Staatsbezoek Mexico

Toespraak | 05-11-2009

Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Mr Governor, Mr Mayor, Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

Buenas Tardes,

I am delighted to address you at today’s luncheon, and to be here in Mexico lindo y querido.

Thank you for your kind words, Governor and Mr Mayor, and for your gracious hospitality. It is a great pleasure for us all to be here.

I was greatly impressed as I walked the streets of Dolores Hidalgo, the town where Father Miguel Hidalgo uttered his famous call for Mexican independence, the Grito de Dolores, almost two hundred years ago. This morning we saw the statue of the man who set off the chain of events that led to independence in 1821.

Next year Mexico will celebrate the beginning of its struggle for freedom, here in Dolores Hidalgo. In anticipation of the bicentennial, it is my great pleasure to offer Mexico a special gift on behalf of the Dutch community in your country, including the Dutch companies operating here.

As you may know, Dutch people are famous for going everywhere by bicycle. We don’t only use our bikes for recreation; for us they are a major form of transport. We jump on them to go to school and work, and to do our grocery shopping. Parents often carry one or two children on their bike – one in front and one at the back. We have even developed special carrier cycles for bigger families. There are more bicycles in the Netherlands than people; our country has the highest density of bicycles in the world.

Cycling is a clean, healthy, cheap way of getting around. It is also safe, if certain precautions are taken. So cycling is becoming more and more popular all over the world, including in Mexico. Now that climate change is high on our list of concerns, cycling should be encouraged as a contribution to sustainability, as the cleanest, healthiest and fastest mode of urban transport. A bicycle-friendly town improves the quality of urban life in other ways too: less pollution, less noise, fewer parking problems. And more exercise, more savings and more happy faces on the street!

The gift that I offer you today and that will be presented to you next year, is a ‘bicycle tool kit’, with ideas for a policy on cycling and graphic tools for developing high-quality cycling infrastructure. We are offering it to all Mexican municipalities to help them carry out a comprehensive bicycle strategy. We would like this project to increase the use of bicycles by 50% over a five-year period, to reduce the number of cycling-related accidents by 50%, and to result in at least 600 kilometres of new cycling infrastructure. These are ambitious goals, I know, but I am confident that together we can achieve them. We will be working closely with local Mexican organisations that promote bicycle use. And the Dutch companies in Mexico participating in the project have pledged to share their experiences with encouraging cycling by their employees – and to provide 90% of the project’s funding!

Ladies and gentlemen,

As a keen cyclist myself, I sincerely hope that this gift will boost the number of kilometres that are cycled in Mexico, enjoyably and above all safely! And I wish you a very successful bicentennial next year.

Thank you.