99% Invisible - 531- De Fiets Is Niets

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

Today the Netherlands has a reputation as a kind of bicycling paradise. Dutch people own more bicycles per capita than any other place in the world. The country has more than 20,000 miles of dedicated cycling paths. International policymakers make pilgrimages to the Netherlands to learn how to create good bike infrastructure.But none of that was inevitable. It wasn't something that magically emerged from Dutch culture.In fact, in the 1960s and 70s, it looked like the Netherlands would follow the same path as the United States. The Dutch had fallen in love with cars and they were rebuilding their cities to make room for them. It was only because of a multi-decade pro-cycling movement that cars didn't take over the country entirely.De Fiets is Niets

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the early 1970s, when March of Unputing was 21 years old, she lived in an apartment with her young kid in the middle of Amsterdam. It was right on a busy road and there was always a lot of traffic. I remember there was a nearby school and you could see before 9 o'clock before the school start children on their bikes crossing that road to go to school at the other side of that busy road. Marcha worried about the kids on their bikes.

Once in a while there were accidents. And one day she heard a collision out on the street. Some people were screaming and other cars had to stop and you could hear their alarms and things. So then you run to the window and you see what's happening. A girl about eight years old had been trying across the street and got hit by a car. She was luckily not so seriously hidden that she had to be transferred to in a hospital, but she was hit and the bike was broken.

And there was a lady at that time, an old lady, someone as I am now, an old lady with an umbrella, like this Mary Poppins sort of type. Margea watched as the Mary Poppins lady approached the driver of the car. She took the point of her umbrella and she poked it right into a stomach. And she was screaming at him

and I was standing at the window and you could see what was happening. That kind of things, you know, you don't forget. In the early 1970s, this kind of collision was all too common. Producer Delaney Hall. There were more cars on the Dutch roads than ever before, and the roads were getting more dangerous. Growing numbers of pedestrians, bicyclists, and drivers were dying and wrecks. People like the Mary Poppins woman, and Marcia, and many, many others, were getting fed up.

That was exactly the feeling we had. Something went wrong over time. We said, what did we do over the years? And why is it that the car is always number one? I have never actually been to the Netherlands, but the story doesn't fit with my impression of the country. It was surprising to me to hear that cars were ever number one in a city like Amsterdam. Today, the Netherlands has a reputation as a kind of bicycling paradise.

Dutch people today own more bicycles per capita than any other place in the world. The country has more than 20,000 miles of dedicated cycling paths. International policymakers make pilgrimages to the Netherlands to learn how to create good bike infrastructure. But none of that was inevitable. It wasn't something that magically emerged from Dutch culture. In the 1960s and 70s, back when Marcha was a young mom, it looked like the Netherlands would follow the same path as the United States.

The Dutch had fallen in love with cars, and they were rebuilding their cities to make room for them. Bicycles were fading away. But then, in one of the great comeback stories of our time, building their cities to make room for them. Bicycles were fading away. But then, in one of the great comeback stories of our time, bikes fought their way back. And one of the reasons why was marcha. The Netherlands is an amazing place to ride a bike.

The country is as flat as a pancake, and temperatures are mild for a good part of the year. So when bicycles first started getting popular in Europe in the 1920s, they really took off in the Netherlands, launching the country's first golden age of cycling. We have images of that. After 1920s and 30s, people enjoying the city, we have moving images of these cyclists, you know, going back and forth over the trim tracks and really playing, being playful and enjoying the city. This is Ruth Oldenzeal, a historian who studied cycling in the Netherlands, and she says that

in the 1920s and 30s, bicycles became the main form of transport for many Dutch people. Some cities even started building bike paths. The popularity of cycling dipped briefly during World War II, but then continued its climb into the 1950s. And because streets were relatively safe during these decades, kids got used to a surprising degree of freedom. We were always outside, and we blayed into streets.

When Martha was a girl, she and her friends learned to ride bikes as soon as they possibly could. By four or five years old, they were riding independently through their neighborhoods. Streets were our territory. They'd zoom around on bikes and gather at the one house in the neighborhood

that had a television. It was the first TV Marcia had ever seen. The kids would just toss their bikes in the yard and go inside to watch kids shows and eat cookies. Neighborhoods were kids grow up without traffic. Kids learn to know each other. They meet each other and you do it. But in the 1950s and 60s, things started to change.

There was a new wave of urban planners on the rise, and they saw bikes as a relic of the past. World War II was over. Europe was rebuilding. People were buying lots of cars. And Dutch cities with their narrow cobblestone streets would need to be totally redesigned to make way for the vehicle of the future. We have a lot of historic cities, Amsterdam being one, and of

course a city in order to accommodate cars. You had to destruct a lot of neighborhoods, and so there were these ridiculous modernist plans to basically erase historic neighborhoods to make a space for cars. There were a number of plans proposed in the 1950s and 60s. In one case, the Dutch car lobby hired an American traffic engineer by the name of David Yokinan. He was supposed to come in and revolutionize the hagg and Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, Yokinin wanted to demolish a number of the city's working-class neighborhoods. He also wanted to fill in one of the city's iconic canals with concrete in order to build a six-lane highway into the city center.

Yokinin assumed that, just like in the U.S., most people would want to live in the suburbs and drive to work. Many people were not into this plan. They didn't want to see the old city torn down and transformed into a landscape of concrete tower blocks and mega-freeways. He became the perfect enemy of the local movement. You know, he was this brash, stupid American.

He was ignorant about local situations. To his opponents, Yokenin was like this cartoonish, super villain, city planner. And he helped unite a misfit coalition of groups who rallied together to fight against his modernist schemes. These very different groups would ultimately help launch the cycling revolution

in the Netherlands. First, there were the local elites who had deep roots in Amsterdam. Like the Nimbi preservationists of today, this group of old money Amsterdamers loved the historic character of the city. And for many decades, since the country had begun to industrialize,

they'd been advocating to protect historic neighborhoods and buildings. They were really proud of their city. They were organizing. They were supporting preservation of the city. Old stuff. Alongside the preservationists, a number of more radical movements began to take shape,

including a group of anarchists called Provo. They declared their opposition to quote, capitalism, communism, fascism, bureaucracy, militarism, professionalism, dogmatism, and authoritarianism. To give you a sense of their vibe, they once published instructions for how to make a bomb out of a pineapple. The Provo's were not fans of the new wave of modernist planners. They didn't want their cities becoming car-centric machines. One of them denounced traffic as a pagan god

that the Dutch sacrificed multiple people a day to. At first, the provost were mostly protesting in the streets, but as they got more popular, they moved into politics, even winning a number of seats on the Amsterdam City Council. There, they proposed a number of seats on the Amsterdam City Council. There they proposed a number of policies to rid the City Center of cars, including what was one of the first bicycle sharing programs in the world, the white bicycles. And the white bicycle was simply a Dutch, a rickety, upright bicycle, one gear, nothing

special. This is Marco Tibermelstrut, a professor at the University of Amsterdam and a co-founder of the Urban Cycling Institute. And what he describes is pretty different from your average corporate city bike program of today. By painting it white, people could offer their bike to the community. Those bikes would not be locked, they would be free floating through the city, and basically everybody could join.

For the provost, the bicycle became not just a practical transportation device, but an important symbol. If the car represented speed and capitalism, then the bike represented the opposite, something slow and humble. The provost said, the bicycle is nothing. The feet is neat, it rhymes. And what they were playing on, it was this notion of the bicycle be very vulnerable. The symbol of the bike really was about a whole new way of organizing society. And it was picked up especially by artists.

Hello. Hello. Hello. One of the most visible examples of this way of organizing society and it was picked up especially by artists. One of the most visible examples of this was in 1969 when John Lennon and Yoko Ono spent their honeymoon in Amsterdam. This was their famous bed in for peace. Where they lay around in a bed for a week and had lots of iconic photographs taken. In those photos, you can see John and Yoko in bed in their white bathrooms with a white dove in a bird cage sitting nearby and in front of them, a white bicycle. Why did you choose Amsterdam today, 7 days in a row?

Because it's one of those important, you know, sensitive, with the provoles and the white buyers of all of them. With the details we don't know, we just pick up the vibrations. You know, it's hard to believe that you do. The provos eventually inspired other groups, like the troublesome Amsterdamers and the cabotters, who created something called the Car Elimination Service. They would ride their bikes through the city, blocking traffic, and reclaiming the streets

for bicycles. But even though the preservationists and the anarchists were a formidable alliance in the war on cars, in the big picture, the automobile was still winning. Between 1960 and 1970, the number of cars in the country quadrupled and the rates of bicycling plummeted. Traffic casualties were way, way up. By the early 70s, over 3,000 people were dying in traffic collisions every year in the Netherlands.

Hundreds of those people were kids, and even more of them were getting injured. The kind of collision that Marcia witnessed from her apartment window had become commonplace. This was true all over the world as cars became more popular. And in many places like the US, people learned to just tolerate this new baseline of traffic-related injuries and deaths. But that didn't happen in the Netherlands. The Dutch decided that losing that many children to cars

was a price they were unwilling to pay. The catalyzing event happened in October 1971. When a six-year-old girl named Simona Longenhof was cycling to school near the city of Aindhoven about an hour and a half south of Amsterdam, a driver speeding around abandoned the road, hit and killed her. op de stad van Eindhoven, op een houdste zout van Amsterdam. Een drijfers beelden op de band in de roud, het en kielter. Dat was gebeurd in helftwoord op een provinciale weg.

De vader was een prominent journalist, namelijk Wic long en half. Hier is hij een documenter van de 90's. In de eerste instantie ben je dan zo'n kapot dat je, het is het jaar eigenlijk helemaal niet, kunnen bedenken wat je daar. In the Eastern Instance de Béder, so it could voltage you. Yeah, it is. Yeah, I had a car money. Couldn't be thinking what you did. And I actually overzoved. At first, you are so broken that you can't really think of what you would do about it. That only came after a year.

A year later, one of Vick's other kids was struck by a car. And thankfully, they weren't seriously harmed. But when Vic was approached by a group of I'mhove and parents who'd been campaigning for safer routes to school, he decided to write an article about his experience. It ran on the front page of the newspaper he worked for. He wrote that society cared more about advertising products to kids than protecting their actual health and safety.

He said that children had to navigate unsafe roads because there was no business interest pushing to make the roads better. Is there no pressure group he wrote? Then let's make one. A Stark headline ran at the top of the article. Stop De kindermord. Stop the child murder. That article on the front page. The whole page with thick letters.

Here's Mar-Chev Van Poetten again. She still remembers seeing Vic's story in the newspaper when she was a young mother living in Amsterdam in that apartment on the busy road. I think he was confronting the readers with sort of language as this is what we do with our children. How crazy are we? Angry, he was angry, and people reading it got angry too. He realized what was happening. So it doesn't alarm Bell.

That's for how the Thrukin has a bomb. Well, that story, it hit like a bomb. I then received so many responses from all over the country, from parents whose children had also had accidents or near accidents. And I was one of those that called him, can we help? Can we do something? Not long after he published the article, Vic traveled to Amsterdam. He met with Marcia and a number of other parents, and they decided to organize a protest using

tactics similar to the provosts and the cabalters. This time, instead of rowdy anarchists, it was a bunch of parents and kids. They decided to stage their first action. On the exact street where Marcia had witnessed the Mary Poppins woman, chastising a driver for nearly killing a kid. And we said, okay, this big street in front of my house, where those accidents were sometimes happening, we said we have to block it. During rush hour, shall I show you the picture? The day of the protest, they showed up and went out into the street.

They made a big circle holding hands. In the picture, it looks like they're skipping or dancing. That's so beautiful to see. It's mostly women and a few children you see here. I'm one in the middle here. This is me. I'm not sure if we were singing, but very friendly. And the police let us do it.

They let us do it. That was also the mood, the society, and the stout what we were doing. That image ended up on the front page of the main newspaper in Amsterdam the next day. And quickly, the movement began to grow. They took their name from the headline on VIX article. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop other groups of parents sprang up in other parts of the country. They all operated independently, but they kept in touch with each other and shared ideas about how to generate attention. Vic long enough again.

Yeah, every time an other kid got hit by a car, we were on top of it right away, to offer some comfort, but above all to immediately identify what caused it, what is the situation like in that town or province. And then immediately, another action would happen and people became active on the spot and supported. That worked like a snowball. Vick eventually left the movement. He was busy with parenting and writing, but he encouraged Stop to Kindermort to keep

going, and Marcheup became the organization's first chair. Like all good protest movements, Stop to Kindermort was good at highlighting the madness of the status quo. The parents involved would show up at protests, carrying images hand-drawn by their kids, showing scenes of traffic violence. And while the group was asking for something pretty basic for kids to be able to move freely and safely through their cities, they were still trying to upend the dominance of the car, and they sometimes face opposition. I'm going to disguise my knowledge, day and it's going to burn,

it's going to burn, it's going to burn. In the answer to a neighborhood of Depeite, a group of parents and children wanted to close the street to cars, so that kids there would have a place to play. In a documentary made in 1972, you can see people dragging and barricading to the street to block cars. And then a driver getting out and angrily dragging it away.

Then two adults shoving each other in the street. Marja says that this kind of thing happened a lot. You sold aggressive reactions of the drivers of cars, maybe on the way to work, opening the window, screaming to us, go away, what are you doing here? But she says that just as often, people walking by would stop and help the protesters. They were really going to the windows of those cars and screaming back, saying, could be your kid tomorrow. And it created really big discussions.

And we had this all over the place, not only in Amsterdam, but also in other cities. One thing that struck me as I interviewed old activists and watched protest footage is how unexpectedly joyful a lot of it seemed. I mean, the group was serious, obviously. They called themselves stop the child murder. But they also managed to make their work seem fun. All in for a general.

For instance, they inspired Demetri Von Torin, a famous Dutch musician at the time to write a song for the movement. It got a lot of airtime on Dutch radio stations. In the group stayed the bicycle ride from the center of Amsterdam to the Prime Minister's house and the outskirts of the city. One of them had a street organ on wheels. In the Netherlands, you have those organs on wheels. And having the music in the streets of people came out of the houses, what's happening here so much, it took their bikes and joined us.

When they arrived, the Prime Minister greeted them in the front yard, served the kids' cookies, and invited them to come to his office later. Marja says they eventually spoke for a couple of hours about traffic safety. By this time, partly thanks to the protests, it was becoming clear to the Dutch government that there were real drawbacks to fully embracing the car. Not just in terms of casualties, but also the huge expense of building roads. In 1972, a Dutch research group released a study predicting it would cost billions of dollars to build out the infrastructure required for cars.

The study's political effect was huge. Pretty much everyone agreed that building that many roads wasn't feasible, and they needed to look for alternatives in the form of bikes and public transit. And then, a turn of geopolitical events helped the whole country see what life could be like with fewer cars. In late 1973, the oil crisis hit the Netherlands. The Dutch government wanted people to use less gas and so they created a series of car-free Sundays

where they banned the use of private vehicles. There are incredible pictures from that time of kids riding their bikes down empty freeways, or people having picnics in the middle of wide roads with live flute accompaniment. Bus and train use sort. Marjoso remembers how different Amsterdam smelled on those days. Must have been a much more healthy air because the cars in those days had still let in their petrol. I remember one was when it was snowing in those days we still had

real snow. Kids were out on the streets in the snow making snow dolls you know with carrots as a nose in the middle of streets it was great. The Carfrey Sundays gave everyone a chance to experience street life in a new way. Bicycle shops sold out of bikes as people rushed to buy them again, and all this momentum helps at the stage for the next phase of the Dutch cycling revolution. For a long time in the Netherlands, the conversation around pedestrian and bike safety had focused on the behavior of pedestrians and cyclists. The emphasis was on making sure you used the correct hand signals and understood traffic laws.

Marcia says that one of the country's main traffic safety groups took that approach. They were called safe traffic Netherlands in English. That group was focusing always on, especially for children, on the behavior. Put them in a yellow coat, all the drivers will see them. You know, this sharp yellow plastic coat. But for anyone who spent even and afternoon with a young child, the limits of the behavioral approach are pretty obvious. When it comes to impulse control, an excited kid ranks just below a dog that has seen a squirrel. And if you're the adult responsible for their safety, and there are two tonn hunks of metal hurling by, it makes you stressed.

Marja says she used to drill her kids. Just cross the road looking to the left, looking to the right, you train them. And while putting a yellow coat on your kid and teaching them to look both ways is of course not a bad idea. It was also clear to Marcia that the educational approach wasn't nearly enough. And more than that, it was asking the wrong people, parents and little kids to solve the problem. If you focus only on that, you don't discuss how is the road constructed?

Where is the space for the bikers? And how is the behavior of small children taken into the design of a road? Instead of trying to change how people acted, they needed to build something different. By the mid-1970s, the Netherlands had taken steps towards making the country's roads more friendly to cyclists. Some communities started charging steep prices for parking in their central districts, or they just banned cars from those areas outright. And others had started building special residential neighborhoods called Vonerfs, which means living street. Those areas required cars to move slowly at the speed of pedestrians and cyclists. There were also some intriguing experiments with bike paths,

happening in places like the Hague, Tilburg, and Delft. But still, for many cycling activists, it felt like the change was too slow and too peaceful. Well, you can change the world if you want to. And we have found out that that's not always true, but to a certain point you can, if the time is right. This is Tom Gaudifroy. I'm Dutch guy. A Dutch guy who studied architecture and was an early member of what's now known as the Feetzer's

Bond. The Dutch Cyclist Union was established in 1975 and if stopped to Kindermort help but traffic safety on the National Agenda, it was the Cyclist Union that really pushed the creation of better cycling infrastructure, street by street, town by town. Members of the Cyclist Union sometimes took street design into their own hands. As an example, Tom told me about a number of one-way streets in the middle of Denboss, the town where he lived. The one-way streets were fine for cars, but they made it so that cyclists had to make long

detours to get where they wanted to go. Cyclists in the city decided they wanted a designated contral flow lane that would allow them to ride in the opposite direction of traffic. They talked with the city. Nothing happened. So at a certain point, we said we have to do something about it.

In the middle of the night, a group of 10 or 12 cyclists went out to the street themselves and started carefully painting a bike lane by hand. And we were nearly finished to please arrive and they said, what are you doing boys? And we said, well, we are doing some work for the municipality. We had to do still four meters. They let us finish the job and then it took us to the police office and said, we should never do that again.

Tom still cracks himself up thinking about this whole escapade and how they taunted the city about it. Oh, we also said them a bill for doing the work. And then they said yeah we were planning to do it, now we have to do it again and then we said well you can use ours, there's no problem. As the 1970s gave way to do it again, and then we said, well, you can use ours. There's no problem. As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, the cyclist Union moved from this kind of direct action into something a lot more mundane, but arguably more influential, data gathering.

The Union had realized that city planners didn't have the kind of information they needed to make the best decisions about cycling infrastructure. And so they set out to survey their members in meticulous detail about all the problems they faced when biking. To narrow road space available for cycling, traffic lights which were not adjusted to the needs of cyclists, different crossings of roads which are very dangerous, high speeds. Eventually, the union developed a lot of expertise. And what kind of road design was best for cyclists?

And they eventually assembled a design manual with guidelines. It was written in a style that would be familiar to traffic engineers. And then we went to the Ministry of Transport and said, well, we have made this and we think that this should deserve a further development. And it took some years, but they said that is a very good idea. And they took over the responsibility of the projects.

The first official government version was published in 1993. It codified all kinds of things that cycling activists had been advocating for nearly 30 years. And I just want to pause here to contemplate what an amazing feat this was. It was ordinary cyclists, organized by the Union, that helped to write the Bible for bike-friendly road design in the Netherlands. It's the same manual with some updates that's in use across the country today, and that people from all over the world hope to emulate.

The effectiveness of the cycling movement in the Netherlands was a sort of perfect storm of historical factors, says historian Ruth Oldenzeel. There's not one thing that's sort of the desilfable that, you know, if you have a compact city, you have cycling. No. Or if you have a great social movement, you have cycling. No.

Or you have cycling paths. You get cycling. No. So it has to come together. But what's unique in the Netherlands is this high rate of cycling, the memory that people had, they knew what they were defending, and it was threatened. In the Netherlands, you had the historic preservationists fighting against the destruction of old cities,

and then the anarchists imbuing the bicycle with symbolic meaning and political importance, and then stopped to kindermore, making traffic safety, a moral issue for the entire country, and then the cyclist union, becoming engineering nerd nerds and actually changing infrastructure across the country. It's an incredible sequence of events, which also makes it hard to duplicate. But at least in the Netherlands, the results have been dramatic. By many measures, it is now the cycling capital of the world.

But there have been trade-offs. The cycling movement was so successful that in many ways it disappeared into the government bureaucracy. Activists from the cyclist union moved into jobs within the Ministry of Transport. And stopped the Kindermord eventually merged with safe traffic Netherlands, the group that was all about getting your kid in a yellow jacket. The merger caused much bitterness for the remaining members of the group,

who felt like their activist edge was being dulled. The result is there's no longer much of a cycling movement in the Netherlands trying to push things further still. And so the numbers have remained stubbornly fixed over the past two decades. Today, 27% of trips in the Netherlands are made by bike. Which is very impressive. Here's Marco de Bromelstrod again.

But it's also very stable already for 20-25 years. This number is 27%, which means that 73% of all trips in the Netherlands are not done by bicycle. And that is something that we now almost have to accept. We lost the activist voice, that's something that we lost. For Marco, it feels like the Netherlands had a shot at building a real utopia. The cycling movement had a chance to kick cars out of the city entirely and to make streets public space again. But instead, they settled for coexistence. The country now has excellent transit infrastructure across the board, for buses, trains, bikes,

and cars. But that was not why John Lennon was in bed with a bicycle. That was not why the counter movement came with the white bicycle in the 70s. And this is something that I feel that we have lost. And this is something where I keep fighting for to bring back. It's amazing to me that even in the Netherlands, there are people who think the country hasn't gone far enough. Marco says the vanguard of the cycling movement is in other places now, where they're pushing

the boundaries of what's possible in ways that he can't imagine the Netherlands doing anymore. There's Barcelona with its super blocks that emphasize walkability and green spaces, and Paris with its mayor who won re-election by promising to create a city where everything you need is within a 15-minute walk. They're also in the process of closing the streets around schools to cars entirely. To be honest, while I get that the Netherlands has lost some of its utopian momentum, it still looks like a utopia from where I sit.

I ride my bike a fair amount in the town where I live, and I ride with my kids. Every time I do, I feel a little nervous, and like maybe I shouldn't. Like maybe it's even irresponsible, given the lack of bike lanes. And the fact that drivers here just don't have much awareness about bikes. And I mean, sure, I wouldn't mind being at the cutting edge in a place like Barcelona or Paris, but I'd also take what Amsterdam

or any city in the Netherlands has any day of the week. My oldest kid learned to ride a bike this past fall. At our local park, she kicked off on her pink two-wheeler and cruised down the sidewalk before wobbling to a stop. You were doing it! She was grinning, so proud to be moving on her own. And I was so proud to see her do it. That was awesome. Way to go, kid. That was awesome. And of course, I felt just a

tinge of fear too, which I hate. It's the kind of thing that makes you want to call up some friends. Maybe sit in the middle of a road, make some makeshift speed bumps, or put in a bike lane under the cover of night. Coming up after the break, the bicycle-related grudge between the Dutch and the Germans that's been going on for almost 80 years. We are back with senior editor, Jolani Hall to talk even more about cycling history in the Netherlands.

Yes, that's right. More by history. Yeah, I mean, I wanted to, to include just a little bit more because in the story we skipped right over the 1940s and World War II, but there's actually some kind of fascinating stuff from that era that I wanted to tell you about. I can see where you cut it out because listeners aren't privy to this, but there's almost a point in every single story where World War II is a part of the story. Right. To the point where it becomes like a cliche in our stories then, like, yeah, we're all just slightly sick of it. Exactly, exactly. Exactly. I know. I know. But this is actually an especially good World War II tangents.

So, okay. Well, then I will allow it. Okay. So, so by the time World War II rolled around in the Netherlands, Dutch cyclists, especially in Amsterdam, had developed something of a reputation for being rule-breakers. They were known for just blowing through stop signs, riding slowly down the middle of the road, and annoying cars, stuff like that. They were sort of like a 1940s version of critical mass. And kind of anarchic in their style. And apparently when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940,

they were pretty taken aback by this behavior. When the Nazis arrived, they were quite shocked and pissed. So this is Pete Jordan. He's an American who's lived in Amsterdam for a couple decades. And he wrote a book about the history of Amsterdam cycling called in the city of Bikes. Here they were, they just conquered the country and they expected to be respected. And yet the cyclists repeatedly ignored numerous rules that were implemented by the Nazis. Even to the point where Pete argues, one of the biggest forms of ordinary everyday resistance to the Nazi occupiers was the cyclists themselves who were not gonna change their ways

just because the Germans were there. Wow, that's so amazing. Yeah, and the clashes between the Nazis and the Dutch cyclists only escalated. What happened was that in 1942, the Nazis first banned Jewish people from owning, renting or borrowing bikes, and they required people to actually turn their bikes in. And then not long after that, it became clear that

the Nazis had plans to confiscate bikes more widely. And when the word leaked out about it, it led to this mad scramble. Thousands of people rushing to get their bicycles off the streets, hiding them in their apartments, hiding them in their attics. I found stories of people bearing them in their backyards, trying to do anything to keep the bikes, of course, for themselves, but also not to fall into enemy hands. And in the end, the Nazis were still able to get their hands

on a lot of bikes, which they used for their own transportation, but they also melted them down and recycled the metal. Or in some cases, they even used parts of them as ironwork, kind of like makeshift rebar when they were building bunkers. Wow, that is fast name. Yeah. So when the war ended, the scale of Nazi theft was finally fully understood and quantified.

And it turned out that over the course of their five-year occupation, they stole everything from factory machinery, hospital equipment to library books and museum artifacts, and of course vehicles as well. So the Nazis stole thousands of cars and trucks and millions of bikes. The Dutch Central Statistics Bureau estimated that there were four million bikes in the Netherlands before the war, and afterwards only two million of them remained. Wow, that is a lot of bicycles stolen by the Nazis. I know, and it also shows you sort of the scale of bicycle use at the time. Yeah.

Still half of them, and there'd still be millions left of them. Some bicycles left, you, exactly. And apparently this bike theft proved to be an especially sore point with the Dutch. Pete says that starting in the 1950s, when German tourists would show up in the Netherlands, and try to order a beer in a cafe or something they would hear this reply, airsman feats to roof, first give me back my. First, give me back my bicycle. First, give me back my bicycle, and then I'll serve you a beer. So the phrase is Airstman feets Tarouk, and it means first return my bike.

And this really became a thing that Dutch people would say to German people, like over multiple generations. So I'm so charmed for this. Okay, so this is something that still comes up to this day. Well, Pete said it's faded somewhat in the present day, but for a number of decades, it was really a thing. And there are so many good examples in Pete's book that might give you a sense of how it kind of built up over time. For example, he described how in 1965, the crown princess of the Netherlands got engaged to a

German, and the two of them went on a tour of Amsterdam. It was like their way of introducing the new fiancee to the capital city. And apparently a couple of Amsterdamers who were Jewish made a banner that said, return my bike, that they tried to send into the sky with 20 helium balloons that did not work. Instead, they hung it from a bridge. And I don't think that the princess or her fiance actually saw it, but the point was very clear.

It was like, we don't like this German dude. Give us our bikes back. Neelan versus Deutschland. Done. It seems like one of the ways the phrase got more popular is that in the 1970s, the phrase was adopted by Dutch soccer fans. In the World Cup Final 1974. So, for example, during the 1974 World Cup, the Netherlands ended up playing West Germany in the final.

And fans in the stands held banners that said, first, return my bike. Wow, they are persistent. Yeah, they're very persistent. And it seems like the use of the phrase continued at least into the 80s or 90s. Pete told me about the example of a friend of his who moved from Germany to Amsterdam in the 80s.

He worked as a music teacher in the primary schools. And apparently when kids heard his accent, they would regularly ask him to give their bikes back, or to give their father or grandfather's bike back. And the interesting thing is these kids were at that point very far removed in time and sometimes even geography from the wartime bicycle thefts. And some of these children were so young,

they of course they were born long after the war. Their parents probably weren't even born during the war. And many of these children had immigrant backgrounds, yet somehow they even knew to say that to a German, a native German person. And am I getting the right impression that this is kind of a bit, like that this is an ongoing joke that they're using, you know,

this obviously really dark part of their history to kind of, you know, make some light of it. Yeah, I actually asked Pete about this because I wanted to make sure I was understanding the context of it. And in his book, he acknowledges that this was a really complicated time in Dutch history. He talks about the ways that the cyclists resisted, for example, but there was also a lot

of collaboration that happens between Dutch officials and the Nazis. And so the first my bike back phrase grew out of that complicated history and the country's genuinely dark and horrific experience of the war. But Pete said that his perception is that as time has passed, the phrase has become something more like a running joke, you know, a dark running joke in a lot of ways. Yeah. Well, this is so fascinating. I'm so glad I know about, give us back our bikes first.

This is such a good part of the story. Thank you so much, Delaney, appreciate it. Well thank you, Roman. 99% of us was produced this week by Delaney Hall with research and production assistance from Lota von Hollen. Lota also did her damnedest to help us with the pronunciation of the Dutch names and words. Any mistakes are purely our own.

The story was edited by Emmet Fitzgerald. Original music by Swan Riel, sound mixed by Martin Gonzalez, fact checking by Graham Haysha. Kurt Colstad is our digital director, Residine, includes Chris Barube, Christopher Johnson, Jason Dalyone, Vivian Leigh, Jacob Muldinano Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars.

The 99% of visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. Special thanks this week to OVT and VPRO Radio for allowing us to use excerpts of their interview with Vic Longanoff, and to Chris Baima, who provided voiceover for Vic's tape. Extra special thanks to Hank Young Decker, whose book, Cycling Pathways, really helped us understand the cycling movement in the Netherlands, but whose interview didn't make it into the episode, for anyone who wants a deep dive into this history, Hank Young's book is excellent and very comprehensive. Bartlett, thanks to Steven Shapel and Martin Monson.

99% invisible is part of the Stitcher and Series XM podcast family. Now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. In beautiful. Uptown. Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI org. We're on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You can find links to others to your shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.