In Dublin quite a few people now cycle to work: for exercise, because they cannot find parking, because of the frustration of traffic-jams. In Amsterdam, a city of 724,000 inhabitants, the future is definitely on two wheels. Dr Laurence Slot, a spokesman for the city's planning department, says: "We will see more and more usage of bikes because we are stopping the growth of the use of cars in the city centre. We are not able nor are we willing to build enough underground parking spaces for private cars. We have added 2,000 underground public spots near the offices and City Hall. The alternative will be the bike and, in fact this is our future."
A visitor from "the traffic chaos of Paris" finds a striking difference. Special lanes are set aside for public transport. Trams take up the centre of the road and bicycles too, commonly have their own lane, next to the pavement; the other lane, and normally it is the only other lane, is for cars and buses. (The visitor from Paris is Vjollca Malla of Albania, one of the students in the prestigious Journalistes en Europe school, writing in their magazine Europ.)
In fact, one of Amsterdam`s endangered species is the motorist. Prices for parking are high: €2.27 per hour. Yes, says Slot, the point of keeping them high is to ensure that there are always parking places for those determined to use them (?). It is cheaper to park the car outside the city and journey in by public transport. And now the clinching figure: in this city of 724,000 people there are 550,000 bikes - i.e., 69 per cent of the population owns a bike. There is an extensive network of trains, trams, running around the clock, writes our journalist. There are 340 trams, 155 normal buses, 10 minibuses, 17 night buses and 44 underground trains. Why would you want to sit in a car jam?
As to those bikes! It must be a problem where to park yours so that you can find it again, among the half million or any good proportion of it. Anybody who remembers, or has seen in pictures of the Emergency years as we fondly call them, bikes stacked in O'Connell Street, Dublin, will have some idea of the problem. Some organisation is needed. Among the brave souls who cycle to work in Dublin, apart from the reasons given at the beginning of this piece, there is the argument that on their own two wheels, they are much quicker in arriving at work than if they drove.