bronson, and probably happens once in a while. That's just not gonna happen. So people will take the car instead because they think it's unsafe.

[00:09:37] - [Speaker 0]
Hans would become an easy target for the resistance.

[00:09:40] - [Speaker 2]
For some reason, I'm sometimes in in a left wing elitist commie. And I thought, I never saw myself as a left wing elitist commie, but that's... People say things, and you just have to let that go. And you gotta deal with it. It was actually getting better.

[00:09:54] - [Speaker 2]
And I must say a lot of people also approached me in a very friendly way. So it's it's come from both sides.

[00:10:00] - [Speaker 1]
In 2024, the provincial conservative government passed a law that gave the province the power to remove existing bike lanes and block new ones if they would eliminate a lane of car traffic, overriding what cities could decide for themselves. This went to the Ontario Court of Appeal and was recently greenlit in August 2026, allowing the removal of three separated bike lanes in Toronto, Ontario, the fourth largest city in North America.

[00:10:26] - [Speaker 0]
It's a major victory for Ontario's premier, allowing him to leave his mark on Toronto's streets. They're taking up one lane of traffic. They're backed up from here to Tibak 2. That's from CBC News with premier Doug Ford speaking in 2026. Take out a bike lane, add a lane for cars, and traffic will flow.

[00:10:49] - [Speaker 0]
It's an argument Hans has heard many times. And for the record, neither of us is anti car. I own one, and so does Hans.

[00:10:57] - [Speaker 2]
If you keep catering to motorized traffic, let's just say it in very general, and this is not a a jab to anybody in a pickup truck or a car or an electric car or anything, because, like I said, I drive too myself. But if you keep catering to drivers, drivers will come into town. And if you widen, for example, the Airport parkway, more people will think, and it's what they call induced demand, wow. There's four lanes on the Airport parkway. I no longer take Road X Y Zed.

[00:11:27] - [Speaker 2]
I'm gonna take the parkway. So now all of a sudden you get more people coming to the airport parkway, and the airport parkway will be plugged in no time. However, that airport parkway turned into Bronson, so now you get all the traffic from that four lane airport parkway, pushes into Bronson, and now nothing moves anymore. And that's what they call induced demand. You build a wider road and there's more traffic.

[00:11:51] - [Speaker 2]
Keep catering to motorized traffic, and meanwhile your LRT is half empty, and you're wringing your hands if you should put another bike lane in, even though the bike lane can handle tens of thousands of people a day if you make it good enough for people to cycle.

[00:12:08] - [Speaker 1]
Ottawa has one data point that answers Hans directly. The Lorry Avenue segregated bike lane opened in 2011. Cycling trips on that stretch quadrupled from 700 to 2,800 per day. Downtown cycling mode share went from 4% to 7%. 2,000,000 trips in five years on eight blocks.

[00:12:28] - [Speaker 1]
It's nowhere near The Netherlands 28% national average. But it happened because the infrastructure existed, not because attitudes change first. We'll be right back after the break.

[00:12:42] - [Speaker 0]
That infrastructure change didn't just bring more cyclists to Laurier. It's starting to change whose cycles. The fastest growing category in Canada's bike market isn't a road bike or a mountain bike. It's the pedal assist ebike where you have to pedal to activate the motor. The motor helps you up to 32 kilometers an hour then cuts out.

[00:13:03] - [Speaker 0]
After that, you're on your own. Hans' mother figured this out at 87.

[00:13:09] - [Speaker 2]
I look to my own mother. She's outside this category now. She's 87 in 2026. And she has an e bike, and she bikes all over the place. She gets her groceries.

[00:13:20] - [Speaker 2]
She cycles to the family members who are still around. And when I visit her in Netherlands, and I would always ask, shall we go for a bike ride? Cause I wanna see new developments and new bike routes and what people do in The Netherlands with cycling infrastructure. So she takes me on a probably a 40 kilometer bike route, being 87, doesn't even wear a helmet. I'm really pushing her to wear a helmet because their reaction gets a bit slower when they get older, of course.

[00:13:45] - [Speaker 2]
And we rarely even cycle on the road because we just go to Delft and stop for coffee there, and then we cycle to a place called Nodorp where apparently my grandmother was born and I'd never been there. She said, oh, don't we drive to Nodorp? And let's just see where your grandmother was born on the farm. Okay. Never saw that.

[00:14:02] - [Speaker 2]
We did this lope, and my mom feels just totally comfortable being 87 on a bike in The Netherlands.

[00:14:09] - [Speaker 0]
My parents are approaching 80. They're healthy, active, but in ebike, I'm not sure I could sell them on it. I've been saying for years, I wanna be playing tennis in my nineties. Hans' mom is 87 and biking all over the place. The difference between these two worlds isn't willpower, and it's not even age.

[00:14:28] - [Speaker 0]
It's the road.

[00:14:30] - [Speaker 1]
That gap is measurable. Peoples4Bikes score cities on how well their bike networks connects people to the places they need to go. Amsterdam, 85. Ottawa, 54. Los Angeles, 32.

[00:14:43] - [Speaker 1]
Hans calls what he does next the small wins, and he means it literally.

[00:14:48] - [Speaker 2]
You cannot rebuild a city in a year, not even in ten years. Even in The Netherlands, it took basically a generation and a half to where we are now. It just takes time. For the longest time, where I lived for twenty eight years in the same house, I used to be the oddball on the upright bike who was cycling to work, and that was an odd odd guy. Now I see parents with kids cycling together to the park across our street.

[00:15:15] - [Speaker 2]
That never happened. And now we see ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, 15 kids. I don't know if they're all the same kids or different kids. With the parents cycling to the park, and they're racing around in the park, and they cycle home with their parents on the street where I live, which is a very quiet street, but still, we didn't see that. If I go to the grocery store fifteen years ago, I was the only one who parked my bike there, maybe one other person.

[00:15:41] - [Speaker 2]
Now I go there, it's like, holy moly, there's six, seven bikes. And you can argue, yeah, six, seven bikes and a 150 cars. Yes. I know that. But we went from one bike to seven bikes now.

[00:15:52] - [Speaker 2]
And I see people arriving that that I think that person doesn't look like they cycle 80 kilometers a week to to work and back. They clearly dusted off an old bike, their own flip flops in pink shorts and a casual shirt. They clearly took the bike to fetch or to get something from the grocery store and home again. And I didn't see that for the longest time. So those are just small signs that I see that reminds me a little bit of The Netherlands.

[00:16:21] - [Speaker 2]
This is really cool.

[00:16:30] - [Speaker 0]
I started this ride annoyed at four extra turns. I'm ending it with a different question, not whether the infrastructure is worth the frustration, but whether I'm willing to be the kind of rider it was designed for. Flip flops, pink shorts, old bike, no particular hurry. Maybe I cut through the odd intersection. Maybe I just leave earlier.

[00:16:50] - [Speaker 0]
Either way, the Cal Lane Strava record isn't gonna break itself. Save the Parking is produced by me, Brian Briggs, from Field Notes presents with my cohost, Meza, host of Mums After Dark. If you wanna find Hans, he's the one with the upright Dutch bike, three gears, and a dynamo headlight.

[00:17:08] - [Speaker 1]
We're at savetheparking.org. Find us wherever you listen.

[00:17:13] - [Speaker 0]
From Ottawa, Ontario, I'm Brian.

[00:17:16] - [Speaker 1]
And I'm Mesa, and I'm also from Ottawa.