Recently, we made a trip over to Houten, which is a suburb of Utrecht. The planners of Houten laid out the city in such a way that it made travel by bike extremely enticing and safe. Their goal was to create a family friendly city for the suburban folk.

They achieved this through the work of creating a ‘Ring Road’ surrounding the city so cars can get places, all while having the inner roads only acting as neighborhood roads, with very few connections between neighborhoods. However, for bicycles, they have MANY bike highways throughout the city, creating a superb network. Many of the trails had parks alongside them. It was beautiful.

Was it impressive? Oh, yeah!

Is this something we can do to our big cities back home? No…not really.

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