The public transit here is very extensive and (generally) reliable. Being extensive brings with it a certain level of complication, and this sometimes mixes poorly with American senses of scale. There’s two metro stops and three bus stops within convenient (Dutch) walking distance from our house.
We didn’t have bikes for about our first week in Amstelveen, so we were reduced largely to walking and public transit, and we still hadn’t adjusted to the proper sense of scale of distances here. Looking at the map, we had the following options:
- 500m walk to Punter bus stop
- 1km walk to Meent metro station
- 2km walk to Middenhoven shopping center
In our heads, the shortest possible walk trumped all other concerns, so off to Punter we went.
I forget why we didn’t go to the Coop that’s a 500m walk from our house … but if I recall, it was closed on Sundays at the time, so wasn’t an option.
What we didn’t quite get is that the 174 bus only runs twice an hour. So we had to wait a little longer than expected for it … with screaming toddlers. And then the first bus was cancelled and we wound up waiting for nearly an hour at this cold, wet bus stop. Hungry children being hungry children, there was a lot of angst between both parents and kids. There was probably some yelling. But eventually, we got to the Amstelveen Stadshart, got some shopping done, and fed the kids (I think their first) McDonalds in the Netherlands.
We waited at the bus stop going the other way for a bit, only to see on the iPhone app that it was completely ambiguous whether a bus was ever going to show up or not … at all. So we found a random street to stand next to (near the library and modern art museum) and called an Uber. We picked the worst possible place to wait, and it took a couple of calls back and forth with the driver to actually find each other.
All while our children were tired and melting down… yet again. In the cold and rain.
So, a 1km walk felt insurmountable at the time - especially with toddlers and bad weather. A year later, while we try to avoid that walk … we totally do it all the time. It’s no big deal.
Now that we have bikes, a lot of this is immaterial: we can cycle (with kids!) up to a few miles quite easily to catch the appropriate metro, train, or bus, to get pretty much anywhere in the country quite easily. We also know the hours (“openingstijden”) of the local grocery stores each day by heart. That 5 minute walk to the Coop is a 2 minute bike ride - if we’re short on milk at dinner time, I can step out to get it and be back in 10 minutes.
Getting the 1km to Meent is just a few minutes on bike, as well, so we frequently cycle over there as a family, lock up, then take the metro (which runs at least every 15 minutes!). We can even bring our bikes on the Metro and use them for the “last km” at our destination.
For that first ill-fated trip, though, we’d have saved ourselves a lot of pain and tears and yelling if we’d just walked all the way to the metro. We’d thought about it - I think Kristin was even a bit mad at me that I thought the bus was the better option and just forged on ahead. A few days later we did just that, and it was absolutely terrible. The kids weren’t used to walking that far, we weren’t used to walking that far, we weren’t used to shepherding the kids for that long of a walk, and it felt like we’d just never, ever actually get there. But the more we did it, the shorter the walk felt, and now it’s just … normal. We do it all the time, if necessary.