Our History

While traveling in Amsterdam on holiday with my family in 2006, I was struck by the extent to which the bicycle was integrated into the everyday life of the Dutch. While I had always used the bicycle as my principle vehicle back home in the States, and often wondered why more people didn’t do the same, in the Netherlands I was not alone. I rode among a sea of bicyclists.

 
The Dutch do everything by bike: they take their children to and from school on bikes, carry heavy professional equipment on bikes, and even ride to the opera on bikes. It is not unusual to see a mother or father ferrying three children, including a newborn, on one bike unit along bike lanes, or to see octogenerian couples riding to a restaurant.
 
I was amazed by the health, social cohesiveness, and beauty of the place and its people, and I thought that much of the individual and social healthfulness that I had observed was directly related to the way in which people get to where they need to go. Here was an entire nation, an entire culture, that confirmed the impressions that I had derived at home in the USA: that habitual use of the bicycle was infinitely more sensible than habitual use of the car, and here was concrete and conspicuous evidence that it was associated with a myriad of individual, social, aesthetic and environmental benefits.
 
And so I wondered. Why hadn’t the same behaviors taken hold in Boston and Cambridge? I discussed this problem with a Dutchman. He summed it up this way: “Yes, you Americans have gotten into some really bad habits.” Was it really that simple?
 
Habit is the means by which senseless behaviors (such as driving in the city) are perpetuated by individuals that might otherwise be regarded as highly sensible. These bad habits have become culturally entrenched and intergenerationally transmitted: In America, driving has become the customary, socially acceptable (and expectable) way of getting oneself and one’s things from point A to point B.
 
The New Amsterdam Project was conceived in response to this problem. It aims to replace cars and trucks with human-powered transit systems.