Category: Travel

Why I think the juice of Chicagoland transit consolidation is going to be worth the squeeze

May 4, 2024 / Steven Vance / 0 Comments

I don’t have a doubt in my mind that transit in Chicagoland needs a better network manager. Based on my research and personal experience using their transit, the Verkehrsverbünde (VV) public transport associations in Germany provide the best model for network managers.

VV network managers integrate service in regions of Germany and comprise multiple municipalities and counties and myriad public and private operators. They facilitate a superior passenger experience than anything I’ve used in the United States.

Generally speaking, VVs draw the routes, select the operators for those routes, set and collect fares, distribute fare revenue to the operators, and design most graphics, branding, and wayfinding (online, on the street and at stations, and in transit vehicles). A key aspect is that the associations don’t run the services. Picture this: the existing Regional Transit Authority does all of the service planning work that the CTA, Metra, and Pace, do now; it operates Ventra; it decides the fares and how transfers between operators works; it brings in new operators as needed.

All quotations in this post are from a single source, a new open access article published in a Transportation Research Board (TRB) journal by Kenji Anzai and Eric Eidlin, “Routes to Regional Transit Governance: Researching the Histories of and Cataloguing the Methods Used to Establish German Verkehrsverbünde”.

I propose my own recommendations for transit consolidation at the end.

What are the problems that strong network managers solve?

If you’re in the Chicago metropolitan area and you ride transit here or talk to people who do, tell me if these issues sound familiar (emphasis added):

“Like in Hamburg, passengers [in the Rhein-Ruhr conurbation] had to buy two or three different tickets when they transferred from one company’s services to another. This was frequently necessary even on short-distance trips…”
“timetables were not coordinated and waiting times for transfer passengers were long”
“there was growing consensus in the problem stream [a phrase specific to the paper] that transit needed to be reformed”
“Rather than rely on the individual transit agencies to come to reach consensus in the problem stream, advocates focused on affecting policy change in the state government [of North Rhine-Westphalia]”
“the cities, counties, and companies of the Rhein-Ruhr region did not at first put aside their own interests in pursuit of the greater good. Parochial thinking was a problem from the start—companies were initially skeptical of the unified tariff system, and it took time for them to realize that by working together they could achieve a system that was more than the sum of its parts” [1]
automobilization and “Falling transit ridership led to falling revenues for the transit companies” (referring to a period in the 1960s, not global pandemic-related)

Network managers in Germany have service characteristics and benefits generally unseen in the United States. The world’s first Verkehrsverbund was founded in Hamburg in 1965, nearly sixty years ago, and the benefits were proven within seven years.

Homburger and Vuchic conducted a study 7 years after the creation of the world’s first Verkehrsverbund in Hamburg, finding that travel times had been reduced by 25% to 50%, and people were more willing to make transfers. Except for a few instances, fares also decreased. The rationalization of the bus network resulted in operational savings of up to 20%, savings that—because of economies of scale—persist indefinitely. The ability of the Verkehrsverbund to spend public money more effectively is a great asset from a public finance perspective. Some rail stations saw passenger counts increase by 25% to 110% after the formation of the HVV, and the percentage of passengers carrying monthly passes increased from 42% to 54%, which reduced boarding delays. As a result, perceptions of public transit improved dramatically at this time. Therefore, Homburger and Vuchic concluded the Verkehrsverbund was a success and recommended it as a model for other metropolitan areas to follow.

If the proposed consolidation authority in Chicagoland can eke out those benefits…that is what I mean when I say the “juice is going to be worth the squeeze”.

How German network managers deliver those benefits

VVs are able to deliver these benefits by starting with these common governance characteristics:

they are an association or union of transit operators (public and private)
they decide the routes, schedules, and fare policies of existing and future services
they commission public or private operators to bid on and run routes for contracted durations (managing route concessions is not common to all VVs [2])
their shareholders comprise the transit operators, and municipalities, counties, and states, served by the routes

The paper highlights that the formation of a couple of the VVs there was a need for negotiations to “convinc[e] leaders in the largest transit agency in the region [i.e. the CTA] to form a network manager with the other agencies [Metra, Pace] under the premise that joining such an alliance would be more beneficial than staying out”. The City-State of Hamburg was the first to develop a VV, and Max Mross, the CEO of the city-owned transit operator, which provided 70 percent of the rides, “had the unique ability to spearhead such ideas, and he used his power to push through the formation of the HVV”.

An aspirational corollary I’m imagining is that if Dorval Carter wants a better legacy he could lead rather than resist the inevitable consolidation.

There are a few contrasting elements between the situation in Chicagoland (where CTA, Metra, and Pace operate) and the situations in Hamburg and North Rhine-Westphalia prior to the implementation of their VVs. For example, public transport companies were most likely to be owned by municipalities and routes terminated at city boundaries, the other side of which constituted a new fare for the passenger.

Another contrast is that the shareholders (municipalities and some operators) across the six German regions studied had consensus on the problem definition. I don’t think that has occurred in Chicagoland yet and may be the first, largest barrier to consolidation conversations. Mayor Brandon Johnson, after one year in office, has not acknowledged the issues of the CTA that he controls; the three transit agencies and one oversight agency have all agreed that more funding is necessary but have not conceded that organizational and service reforms are necessary to ensure that additional funding improves passenger services.

A proposed bill in Springfield would craft a new agency called the Metropolitan Mobility Authority. The bill’s adoption – and later implementation of the MMA – would probably go smoothly if there is a political coalition of Mayor Johnson, Governor Pritzker, and the county executives who select the current and future authority board members. Part of forming the coalition is identifying and agreeing to some of the problems of the current formation and service delivery of the transit operators today. In other words, offer something that the transit agencies want in exchange for their affirmative participation in a new network manager.

(The proposed bill implements CMAP’s PART Option 1 while the model I describe represents much of PART Option 2.)

Practical example: Bonn, Germany

I have visited Bonn, Germany, six times. Bonn is in the Verkehrsverbund Rhein-Sieg (VRS) public transport association that includes Cologne and an area of nearly 2,000 square miles. VRS’s member operators provide about 200 million more trips annually in that area than in Chicagoland where it also has one-third of our population.

There are 10 operators in the VRS network, including Deutsche Bahn and SWB, a transit operator owned by the City of Bonn, plus a bike share system operated by Nextbike and included in some VRS passes.

To travel between Bonn and Cologne there are multiple options [3]. One could take the U-bahn light rail line, operated by the SWB (owned by the City of Bonn), but it would be faster to take regional train routes 5 or 26; each departs hourly 30 minutes apart. The two routes have shared stops only between Bonn and Cologne and go in other directions beyond the two cities.

Here’s where the two routes become interesting:

Route 5 is operated by National Express, a British company
Route 26 is operated by MittelrheinBahn (a brand of Trans Regio which is a subsidiary of Transdev formed by a merger with Veolia)

To the passenger, this distinction is not meaningful. Their VRS ticket – sold through the VRS and DB apps, or made available via an employer program – works identically well on either train. What happened, without being too specific, is that the VRS identified the need for these two routes and tendered their operation to qualified transportation companies. Those companies offered their bids to operate the route knowing that the fare price was fixed by the VRS and the amount of subsidy was also fixed by the VRS and its public entity shareholders. These companies are also aware that they are competing against DB’s high-speed and medium-speed train services as well as the slower, aforementioned light rail line (which costs the same).

I bring this up so that readers can imagine…transit abundance. If suddenly the current RTA or the future MMA opened up routes to additional operators it’s quite likely that no operators would bid on the routes because there are so few riders and little ability to make money. But if the subsidies for the current operators are also made available to new operators who could deliver sufficient service for a lower cost then it could create a market of operators who want to provide abundant transit services. Abundant transit services are a key change the region needs to grow transit ridership; I predict that with Metra adding a bunch of new runs on the BNSF line from Chicago to Aurora that Sunday ridership will increase drastically. Given more or better options, people will take trips they wouldn’t have otherwise taken.

Network managers closer to Chicago

Toronto. You may have heard of Chicago’s twin Great Lakes city to the north, which is even shaped like Chicago if it were rotated 75° clockwise. In the Greater Toronto & Hamilton Area (GTHA) Metrolinx is a municipal corporation (“Crown corporation”) of the Ontario province founded in 2006. Metrolinx operates the contactless card (Presto), the GO commuter rail service that is transitioning to a regional rail system, the Pearson airport express rail link, and several new rail lines and extensions. Metrolinx is also renovating and expansion Toronto Union Station and building bus rapid transit lines.

However, Metrolinx is not involved in local bus and streetcar route planning and service delivery operated by the Toronto Transit Commission. This is a major difference between Metrolinx and VVs as the German network managers are the first and last stop when it comes to deciding where routes exist and when they run.

Recommendations for consolidation in Chicago

If Chicagoland transit consolidation was to more closely align with the VV model, it would need to incorporate the South Shore Line (running between Chicago and South Bend, Indiana) and intercity coach buses (like DASH, which runs between Chicago and Valparaiso, Indiana) into service and schedule planning and fare payment and transfer integration. Example: The Rhein-Main VV is the transit association that covers Frankfurt in the state of Hesse, and spills over into the state of Rhineland-Palatinate where Mainz is.
The state legislators who support the bill should be prepared to use their power over the state’s transit authorities and the public purse to create an “influx of resources” to induce members’ entry (the operators and the counties that choose board members) to the consolidated organization. What does that mean? In Hamburg, prior to the establishment of the VV, Deutsche Bahn (DB), the federal railway operator that operates all long-distance trains and most suburban trains (now under contract to the VVs, see note [2]) demanded that the new VV pay for a new central trunk line, subsidize the suburban rail network, and give it veto power. There are plenty of potential and proposed transit expansion projects that the state legislature can choose from to fund to ensure broad support for the consolidation: regional rail that runs more trains all day between suburbs and Chicago; a new tunnel under the Loop that would create Metra lines through downtown so people don’t have to change trains as they commute between suburbs; increased bus service across the board (responding to operator unions being against the consolidation idea because they believe it will mean fewer jobs). From the article: “Both the [Hamburg] city-state and DB agreed on the problem, but disagreed on the terms of the policy package that would be the solution.” In Chicagoland, I think we need to continue working on identifying and agreeing to a consensus problem stream.
The four transit agencies (the three operators plus the Regional Transportation Authority) have also stressed that more funding is needed but the state legislature should “make large infrastructure investments conditional on establishing a network manager”.

Notes

This part continues: “It may have taken several years, but the stakeholders did eventually build enough mutual trust that they began reaching agreements that laid the groundwork for further cooperation.” I said in my WTTW interview that the benefits may not be seen for several years, implicitly referring to the hard work of integration. The Rhein-Ruhr VV started nine years later, and I hope that Chicagoland can consolidate faster. At the moment, CTA president Dorval Carter seems obstinate in the face of demands for reform and specifically is skeptical of consolidation. (The Hamburg VV formed in five years and the Hannover VV formed in one year.)
In this post I am using a simplified view of verkerhsverbünde. Universally across Germany they are fare and branding integrators but not all of them are engaged in route and service planning or contracting services to operators. That is taken care of by ÖPNV-Aufgabenträger (Wikipedia article in German). For example, Verkehrsverbund Mittelsachsen in Chemnitz has the dual role that I’ve been using in this post; refer to this article about how VMS has contracted operators for some of the regional rail routes. The Berlin-Brandenburg also has the dual role while the VRS in Cologne/Bonn, used in my “practical example”, does not do the service planning and contracting.
A shortcoming with VVs is when there are two in adjacent regions, like the Cologne/Bonn part of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Rurhgebeit part of the same state (Duisburg, Essen, and Dortmund). Each has a separate VV – VRS in Cologne/Bonn and VRR in the Rurhgebeit – and there are many people who regularly travel between the two and the ticketing for passes is more complicated. I don’t think this is a potential problem in Chicagoland as long as some Indiana services are included in the future network manager because there is not a similarly large and adjacent region with an overlapping service area.

Biking around Texel Island

December 17, 2023 / Steven Vance / 0 Comments

Saturday, May 13, 2023, in the Netherlands on day 3 (day 12 of my trip).

Day 12

I had discussed with my friend that I wanted to go somewhere new and do something significant, likely distant from Rotterdam. I had long wanted to visit one of the Dutch islands that curves the country’s border in the North Sea from the area north of Amsterdam to Germany. The largest and easiest to visit one is Texel Island.

We left the house at around 8 AM to cycle to Rotterdam Centraal and ride the Intercity Direct train, with our bicycles, to Amsterdam Centraal station, where we changed to an Intercity train to Den Helder, a city at the tip of the Dutch mainland north of Amsterdam. The train arrived in Den Helder at 11 AM, where we picked up some snacks and cold sandwiches at Albert Heijn (the largest supermarket chain in the country), and rode over to the TESO ferry’s terminal.

Like many other ferries in the world, tickets are purchased only in one direction because of the assumption that you’re going to use the ferry to return (and Texel Island has no road crossings so a boat is the main way on and off). Another neat thing about this ferry is that pedestrians and bicycles are able to disembark and board simultaneously because outgoing bicycles are parked only on the right side of the boat and there is a one-way on and one-way off system for pedestrians and bicycles.

On the ferry

I wasn’t prepared to board this ferry. After we parked our bicycles in the designated area and went upstairs to the cabin I was floored at the cruise ship-like appearance. There was a self-service café, enormous bathrooms, a children’s play area, artificial trees, and a variety of seating options – single seats, seats with tables, couches to look out the side and couches to look out the front.

After inspecting the map of cycle routes on the island my friend and I decided to ride around the whole island clockwise. (An advantage of riding clockwise that day was to have a tailwind in the second half of the journey, when we would be tired.)

On the island…

…we saw everything.

sheep
dunes
polders
Scottish Highlander cattle
forests
farms
tons and tons of e-bikes – I think that acoustic bikes were in the minority!
a lighthouse
beach cabanas
tulips
sea protection walls
passed through the towns of De Koog and De Cocksdorp

According to the tracking I did on Strava we rode 37.6 miles.

Heading home

On the return ferry my friend consulted the NS Travel Planner app to figure out the best itinerary of trains back to Rotterdam, as well as to figure out the time between the ferry’s arrival and the next train’s departure. It would be close, he said. We would need to exceed the Google Maps estimate of cycling time between the terminal and the station. And, he said, it’s likely that other people with bikes on this ferry also want to take the train and Dutch trains have a very small amount of space for bikes.

We cycled fast, and we made it onto the train about two minutes before departure. At Zaandam we changed to a Sprinter to Hoofddorp via Amsterdam Schiphol airport and at the airport station we changed to an (older) Intercity Direct train to Rotterdam. (The Intercity Direct train we took from Rotterdam in the morning was the new ICNG – next generation – set, and these trains have space for more bikes.)

How to map where I traveled when I went to Gorinchem, NL

December 6, 2023 / Steven Vance / 0 Comments

On Monday, December 4, 2023, I wanted to ride a line in the Netherlands that I hadn’t yet, which is called the “MerwedeLingelijn” and goes between Dordrecht and Geldermalsen. In the NS journey planner database it’s called “Stoptrein” which distinguishes it from “Sprinter” and “Intercity”. Those names distinguish the service types on the Dutch railway network. (This particular Stoptrein is also a diesel-electric trainset.)

From Rotterdam, where I was staying, it would require at least one transfer to get to Gorinchem. But I wanted to stop in Utrecht to say hi to a friend during his work break – this meant there would be two transfers.

Here’s the itinerary I traveled on Monday

Rotterdam Centraal to Utrecht Centraal via Gouda, Intercity (half-hourly service) – 55 km
Utrecht Centraal to Geldermalsen, Sprinter (10-20 minute service) – 26 km
Geldermalsen to Gorinchem, Stoptrein (half-hourly service) – 27 km
[lunch and walk in Gorinchem, distance not recorded]
Gorinchem to Dordrecht, Stoptrein (quarter-hourly service) – 24 km
Dordrecht to Rotterdam, Waterbus (hourly service) – 21 km

How I drew the map

I wasn’t about to draw the routes by hand (although I did record the Waterbus ride on Strava as a “sail”) so I grabbed the data from OpenStreetMap.

If you want data in bulk from OpenStreetMap a common way to get it is from the HotOSM export tool. But I wanted specific transit routes, for which I could find the “way” IDs and export only those. For that I used Overpass Turbo and wrote the following query:

[out:json][timeout:25];
// gather results
rel(id:324888,13060594,5301520,2785504);
way(r);
// print results
out geom;

Notes

Frequencies refer to the pattern in the hour I used the service. The itinerary doesn’t include a Rotterdam Metro ride or the roundtrip bike ride from the Schiebroek neighborhood to Rotterdam Centraal).

Starting on December 10, the NS (Dutch national railway operator) is adding over 1,800 train services each week.

Netherlands, day 2 (day 11 of the trip)

July 16, 2023 / Steven Vance / 0 Comments

My friend and I took an afternoon ride around Zoetermeer and Bleiswijk, two suburbs of The Hague with 125,000 and 10,000 people, respectively. Read other posts from this trip.

Day 11

Friday, May 12, 2023 – 195 photos taken – find more on Flickr

I don’t remember what I did in the morning – I probably worked.
My friend and I left his flat on our bikes at 15:00 and met my other friend to eat at Mecca, where Zu, a neighborhood cat, wandered in.
After this late lunch my friend and I started our bike ride along the Rotte River (how Rotterdam got its name) towards Bleiswijk.

The Netherlands has a signed water route network for people driving boats

We biked atop a lot of dikes, through several rural neighborhoods, and past the Willem-Alexander Baan (a rowing course in an artificial lake).
We also biked under a temporary bridge. As I’ve written before I believe the Dutch are very good at building infrastructure, and that extends to temporary infrastructure as well including modular and prefabricated pieces like a bridge!
At one point it was time for a McFlurry. We turned off of the intercity bike path, through a comfortably large bike tunnel under a motorway, and into the McDonald’s parking lot, where was plenty of bike parking and e-bike charging points (I suspect that many of the bikes parked here belonged to the employees).
The McDonald’s was in a commercial area full of fast food restaurants and logistics and distribution centers nestled in one corner of a motorway interchange but throughout all of this was well-designed, separated bike and pedestrian infrastructure.

Electric bike charging at a highway-side McDonald’s

After the ice cream break we headed over to an odd new transit interchange station called Lansingerland-Zoetermeer. Here people can change between a small park and ride, a kiss and ride, buses, sidewalks, and bike paths, to a ground-level intercity train station (to The Hague or Gouda) or to an elevated light rail station to The Hague. Service to Rotterdam is also possible via two bus routes to a nearby Rotterdam Metro station but I’m not sure why you would have gotten into a situation where you would need that connection.
(I’m calling it light rail for simplicity, but if you’re looking at how the street and sub-street rail transit networks overlap in Rotterdam-The Hague-Delft you could get easily confused. For example, there is a Rotterdam Metro [light rail] line to The Hague but which is also called RandstadRail, a RandstadRail line from The Hague to Zoetermeer, trams in The Hague, and different trams in Rotterdam, as well as a single tram line from The Hague to Delft but no Rotterdam Metro and no Rotterdam tram to Delft – there are Sprinter and Intercity services instead.)
I think something that is really neat about the station’s design: if you arrived there for the first time via the light rail then it would be very hard to tell that you would be standing on a bridge over an intercity track and a motorway after disembarking. The station looks very typical and uses vegetation and a wall to block the sound of high-speed vehicles below.

Southern entrance to the station (ground level)

Next we arrived into Zoetermeer, greeted by two cats. (There are a lot of cats roaming the traffic calmed neighborhood streets in the Netherlands.)
Zoetermeer is a “new town”, in that its prime development period was in the second half of the 20th century after many urban planning principles had changed, the automobile was a major factor in city design, and European countries were still rebuilding many cities after World War II – growth started in earnest in the 1960s when new housing was needed.
The population growth, in typical modern Dutch fashion, happened in a way that planned residential, commercial, and retail land uses, transportation, and green space, in concert with each other. These compact and mixed-use patterns – where most of what one needs is accommodated for or provided nearby – are repeated easy to discern even if you only visit a few towns, including Zoetermeer, Almere, Houten, Diemen, and the newer, outer parts of Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Utrecht.

Cat walking in the middle of the street in Zoetermeer

At this time we had been cycling for less than three hours but it felt like longer because of the seemingly large gaps between stops (in fact, they’re not that large, it’s that they’re separated by wide expanses of open space or industrial areas rather than continuous low-density built up area like you would see in the United States).
We turned around to go home, via another way (see the Strava map below). The return route took us on a path that paralleled the bus-only road that carries two routes between the Lansingerland station and the nearest Rotterdam Metro station at Berkel en Rodenrijs, adjacent to where I was trainspotting yesterday (as well as some intermediate stops to reach the greenhouses).
The bus-only road has a self-enforcing design. There is a “bus sluis”, or “bus sluice”, or “bus gate” (see my photo), which is a dip in the road where car wheels go but a height increase in the road between the wheel area. This means that if you’re driving a vehicle that is not high off the ground like a bus or a farm equipment you will severely damage the underside of the vehicle.
Oh, yeah, this area is the greenhouse zone of the country where lettuce and tomatoes and other vegetables are grown for the country and for export, propelling the Netherlands to have one of the highest agricultural GDP in the world.

A new housing development at the edge of Zoetermeer

Amidst the greenhouses is the HSL (the high-speed line between Amsterdam Schiphol airport and Rotterdam Centraal). I stopped at least once to take some photos and videos of the Thalys, Intercity Direct, and Eurostar trains that ply this route.
Along the route I saw what looked like an amazing playground called Tuin van Floddertje. Floddertje is a children’s book character, a girl who gets into all kinds of dirty messes immediately after washing up.

Tuin van Floddertje (adventure playground) #1

We rolled back into the neighborhood where my friend lives and said hi to “Loofje”, the yellow tabby cat that I named “Little Loaf” using a fake Dutch word I invented that’s pronounced “loaf-juh”.
This is also when I saw the neighborhood square that helps make this a complete neighborhood, since it’s 20 minutes away from the city center.

Château-inspired high-rise residential building

Netherlands, day 1 (day 10 of the trip)

June 12, 2023 / Steven Vance / 0 Comments

I arrived to Rotterdam via ferry over the English Channel from Harwich, England, on Wednesday evening (day 9). This part of the travelogue is about day 10. Read other posts from this trip.

Day 10

Thursday, May 11, 2023 – 289 photos taken – find more on Flickr

I woke up to have breakfast with my friends, who I was staying with. They were going to their offices in Amsterdam, but rather than travel with them I decided to get ready a bit slower and meet them in the evening for dinner.
I left their house at around 10 AM and started cycling, on the OV-fiets shared bicycle, owned by NS, the Dutch national railway company, that I picked up the day before. My destination was Rotterdam Centraal station so I could return the bike and hop on an Intercity Direct high-speed train to Amsterdam (the train runs high-speed between Rotterdam Centraal and Amsterdam Schiphol airport). But I was distracted by the planes landing at the Rotterdam-The Hague (RTM) airport, which is five minutes from my friends’ house.
At this point I realized I didn’t really need to be anywhere soon, so I kept cycling. My friend D. had already pointed out a place to spot trains on the “HSL” (high-speed line) so I headed there, which is about 10 minutes north of their house, in between Rotterdam and a suburb called Rodenrijs. Dutch land use is quite compact. The built-up area ends with a hard line and then there’s either agricultural land or nature preserves. The area between their neighborhood and this suburb had a bit of both. From this location I spotted Thalys, Eurostar, and NS’s Intercity Direct trains in both directions.
Having enough of this I cycled back to the house to recharge my phone (I had already used half of the battery recording so many photos and videos in two hours). Only then did I cycle 18 minutes to the station and board the next ICD train. ICDs depart every 15 minutes, so I didn’t bother to target a timed departure. I also like to get an “American cookie” at Kiosk, a $5 cold cuts sandwich, and drinkable yogurt.
On the train I spotted my trainspotting spot (view it on a map).

At Schiphol airport station I changed trains to a Sprinter to Amsterdam Zuid (south) station, where I changed to the Amsterdam Metro so I could disembark at Jan Van Galenstraat station. Why? That’s the nearest station to where the bike I own lives. (It lives at another friend’s flat, who lend it to their visiting friends occasionally.)
Schiphol airport is a notable station: it has six platforms and trains to everywhere in the country, plus Thalys trains to Brussels and Paris stop here. My friend will sometimes take the train from Rotterdam, disembark here, and bike the rest of the way to his Amsterdam office to ensure he gets enough cycling in that day.
I unlocked my bike (which my friend had set out for me the day before) and rode it northeast towards the city center. My destination was the Allard Pierson Museum because I wanted to see their “Maps Unfolded” exhibit. The exhibit displayed maps created by Dutch people and over the last 400 years, showing the Netherlands, places colonized by the Dutch, and maps of the world made by Dutchies.
As usual, I missed a turn or two but serendipitously encountered a recent major streetscape change (basically a project that converted asphalt and space for cars to space for people and more landscaping – read about the changes at Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal on Bicycle Dutch).
The upper floors of the Allard Pierson Museum gave me great views of the Rokin canal, the shops that front it, the cyclists that ride it, the tourists and Amsterdammers that lunch on the water’s edge, and the tour boats that slowly motor along.

After the museum I checked out the new underwater bike parking garage. Read that again. The Dutch have built an underwater. bike. parking. garage. Watch this 1-minute time lapse video that shows how it was built. A canal area in front of Amsterdam Centraal station was dammed and emptied of water. The garage was built, with a watertight roof and vertical circulation and the water was replaced.
This bike parking garage has 7,000 spaces, on double decker racks that use pistons to assist bicyclists in lifting the upper racks up and down. Again, Mark W. has demonstrated this over and over again on his blog. Each of the numbered aisles indicates about how many spaces are free.
The garage replaces two other garages on the south side of the station, and is part of a long-term project to “clean up” the areas around the station. (The project includes enlarging waiting areas for the tram platforms, reducing lanes for cars, preventing vehicles that aren’t taxis and mobility transit from getting close to the station entrance, and decluttering bikes.)
Everyone who uses the garage must check in their bike using their OV-chipkaart (public transport smart card) or a contactless bank card or smartphone wallet. This way the garage automatically tracks that everyone who leaves with a bicycle was also tracked as entering with a bicycle (although the system doesn’t check that it’s the same bicycle).
The bike parking garage has a direct entrance to the Metro station and the train station (where one can board trains to anywhere in the country, as well as to Belgium, France, Germany, Poland, and I think Czechia).

Entrance to the underwater bike parking garage at Amsterdam Centraal

The next new thing to see is the IJboulevard, an extension of land into the former bay called the IJ on the north of Amsterdam Centraal. (I really don’t know what to call it now, the Wikipedia article calls it a “body of water”.) The IJboulevard is a kind of linear plaza that’s as long as the train station shed, a new public space. It wasn’t hot when I was traveling, but I’ve recently seen complaints on Dutch Twitter that it’s oppressive without landscaping.
Also on the north side of the train station is the bus station, which is on level two (or level one if you’re European). It’s been there for many years, but it’s impressive due to its operations and the architecture.
The ferries are also on the north side of the train station. This station is truly a multimodal hub. It’s one of the most fascinating and bustling places to be in the city. There are two ferry routes here for pedestrians and bicyclists to the north side of the IJ, and another ferry route a quarter mile to the east. All the ferry routes are free and operate 24/7 because there are no bridges or tunnels for pedestrians or bicyclists (even if there were they would be sorely inconvenient because of their length and depth or height). Since 2018 there has been Metro service to the north side of the IJ; this allows bicycles but there’s a fare and doesn’t operate 24/7.
Ferries are designed to walk and roll on and go back and forth; they don’t need to turn around. They leave on a schedule – pay attention to the countdown screens at each dock – but must yield to boat traffic already in the IJ, which I got to watch.

It was time to move on, towards the restaurant where I would be meeting my Rotterdam friends. I biked to Vondelpark, Amsterdam’s main park. Vondelpark is surrounded mostly by housing so it connects to side streets, but it’s crossed by a main street and buttressed at the south end by a main street separates it from Rijksmuseum and Museumplein.
Because of how it’s connected to so many side streets, and a couple main streets, Vondelpark makes a greater “intersection” for through-routes. But it’s also a wonderful place to cycle for people watching, recreation, or to cycle in circles, like I did. Using my new handlebar phone mount I recorded some video and captured this awesome scene of three bicyclists riding side by side by side all turning at the same time!

11-second video of what appears to be some very fluid and coordinated cycling in Vondelpark.

We ate dinner at a vegan burger restaurant called Vegan Junk Food Bar that dyed their buns hot pink as a fun gimmick (some of the food was good and some of it was mediocre) and afterward had beers at Brouwerij ‘t IJ (Brewery of the IJ).
From the brewery we walked about half an hour to Amsterdam Centraal station and boarded the next Intercity Direct train back to Rotterdam Centraal, and took the Rotterdam Metro back home – this time with my personal bicycle so I could have it for the next five days in Rotterdam, and a special ride around Texel island (in a future blog post).