Last year, I had a work meeting in Europe that took me through Amsterdam. I spent a short weekend in the Netherlands at the end of the trip, where I noticed how bikes dominate the transportation scene. Is it possible to bring the bicycle-centric culture of these Dutch cities to North America?

Amsterdam was the first city I visited where I thought, “It would be really difficult to get around in a car or work truck here.” The city is built for bicycles and small boats traveling through canals. Many streets are wrapped around arc-shaped canals, which don’t give cars much visibility or the opportunity to exceed 20 miles per hour. Car parking seemed treacherous, as the other side of a curb could be a 6-foot drop into a canal. 

These are some of the many factors contributing to bicycles being the preferred mode of transportation for pedestrians and workers. 

Some cities in North America are already somewhat bike-friendly, depending on where you establish a baseline. People for Bikes developed a ranking system for cities that aggregates a long list of criteria into a score of 1-100. The analysis measures the quality of a city’s bike network, which includes the “amount of protected bike lanes, off-street paths, slow shared streets and safe crossings [enabling] people to comfortably bike around a city.”

In this ranking system, Amsterdam was the 13th overall city in its dataset. The No. 1 city in the world was The Hague, also in the Netherlands. 

The No. 2 city might be a surprise: Provincetown, Mass., only has a population of 3,273 people, but it had excellent scores for access to city necessities. This area is located at the very tip of Cape Cod, allowing for a geographic dead-end that improves the scenario for bicyclists. Provincetown is a destination, not a transit hub to other cities. 

On the other side of the spectrum, El Paso, Texas, was the lowest-scored city in the United States. With an aggregate score of 6/100, this is a car city that wouldn’t be encouraging to cyclists. 

What do these scores have to do with the general PHCP community?

Bike-friendliness important to homebuyers

Millennials are the ones building and buying homes now and looking for a different type of community. In 2022, Forbes found that 26 percent of U.S. adults were millennials, but they produced 54 percent of the mortgage applications. 

A National Association of Realtors survey found that 26 percent of millennials most likely used a bike in the last 30 days. However, the top five reasons they didn’t bike more were related to lack of bike-friendliness, not lack of desire. 

The survey explains: “The top five reasons why people don’t bike more: they need a vehicle for work, school or other reasons; the places they need to go are too far to bike; they don’t have a bike; they don’t feel safe in traffic; and there are too few bike lanes or trails.”

Most homebuyers are looking for homes that provide accessibility to biking or public transit. Unfortunately, most major U.S. cities are far behind European cities for public transit access. 

Comparing the bike-friendliness of Amsterdam with El Paso, there is an enormous difference in the total city area. El Paso is a city of 870,000 people across 256 square miles of land. Amsterdam’s municipality has 921,000 people sharing 85 square miles of land. The population density is very different in these cases, which makes it easier to bike between a larger number of necessities in the Netherlands. 

If millennials want to ride bikes but have more ground to cover, where does that leave us in the United States? The electric bike might bridge the desire to cycle more and the larger terrain to cover. Another popular option is to develop more high-density communities in big cities built around walking and biking paths. 

Where I live in Salt Lake City, a bike is a better option in some neighborhoods than others. I rode a bike all over the University of Utah campus when I lived there. Today, it would be a long and potentially dangerous trip to cover all the errands I generally do in a week solely on a bicycle. 

Salt Lake City has proposed redeveloping an old train depot area outside the downtown core. The plan would connect the commuter and light rail transit systems while prioritizing walkability across 11 acres. The Rio Grande District Project, named after the existing train depot, would be an attractive option for millennial home buyers, if it comes to be.

The Cargo Bike

What does the interest in bicycle-centric neighborhoods mean for the larger PHCP community? A service call or site commissioning visit could become a real hassle with a pickup truck. Picture a city where most site visits are like trying to navigate into the center of a large university, where you need to find parking and haul tools to the destination. Homebuyers’ preference for walkable, bikeable neighborhoods will likely make simple construction tasks more difficult. 

I have a proposal: look into a cargo bike. This segment of bicycles and tricycles combines the ability to navigate cities easily and park closer to the destination with the option to haul a heavier load of tools and supplies. If you have a lot of heavy tools to lug around, an electric version might be better. 

Overall, there is a long way to go before big and small cities are more bicycle-centric than truck-centric. However, a 2017 study from traffic data collector INRIX found that U.S. motorists wasted an average of 17 hours a year looking for a parking spot. In New York City, the number was 107 hours of searching, on average. We also overpaid for parking time we didn’t need at parking meters, just to be safe and not get a ticket, to the tune of 20.4 billion dollars. 

When you consider these pieces, the cargo bike doesn’t sound like a bad option for getting to your next destination.