Book review: Building the Cycling City

Melissa Bruntlett and Chris Bruntlett, Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality (Island Press, 2018), xiii + 223pp.(6/2/2026) When the husband-and-wife team of Melissa and Chris Bruntlett toured bicycling facilities in the Netherlands in 2016 on assignment for Daily Hive, that country had a long-standing reputation for cycle commuting, such that North American cities despair of replicating their success. When they expanded their articles into this book the Bruntletts sought not only to describe Dutch efforts, but to show it was not ever thus, and that Dutch transportation policy was made the same slow, uncertain way in which all policy is made.Political scientist John Kingdon explained transformative policy change as resulting from the rare confluence of widely recognized problems, availability of acceptable policy solutions, and favorable political alignments (see Hoefer 2022). The Dutch city of Rotterdam, heavily bombed during World War II, experienced two…