Amsterdam it Ain’t!
So. Yesterday, Amsterdamize put up some charts about the Dutch population’s ways of getting around. Great stuff, showing how far people travel, and what mode of transport they use depending on journey length, and how far people cycle.
As an engineer, I like numbers, so I thought it would be fun to compare our part of the world with Amsterdam. A little digging on Gooooogle yielded two reports - one on commuting distances in Tyne & Wear - 2008, and another from 2001 showing the different transport modes’ distributions in the Tyne & Wear. Here’s the sort of thing presented in the 2008 report, and there were numbers to accompany this too:
While the 2001 report was slightly less user friendly:
I’ve mashed the two of these together, and converted some of the data from Amsterdamize, so that I can compare like-with-like(ish).
And in Tyneside, we don’t live that far from work as a rule:
This is kinda alarming, isn’t it? Although for all commuting journeys the proportion who drive is roughly the same, look at the difference in cycling. Moreover, for Amsterdam journeys of less than 10km, around half are by bike. That accounts for 95% of all bike commuting journeys, so they’re obviously not being dogmatic about their bikes - just practical. If your commute is more than 10km (six and a bit miles), maybe the car, train or bus does make more sense.
What this says to me is that in Tyne & Wear, we need to do more.
People say that the weather here isn’t conducive to cycling. Actually, it is - we’re in the rain shadow of the Pennines, and it’s no-where near as cold here as Amsterdam in the winter (they have a somewhat continental climate, so despite the more southerly latitude, winters can be colder for longer). People also say that Amsterdam has the advantage of being flat (interesting flat, not Noël Coward talking about Norfolk flat). But come on - once you get up from the riverside itself, most of Newcastle, and the towns along the Tyne are on a plateau that’s not far off pancake-level. Trust me - I grew up in North Kent, so I know about cycling up hills (not big, but eye-wateringly steep).
It’s no wonder that only 1% of people cycle to work here, compared with 39% in Amsterdam. Gateshead actually boasts of having “over 20km of cycle lanes” (compared with 927km of roads), while North Tyneside’s flagship Waggonways are lovely places to ride with the kids at the weekend, but frankly for most commuting journeys, just a road to no-where.
We need to focus on making taking the bike to work the default mode of transport for the 67% of us who live within 10km of work. To do that will need our local councils to start showing some leadership. They’ve looked at what people in the UK tend to use their bikes for (a grown-up’s toy for use in leisure time), and tended to create infrastructure that serves those needs. If they’re serious about reducing car use and their carbon footprints’, then it’s time they treated cycling as more than a weekend thing, annexed off to non-core parts of their budgets, and put firmly into their transport infrastructure strategies.
Karl, that’s awesome! Great work, very very insightful. However, you need to change ‘Amsterdam’ in the chart to ‘The Netherlands’ as the stats are for the entire nation. Still, you can create an extra Transport Method chart for Amsterdam with these numbers:
- Car: 28%
- Bicycle: 39%
- Public Transportation: 23%
- Walking: 8%
- Other: 2%
Cheers!
I was going to say that I thought the 60% car number for Amsterdam seemed WAY OUT of whack… Marc’s numbers sound more logical…
Of course, in Seattle, sadly, the numbers are probably 95% car, 4.5% public, 0.45% Bicycle, 0.05% Walking…. just my guess.
Updated - thanks for the pointer (I’d looked at the original page you’d referenced, but my Dutch isn’t quite up to that!)
Don’t mention it, love your work! With your permission, I’m going to update my end of this post with your graphs…now even thinking about creating some sort of grand overview of countries/major cities. Another little project, sigh
Granted (& cool!) - everything of mine on Flickr is Creative Commons Attribution licensed so take what you need.
Excellent work, Karl. That journeys-by-car similarity really jumps out. Amazing.
And maybe I’ll work some of this in to rather fabulous book you link to.
I don’t even want to think what Kentucky’s numbers would look like. Even in Lexington, which is a college dominated town, there are less than a few percent that would commute to work…. sadly, I’ve given in and mostly don’t commute anymore.
Karl, what tool did you use to gen these charts! They are beautiful!
[...] Update: Karl posted “Amsterdam it Ain’t“, taking this Dutch national data and simplifying traffic data of where he lives (Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK) to visualize a good comparison (including the statistics for Amsterdam that I gave him), resulting in this very clear picture: [...]
My charts were done in Numbers - Apple’s spreadsheet. It does a really nice job of the rendering, but it’s a shame I can’t figure out how to get it to display percentages on the vertical axis of the barchart though! Numbers looks really pretty, but for serious number crunching, I still use Excel.
you can do that, or just use Keynote, it has some great graph capabilities.
An excellent post with good stats.
I think it is quite simple. What it comes down to and that is subjective safety on the streets. If people feel danger when cycling, they won’t cycle. It makes efforts to encourage cycling simply not work.
Over here (I live in Assen in the Netherlands), there is a decent budget for providing good quality cycling infrastructure, and the result is that cycle journeys are free of stress.
David, I bet you have some relevant statistics for Groningen en Assen, maybe put those in to? Groningen puts Amsterdam to shame