EP 272 GEERT KLOPPENBURG: An inconvenient truth about what's really happening on Dutch streets

NJB and his fanbase will never ever discuss this issue! Thank you for telling the truth that nowhere is perfect.

hello everybody, glad to be on this show, thanks John! (sorry english not native lanquage)

WOW! Great videos Geert. What a traffic nightmare.

Sometimes we need people that exaggerate a little bit,.... It keeps us sharp.
As I use to say..... "zonder dwarsliggers geen spoorlijn" ....(The subtlety will be lost in translation.)
I like your guest.

Amsterdam (inner-city and older neighbourhoods) are at times a bit of a traffic jungle. I regularly drive there (car) and Geert is right, in a way, in the intro: one can only wait so long. BUT, many car drivers call this upon themselves BY STOPPING. My excellent driving instructor hammered the fact that, unless there is a traffic light or stop sign you should always try to keep rolling, however slow.

Just order less of everything. And take the bike to buy groceries, dinner and gifts for Sinterklaas or christmas, etc.

I really don't see the problem. No video's of these 'rampant accidents'. I see people carefully navigating traffic. Yes there are bad spots. Sure. And keeping big lorries out of these areas at specific times is a good idea. But it's not the savage carnage Geert seems to imply.
Plus I still don't know what Geert proposes. Except banning lorries and delivery vans at peak times when children travel. Which in itself is a good idea.

We have 'aanrijding' and 'ongeluk' in Dutch.

Not sure I did enjoy this particular episode, John 🙂 Still, a like obviously. This one was not for me, but maybe it reaches another audience.

as a dutchman from the countryside, riding a bike in amsterdam has always "looked scary" to me

This is CRUCIAL data in the way people move. Thanks for shedding light on this!🙏🙌

He is a complainer by profession

I think deliveries is an area ripe for optimisation - one van delivers 20 items - not the other way, around as it is in my neighbourhood.

Until they have a more permanent solution, a little courtesy would help a lot. The trucks are stuck there, and the bikes never seem to see that and stop for a moment to let the trucks pass through.
Everything flows better when we watch out for each other.

Bit hyperbolic. What is Geert suggestion exactly ? Seems like a nice guy to have a beer with but he says a lot but doesn't tell us much.

Such a great interview! Geert was so fun, funny and passionate. I found myself agreeing out loud 😂 Thanks John!

I didn't know about Geert, but I'm a fan now! I'm sure he gets a lot of hate for "airing out the dirty laundry". Thank you for this insightful interview. :)

Crazy he got an interview with our king

bro havent seen jakarta XD

Very entertaining. Long live The Commons.

Thanks to this I found Geert's yt channel! Brilliant videos that need more views for sure.

I personally count the invention of the personal motor car one of many bad inventions that really messed up communities and populations world wide. I see in my own small country of Ireland totally messed up that will take decades and billions to rectify if it ever does. We had a super rail network when we gained independence that we simply ripped up and sold after the brits went home. We are simply swamped with personal cars. The drivers simply refuse to get out of them. Our country is same size as the Netherlands. So I feel Holland took the right measures in saying no to the personal car. We have to say the same but our population wont.
Getting back to the video. The simple answer to this is get the trucks in earlier or during the night. The truck drivers do not want to be in the middle of conflict and I see some shop deliveries here in this country adopting this in Ireland here for much the same reasons, that once school time arrives all our towns and cities are grid locked with personal cars.
I go for my long cycle to work at these times and I meet the delivery trucks in early hours and they have no problem. The shops stack their shelves during the night and all works out. We have very few shop deliveries during normal hours as the poor guys would not get home.
None of our cities and towns either here or in the EU or over there with you in US bar a few were made to accommodate the personal car. No matter what way you do the math's it is totally not pheasable world wide for ever one to have a car but the public out there have not got the message.
All these fancy discussions that you have here and other places move around this topic and kid yourselves that there is room for us all in this wonderful world but sorry guys there is not.
I see it here in this country. Our government will give the impression of promoting a car less society but at the back of it all. It would miss all the revenue it would loose if everyone got rid or their car either via road tax or the tax on the fuel.
I am one for getting rid of motor transport as we need the trucks and vans to deliver our stuff. But I am against where every personal trip to a shop or work or anywhere should be conducted in a car be it internal combustion or electric. This is a big nettle that no one wants to address.
If most of the car went no country would need special lanes for cyclists as we would naturally be part of the landscape. But we are not and everyone that gets in a car expects to get to their destination before me on my bike. They resent me cycling through their gaps and getting there before them. Everyone needs to stop driving their personal car NOW.

I never felt the NL were perfect, but they are So Many orders of magnitudes better.

Mixing modes and intersecting is really problematic. I think we need to admit that cars aren't sustainable, they cannot be made perpetually under zero carbon, which is what we MUST achieve. I guess I'd ask Geert if we stopped, took a deep breath and understood that mass transit and micromobility are the only sustainable modes to pair together under zero carbon, why are we continuing to design for cars as the primary mode? Am I crazy to think that we won't be making new cars under zero carbon? No, not at all. EVs require 20-40 tons of CO2e emissions to create, and they are not fully circular, just like plastic recycling is not fully circular. We need to be honest, where companies refuse to be, and state quite clearly that under zero carbon there isn't a viable formula to produce and operate full sized motor vehicles. This isn't about preferences. This is comparable to post WW2 and the fact that there weren't resources to build and use full sized cars in Germany, in UK and in Japan among other devastated places. That is why we had microcars and rode bicycles. Honda, Suzuki became motor companies by way of what today would be e-bikes.

Anyway, I think we can learn how to build the Dutch way, EXCEPT that it so far has been based around urban cycling and supporting cars too. But that's not what we need. We can and should morph streets and roads to advisory roads ASAP and being to support the e-bike and other micromobility as critical climate solutions, instead of pretending it will always be a minority mode.

Sadly, in Berlin a lot of the change was reversed, when the Conservatives got back at the helm. Same old story.

We have 'ongeluk' vs 'aanrijding/botsing' ('accident' vs ', 'hit/collision') but the latter only applies to a collision between a motorized vehicle and another person (be it a pedestrian or another driver). The generic term for a preventable "accident" involving a motorized vehicle in Dutch is a loanword from English: "crash", which in turn may be a loanword from Dutch; 'kras' (scratch).

About looking a crash data for (deadly) hotspots: I think, this worked well, when people were "dying like the flies" in the 1970s, but with the situation today we are only "measuring" a combination of traffic volumes and randomness. As the phrase goes "Once is by chance. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a pattern." …yeah, good luck finding a spot, where three cyclists have died.

Why are corporate lobbyist allowed to have influence in politics? Politicians shouldn't be lending an ear to hear what they have to say. Those 2000 VW lobbyist in Brussels should be completely ignored.

THERE TO MUCH CAR ,IN THE NETHERLANDS !!!!!

You can always say things can be better. Im annoyed at Geert doing like its all a mees and the safe infrastructure is not safe. cyclists in Am,sterdam cam be very rude. but tearing down the safest cycle network of the world is so stupid when you only look to Amsterdam. So Geert shut your mouth and dont tear down a safe NATIONAL vycling network. Im sick of Dutch people always complaining and tearing down the blessings that we have and not apreciating our efforts!