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It is very pleasant and easy, and also very safe, to use any mode of transport you wish in the Netherlands. Amsterdam was rated easier to drive in than London UK. Hope this helps! |
Waze has a Global Driver Satisfaction Index,Netherlands are in 1st place. Might be worth looking up if you’re interested in the driver experience. Buses don’t have bike racks. Only folding bikes can be taken on a bus, if it’s not too busy on the bus. The bus usually will take people near their destination, walking dist... |
I am a Dutchie living in Australia and can tell you from comparison that the Dutch system is leading in the world. |
Getting on a bike here is close to suicide and I therefor never do. Getting in a car is almost as dangerous as the system puts the onus on the drivers, which I have found is never a good idea. It throws up challenges rather than guidance and near misses are pretty much guaranteed every time you hit the road. |
The consistent use of recogniseable situations, bus bays, seperation of different modes of traffic, rulers (yes, I mean that seriously – straight lines are a blessing), proper signage, professional driver education and other aspects Dutchies consider normal make driving in the Netherlands a LOT easier and a LOT less fr... |
Dutch drivers learn to take cyclists into account (position on the road – lesson #1), cyclists often have their own seperate lanes. It is only on smaller roads where things can go slowly but these roads are only used for short stretches anyway as a means to get to the larger roads. |
I have discovered the Dutch “just act normal” approach has meant that our stellar achievements in this area have not received the kudos and attention it is worthy off. Perhaps even more so nationally than internationally! |
Can you tell I miss Dutch urban planning? |
So this is that extension of the Maximacanaal path, the surveillance path you mentioned last year? |
In an upcoming post I will show you how the two connect (via the bridge at the 7:34 mark in the double speed video). |
Hallo Mark, hoe het met ye? Ik learnen nederlands. |
I was wondering about how you avoid that painful feeling in your ear when you ride a bicycle in colder or windy weather. I wear a tuque (which in Canadian English and French is a knit cap) when I ride during these conditions and still it can be a problem. In fact I had the whole day in pain because of this as a result ... |
And also, I was wondering whether it is worth wearing a helmet if the fine for not wearing one is not much and fines are uncommon? I’ve tried it both ways, but still it can feel weird that I don’t wear one if I don’t also wear my tuque. |
I have no trouble in wind and in colder weather I also wear a knit cap, that also covers my ears. We never think about plastic head gear here. |
Thanks for the good encouragement. This morning I asked a prorail telephone operator to be connected to the department that deals with potential train speed limit (the Dutch way of saying this, snelheinden, amusingly literally translates to speed hinderer) upgrades due to signalling upgrades, what my name is, that I ho... |
The only thing that would make you wear a bicycle helmet is if a (non Dutch) car driver threw one at you and announced that they were going to “accidentally” hit you if you didn’t. Of course that would be a crime. Punished by the worst of Dutch law, making the driver wear a bicycle helmet and high viz while riding, gas... |
wearing a helmet to protect against an aggressive car driver is a concept that is entirely alien (notice I’m not using ‘foreign’ here?) to us. |
Police, you need to go and arrest Mark. He ran a stop sign! He clearly needs a few thousand euro fine and a few decades in prison, he’s clearly a reckless cycling who is going to run elderly women down and toddlers! |
On a more serious note, stop signs are somewhat rare in NL, with yield signs being the preferred method of indicating right of way. I am mildly curious why that stop sign exists at all. |
I think they exist because of occassional problems with visibility. But in the US and Canada they are often used instead of yield signs despite both assigning priority to a particular road and all way stop signs just being a stopping version of an uncontrolled junction with no signs or signals. |
This entry was posted on 12 April 2016 by Bicycle Dutch in Original posts and tagged ’s-Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch), canal, long distance cycle paths, market to market, ride, Veghel. |
The Labour Party is a centre-left political party in the United Kingdom.Growing out of the trade union movement and socialist parties of the nineteenth century, the Labour Party has been described as a “broad church“, encompassing a diversity of ideological trends from strongly socialist to moderately social democratic... |
Founded in 1900, the Labour Party overtook the Liberal Party as the main opposition to the Conservative Party in the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and from 1929 to 1931. Labour later served in the wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after which it formed a majority government... |
The Labour Party was last in government from 1997 to 2010 under Tony Blairand Gordon Brown, beginning with a landslide majority of 179, reduced to 167 in 2001 and 66 in 2005. Having won 232 seats in the 2015 general election, the party is the Official Opposition in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. |
Labour is the largest party in the Welsh Assembly, the third largest party in theScottish Parliament and has twenty MEPs in the European Parliament, sitting in the Socialists and Democrats Group. The party also organises in Northern Ireland, but does not contest elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly. The Labour Pa... |
The Labour Party’s origins lie in the late 19th century, when it became apparent that there was a need for a new political party to represent the interests and needs of the urban proletariat, a demographic which had increased in number and had recently been given franchise. Some members of the trades union movement bec... |
In the 1895 general election, the Independent Labour Party put up 28 candidates but won only 44,325 votes. Keir Hardie, the leader of the party, believed that to obtain success in parliamentary elections, it would be necessary to join with other left-wing groups. Hardie’s roots as a lay preacher contributed to an ethos... |
After a debate, the 129 delegates passed Hardie’s motion to establish “a distinct Labour group in Parliament, who shall have their own whips, and agree upon their policy, which must embrace a readiness to cooperate with any party which for the time being may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interests o... |
Support for the LRC was boosted by the 1901 Taff Vale Case, a dispute between strikers and a railway company that ended with the union being ordered to pay £23,000 damages for a strike. The judgement effectively made strikes illegal since employers could recoup the cost of lost business from the unions. The apparent ac... |
In the 1906 election, the LRC won 29 seats—helped by a secret 1903 pact betweenRamsay MacDonald and Liberal Chief Whip Herbert Gladstone that aimed to avoid splitting the opposition vote between Labour and Liberal candidates in the interest of removing the Conservatives from office. |
In their first meeting after the election the group’s Members of Parliament decided to adopt the name “The Labour Party” formally (15 February 1906). Keir Hardie, who had taken a leading role in getting the party established, was elected as Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party (in effect, the Leader), although on... |
The People’s History Museum in Manchester holds the minutes of the first Labour Party meeting in 1906 and has them on display in the Main Galleries. Also within the museum is the Labour History Archive and Study Centre, which holds the collection of the Labour Party, with material ranging from 1900 to the present day. |
During the First World War the Labour Party split between supporters and opponents of the conflict but opposition to the war grew within the party as time went on. Ramsay MacDonald, a notable anti-war campaigner, resigned as leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party and Arthur Henderson became the main figure of authori... |
Despite mainstream Labour Party’s support for the coalition the Independent Labour Party was instrumental in opposing conscription through organisations such as the Non-Conscription Fellowship while a Labour Party affiliate, the British Socialist Party, organised a number of unofficial strikes. |
Arthur Henderson resigned from the Cabinet in 1917 amid calls for party unity to be replaced by George Barnes. The growth in Labour’s local activist base and organisation was reflected in the elections following the war, the co-operativemovement now providing its own resources to the Co-operative Party after the armist... |
With the Representation of the People Act 1918, almost all adult men (excepting only peers, criminals and lunatics) and most women over the age of thirty were given the right to vote, almost tripling the British electorate at a stroke, from 7.7 million in 1912 to 21.4 million in 1918. This set the scene for a surge in ... |
The Communist Party of Great Britain was refused affiliation to the Labour Party between 1921 and 1923. Meanwhile, the Liberal Party declined rapidly, and the party also suffered a catastrophic split which allowed the Labour Party to gain much of the Liberals’ support. With the Liberals thus in disarray, Labour won 142... |
The 1923 general election was fought on the Conservatives’ protectionist proposals but, although they got the most votes and remained the largest party, they lost their majority in parliament, necessitating the formation of a government supporting free trade. Thus, with the acquiescence of Asquith’s Liberals, Ramsay Ma... |
Because the government had to rely on the support of the Liberals it was unable to get any socialist legislation passed by the House of Commons. The only significant measure was the Wheatley Housing Act, which began a building programme of 500,000 homes for rental to working-class families. Legislation on education, un... |
The government collapsed after only nine months when the Liberals voted for a Select Committee inquiry into the Campbell Case, a vote which MacDonald had declared to be a vote of confidence. The ensuing 1924 general election saw the publication, four days before polling day, of the Zinoviev letter, in which Moscow talk... |
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The government, however, soon found itself engulfed in crisis: the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and eventual Great Depression occurred soon after the government came to power, and the crisis hit Britain hard. By the end of 1930 unemployment had doubled to over two and a half million. The government had no effective answer... |
As the economic situation worsened MacDonald agreed to form a “National Government” with the Conservatives and theLiberals. On 24 August 1931 MacDonald submitted the resignation of his ministers and led a small number of his senior colleagues in forming the National Government together with the other parties. This caus... |
As the threat from Nazi Germany increased, in the late 1930s the Labour Party gradually abandoned its pacifist stance and supported re-armament, largely due to the efforts of Ernest Bevin and Hugh Dalton who by 1937 had also persuaded the party to oppose Neville Chamberlain‘s policy of appeasement. |
The party returned to government in 1940 as part of the wartime coalition. When Neville Chamberlain resigned in the spring of 1940, incoming Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided to bring the other main parties into a coalition similar to that of the First World War. Clement Attlee was appointed Lord Privy Seal and ... |
A number of other senior Labour figures also took up senior positions: the trade union leader Ernest Bevin, as Minister of Labour, directed Britain’s wartime economy and allocation of manpower, the veteran Labour statesman Herbert Morrisonbecame Home Secretary, Hugh Dalton was Minister of Economic Warfare and later Pre... |
At the end of the war in Europe, in May 1945, Labour resolved not to repeat the Liberals’ error of 1918, and promptly withdrew from government, on trade union insistence, to contest the 1945 general election in opposition to Churchill’s Conservatives. Surprising many observers, Labour won a formidable victory, winning ... |
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His replacement, Hugh Gaitskell, associated with the right wing of the party, struggled in dealing with internal party divisions (particularly over Clause IV of the Labour Party Constitution, which was viewed as Labour’s commitment to nationalisationand Gaitskell wanted scrapped) in the late 1950s and early 1960s and L... |
Wilson’s government was responsible for a number of sweeping social and educational reforms under the leadership of Home Secretary Roy Jenkins such as the abolishment of the death penalty in 1964, the legalisation of abortion and homosexuality (initially only for men aged 21 or over, and only in England and Wales) in 1... |
After losing the 1970 general election, Labour returned to opposition, but retained Harold Wilson as Leader. Heath’s government soon ran into trouble over Northern Ireland and a dispute with miners in 1973 which led to the “three-day week“. The 1970s proved a difficult time to be in government for both the Conservative... |
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In the 1979 general election Labour was heavily defeated by the Conservatives now led by Margaret Thatcher. The number of people voting Labour hardly changed between February 1974 and 1979 but the Conservative Party achieved big increases in support in the Midlands and South of England, benefiting from both a surge in ... |
After its defeat in the 1979 general election the Labour Party underwent a period of internal rivalry between the left represented by Tony Benn, and the right represented by Denis Healey. The election of Michael Foot as leader in 1980, and the leftist policies he espoused, such as unilateral nuclear disarmament, leavin... |
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Neil Kinnock, leader of the party in opposition, 1983–92. |
Foot resigned and was replaced as leader by Neil Kinnock, with Roy Hattersley as his deputy. The new leadership progressively dropped unpopular policies. The miners strike of 1984–85 over coal mine closures, for which miners’ leader Arthur Scargill was blamed, and the Wapping dispute led to clashes with the left of the... |
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The 2015 General Election resulted in a net loss of seats throughout Great Britain, with Labour representation falling to 232 seats in the House of Commons. The Party lost 40 of its 41 seats in Scotland in the face of record breaking swings to the Scottish National Party. The scale of the decline in Labour’s support wa... |
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The red flag became an inspiration which resulted in the composition of “The Red Flag“, the official party anthem since its inception, being sung at the end of party conferences and on various occasions such as in parliament on February 2006 to mark the centenary of the Labour Party’s founding. During New Labour attemp... |
The Labour Party is a membership organisation consisting of Constituency Labour Parties, affiliated trade unions, socialist societies and the Co-operative Party, with which it has an electoral agreement. Members who are elected to parliamentary positions take part in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) and European Pa... |
The party’s decision-making bodies on a national level formally include the National Executive Committee (NEC), Labour Party Conference and National Policy Forum (NPF)—although in practice the Parliamentary leadership has the final say on policy. The 2008 Labour Party Conference was the first at which affiliated trade ... |
The Labour Party is an unincorporated association without a separate legal personality, and the Labour Party Rule Booklegally regulates the organisation and the relationship with members. The General Secretary represents the party on behalf of the other members of the Labour Party in any legal matters or actions. |
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Unite the Union showing their support for the Labour party on their Leeds offices during the 2015 general election. |
TULO (The Trade Union & Labour Party Liaison Organisation) is the coordinating structure that supports the policy and campaign activities of affiliated union members within the Labour Party at the national, regional and local level. |
As it was founded by the unions to represent the interests of working-class people, Labour’s link with the unions has always been a defining characteristic of the party. In recent years this link has come under increasing strain, with the RMT being expelled from the party in 2004 for allowing its branches in Scotland t... |
The Labour Party is a founder member of the Party of European Socialists (PES). The European Parliamentary Labour Party’s 20 MEPs are part of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D), the second largest group in the European Parliament. The Labour Party is represented by Emma Reynolds in the PES Presidency. |
The party was a member of the Labour and Socialist International between 1923 and 1940. Since 1951 the party has been a member of the Socialist International, which was founded thanks to the efforts of the Clement Attlee leadership. However, in February 2013, the Labour Party NEC decided to downgrade participation to o... |
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