Lessons from the Dutch: Fietspad Exhibition at Habit Coffee in Victoria, BC

If you find yourself in Victoria, BC before June 30, 2024, head over to Habit Coffee on Pandora Avenue to check out my first Fietspad exhibition. Cost of entry… buy some of their great coffee and locally sourced snacks to support this shop doing a great service to the community in hosting such events by local artists… and engineers…

In planning this, I tried to use this opportunity to not only share some photos from my book Fietspad, but also to tell a bit of a story about what it’s like riding bicycles in the Netherlands, introduce those that might not be familiar to some of the experiences you might have there, and the design techniques they use. Hopefully it’s interesting, hopefully it inspires those that attend. The only place to see the exhibition is in person, there’s ten boards there speaking to some of the things I found from the Fietspad trip…

I also want to thank my employer ISL Engineering and Land Services who helped with setup and printing costs. Active Transportation is a big part of what we do at ISL, and what I do in particular. That includes many of the recent bicycle projects in Victoria, as well as others throughout BC and Western Canada. Reach out if you’re interested in working with us.

My hope is, that through the Fietspad book, subsequent Dutch trips, and blog posts, as well as ongoing projects and work with industry associations, we can further improve our active transportation guidelines and infrastructure in Canada, learning from the Dutch, and adapting some of their techniques for the Canadian context. The more these ideas are shared, the more normal they become, and the easier they’ll be to pursue, hopefully this exhibition contributes to that in some small way…

Many thanks again to Shane, the owner of Habit Coffee for Hosting! Hope you can make it to the exhibition before the end of June. There’s one copy of Fietspad left on the shelves, plus a couple of Curbing Traffic, and many other interesting books… Fietspad is of course available online at the links above…

Finally, I couldn’t not take a few photos of the bike lanes making my way to and from the shop to setup… Protected bike lanes, people riding bicycles and scooters and driveway conflicts…