“ I am a bird ”
That’s all I could think when I hopped on a bike on my way back to the Antwerp train station.
I write this with the most sincere thought in mind— biking your way through a city changes everything.
Walking is great, but with time being my most prominent antagonist, wheeling at three times the speed was a no brainer for me. Also, dehydration is real, and the burning sun wasn’t on my side that particular summer day.
Biking through Antwerp not only made me feel like Superman, but it also made me think deeply about my experience of the city through its relationship to this amazing (and sometimes problematic) form of transportation.
Here are my biggest takeaways from my biking adventures in Antwerp, Belgium:
I totally felt like a local. The tourists I saw were mostly concentrated at the museums and city center— not at the neighborhood park or local grocery store. With the bike and only my backpack, I felt like a college student just riding from school to my house admiring just another day in the city. In my opinion, this is the best way to experience a foreign town. Even though I was still a tourist, blending in with the locals allowed me see the city in a unique perspective and not as a complete outsider.
In some aspects, I felt a lot safer. I had no major safety issues in Antwerp, but we should aways be cautious when exploring new cities, especially alone. Having a bike allowed me to explore deeper into unknown neighborhoods and simply get lost in the city instead of sticking to the touristy areas all day. If I happened to make a wrong turn in a dark alley, I was happy knowing that I could pedal away quickly instead of attracting attention with my weird speed walk.
On the other hand, bikes can be a lot more dangerous than cars. I loved biking through Antwerp, but bikes are fast… and bikers will probably not stop at a high speed bike lane just because you’re walking where you’re not supposed to. On my one day in the city, I saw two bikers get hit by cars and three bikers run into pedestrians. Everyone was fine, but one of the biggest lessons I learned that day is that being attentive to your surroundings is a must… because the city ain’t stopping for you! Also, helmets aren’t a bad idea at all.
Confidence levels went up. When you feel confident about where you’re going in a strange city, the world is your oyster. Being able to get in and out of places quickly with a bike, made me a lot less scared or unwilling to take risks and discover the city on my own. Also, when you integrate with a city in a bike lane— moving at the same pace of other bikers and pedestrians— you feel like you truly are in another universe not because it’s a different country, but because, for a moment, it feels like that is your life. It’s very cool.
Of course thought, I was always careful to never stay alone for too long if I did turn into a strange neighborhood. Blending in is awesome, but still use common sense and remember that you actually don’t know the city 100% !
Overall, if you’re careful, want to see twice as much in a day, and you want to feel like a bird, I’d say riding a bike in Antwerp is the way to go.
Just experiencing this one day as a biker in Antwerp opened my eyes to the importance of safe and abundant bike lanes in a city and the role it plays in every day urban activity.
Now the question is, how can Houston and other larger cities benefit from these transportation strategies? We’re talking about a differently scaled city, but in the long run, applying similar tactics in terms of bike lanes and public transportation could be a game changer in the way urban life could be in these more populated cities.
