Even Small Towns are Great Here (5 Years in the Netherlands)

We have lived in the Netherlands for five

years

and during that time we have been to many different cities and

towns

. Obviously, I talk a lot about Amsterdam on this channel because it's the city I live in, but I routinely show clips from others. Places I've been in the country most of the time I didn't go to these places specifically to film them, they were just some of the places I had to go because I was going on a date or visiting friends or just living my life and Although I took a few video clips

here

and t

here

, I never collected enough footage to make a full video about any of these places, especially in the early days, but a lot of these places are really interesting and I think you'll find them.

They're also interesting because one of the things that honestly blew me away after moving to the Netherlands is how good things are everywhere. When we arrived in the Netherlands, we tried to get out of the city as much as possible to get to know our new country before we have a YouTube channel. I used to take photos or videos of things I found interesting and it's a lot of fun to remember a lot of what I thought was worth filming. Most of these videos are too short like they never were. It's meant to be posted on YouTube, so you'll have to excuse me if I have to repeat some of them.

Anyway, let's get started. We have visited the city of Harlem several times before and after moving to the Netherlands as it is an easy trip from Amsterdam. By train, visiting Harlem for the first time was a really eye-opening experience for me, as it was the first time I realized that

even

a city of about 160,000 people could be really active and lively, and I talked about that in the first video. On this channel, my hometown has more than three times the population and it would take a 50-car pileup to see that many people out of their cars at the same time.

This is entirely due to the design of Harlem and its pedestrian center. I took our children. to Leiden to visit the Natural History Museum again trivially easy access by train and a short walk this is literally the only video I took of Leiden this pedestrian crossing surprised me because it was a very safe crossing where the street narrowed with this large pedestrian Island, oh okay, clearly I was easily impressed in those early days, but seriously, this wouldn't exist in any city this size in Canada and that's really sad. I did something similar in the city of Harlingen, where the only video I took was this one again. of a safe pedestrian crossing, in this case the crossing is elevated to slow down drivers.

If you live in Canada you have to gather all your neighbors and fight for

years

to get something like this installed, but in the Netherlands they are everywhere. and usually installed by default for a while we were attending some speedcubing competitions which meant we had to travel to very random places in the Netherlands. This is Lent, which is basically a suburb of naimehen. We hadn't been in the Netherlands for long. At this point, everything was new to us. I remember it being so surprising that we could so easily take a train to the other side of the country and when we got there, it was safe for our entire family, including our children, to bike alone to the neighboring town there was also a separate bike path that I remember thinking it was very high quality, especially in such a

small

town.

This bridge was cool too and it was interesting how they went through this Old Tower to build this bike path. I remember thinking that only the Netherlands would care enough about cycling infrastructure to do this. The other fascinating thing about Lent was that it felt very suburban with a lot of single family homes, but it was still perfectly safe to ride a bike and there were a lot of families on bikes like this. of suburban streets closed to car traffic are ideal routes for cycling without having to build any specific bicycle infrastructure. Bike lanes are not needed here because the speed and volume of cars were very low.

Suburban streets lined with single-family homes. but still, the recycling sure left us stunned. Another speed cubing competition was in airmelo again. Our destination in this

small

town was easily accessible by train and bicycle. What surprised me was that such a small city of 27,000 people had so many trains going to it. and with a ridiculous amount of bikes parked out front, the other thing that surprised me was the oncoming traffic, i.e. the infrastructure used to slow down and restrict car traffic, so many streets were closed to traffic of cars and again it was easy to cycle everywhere without any dedicated bicycle infrastructure.

I talked about this in one of my first videos about the traffic coming to this channel. This small city had more traffic measures than I have seen in literally any city of any size in Canada and when it comes to small ones. The cities in Canada are all extremely car-centric, they are legitimately terrible places to be despite being small enough to easily cycle from one end to the other, so being in a small city that wasn't full of malls nor overrun by cars was Simply incredible, it really became clear to me that to make a place bike-friendly it was more important to restrict cars than to build expensive bike infrastructure, after all, protected bike lanes are really just an extension of automobile infrastructure, right?

You don't need bike lanes if you don't have many cars, we also attended a speed cubing competition in vain and this whole city deserves its own video one day as it is often considered the best city for cycling in the Netherlands . the train station is right on this nice bike path and connects directly to this pedestrian mall fully accessible on foot or by bike without interacting with any cars and this is not

even

the main train station, it is the suburban station of a place with just 65,000 people like you would never see this anywhere in Canada, never mind small town suburbs, we took a vacation to bomb an island in the North Sea.

I was surprised that we could take a train directly to the ferry and when we got to the island we could rent electric bikes and bike everywhere, we were even staying on a farm like a real rural farm and it was still easily accessible by separate roads that They were only used by bicycles and tractors, this country never ceases to amaze me, we went on vacation to a small camping area on the outskirts of Omen, a small town, eighteen thousand people, obviously a lot of people drive here, but still There are alternatives to walking and cycling.

I drove to take a look at the city and saw. Traffic comes from everywhere. Watch the traffic coming down this main residential street. There is no way this exists in such a small town in North America. This street would be wide, straight, high speed and have many cars. People would have signs in their yards. telling drivers to slow down and that no one would let their children out on the street. It's just a totally different way of designing a residential area. I was also surprised by how good the new road infrastructure was. You can see a very clear separation between streets and roads there.

There are no steps here, for example, the businesses in this Industrial Zone were accessible by streets separated from the main road and accessible by roundabout. I talked about this in more detail in my video on steps of course there was a train station with a lot of bikes. Outside of this this would never exist in North America, in a city this size we also stayed in a camp near Diepenheim and I had to drive there to buy food. I think this place was the one that surprised me the most because less than 3,000 people live there. Here and there were charming houses on small streets with calm traffic, of course, and people of all ages on bicycles everywhere.

What was even crazier was when we ended up at their tribe, there was good calm traffic everywhere, we saw a lot of people on bikes, but I really wanted to film this because it is a

great

example of rural transit in the Netherlands, a bus stop bus with a bicycle rack so that people can cycle to the bus stop and this bus stop has buses that run every 12 minutes and reach a town of 265 inhabitants. people I know from cities a thousand times larger in Canada that have less frequent bus service, we take our kids to the Bonami Computer Museum in Zavola, this is on the outskirts of town, about four kilometers from the train station , but it was still trivially easy. and it is safe to reach by bicycle, zwala's population is approximately 120,000 people.

It was surprising to us how even these places in a random business park on the outskirts of a small town were still accessible to us with a train and bike combination I had. I've never seen anything like this before. Also, the computer museum is amazing. You should go if you are nearby. We stayed for a few days at a campsite near Usan, so I drove into town to see it, of course I could easily choose. board a rental bike at the train station bike rack. I wanted to come here because David Hembrough, a British blogger who runs the blog A View From the psychopath, lives in Assam and talks about it a lot.

Again it was an absolutely lovely experience. Small town and it was really nice to walk around and there were a lot of nice residential neighborhoods everywhere, of course the cycling infrastructure was absolutely top notch despite being a city of less than 70,000 people, one of the suburbs of Asan called Closter Vein. It looked

great

on the map so I decided to go by bike, of course it was always perfectly safe and comfortable, and there were also plenty of other people on bikes for all kinds of trips. I just couldn't believe how good a small town could be.

Closter La Veta itself was also very nice despite being a modern development, there was a mix of housing types including single family homes and they were all connected by car free walking and biking trails. The crazy looking circle was a pedestrianized center with underground parking and apartments and all the shops you would need on a regular basis, this proved to me once again that modern suburban neighborhoods don't have to be car-centric and seedy. I think Austin should have a tram line although their public transportation is decent but they are just buses while we were driving back to Amsterdam we wanted to stop at a grocery store so we went to this random neighborhood called Fat Horse outside of Omersford again totally impressed, this place is so suburban as it is right next to the highway but there is a lot of traffic coming from a nice little shopping area that is within walking distance of the houses.

I intended to re-film this but never did, but it really shows that good urbanism is everywhere in the Netherlands, even in new developments, it's not reserved for just a handful. of old neighborhoods in bigger cities like in Canada we decided to spend a few days in the city of Warden because it looked good. I'm starting to sound like a broken record here, but again it was absolutely wonderful, there were all pedestrian streets. about the city center and there were a lot of people, there were modern developments which were extremely nice and there were no giant steps, there were no long parking lots and the train station was also very nice, it had a large outdoor parking lot for bikes as well as one interior and more on the other side as well and, of course, regular train service despite being a city of approximately 50,000 inhabitants, as if they came from Canada.

It was crazy. A family friend came to visit us in the Netherlands, she had Dutch heritage and we went to see some members of her family. This took us around an absolutely charming old town of approximately 35,000 people. They lived in this typical Dutch suburban neighborhood and it was really nice. The row houses were well maintained. The streets were safe and narrow and there were many things that were easy to walk to. and a short bike ride away, of course, was a nice little train station with a ridiculous amount of bikes parked out front. Snake Town Center is pedestrian-friendly and is a truly wonderful place to be.

We went out on a boat and sailed through the canals. I don't think a small town can be so nice as a reference point. This is what the center of a city of similar size in Canada looks like, and I always assumed that's what all small

towns

were like. I never could have imagined that a small town, city could havea pedestrian center before coming to the Netherlands and yet here they are everywhere. We also visited his extended family in Elkmar, a city with a population of about a hundred thousand people, and I was absolutely shocked that it was a neighborhood of single people. family houses in a relatively small town and yet it didn't have very wide streets with speeding cars, it was quiet and boring just like a suburb is supposed to be, but it was also perfectly safe to walk and bike and was directly connected to a local park with a network of separated cycle paths that could take you anywhere else within the city.

We saw so many children playing together and without any parents around. This is simply a better way to design a suburb. I was doing a contract in the city of zeist, so I had to travel there every week. I'm going to make a whole video about this because it was the most beautiful modern train station I've ever seen. This is ridiculous right? A city of 65,000 people in Canada doesn't even have a train station anymore, let alone one that looks like this. This is just a small sample of the places we went to in our first years in the Netherlands.

There are many other places we have been and I have already talked about many of them on this channel. I have another YouTube channel where I live stream my bike rides and these live streams show a totally unfiltered view of what it's like to ride a bike in the Netherlands. I started doing these walks because I wanted people to see. what it's really like here among the places that I choose to film and it's nice almost everywhere and that's really what I want to make clear to people because what really struck meWhat it told me about going to all these random places, from industrial parks to suburban neighborhoods and small towns, was that none of them were bad, sure some places were better than others and there are certainly a lot of places that could benefit from better public transportation, but I have yet to do it.

I can see any place in any city or town in the Netherlands where I felt uncomfortable or unsafe being outside a car, and yet when I think about my time in Canada, I would go to places that I would call bad on a regular basis. and every time I had to leave my neighborhood without driving I expected to feel unsafe multiple times and literally every time I had to go somewhere in a suburb or small town I absolutely had to drive and I was surrounded by trash like this. Most of the time, the funny thing is that after a few years of living in the Netherlands, my idea of ​​bad has changed.

For example, I absolutely hate the Zylstrat in Amsterdam and avoid it whenever I can, but in Canada this would be considered one of the good places. It is what motivates me to continue making videos on this channel. I want people to understand that I'm not just looking for the best parts of Holland to highlight while ignoring the bad parts, there are no bad parts or if there are they are very few and far from that, I haven't seen them. A great example is my video about this business park next to the airport. I just couldn't believe that a business park next to the airport could be easily accessible to public transportation, safe for walking and biking, and even pretty or this.

Random business park in Amsterdam with a beautiful two-way cycle path running through it. I spent much of my life going to business parks in various cities in the US and Canada, but they were all shit, without exception. I always assumed it was like that. exactly how they were and yet apparently they don't have to be and the same goes for small towns. I hated small towns in Canada, they always seemed like garbage with giant parking lots and a high-speed Strode running through the center of town. and yet here the small towns were charming and were usually easily accessible by public transport and almost always had some kind of pedestrian area.

Five years of living in the Netherlands have changed me forever. I will never be able to go back to the life I had before. and the other big advantage of living here for five years is that I can apply for a Dutch passport, which is great because after traveling the world I finally found the place I want to live and I have no intention of ever going back. I would like to thank my followers on nebula and patreon who pay me to walk down memory lane. If you want to support the channel, check out nebula.tv not just bikes or patreon.com not just bikes oh.