Category: Amsterdam

Netherlands, day 1 (day 10 of the trip)

June 12, 2023 / / 0 Comments

I arrived to Rotterdam via ferry over the English Channel from Harwich, England, on Wednesday evening (day 9). This part of the travelogue is about day 10. Read other posts from this trip.

Day 10

Thursday, May 11, 2023 – 289 photos taken – find more on Flickr

  • I woke up to have breakfast with my friends, who I was staying with. They were going to their offices in Amsterdam, but rather than travel with them I decided to get ready a bit slower and meet them in the evening for dinner.
  • I left their house at around 10 AM and started cycling, on the OV-fiets shared bicycle, owned by NS, the Dutch national railway company, that I picked up the day before. My destination was Rotterdam Centraal station so I could return the bike and hop on an Intercity Direct high-speed train to Amsterdam (the train runs high-speed between Rotterdam Centraal and Amsterdam Schiphol airport). But I was distracted by the planes landing at the Rotterdam-The Hague (RTM) airport, which is five minutes from my friends’ house.
  • At this point I realized I didn’t really need to be anywhere soon, so I kept cycling. My friend D. had already pointed out a place to spot trains on the “HSL” (high-speed line) so I headed there, which is about 10 minutes north of their house, in between Rotterdam and a suburb called Rodenrijs. Dutch land use is quite compact. The built-up area ends with a hard line and then there’s either agricultural land or nature preserves. The area between their neighborhood and this suburb had a bit of both. From this location I spotted Thalys, Eurostar, and NS’s Intercity Direct trains in both directions.
  • Having enough of this I cycled back to the house to recharge my phone (I had already used half of the battery recording so many photos and videos in two hours). Only then did I cycle 18 minutes to the station and board the next ICD train. ICDs depart every 15 minutes, so I didn’t bother to target a timed departure. I also like to get an “American cookie” at Kiosk, a $5 cold cuts sandwich, and drinkable yogurt.
  • On the train I spotted my trainspotting spot (view it on a map).
Planespotting at RTM
Entering the pasture on a rebuilt cycle path that doubles as a farm and railway access
An Intercity Direct train towards Amsterdam
Snacks for the road
Where I was trainspotting just an hour ago
  • At Schiphol airport station I changed trains to a Sprinter to Amsterdam Zuid (south) station, where I changed to the Amsterdam Metro so I could disembark at Jan Van Galenstraat station. Why? That’s the nearest station to where the bike I own lives. (It lives at another friend’s flat, who lend it to their visiting friends occasionally.)
  • Schiphol airport is a notable station: it has six platforms and trains to everywhere in the country, plus Thalys trains to Brussels and Paris stop here. My friend will sometimes take the train from Rotterdam, disembark here, and bike the rest of the way to his Amsterdam office to ensure he gets enough cycling in that day.
  • I unlocked my bike (which my friend had set out for me the day before) and rode it northeast towards the city center. My destination was the Allard Pierson Museum because I wanted to see their “Maps Unfolded” exhibit. The exhibit displayed maps created by Dutch people and over the last 400 years, showing the Netherlands, places colonized by the Dutch, and maps of the world made by Dutchies.
  • As usual, I missed a turn or two but serendipitously encountered a recent major streetscape change (basically a project that converted asphalt and space for cars to space for people and more landscaping – read about the changes at Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal on Bicycle Dutch).
  • The upper floors of the Allard Pierson Museum gave me great views of the Rokin canal, the shops that front it, the cyclists that ride it, the tourists and Amsterdammers that lunch on the water’s edge, and the tour boats that slowly motor along.
An older Sprinter train
Green transportation city
Sometimes you have to wait for a boat to pass, just like in Chicago
My Giant bicycle (did you know that Giant makes Dutch-style bikes?)
A tram passes through Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal
A disturbing map that shows the inundation areas if sea level rises 1 meter.
An Amsterdam tram travels on Rokin (streets next to canals are named after the canal, and the canal is basically the centerline of the street, with odd number houses on one side and even number houses on the other side).
  • After the museum I checked out the new underwater bike parking garage. Read that again. The Dutch have built an underwater. bike. parking. garage. Watch this 1-minute time lapse video that shows how it was built. A canal area in front of Amsterdam Centraal station was dammed and emptied of water. The garage was built, with a watertight roof and vertical circulation and the water was replaced.
  • This bike parking garage has 7,000 spaces, on double decker racks that use pistons to assist bicyclists in lifting the upper racks up and down. Again, Mark W. has demonstrated this over and over again on his blog. Each of the numbered aisles indicates about how many spaces are free.
  • The garage replaces two other garages on the south side of the station, and is part of a long-term project to “clean up” the areas around the station. (The project includes enlarging waiting areas for the tram platforms, reducing lanes for cars, preventing vehicles that aren’t taxis and mobility transit from getting close to the station entrance, and decluttering bikes.)
  • Everyone who uses the garage must check in their bike using their OV-chipkaart (public transport smart card) or a contactless bank card or smartphone wallet. This way the garage automatically tracks that everyone who leaves with a bicycle was also tracked as entering with a bicycle (although the system doesn’t check that it’s the same bicycle).
  • The bike parking garage has a direct entrance to the Metro station and the train station (where one can board trains to anywhere in the country, as well as to Belgium, France, Germany, Poland, and I think Czechia).
Entrance to the underwater bike parking garage at Amsterdam Centraal
Heading down the travelator into the underwater bike parking garage
Walking the bikes to the checkin barrier-free turnstile
The columns indicate space availability
Double decker bike parking
A view of the vertical circulation into the underwater bike parking garage
  • The next new thing to see is the IJboulevard, an extension of land into the former bay called the IJ on the north of Amsterdam Centraal. (I really don’t know what to call it now, the Wikipedia article calls it a “body of water”.) The IJboulevard is a kind of linear plaza that’s as long as the train station shed, a new public space. It wasn’t hot when I was traveling, but I’ve recently seen complaints on Dutch Twitter that it’s oppressive without landscaping.
  • Also on the north side of the train station is the bus station, which is on level two (or level one if you’re European). It’s been there for many years, but it’s impressive due to its operations and the architecture.
  • The ferries are also on the north side of the train station. This station is truly a multimodal hub. It’s one of the most fascinating and bustling places to be in the city. There are two ferry routes here for pedestrians and bicyclists to the north side of the IJ, and another ferry route a quarter mile to the east. All the ferry routes are free and operate 24/7 because there are no bridges or tunnels for pedestrians or bicyclists (even if there were they would be sorely inconvenient because of their length and depth or height). Since 2018 there has been Metro service to the north side of the IJ; this allows bicycles but there’s a fare and doesn’t operate 24/7.
  • Ferries are designed to walk and roll on and go back and forth; they don’t need to turn around. They leave on a schedule – pay attention to the countdown screens at each dock – but must yield to boat traffic already in the IJ, which I got to watch.
Bus station at Amsterdam Centraal
Ferry waiting for cargo ship
Ferry proceeds after the cargo ship has passed
The IJboulevard (two ferry routes are in the background, and a third ferry route is behind me)
  • It was time to move on, towards the restaurant where I would be meeting my Rotterdam friends. I biked to Vondelpark, Amsterdam’s main park. Vondelpark is surrounded mostly by housing so it connects to side streets, but it’s crossed by a main street and buttressed at the south end by a main street separates it from Rijksmuseum and Museumplein.
  • Because of how it’s connected to so many side streets, and a couple main streets, Vondelpark makes a greater “intersection” for through-routes. But it’s also a wonderful place to cycle for people watching, recreation, or to cycle in circles, like I did. Using my new handlebar phone mount I recorded some video and captured this awesome scene of three bicyclists riding side by side by side all turning at the same time!
11-second video of what appears to be some very fluid and coordinated cycling in Vondelpark.
Cycling next to a tram
Bridge in Vondelpark
Cycling under Rijksmuseum to Museumplein
  • We ate dinner at a vegan burger restaurant called Vegan Junk Food Bar that dyed their buns hot pink as a fun gimmick (some of the food was good and some of it was mediocre) and afterward had beers at Brouwerij ‘t IJ (Brewery of the IJ).
  • From the brewery we walked about half an hour to Amsterdam Centraal station and boarded the next Intercity Direct train back to Rotterdam Centraal, and took the Rotterdam Metro back home – this time with my personal bicycle so I could have it for the next five days in Rotterdam, and a special ride around Texel island (in a future blog post).
Brick Expressionism (this is the Amsterdam City Archives building)
Ugly residential architecture
Koploper train, in the distance
Booking.com office, and an ICE train
Daniel and I walking in Amsterdam
The crappy bike area in the Intercity Direct trains (soon to be replaced by ICNG trains)

Transportation infrastructure is for more than transportation’s sake

November 27, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Transportation infrastructure should be designed for more than carrying people through places. It also needs to be about carrying people to places, because transportation is for moving people as much for commerce as it is for being social.

The Dutch consider “social safety” when designing and redesigning streets (they’re constantly upgrading streets, roads, and entire neighborhoods to standards that seem to be frequently updated).

Mark Waagenbuur posted a new video this week showing a new tunnel under Amsterdam Centraal, the main train station in Amsterdam, and he highlighted several of its social safety features.

The screen grab I embedded above – and posted on Twitter where it got a lot of shares and likes – shows an aspect that’s common across all cycling facilities in built-up areas: it’s wide enough to ride side by side with your friend, mother, or lover, with still enough room on your left for people to pass you in the same lane.

Another aspect of this tunnel is that it has sound-absorbing panels. Often tunnels have a disturbing echo that inhibit comfortable communication – my new home office has an echo and it makes it hard to have conversations on the phone here because I hear an annoying feedback. The communication is important to be able to hear people cycling with you, but also to hear what other people are doing.

The tunnel has a final feature that supports social safety: clear, wide, and open sight lines. Not just from end to end, but also to the sides. It’s hard to hide around the corner because the breadth of vision is so wide that you would see someone lurking in the corner.

For Chicagoans who use one of the many old tunnels under Lake Shore Drive connecting the “mainland” to the nation’s most popular trail along Lake Michigan, the feeling of claustrophobia and invisibility of what’s around the bend is too common. New tunnels, which I prefer to bridges because you go downhill first, should be a priority when the State of Illinois rebuilds Lake Shore Drive north of Grand Avenue in the next decade. This is what those tunnels look like; sometimes they have mirrors.

We can sell ads on the Lakefront Trail underpasses, but they're still shitty to walk through

There was no contest: I had to visit the Netherlands again

October 13, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Me bicycling on the Hovenring in Eindhoven

Me bicycling on the Hovenring in Eindhoven. It’s the world’s first, floating bicycle roundabout. It’s a gratuitous way to solve the problem the city had at this intersection outside the built up area. Despite its frivolity, it wasn’t as expensive as something that solves a similar problem in the United States. 6.3 million euros in 2012. The Navy Pier Flyover in Chicago is over $60 million in 2014.

In my last trip to Europe, which concluded three weeks ago, I hadn’t yet scheduled where I would stay on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights on my final full week (I came home the following Tuesday).

On that Monday I was in Barcelona but my mother was going back home and I had to move on. On Thursday I was going to be in Bonn.

“Where should I go?” I debated. I considered Morocco (that was a complicated journey and I didn’t want to go alone), and Salzburg or Austria. Then, after talking to a couple before and during my trip I decided I would stay in Lyon, France.

Once I was in Seville, though, right before heading to Barcelona, I started looking at possible journeys from Barcelona to Lyon. They weren’t looking good. They were cheap, but the timing was bad – flights weren’t frequent enough, departed and arrived at odd times, and the train journeys were long.

But “timing” turned out to be just an excuse to avoid having to go to France and skip going to the Netherlands. I really wanted to go to the Netherlands. It wasn’t possible for me to skip visiting some Dutch friends and the greatest country for transportation and utility cycling. I still had more things to see there!

Rotterdam Centraal (train station)

My favorite train station in Europe: Rotterdam Centraal.

My friend Daniel in Rotterdam was available to host me for a couple nights. There was no contest anymore: I booked a flight on Vueling from Barcelona to Rotterdam, just 90 minutes away. And he was even going to pick me up at the tiny airport so we could take the bus to the central train station and get me an OV-fiets bicycle (it’s the national bike-sharing system that requires a Dutch bank account to rent).

On this trip to the Netherlands, though, I only added one new Dutch city: Eindhoven, where I had to see the Hovenring. I paid an arm and a leg to get there – thanks, expensive intercity Dutch train travel prices!

So here’re the 16 cities where I’ve stayed or visited in the Netherlands, in chronological order:

  • Amsterdam (2011, 2012, 2014)
  • Utrecht (2011, 2015)
  • Houten (2011)
  • Zandvoort an Zee (2012)
  • Den Haag/The Hague (2012)
  • Delft (2014)
  • Den Bosch/s’Hertogenbosch (2014)
  • Nijmegen (2014)
  • Arnhem (2014)
  • Groningen (2014)
  • Veendam, Bourtange (Spanish fort) (2014)
  • Leeuwarden (2014)
  • Haarlem (2014)
  • Rotterdam (2014, 2015)
  • Delft (2014, 2015)
  • Eindhoven (2015)

The list excludes cities I only transited or biked through. I’ve transited through Venlo half a dozen times by now. It’s on the German border. It’s a tiny station, tiny town, but has a lot of intercity traffic. I’ve biked through Pijnacker twice, now: once while biking from Rotterdam to Delft in 2014, and the second time, in 2015, I took the metro there and biked the rest of the way to Delft (this time to see the new train station).

I’ve also biked to the Hook of Holland in 2014; not the city, but the port, canal, and to see the Maeslantkering, a flood barrier that’s part of Delta Works.

Railfan at heart

January 13, 2013 / / 14 Comments

An ICE3 train is headed towards or away from the Hauptbahnhof in Köln (Cologne), Germany. The photo was posted by peters452002.

I am a railfan by any definition of the word. I cannot stop looking at pictures of trains. I look at Flickr every day and follow many contacts in Europe and Japan who post photos of trains. I’ve never attempted to describe why I think they’re beautiful and I’m not going to start here. I’ve been fascinated by things on tracks for as long as I can remember.

I was very happy to choose DB for my trip from Amsterdam, Netherlands, to München, Germany. Here’s a photo of the front of the train at Amsterdam Centraal Station.

Here are my other DB train photos.

N.b. I bring this up now because (1) I really love this photo that I spotted in my contacts feed, and (2) I explained what railfans and train foamers are to a friend after breakfast today.

Tidy bikes on trains: a trip to Den Haag, and Thursday in the Netherlands

November 28, 2012 / / 12 Comments

Two WorkCycles bikes stand tucked out of anyone’s way in a Nederlands Spoorwegen (NS) train to Zandvoort aan Ze. See all photos from this set, and from Netherlands.

60% of people arrive to train stations on bicycles.
A third of the country commutes by train each weekday.
Passengers, in a departure from American transit policies, must pay a fee to bring a bike aboard trains. (Bikes are not allowed on buses or trams, though.)

In August, my friend Brandon Gobel and I took a trip to Copenhagen for 7 days and Amsterdam for a little less than 3 (when he returned to Chicago I kept going to Munich and Berlin). We arrived in Amsterdam on Wednesday, August 22, by overnight train, walked to the WorkCycles Jordaan shop and picked up our reserved rental bikes. Brandon got an opafiets and I a Fr8 (the same model I bought two days later).

Bicycles are accommodated at every point in a Dutch resident’s journey – and for visitors, too! I don’t know how it would have been possible for us to do so much in the Netherlands without the bicycles.

In Latin: A wise man doesn’t piss against the wind. 

On Thursday we had breakfast at some place with a surly waiter that old pancakes near the Apple Store and this funny slogan written in Latin. We then ambled to Amsterdam Centraal Station to buy tickets for our short train trip to Zandvoort from where we’d then bike to Den Haag (The Hague; I just love pronouncing Den Haag). The station never stops bustling. We walked our bikes to the desk to buy one-way tickets, including all-day bike tickets. I never set a PIN on my credit card so the NS ticket vending machine wouldn’t accept it; I had no idea that you could set a PIN on credit cards, thinking that was something only debit cards had.

The train station at Zandvoort. The train is a DD-AR.

A lot of people were traveling to Zandvoort: it’s a beach resort town less than an hour from Amsterdam and the weather was atypically wonderful, warm and sunny. We rode in the direction of the water until we found the infamous red and white bike wayfinding sign pointing to Den Haag. It hugs the sea for a short distance. Before deviating, though, I wanted to jump into the North Sea.

There are no photos of me swimming in the North Sea, but here’s a photo of my rental bike on the beach. 

We got back on the route to Den Haag. I didn’t bring my GPS logging device so I can’t say for certain where we got off the route, but we kept going south and on the advice I got from a local, “kept the sea to our right”. We eventually drifted inland and started riding through towns and along highways (Americans: in the two-lane, rural sense of the word). There was separated infrastructure for most of the journey. When there wasn’t, the roads and laws were set up to prioritize bicycle traffic.

Welcome to South Holland province. Holland ? Netherlands. Do not call the Netherlands “Holland”. 

At one point in our “off the route” cycling, the off-street path ended. That didn’t seem right. I didn’t notice a sign indicating that we should turn off prior. We backtracked a little an then found a different path (still no directional sign). But we kept moving south. Neither of us had a map, nor data connections on our iPhones. I was confident we wouldn’t need one. I have a pretty good sense of geography, even in a foreign country. This one’s so small and I memorized some of the names on a map before we left.

I will admit that I was getting nervous. I didn’t want to “get lost”, even though I completely disbelieved that “getting lost” in the Netherlands was really possible because of its small size and extremely well-connected towns, trains, and roads.

One of the signs that eventually popped up along the bike path that pointed us towards Den Haag. 

“Huzzah!” A red and white sign saying Den Haag is 17 km thataway! After this sign, every proceeding junction had one pointing to Den Haag. It’s still weird that we got off the route for 30-45 minutes (it seems longer).

The last part of the route before entering Den Haag is along a motorway. This is kind of awkward. Think of biking along any interstate. The only separation between the bike path and the road was a strip of grass and some trees (I didn’t take a picture of it). This is the complete opposite of American motorway design (Americans: motorway is “European” for interstate): here, if there’s no concrete or metal barrier on the outside, then there’s a 50-feet wide cleared right-of-way, often with a ditch.  But we know that while clear areas mean less colliding into stuff, it means faster driving!

Pretty much any city greater than 200,000 people in Europe has trams.

Anyway, back to the bike route. We arrive in Den Haag. We head toward the train station, in the center of town. We’re hungry but there’s nothing around here (which is unexpected, as this is the center of town). But the center of Den Haag is very modern and “business oriented”. Maybe the restaurants are inside the office buildings where the plebeians can’t find them.

Expansive plaza outside the Den Haag train station. View of the opposite direction.

We bike north a little towards what looks like a residential area and find what could be a dive bar. Whatever, as they’ve got cheap beer and food. The menus in Dutch, neither of us read Dutch, and the proprietors don’t speak English, but we recognize the word “hambuger”. That’s what we order. I order mine “deluxe” – I can’t remember how it was described; it came with an egg on top! Hamburgers don’t automatically come with buns, apparently.

We ate weird hamburgers at Café Locus. 

I turn on my iPhone and find that the restaurant has wifi. I’m having a hard time recalling how I asked for the wifi password. A patron (who seems like a regular) knows English and passes this along to the proprietor and tells me the wifi password. After a few attempts it works. I needed it to try and contact someone in Delft whom I wanted to meet but it wasn’t to be. We pay up and depart the restaurant for the Den Haag train station, saying thank you and goodbye to the owner and patrons.

A low volume neighborhood street between Café Locus and the Den Haag train station. 

The bike ticket we bought (€6 each) is good for the day. We return to Amsterdam, tired. It was a smooth, fast train ride  on a VIRM (my favorite).

The return train to Amsterdam (which leaves pretty much every 30 minutes) had seatbelts for bicycles. 

We return to the apartment on Bilderdijkstraat we rented through Airbnb. The lovely bakery across the street, Cake Loves Coffee, is still open so we talk to the owner and sole employee, Nicole. I get a slice of berry sponge mascarpone (photo). We can’t subsist on sweets and fill up on fast food pizza restaurant across the street while we gulp beers sitting outside on the sidewalk in front of the apartment, watching nearly a hundred people bike south after work.

Beers in public. Yes, it’s allowed. Yes, it’s a very civil and normal thing to do. No, it doesn’t lead to the downfall of society. 

View Street View of apartment/bakery neighborhood larger. This image was taken over 3 years ago and the street has been redesigned. Instead of having door zone bike lanes, there’s now a proper cycle track. The bakery wasn’t built yet.

It eventually comes time to head out and visit the Red Light District. What a fun place to visit. If you don’t like seeing real live topless women, or stag parties (Americans: stag is British for bachelor), you should probably avoid it. On our way back to the apartment we stop at a nice bar down the street (between it and Vondelpark). I had noticed it the previous day and finding it reminded me of something peculiar: I never created a turn-by-turn route for any journey we took but I was able to get Brandon and I to any destination in Amsterdam, and “home”, without too many deviations (one of my goals is to never backtrack). I think half the money we spent that wasn’t on trains was spent on booze.

Hash Marijuana and Hemp museum in the Red Light District. 

A group of guys carry the bachelor in the Red Light District. Prostitution is legal in this area of the city. It’s impossible to photograph Amsterdam without a bike in the shot.