In City of Bikes

The author Pete Jordan is known from his memoir Dishwasher: One Man´s Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States. Pete’s work has also been featured on public radio’s This American Life and in the New York Times. He fell in love Amsterdam while doing his research for his memoir and he decided to stay in Amsterdam with his wife and has been living there since 2002.


The chapter 20 “It´s a Joy to Be on a Bike Again!: The 1980s Onward is about the City of Bikes, Amsterdam. The author starts the text with little story of father who bicycles with his son, Ferris.  In the story Ferris from his young age sat on his perch on front of his dads bike and while crowing up they had to come u­p new ways to ride together and in the end story tells how Ferris got his first own bike. After the story the author continues to history of cycling and its evolution in Dutch. He also talks about cyclist´ behaviour and how the bike thefts were affected by the bike culture.

When the author tells about cyclist behaviour he comes in engagement with situation where cyclist´ were asked why they don´t fix the light of their bicycles, which were mandatory by low, one of the cyclist commented “Why should I repair my bike when it´s just going to get stolen anyway?” This was one of big problems in Amsterdam´s bicycle culture. In my opinion the government, police department and justice system used clever ways to reduce the thefts. Like, example on-street sale were banned strictly and if you wanted to sell your bike you needed to go to bike shop and prove you identity. This was proving to be a good way ­to drop bike thefts. One of the shopkeepers said that if “I ask to see their ID and they say they´ll go get it, they never come back”.  They used several other methods to low bike thefts and they also used efficiently advertising in order to achieve the goal. 

­The text starts interestingly with a story and it is easy to read. That allows me to think that the text is written for the general public audience. The text explains well the history and the culture of riding with bikes in Amsterdam so any knowledge before of the subjects is not needed.

The text has been published in 2013 and Amsterdam is still considered as the city of bikes. Global warming is issue around the world and a matter of concern. Driving with cars pollutes the air and it plays a big part of global warming. That´s why I think we could ask from ourselves what would make us people excited and the same time concerned to involve to help to slow down global warming by stop driving a car or at least to leave all the unnecessary driving with cars out? And what could governments of other countries do to achieve the same influence that Amsterdam did and get the car usage to drop? 

A/W16 collection from Samuji. Samuji is a creative studio and design house based in Helsinki, Finland. “Our ambition is to produce timeless and sustainable design that serves a purpose yet carries a story.”

­