discussion. council general, thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you very much, mr. mayor. it's indeed to -- exciting to be here as council general of san francisco in this beautiful city, especially on a day like today. it's really great. you've been in amsterdam. in 1969 i learned and have reason for you to come back to that beautiful city soon. i'd love to work with you on a relationship between amsterdam and san francisco because there's so much in common between the two cities. and a lot of things that san francisco can learn from san francisco and the other way around. and my hope for these two days is that we will have something out of it as well and i'm sure

we will have something out of it as well. and you probably will not remember amsterdam in the 1960's and the 1970's. i'm old enough to remember amsterdam in the 1970's and it was all different at that time. there was a lot of congestion, a lot of cars in town and it changed. it changed by changing the culture, changing policy and implementation of policies with hard work and i think hillie talens will show some figures and numbers about the travel that we did in the nether land as well. and about the economic benefits that investing in bicycle infrastructure gives to us. if people from here -- they just did a great city -- study about additional investments in the nether land.

100 million bike paths and they discovered that within one year, the benefits would be higher than at 100 million. if you look to how -- if you look to mobility. if you look to product -- productivity and all those kinds of things. the good news from the netherlands is that you'll find the biggest supporters of good bike infrastructure among retailers. they know what good customers bicyclists are. and -- when we started discussions about this think bike workshop. we did this in other cities in the u.s. and we will be in that other big california city, los angeles, in a few other days. thursday, and -- thursday and friday. and i was convinced quite

easily about the use to have these kind of work shops in l.a. but i thought san francisco, there's so much going on already. we had leah and for almost nine months in amsterdam and chairman david chiu and others for a week. and there is such great organization here and there are so many ideas. there are so many professional little here already about bike infrastructure and the future of biking. but it will come down to implementation and it's perhaps a bit like riding the wiggle. you have to push hard and hopefully we might be a sort of additional support, a sort of small electricity motor for you to push your -- up that hill.

and it will come down to implementation and leadership and it's great to have a sort of down to earth approach during these two days. working in teams on i think three important places in town. market, mid market. there's a lot going on. last week we had people from one of the biggest and the greatest argument tech yurl firms in the world, the colehouse firm here in san francisco. they talked with people from twitter and people in the city about mid market developments and good infrastructure for bikes and tradition is a part of it. i'm so hope that polk street is in it as well. it's my daily commute. i hope that in the next two years that i have the honor to

be here as well to get some profit off this workshop as well. the third one with wiggle i think is a quite interesting one. we don't have a wiggle in the netherlands. we don't need a wiggle in the netherlands. but i -- i thought what an interesting word that is, wiggle. where does it come from? is it a san francisco-invented word? so i looked it up yesterday in the oxford dictionary. to my surprise i found the origin of the word "wiggle" is in dutch. sorry about that. it's to wiggle. to move to left to right. that's something we do in the netherlands. in politics as well. and even i find out that the name beggler, somebody who

wiggles, is a common name in the netherlands and in the dutch translation of harry potter, the lady who writes all the booklets for the school in the harry potter school is madam wiggli. i thought it might be good to contact her to get some additional support for this workshop and then i find there's no need for it because we have tall resources here. you could look at the dutch team and all the professionals here in san francisco to work on the three projects in the next few days, and as you, mr. mayor, i'm looking forward to the results. it's an honor for me to introduce to you hillie talens, who is a great professional in the netherlands about biking, biking infrastructure, the

safety of biking. a lot of experience. i would like to give you the floor. hillie! [applause]

>> ok, good morning. thank you for the introduction and -- i'll be leading this think bike workshop and for all of you to get an understanding of cycling in the nether land i've prepared a presentation for you all and then we work things out in detail in the three groups i'll introduce to you later. cycling in the nether land, that's what this is all about and i'm not here to you -- we netherlands you need to do in the u.s. and in san francisco specific, but just pick out the things that are useful for you and translate them into u.s. opportunities in san francisco, new opportunities. it's not my task to say you must do it like we do in the netherlands. i'll just show you what we do in the netherlands.

and about myself, my name is hillie talens, as you were already told. i work for krowell, which is an n.g.o. and not for profit company, and i work as a bicycle ambassador for the dutch cycling council. on this slide you can see are my hobbies. my greatest passion are turtles. i've checked them since i was a little girl and i can be very philosophic about it but that is for lunch break. and another hobby of mine is traveling and that comes together with my profession very well because now i'm here and i live in the netherlands. how far can you travel? making pictures, photographer is -- photography is another

way of fend spending my free time and in my slides you will see some results of that hobby and combine that with traveling all over the world, you have nice chances for making pictures. and the last one, finally when i get home, my garden is the last passion. i grow my own vegetables and like to make dinner and enjoy that with friends and family. and as you notice, cycling is not part of my hobbies. cycling is not a hobby of mine. it's just a transportation mold just like the others. you can see here my car. it's a volvo 480. that's the classic. and the bicycle is one of the three i own so i'm pretty average dutch. i have a nice one. this one for holidays, for recreational regions. i got a campy old one that's very noisy i use for commute

ing and i have a nice one which i use when i'm in town, go shopping or go see friends or elsewhere. so i have three bicycles and i use them in different ways. for commuting and business travels i always use train, public transport. that's the easiest way to get from a city center to another city center and when i really want to have fun i take my motorbike. that's the nice green vehicle on the bottom of the slide. my presentation. i'll start with some facts and figures, then the benefits for the society, the dutch dutch. how we do it in the netherlands and then i go deeper into bicycle infrastructure. that's the main reason for this workshop and also the main argument for using bicycle or not using bicycle. i go briefly into enforcement in education and i come up with some conclusions. bike ownership in the

netherlands and other european countries. i don't have the u.s. figures here. i have to go to my notes. but you can see the netherlands is top in europe as it comes tobacco ownership. we have more -- to bicycle ownership. we have more bicycles than people. so you can imagine how many bikes there are. you can find them on every street, every street corner. denmark is very good. second. and then you see it all the way down to spain. oops, now i see a mistake in my slide. uh, where -- if you compare the netherlands with other cities, we have 27% bike share. so this is the use. we own many bikes but we use them a lot as well. we use -- 27% of our trims are made by bicycle, average in the

netherlands. denmark, 18%, germany, 10%. and in the u.s., average in your country is 1%. the latest figures i've got. and as i've told you it's the average, 27%. but if you have a closer look and you look at short-distance trips then it's 34% on the bike and 15% of trims up to 10 miles we also use the bicycle. still a great share. and we have two cities that are top of our bike use. the city of gronig and the city of shola. over 50 october of of all trips daily made by bike. and for regional use of the bicycle. got some figures compared to a car. then you can see that

schoolchildren use the bicycle very frequently for education. and still businessmen use the car a lot. and social recreational reasons. a reason for using the bike and shopping. we like to go shopping on our bikes. come to that later. and when it comes to gender. who's using the bicycle. i'm told that the netherlands is very typical on this. we have more women on bikes then -- than men. and the most intense users are girls from the age of 12 to 18 and that's easy to explain because i once was a girl of that age and to me, mabika was my ticket to freedom. i didn't want my mom and dad bringing me by car somewhere and then say well, i'll pick you up at 6:00.

i go on my bike and i'll try to make it at 6:00. most of the time i was there. 6:30. and then later you can see at all ages, women still use the bicycle more than then -- men, in their 30's to 50's. and how far do they go? still, the girls are top of this list and they use the bicycle for seven kilometers per day. and then you can see that it goes down fast but still, oh, here men are cycling further. so the men that are using the bicycles cycle further than the women and that is explained by the fact that women mostly work near their homes and men commute over a longer distance. we did a survey on emotion that

people felt when they were traveling -- were driving the streets or riding and we asked them what feelings do you have. how do you feel? and then cyclists mostly answered i feel joy. and they hardly felt fear or anger or sadness or even aversion and if you compare that with transport then that's not so joyful and people don't like it so much and it made them even angry. and for the car you can see that the people are more afraid in cars and more angry in cars than on the bicycle. that's a nice conclusion from this result i wanted to share with you. so cycling is joy. that's what i heard more people say. mr. rice kin also mentioned --

reiskin also mentioned psych sling joy. do we feel happy we arrived home in one piece or is it just fun and safe together? the figures show that the netherlands, cycling in the netherlands is the safest transport mode in europe. if you compare to it, for example, italy, which is very dangerous for cyclists. we do fairly well. the explanation is, to my opinion, in the fact that we call safety by numbers. the more you get, the safer it is. and i'll show you the next slide to prove that. this is the bike share in the u. where the netherlands is extreme left and the u.k. is extreme right. and third is italy, for example. denmark is second next to the netherlands. if you compare that with safety numbers, you see that in the netherlands, where we cycle a

lot, not too many people on bikes got killed and it's just the other way around in it italy and the u.k. where people do not cycle but get killed if they cycle. and somebody can come up with the arguments that we have a lot of good bicycle infrastructure in the netherlands. that's true, but in england they are building a lot of bicycle infrastructure as well, but they do not get the people on the bikes, so for them that go it's still very dangerous. it's not only infrastructure, it's mindset, it's safety in numbers. all the contractors have to be aware that there are bicycliststs in the street as well. so if you have a lot of bicyclists in the street, all the car drivers see it all the time so they learn to negotiate wilt. was it always like this in the netherlands? it was in the early 1920's.

this is not a picture of mine. i didn't make it. then we had the second world war and people from the u.s. came and they freed us from the enemy, but you also brought cars with you. so in the 1950's, the bicycle use dropped dramatically and the danger increased a lot. and was not only you with your cars but also civilization. that's what we did ourselves. then the bicycle was considered old-fashioned and our transport policy was based on bike use -- car use, excuse me. we had a left wing politicians saying i want every worker to own his own car because the car is the motor of our economy.

that went on until the 1970's, as you can see, but in 1975 we had a dramental year. we had a lot of fatalities in traffic. we had the oil crisis and people got away from the environment. the air was very polluted. the main industrial area of the netherlands, we always had warnings orange, which means close all the window, stop breathing. because it's very polluted. for many of us, i can say us because i was there at the time, by the time. it was time for a change. people like tony boss, they started to organize the cyclists union and to establish the cyclist union, we called the national safety plan, road safety plan. and we started to introduce --

gradually, bike use went up and the danger and the fatalities decreased but not enough, so after a while we introduced the bicycle master plan, the ministry of transport introduced the national bicycle master plan to make all the local politicians and local engineers aware of the need for better infrastructure and more attention to the bicycle. that helped for a while but after 10 years, the bicycle plan was -- master plan was completed and the attention for the bicycle in-- decreased again so time for a new approach and then they introduced the bicycle council. it was a group of people, experts from all sorts of organizations, both

governmental and nongovernmental, and they put together the forces to implement more information, more things to do, improve bicycle facilities and bicycle policies and the bicycle council is not working for 10 years. we celebrate our 10-year anniversary next month. and what will come up next, we don't know but we're still not at the bike use level of the 1950's, so also we can improve. and in the netherlands, i also have to explain the benefits of cycling. sustainability, accessibility, health, livability and economics. and what do i tell about it? well, for sustainability, cycling is emission-free, uses hardly any oil, only to produce

the bike and to have your chain go well. it reduces the global footprint for the person. we all have our global foot print, what we use from this earth, and the footprint of the country and it alleviates global warming. what can be more sustaining except for walk something accessabilities? as mentioned before, we mentioned all the dutch people that are now on the bicycle in the car and who have a city that doesn't move anymore. it's congested for 24 hours. but there's more. the infrom structure use is more -- infrastructure use is more efficient. parking space is not so expensive when you park a car. you can park where you park a bike and you can park eight bicycles in the space of one car. when it comes to health, in--

it increases the life expectancy. you can live longer, three years longer when you cycle every day to work, to school, to shops when you use the bicycle more often and that longer life is spent in better health. it makes you live in better health for more than 10 years. and it also reduces the diseases like obeesty and the heart diseases, the most obvious ones and what struck me is alzheimer's disease that comes later or doesn't come when you cycle a lot. it keeps your brain fresh and going, i guess. and what also is very important that work absenteism is reduced for people that use the bike more often. as it comes to lifestyle, of course we also have lifestyle.

cycling in the netherlands is not so much a lifestyle as it is here in the u.s. but cycling offers more joy and happiness, less traffic noise, cleaner air and better social integration. yesterday during the bike ride i noticed that the americans, the san franciscans who cycled with us, they met a lot of fans. they were constantly waving and saying hi, hello, and how are you? and in a car, well, with the speed you're going, it's difficult to recognize who you're approaching and to say hi, the car is on the next block. on the bicycle you can see each other, wave, call each other in the evening saying well, what were you doing at the wiggle? economic benefits -- well, all these benefits i mentioned are also to be translated into economical benefits. as was mentioned, for the

shopkeepers, the psychists are very good. at -- cyclists are very good. at first they don't didn't know because they see the huge trolleys with lots of growsies getting into the supermarkets with lots of cars. with you -- but surveys showed that car customers just come once a beak and bicyclists come every day and every day they spend $20. if they come six days that's $120. and the family trolley, that huge car is worth $80. so cyclists are good for shopkeepers and we are getting in a system of awareness now that shopkeepers do welcome bikers more than -- better than car users. so what makes the dutch people cycle? it's the flexibility of the system, the convenience.

it's right in front door and you can cycle to the front door of your destination. it is perceived safe. we all feel safe in the streets. as you saw we feel joy with no fear. it's cheap if for us dutch that's very porn. we got health benefits. we feel more healthy. it's the fastest way around in town and it's easy to combine with other modes of transport. as i explained i've gotten a old bike for my commuting trips and most of the people also have a bike on the other end of the trip to go to the office. well, who's on a bicycle? what is a cyclist? what does he need? to make good infrastructure you have to keep in mind that a cyclist is a vehicle with muscle power so you have to move yourself. it is a balanced vehicle, so you have to get on with people at a certain speed to cycle

safely. cyclists have helmets on so in case of an accident it's just the person that gets hit and no crumple zones of air bags, etc. our bikes have hardly if any suspension. but if you go on a bumpy road you still feel it in all your arms, legs and in your whole body. it's open air so in wind and rainy conditions, as you can have in the netherlands and as they say you have here but i haven't experienced, you have to keep in mind that people need shelter or protection against wind. it's a social activity so people meet each other, can talk to each other, can negotiate priorities and after all, they're humans. so what do we do with this information? we have a cycle speed. a designed speed of our infrastructure of 20 miles to

25 -- 12 miles to 25 miles per hour. but we also have to keep to the official speed limits, so the very fast going like the one in the bright colored banana bike has to slow down in residential areas, home zones and other zones. but the insfra structure or the facilities needs to be for that -- need to be comfortable for the elderlyle lady as well. so -- ederly lady as well. so this is what it's all about. good infrastructure you get more cyclists and this picture is what we mean by a royal cycle road. so here the biker is a king.