🇳🇱 Netherlands · 🇻🇳 Vietnam
By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office
The Netherlands and Vietnam are the two most bicycle-intensive societies on earth, and they have arrived at this condition from entirely different starting points and through entirely different philosophies. The Netherlands has 23 million bicycles for 17 million people, which means statistically there are more bikes than citizens, which raises questions about what happens to the surplus and whether some of those bikes are leading independent lives. Vietnam has 45 million motorbikes and a traffic culture so fluid and so seemingly chaotic that first-time visitors frequently stand on the kerb for ten minutes before accepting that the crossing only works if you commit to it and walk steadily into the oncoming stream.
Both countries move primarily on two wheels. Both have urban cultures shaped by the practical realities of two-wheeled transport. The similarities end there. Dutch cycling is engineered, rule-governed, and so comprehensively integrated into urban infrastructure that you could navigate the country on a bicycle from the train station to your final destination without once needing to check whether you were allowed to be where you were. Vietnamese two-wheeled urban life is improvised, democratic, and operated by collective intuition — a distributed, self-organising traffic system that looks, to the uninitiated, exactly like what would happen if you gave everyone a motorbike and removed all the rules, which is approximately what happened, and which works remarkably well.
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Buy a Dutch bike immediately upon arrival — the heavy, upright, single-or-three-speed Dutch omafiets (grandmother bike) is not a lifestyle accessory, it is the correct transport for Dutch cities, and arriving without one is like arriving in a city without shoes | Walk in the bike lane. This is the most important rule in the Netherlands and it is enforced not by law but by the expressions of Dutch cyclists, which range from sharp bell rings to remarks delivered in flat English that communicate disapproval with admirable efficiency |
| Learn the traffic light system for cyclists — Dutch cycle paths have their own traffic lights, their own right-of-way rules, and their own road markings, and understanding them takes a few weeks of active attention | Bring a lightweight road bike or fancy urban bike from elsewhere and expect it to survive long-term. Dutch cities have dedicated bike theft ecosystems of considerable sophistication, and a desirable bike is a temporary possession |
| Lock your bike with a good Dutch lock (AXA or Kryptonite are the standards) using both the wheel lock and a chain to a fixed object | Underestimate the social infrastructure of Dutch cycling. Bike paths are shared with other cyclists moving at similar speeds, and the unspoken conventions around passing, signalling, and lane position are real and are learned by observation |
| Use the OV-fiets (public transport bike rental) system if you are still establishing yourself — the Dutch public transport bike rental scheme allows you to take a bike from any train station for a daily rate, which solves the transport problem while you find your permanent bicycle | Cycle while talking on your phone without a headset. It is illegal and Dutch police are surprisingly present at known smartphone-cycling locations |
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Learn to cross Vietnamese streets before you try anything else — the technique is to walk slowly, steadily, and predictably into traffic, make eye contact with approaching vehicles if possible, and trust that the traffic will flow around you. Stopping or changing direction is what causes accidents | Freeze at the kerb waiting for a gap. Gaps in Vietnamese urban traffic are rare and the gap-waiting strategy results in standing on a pavement indefinitely. The traffic is moving more slowly than it appears and it will accommodate you if you give it something predictable to accommodate |
| Rent a motorbike only after you have spent significant time as a passenger and pedestrian — Vietnamese traffic flow has an internal logic that is only visible after extended observation, and entering it without that context on a vehicle with more power than a bicycle is inadvisable | Drive a car in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City's old quarters on your first month. The density, the informal rules, and the spatial awareness required are developed through time on a motorbike first |
| Use Grab (the regional rideshare equivalent) for longer trips — it is reliable, affordable, and provides an excellent opportunity to observe the traffic from a passenger perspective | Underestimate the utility of xe ôm (motorbike taxi) drivers who know a city. A regular xe ôm driver in a Vietnamese city is a navigation system, a local contact, and occasionally a surprisingly good restaurant recommendation |
| Observe how Vietnamese urbanites carry objects on motorbikes before you make assumptions about what is possible — the practical engineering of Vietnamese motorbike cargo management is extraordinary and includes furniture, livestock, and quantities of produce that defy physical expectation | Assume air quality in Vietnamese cities is uniformly good. Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi have significant air quality issues related to traffic density, and a good mask during high-pollution periods is practical rather than excessive |
The Netherlands did not arrive at its cycling culture by accident — it arrived by policy decision made in the 1970s, when Dutch urban planners, faced with a choice between car-centric development and human-scale cities, chose the latter with a specificity and a funding commitment that has produced, fifty years later, the most comprehensively cyclist-friendly country on earth. The bike lane is not a gesture toward sustainable transport; it is the primary transport infrastructure, wider than the car lane on many Dutch roads, maintained to a quality that makes British cycle lanes look like an afterthought, and used by 27% of all journeys in the country as a whole.
Cycling in the Netherlands is not an activity for the athletically inclined or the environmentally motivated — it is the default, neutral choice for getting places, made by people in business suits, people carrying children on cargo bikes, people with shopping bags hanging from both handlebars, people smoking, people in heels. The demographic breadth of Dutch cycling is itself evidence of how thoroughly the infrastructure has removed all friction from the choice. You cycle because it is the easiest option, not because you have decided to be the kind of person who cycles.
The social conventions of Dutch cycling are as rigorous as the infrastructure. Do not walk in the cycle lane. Do not stop in the cycle lane. Do not change direction unexpectedly in the cycle lane. The Dutch cyclist communicating their displeasure at your behaviour is not being rude — they are enforcing a shared commons that functions only if everyone follows the conventions, and your walking in the bike lane has disrupted a system that seventeen million people depend on.
Vietnamese urban traffic operates on a principle that traffic engineers would call emergent order and Vietnamese people would call obvious. The motorbike is the primary vehicle because it is affordable, manoeuvrable, and practical in cities that were not designed for cars — narrow streets, dense neighbourhoods, buildings flush to the kerb. The traffic appears, to the outside eye, to have no rules. What it has is a different set of rules than the observer is expecting: implicit, distributed, collectively enforced through the feedback of being on the road with forty thousand other people making the same calculation.
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The key insight into Vietnamese traffic is that it is slow. The speed of a motorbike stream in Hanoi's Old Quarter is approximately that of fast cycling — fast enough to move through a city, slow enough to accommodate pedestrians, slow enough to correct for the unexpected. The crossing pedestrian is not in danger because the traffic is slow, predictable in its collective response, and accustomed to pedestrians as a normal part of the road environment. The danger is for the pedestrian who disrupts the collective prediction by freezing or turning back.
Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi are genuinely excellent cities to inhabit once you have learned to move through them. Dense, walkable within neighbourhoods, cheap to transport across, full of street food vendors accessible by motorbike at hours when other cities have closed their kitchens, and socially organised around the outdoor life that two-wheeled mobility enables.
The Netherlands has the world's best two-wheeled urban infrastructure, and Vietnam has the world's most fascinating two-wheeled urban culture, and the distinction is important because infrastructure can be copied while culture cannot.
Moving to the Netherlands means learning a system that will, within three months, feel so natural that you will be unable to explain to non-Dutch visitors why they keep walking in the bike lane. Moving to Vietnam means learning a set of instincts that will, within three months, feel so embedded that you will cross a busy intersection without fully remembering that you found it impossible in week one.
Both are places where two wheels are the right answer. They just require different kinds of confidence to ride.
Internations Amsterdam — "I had my first bike stolen in eleven days. My second in six weeks. Both were locked. Both were in what I thought were reasonable places. A Dutch colleague eventually explained the bike theft ecosystem to me with the detachment of someone describing weather. 'Yes, bikes get stolen. You get a cheaper bike. You chain it more securely. Eventually you stop caring because a Dutch bike costs sixty euros second-hand.' I now have a bike that cost sixty euros second-hand. Nobody has stolen it."
expat.com Hanoi — "Crossing the street in Hanoi was the most frightening thing I did in my first month, and I had moved cities three times before. The technique that worked for me: find a local, ask them to cross with you, observe carefully, then try it yourself. The first successful solo crossing felt like something significant. Three months later I was crossing six-lane roads while checking my phone and somehow this seemed reasonable."
Reddit r/Netherlands — "Nobody prepares you for the tram-bike-pedestrian interaction zones in central Amsterdam. They are a three-dimensional chess problem that locals navigate by instinct and that tourists fail at in ways that cause traffic delays, glares, and occasional mild collisions. My advice: stand still, look in all directions, wait for a local to provide a template, and then follow them exactly. Do not improvise."
The Netherlands and Vietnam have both built urban lives around two-wheeled transport and both have produced cities that work — efficiently and differently, with completely different aesthetics, at completely different income levels, for completely different reasons.
What they share is the thing that all good urban transport systems share: they have made the default choice the right one. In the Netherlands, cycling is easier than driving. In Vietnam, a motorbike is the only sane response to the city's geometry. In both cases, the two wheels are not the idealistic option — they are the practical one.
Get on the bike. Learn the rules, written and otherwise. And whatever you do in Amsterdam, stay out of the cycle lane.
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Danny Fisk
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.