“Where are our helmets?” my daughter Harper asked. We were standing outside a cycle shop in the Dutch city of Delft, along with Harper’s older sister, Lyra, and my wife, Alia.

“We didn’t buy any,” I replied. Along the dark green Wijnhaven canal, confident Dutchmen and Dutchwomen whizzed around, their blond heads exposed to the soft northern sun. “In the Netherlands, only tourists wear helmets.”

“What if we get in a crash?” Lyra asked.

“We won’t,” I said. “O.K., now, let’s line up—oop!” A Dutchman in a sleek blue suit, riding a sleek blue bike, was swerving around me from the south. Another rider, approaching from the north, rang her bell to remind me that I was blocking traffic. “Everyone, get on,” I commanded, but nobody did. Small traffic jams were developing on either side of our uncertain foursome. “Let’s maybe walk our bikes to a less busy street,” I said. We wheeled our way across a bridge into the Markt square, where the primary obstacle was an Italian tour group.

It was April of 2017. We were to live in Delft for three months, and our canalside apartment, on a street named Hippolytusbuurt, was within riding distance of the grocery, the bakery, the girls’ school, the library, the IKEA. Back home, in Virginia, our lives had been a blur of traffic, from drop-offs at soccer practice to hectic commutes. While our family was in Holland, Alia and I decided, we would take a break from driving cars. Cycling was the norm in the Netherlands, and fulfilled the dream of every American rider who wished she could rule the road. It was a country with more bikes than people, and we were eager to slip into the two-wheeled flow.

At the cycle shop, we’d bought used bikes for the adults and new but cheap ones for the kids. In the Dutch style, they weren’t mountain or racing bikes but city cruisers, meant to be ridden perfectly upright, your back as straight as a marching soldier’s. An employee had attached brightly colored milk crates to the back of each bike, so that we could carry baguettes, or whatever. I secured an agreement from the manager that he would buy back the bikes upon our departure, that July. I’d have been satisfied with a handshake, but the manager, being Dutch, had drafted a three-sentence contract, which we both signed in duplicate.

Alia took out her phone, opened Google Maps, and pointed to a lake just east of the city. “I thought we could ride out here and see what we see,” she said.

“Can we get a snack?” Harper asked.

“I am sure we will get a snack.”

And so we set off, with varying levels of feigned confidence, down the brick streets of Delft, the uneven surface making our wheels jostle. Every few turns of the pedals, I’d ride past a single brick that was painted the elegant blue-and-white of Delftware. As we crossed a canal on a high stone bridge, four boys zoomed past, each with a girlfriend perched sidesaddle atop his back wheel; they were followed, like a punch line, by a girl, pedalling hard, with a boyfriend sitting pertly atop hers.

We rode past the Oude Kerk, whose steeple, from the fourteenth century, leans at a pitch greater than that of Pisa’s tower. To our right was a wall of narrow three- and four-story apartment buildings, each with a business on the ground floor. To our left was the seven-hundred-year-old Oude Delft canal, its still surface covered with lily pads and floating trash. There was no protective guardrail or fence, not even a curb—just an unnerving, cliff-like drop. I kept imagining myself zooming off the edge, “Thelma & Louise”–style, and into the dark water.

Alia led the way, with Lyra, then eleven, and Harper, then nine, in the middle, and me covering our rear. “Try to stay to the right,” I called ahead, as faster bikers passed on our left. When a hatchback zipped past us, mere inches from our bikes, Lyra shouted, “That car almost hit me!” After another car came uncomfortably close, she cried, “I don’t like this! Why aren’t we wearing helmets?”

There’s a gesture I make when I’m biking in the United States that, to me, encapsulates the status cyclists have in this country. Whenever I reach an intersection with a car approaching, I slow down to make sure I won’t be hit, and, even when I have the legal right of way—on a bike path, or when the car has a yield sign—I acknowledge a driver’s stopping with a little half-wave. Thank you for obeying the law and not killing me, I am saying.

Even in optimistic American municipalities that have demarcated bike lanes on the street or paved a few bike paths, cars come first, and drivers rarely look out for cyclists. Drivers park and then swing their front doors wide; they make right turns without looking behind them; they pull out of parking lots and cut across bike lanes at full speed. Who can blame them? The system was built to maximize drivers’ efficiency, and anything that might slow them down is a glitch.

For cyclists used to being second-class citizens, watching bikes navigate the Netherlands is revelatory. It’s not just that Dutch train stations all house massive underground bicycle garages, with thousands of bicycles, or fietsen, locked up on tiered racks. It’s not just that every busy street has a handsome bike lane, paved in dark-red brick. It’s that on Dutch streets, bikes rule the road. They take priority in design and traffic flow. Traffic circles are laid out so that cyclists need never stop for cars. Busy intersections often have overpasses or underpasses, so that cyclists never have to slow down.

Most important, drivers look out for cyclists, cede the right of way, and are rarely surprised by them. After all, nearly all those drivers are cyclists themselves. The eighteen million residents of the Netherlands own, in total, more than twenty-two million bicycles. Dutch kids ride in child seats practically from birth, are on balance bikes by two, and are cycling unaided by four. Old people continue to cycle, too: when pedalling gets too difficult, they switch to battery-assisted e-bikes, which now outsell standard adult bikes in the Netherlands.

When you’re biking on a Dutch street, the person next to you in a Renault Clio is driving today only because she broke her arm or has to cart furniture home from the store. Most days, she’d be biking next to you, unprotected from cars except by custom, respect, and the forethought that comes from being able to think like a cyclist. In the Netherlands, drivers don’t turn right without checking their blind spots. They don’t park in bike lanes, not even just for a minute, to drop something off. And no Dutch cyclist ever half-waves at a driver for making a required stop—they assume that drivers will see them and obey the law.

Even if something goes wrong, a biker will still likely emerge unscathed. Dutch transportation designers strive to create what Wim Bot, an official in the Dutch cyclist’s union, calls “forgiving infrastructure”—systems that allow users to make errors without causing a crash. Studies have demonstrated that when a car hits a cyclist at speeds in excess of thirty kilometres per hour the cyclist is not likely to survive. Therefore, Bot told me, “thirty kilometres is the maximum speed in every living area in the Netherlands.” This consistent speed limit means that “it’s safe to have shared space between users of different forms of mobility.” Even though nobody wears bike helmets in the Netherlands, the fatality rate there is six times smaller than that of the United States.