BECAUSE the football was so forgettable, the tinkling torrent of tintinnabulation lives longest in the memory.

Last week, Middlesbrough's well-lubricated supporters headed on foot to the stadium in Eindhoven to watch their team's unsuccessful Uefa Cup final just as the Dutch rush hour began.

And the Dutch commute by bike. There were hundreds of pushbikes flooding out of the town centre; and there were thousands of supporters swaying against the tide into it on their unsteady feet.

Cultures clashed. The air was full of the sound of the bikes' bells, ringing, dinging and high-pitched pinging.

The Netherlands has a population of 15.8 million people who between them own 16 million bikes. Everyone cycles. Businessmen in suits. Old women doing their shopping. Trendy teenagers holding hands with their first loves as they pedal out from behind the bikesheds. Mothers on the school run with giant hoppers on the front into which they throw as many helmetless kids as possible.

Darlington has recently won nearly £5m to spend on getting people out of their cars. It is one of three "towns on the move" in the country; it is one of five Cycling Demonstration Towns; "do the local motion" is the catchphrase.

Thirty-five per cent of Darlingtonians are employed within two miles of their home - they should be biking to work. Forty-seven per cent of journeys within Darlington are less than two miles long - they should be pedalled.

But barely anyone bikes. When two bike-borne commuters pass, they greet each other as if they were the last members of a way-of-life on the verge of extinction. Five bike racks were installed on the side of the new multi-storey car park. In five months, they have yet to have a bike racked in them.

In the Netherlands, the cyclist is king of the road and master of the footpath.

He can go through red lights and ignore one-way systems. The lines on the roads say bikes - not cars - are the champions of the tarmac.

On the footpaths, pedestrians listen out for the tinkling bells and move graciously out of the way without complaining.

The Dutch cyclist has 12,000 miles of cyclepaths devoted to pedalling. These connect towns and villages, and they do not require him to dismount every time he comes to a roundabout.

Even the taxman looks out for the cyclist: you get a 300 euro tax break if you commute six miles a week, for a minimum of three days a week.

Our lifestyle shuns the cyclist. We shop at out-of-town supermarkets which require a Chelsea tractor to carry all the boxes home; the Continentals have bakers and butchers on most corners and so dangle a single shopping bag off the handlebars.

If we eat out, it's a car-drive away in a quiet country pub. Our nearby town centres are too full of binge-drinkers for it to be safe for a cyclist to pedal through.

But even if we spend millions on cyclepaths, re-design our town centres, re-educate our drivers and pedestrians and reconciled Gordon Brown to losing a few quid, would two wheels ever be better than four?

After all, Holland is flat. The Tees Valley requires leg power, particularly pulling up the bank to Bolam.

That night, Sevilla's fourth goal against Middlesbrough went in as it neared 11 o'clock. Curious Dutch people were still pulling up on their bikes to see the British en fete. Even at that late hour on a mid-May night, they were only wearing shirt sleeves.

However much we spend promoting the "local motion", won't the British weather always put a spoke in the wheel of cycling?

Published: 20/05/2006