(This post is a ‘chapter’ of a larger project – Bicycling Facilities in Holland)

Introduction

A ‘bike boulevard’, also known as a ‘neighborhood greenway’ is a designated route on a residential street that serves the needs of cyclists but also improves neighborhood streets. For bikes, the neighborhood greenway is a designated route on a street with features that make bike travel more pleasant and direct. For local residents, neighborhood greenways limit through traffic and at the same time they are direct paths to arterial streets.

In the Netherlands, neighborhood greenways are referred to as cycle streets. These definitions are not rigid. Some neighborhood greenways in the Netherlands use more than one type of street configuration to complete a route. Part of a neighborhood greenway may incorporate roads with bike lanes or a solitary bike path. An important feature of a cycle street is the transition from one type of street configuration to another. To get a sense of the variety of different types of cycle streets in a given town or city in the Netherlands see Topic 1 about the frequency of different bike facilities.

With the purpose to improve and expand effective neighborhood greenways in the United States, we evaluated existing configurations and transition points of cycle streets found in the Den Haag region of the Netherlands. Our goal is to provide ideas for how to implement neighborhood greenways and greater connectivity between them in the United States.

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