Video – Plus 1, Minus 2

YouTube channels Not Just Bikes and Shifter recently played a game of Plus 1 Minus 2, comparing bicycle trips from “downtown” to a hardware store in their respective towns of Calgary, Canada and Amsterdam, Netherlands. They looked at how the infrastructure made things easier or harder for the non-car folks, and for each moment of bicycle friendliness they got “+1”, and for each moment off difficulty or discouragement they got “-2”.

Their videos were really interesting to watch, and it occurred to us that a similar trip in our area of the Netherlands might also be of interest to others. Also, we were worried that too many people might be discouraged by the thought process “well of course you can have good bicycle infrastructure in Amsterdam…”, and wanted to show off a less “major city” locale.

Board games are another passion of ours, and often times a good board game will get “expansions” which add new pieces, gameplay, or scoring. We wanted to fold that idea into our video, so we added “Cars Removed From Road”: the number of cars that would have been on the road without a good bicycle network; and since intersections filled with traffic lights are much rarer here, we called out the few signalized intersections we encountered.

I hope you enjoy our video of “Plus 1, Minus 2, Urban Cycling Edition: Gelderland Expansion!”