About 6 weeks ago I did a series of tweets of my initial thoughts on cycling in Rotterdam. I want to spend a few minutes expanding on them.

1. You can cycle everywhere, the quality of the infrastructure varies but you can guarantee that it exists.

— Paul James (@pauljames)

November 4, 2014

Rotterdam is not renowned within the Netherlands as a great place for cycling, but you have to remember that it’s got a lot of serious competition. First a quick history lesson.

In the Second World War, as a key position between Germany and Britain, Rotterdam was bombed completely flat by the Nazis in a bid to break the Dutch resistance and force the Netherlands to surrender. After a day of intense bombing, the entire city centre (2km square) was burned to the ground, the only medieval building to survive was the church of St Lawrence.

This meant the city had to be rebuilt, between the 1950’s and 70’s it was transformed into a modern US style city with large blocks and wide boulevards. Luckily, at this point the Dutch had already started down their path of building cycleways along main roads and so a comprehensive cycle network along the boulevards was also built.

The centre of the city has cycleways on each side of the main streets, they are 2+ metres wide, smooth and flat and meet at block corners with large traffic light controlled junctions. Due to the width of the cycleways and the streets in general (2 x tram lanes + 4-6 x traffic lanes + 2 x cycleways + 2 x footways), salmoning is common as there’s plenty of space to pass people coming the other way while crossing and then crossing back to get to a destination on the near side is much slower than going against the flow for a short distance.

Further out of the city centre, in the newer parts of town and along the Nieuwe Maas riverside, bi-directional cycleways are the norm as sideroads are fewer and further between and there’s more space between the main roadway and the cycleway reducing the problems when roadway and cycleway must cross.

Sometimes the cycleways do run out, but when they do you are either out of the city and have a quiet access road without through traffic, or there are still cycle lanes better than any in London. Some areas of the city are old and the bike infrastructure looks it, but motor traffic numbers are restricted or there are much better alternative parallel routes.

Although Rotterdam isn’t like the medieval streets of many European cities, I think there are many lessons for London and beyond to learn from it.