Even before the war, bicycles were hugely popular in the Netherlands. When novelist Virginia Woolf visited Amsterdam in 1935 she wrote in her diary of ‘cyclists [who] go in flocks like starlings’. This love of bicycles was partly for geographical reasons. The flat landscape made travelling by bicycle relatively effortless, and the small size of the country meant that cycling from point to point rarely took long. Narrow streets also resulted in driving in cities being bothersome, while the general lack of space led to frequent difficulty in finding a parking place. Economics played a role too –
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