Would you go furniture shopping on a bike? Citizens of Groningen, Netherlands, visit IKEA with special cargo bikes, which is just one of the reason this Dutch town is of the world鈥檚 most bicycle-friendly cities, The city has 190,000 inhabitants, 75,000 cars and around 300,000 bicycles.
The city has become a model for effective bicycle infrastructure due to the compact street plan enacted in the 1970s. Gorningen鈥檚 center is divided into quadrants, and the city government stipulates that citizens could not drive via car directly from one section to another. However, this law didn’t apply to bicyclists.
“This is not really an anti-car measure,” David Hembrow, who blogs about Dutch bike culture, told The Atlantic. “What this is, is making the neighborhoods where people live more pleasant, and making cycling into a viable option.”
Today, half of all trips in Groningen are made via bicycle, nearly doubling the bicycle commuter rate of the top bike friendly cities in the U.S. In Davis, California, a little less than a quarter of residents commute via bicycle,