Two bikes, one jacket, no car

I own two bikes, which is one more than I need and one fewer than most people here seem to have.

The first is the going-out bike. I bought it second hand when I moved over and it is now rusty, unlovely and slightly wrong in every dimension, and I still have it, which is the genuinely remarkable part. Everyone will tell you that your bike in this city gets stolen. Mine has survived years of being left against railings outside bars, and I am completely convinced the reason is that it looks like something already stolen twice and abandoned. Ugly is a security feature. Nobody wants it, including me, and that is the arrangement.

The second is the nice one, for daytime and for anywhere I would rather not arrive covered in chain grease. It has gears and it has hand brakes, both of which count as luxuries in a country where the default is one speed and a pedal you shove backwards. I inherited it from a friend who moved to the UK, which is how a lot of decent bikes change hands here. People leave, and their bike stays behind and joins somebody else’s household.

The jacket

The gear question has exactly one honest answer and it is not a brand. It is length. My rain jacket comes down to the knee and has zips up the sides so your legs can actually work the pedals. That is the whole specification. A short waterproof keeps your shoulders dry and delivers all the water directly onto your thighs, which is worse than being straightforwardly wet, because now you are wet in a way you paid for.

Everything else people buy for this is optional. Overshoes, no. Waterproof trousers, technically correct and socially unbearable. A hood under a helmet, if you wear a helmet, which almost nobody here does and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What I do not do

I do not commute by bike, which feels like a confession. The office is south of Utrecht, and there is no version of that journey where a bicycle is a serious proposal. So my saddle time is entirely social and errand shaped, which I think is actually the better relationship to have with a bike. It is transport for the parts of my life I chose, rather than the part I am contractually obliged to.

I also drink and cycle, as does everybody, and I should be clear that there is a legal limit for cyclists and I have certainly been the wrong side of it. It remains one of the last pieces of mild collective lawlessness that this country has quietly agreed not to look at directly. I assume that will change. I assume the change will be entirely correct, and I will be irritated by it regardless.

What it did to cars

We do not have one any more. That was not a principled decision, it was arithmetic: it sat still for most of the week, cost money continuously, and the city had already made every trip under five kilometres faster without it.

The remaining reason to drive is the office, and driving to the office taught me that I am a bad fit for Dutch roads. The A2 between Amsterdam and Utrecht is six lanes of motorway with a hundred limit on it, which my brain refuses to accept as a serious instruction, and the cameras were entirely unmoved by my reasoning. Twenty years of British motorway habits do not survive contact with a country that both builds enormous roads and means it about the speed.

Which is the actual lesson, and it is not about bicycles. Design shapes behaviour, and it does it whether or not you agree with the design. Make the bike lane continuous and protected and separated from the traffic, and I will use it without ever once deciding to. Put a hundred limit on six lanes and I will fight it in my head every single morning and lose every single time.