Amsterdam

Here we present our final -- and most informative -- Streetfilm from Amsterdam. It provides a nice cross-section of commentary on life in the City of Bikes. If you'd like to skip directly to a certain section, use this table of contents:

I'm currently on a European junket, and ahead of the more serious Streetfilms that will come out of it, I thought it would be prudent to put up some everyday street scenes of bicycling in Amsterdam.

This year's celebration of the Dutch Queen's Day in San Francisco was a bit special.

It’s not often that you get to take your idea of utopia out for a test ride. But that’s what I was lucky enough to do for seven months last year while on sabbatical in Amsterdam.

By now, you've probably heard that SFBC Executive Director Leah Shahum is taking an eight-month sabbatical to one of the world's great cycling cities, Amsterdam. Shahum will be missed by many during her absence, but I'm excited to announce today that she'll be chronicling her experiences and thoughts from Amsterdam for Streetsblog San Francisco.

Like so many people, when Soraya Nasirian saw Dutch people on bicycles, she had an epiphany. "Why aren't more Americans riding bicycles like this?" she wondered. "Why do Americans ride hunched over, on bikes with no racks, carrying their stuff in all kinds of bags and riding so fast and aggressively?"

As Streetsblog San Francisco reported last month, cities around the world have timed their traffic signals to favor slower moving modes, and now San Francisco has started a trial on one of the busiest bicycle routes in the city, Valencia Street.