Last weekend, my girlfriend and I took off from Brussels for a two day bike trip through part of the Flemish region, taking the train back to Brussels on Sunday evening.  I had heard that bike touring was good in Belgium, but coming from some experience bike touring in Canada, I assumed that this meant that there were plenty of country roads and generally polite drivers.

But, no, that’s only the beginning.  In fact, in the Flemish region, there is a huge network of bike-exclusive roads, which you navigate by going from one numbered checkpoint to another.  Actually, to be clear, the routes alternate between bike-exclusive paths and shared use as a minor road, which hardly differed from the bike-exclusive paths.  The entire network is in a fantastic state of maintenance, and extremely well sign-posted.

I’ll give a brief photo journey of the trip.  Coming out of Brussels, we went through the Foret de la Soigne, just outside the Brussels city centre, which boasts great scenery and a comprehensive set of trails for walking, running and cycling.  It suffered a little bit on the sign-posting front, but made up for it in beauty.

From there, we connected onto the Flemish network, which largely passed through the country-side.  There, we probably saw more apple orchards in harvest than cars.

So, why is it possible for Belgium to maintain this system over Canada?  There’s no doubt that it benefits from the proximity of one town to another.  However, there are certainly areas of Canada that have the same layout, and we don’t see a similar system.

More importantly, it benefits from the culture in Belgium.  People bike here.  They bike to work (although that is somewhat less the case in Brussels itself given how crowded the city is with cars).  They bike for recreation.  They bike to get groceries.  They bike as families, as couples or alone.  On Sunday morning, we saw at least a dozen bike teams, in matching jerseys, biking around the Flemish region.  Some appeared to be quite competitive, others didn’t.

There simply isn’t the same barrier here to bicycling as a mode of transport.  It’s done recreationally on a much wider scale than in Canada, but bicycles are also used for practical purposes on a routine basis, which probably in turn fosters their recreational use.

It’s this culture of bicycling in Belgium that allows them to sustain such an impressive system of bike routes.  It’s this culture that explains why Belgium does it so much better.

While in Canada, Car Free Day amounts to little more than an appeal to voluntarily use another method of transportation or the closing of a few blocks for a form of street fair, in Brussels, they shut down the entire urban centre, amounting to 160 km2.  Granted, this was done on a Sunday, so they weren’t quite willing to impede regular commuting traffic.  However, in a city of over 1 million residents, with an ordinarily crowded, bustling centre (to a degree that isn’t even comparable to Ottawa), this was still a very big undertaking.

The effect was nothing short of dramatic.  Immediately below, I’ve got a split-screen photo of General Jacques, a major commuting road near my apartment.  On the left is a photo of General Jacques that I took yesterday afternoon at about 4pm, at the beginning of the commuter rush.  On the right is a photo of the street on Car Free Day.

Car Free Day in Brussels was incredible no because of what there was, but because of what there wasn’t: unpleasant smells, offensive noises and a general feeling of unease from the overwhelming domination of cars in our cities.  This last one I don’t even notice on a day to day basis, but it’s absence was palpable.  For that matter, I don’t notice many of the effects of cars on a given day of walking around the city, but when they were gone, there was an almost eerie calm, despite the fact that you were surrounded by dozens or hundreds of people.

Simply put, Brussels without cars was a much nicer, healthier and safer place to be.  Experiencing that was both inspiring and depressing, a sentiment which I’m sure I was sharing with thousands of other people in the city that day.

I’ll finish this post simply by showing a few more photos of the city.  All of the photos below were taken on major streets in Brussels, which are usually crowded with cars.