Back to Two-Wheeled Tranquility in Nijmegen, Netherlands
With a flight home out of Amsterdam, it would have been rude not to spend the last couple of days in the Netherlands, and after a few weeks in cities that still have a way to go in terms of bicycle infrastructure, it was so good to once again enjoy the ease of getting around the Netherlands by bicycle…
That being said, this blog post isn’t really all that much about the infrastructure; it’s just enjoying a city, that like most in the Netherlands is easy to get around by bike, and taking a few photos along the way. We toyed with the idea of just going back to Utrecht for a few days, but decided we should see something different this time.
We’d last travelled through Nijmegen on the Fietspad trip back in 2022, but on that occasion, rode from the train station straight out of the city towards Arnhem. Being one of the oldest cities in the Netherlands, we figured it was worth giving Nijmegen a longer visit... We flew into Amsterdam from Vienna, and if it matters, a reminder that this trip was in October 2024, it’s just taken a while to get this final blog post out…
The train ride from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport was about 90 minutes, and from the station, we had a 20 minute walk to our hotel, passing these stairs with multiple bike ramps down to the underground bike parking at Nijmegen Train Station…
We just walked around town a little that first evening, enjoying the largely traffic free centre. I didn’t take many photos, but there will be more from the centre later… Here is the traffic controlled entrance to the pedestrian zone that encompasses many streets…
Crossing Bridges
Day two would see us utilize the free bikes the hotel provided to explore around town… First weaving our way back and forth across the many bridges… This is the Waalbrug over the Waal River, which opened in June 1936, replacing a ferry as the only way to switch sides. Today there’s a few more options…
This next bridge is interesting… The Lent Loper Bridge, constructed in 2016 for a budget of €10.8 million, has a section for cars on top, that we biked across, but these people below are biking on the lower section so I’m not sure what is correct for bicycles…
I missed this entirely at the time, but there are little walkways from side to side for pedestrians between the lower walkways on each side that allow you to view the underside of the car deck from, but are apparently structural too. The problem of just taking things as they come, is that you sometime miss neat things… I really should have investigated this further, but there are some more photos here from the designers… It’s an interesting and somewhat elaborate configuration for a bridge to a little island, but I’d say pretty good value given the aesthetics… A bit of a tourist attraction in its own right…
The Lent Loper takes us to the little island or peninsula of sorts, known as Veur-Lent that sees the Wall River pass by on one side with an inlet from the river on the other side. Not far from the bridge above stands the Face of Nijmegen, a recreation of the Nijmegen Helmet, a Roman cavalry sports helmet from the first or second century AD, and found around 1915 in a gravel bed on the left bank of the Waal river. The island/peninsula is about as wide as what you can see below so we followed the fietspad for a bit that runs along the centre…
A slightly less comfortable exit from the island/peninsula was via the Zaligebrug with its bumpy precast concrete bridge deck… Don’t get me wrong, any bridge is better than no bridge, but I’m curious about the choice of surface treatment here... I don’t imagine it’s great for anyone…
Beyond the bridge above, we’d join a bicycle street running around the edge of a new neighbourhood…
This new Woonerf could use a few more chicanes…
A traffic free connection between neighbourhoods with separate bike path and sidewalk at a slightly different grades and street lighting…
Taking your other bike for a ride… A somewhat common thing in The Netherlands…
A family easily navigating a Dutch roundabout and various bicycle wayfinding signs… Regular bicycle signs… Fast cycle route signs… Node network signs… Lots of options…
A bridge over a multi-lane road rather than river this time… One you could argue it would be less effort for people on bicycles if they’d just stopped traffic and let us cross the road at-grade but there’s a pretty major intersection behind me, and even in the Netherlands, they prioritize traffic flow at times…
We worked our way back to the centre of Nijmegen via the Oversteek Bridge… Interestingly, this bridge was proposed to reduce congestion on the Waalbrug, the one we first crossed that lies 2 km to the east… This raises a question about the balance between inducing demand and providing appropriate capacity for the population? Presumably the city already has a pretty good cycling mode share… So do you accept you’ve done enough, or do you continue to use congestion as a tool to constrain further traffic growth? At what point do you consider some form of congestion pricing? Could it just have been another bicycle bridge? A few quick bridge facts… It is the longest single-arch bridge in Europe and cost an estimated €260 million and opened on 23 November 2013…
The space under the Oversteek Bridge is home to an outdoor gym in one part, and this pump track near the riverbank. The old industrial area to the west is being repurposed for various things today, from restaurants, to coffee shops, a brewery and creative spaces to name a few uses…
Rex is one of those new uses and our lunch spot that day… Industrial on the outside… Quite fancy on the inside…
Working our way back along the water… Taking note for future photo exhibitions… Cool to see window space used for things like this… De Gelderlander is a Dutch daily newspaper focused on Gelderland and immediate surroundings.
Gelderland is the province Nijmegen lies within, and is located in the centre-east of the country. The capital of Gelderland is Arnhem (pop. 159,265); however, Nijmegen (pop. 176,731) and Apeldoorn (pop. 162,445) are both larger municipalities. Gelderland had a total population of about 2,134,000 in January 2023, and contains the Netherlands's largest forest region, the Veluwe…
Between the Waalbrug and the Oversteek bridges, lies the railway bridge that had a walkway and bike path added in 2004 known as the Snelbinder, providing a third option today (but second at the time) for people to cross the river on foot, by bicycle or other forms of micromobility… This was the bridge we took straight out of Nijmegen in 2022… It’s quite the structural add-on and cost around €40 million…
Back in the Centre
We follow the riverfront for a bit… But even in the Netherlands… We can’t escape the curse of the Dodge Ram jutting out into our advisory bike lane… It’s probably worth noting that over the course of our last few trips to the Netherlands, that I notice an increasing number of big trucks like this… I wonder if they’re taxed more… And if not, if that’s coming…
We made it safely around the Dodge Ram… Worked our way up a big hill (for the Netherlands) and back into the centre with its wide largely pedestrianized streets…
Walking around the centre, we see this somewhat new pedestrian street built largely as one development, it seems... You could call it an outdoor mall, I guess… The umbrellas overhead, I assume, are part of the Umbrella Sky Project, an initiative started in Portugal, to enliven streets, encourage people to visit, photograph them, share them on social media, and of course support the local businesses while they do that… Or is at least riffing off of that concept…
Getting closer to the old centre, a taxi made it in… So much outdoor patio space… Is it wise use of public space? Is vibrancy in the city centre more important than a sidewalk? When the street is largely available for pedestrians, not a big issue… Hopefully, the businesses are paying a little more tax for the privilege of using that public space…
Taking in what I think is the oldest street in Nijmegen, Lange Hezelstraat… which is on quite a slope from the centre down to its end. Not immediately obvious from this photo below left is the drainage channel in the centre that creates a sort of cascading waterfall effect when it rains which is kind neat… Luckily it rained quite a bit the next day in the photo below right…
There’s not much more to say here except express again the need for more small pedestrian friendly streets in North America with small stores, cafes, and whatnot to bring people to them… Couldn’t say for sure, but this street must be ~5m between the catch basins with say ~4m either side often utilized by patios... Next design guide anyone reading this creates in North America… Think about adding a street option with an approximately 13m right-of-way, no setbacks, a flex zone out front, time restricted vehicle servicing, and see what happens… It’ll probably win an award or two…
There is of course underground bike parking in the centre like many (if not most) cities in the Netherlands… 799 spaces available at this one… I didn’t investigate, but I wonder if it works like the system in Utrecht with the double bar code system…
Exploring the Forests
The next day we headed south of the city and explored some of the forest areas, enjoying many paved trails through the forest, as well as a couple of single-track trails that would have been more appropriate for a mountain bike than our city bikes equipped with only back-pedal brakes… There were a few hills in those forests…
Bit of gravel biking too…
In my happy place riding bikes in the Netherlands… Although this bike looks smaller than I remember it feeling while riding… Maybe one of many rental bike related reasons I came home with a bad back… The Brompton’s will be back in for the next trip…
Home Time
The next day, we were up just as the sun was also coming up… And we made the short walk back to the train station while people went about their morning commute…
We took the direct train back to the airport… The ease with which you can get around this country without a car still amazes me, although to be fair to the other cities we visited, we managed almost exclusively without car the whole trip whether using buses, trams, coaches, trains, electric scooters, rental bikes, and the occasional taxi…
That’s it for this trip… I’m not sure exactly what’s to come in 2025, but there will be plenty more bicycle infrastructure related blogs in the weeks and months to come… Reminder that if you’d like notifications in your inbox when those are posted, sign up for my newsletter using the link in the footer…