Copenhagen

So, we've made it to Copenhagen! In some ways it's an advantage that we're staying out of town (in Gentofte). The suburbs are quite different from the city, where metropolitan rushing seems to be the order of the day. In fact mobility in Copenhagen altogether seems more frantic than the likes of Bremen. The wide cycle paths don't simply cater for large numbers. They cater for different styles - and speeds - of cycling.

Don't be fooled by the excellent Cycle Chic movement. Large numbers of Copenhagen's cyclists, chic or otherwise, seem to be in a mighty hurry to get to wherever they are going. Maybe they have taken the point that cycling is quicker than driving in a city to heart, and are desperate to prove it with every last heave of the pedal. The funny thing is, this speed cycling is not restricted to the helmet and lycra brigade. Today, for example, we were doing our usual 15 kilometres per hour pootle along the coast, on a lovely sunny day (it's my birthday, all the more reason to pootle), when we were overtaken by a frantic, bell ringing lass in her 30's, sitting more or less horizontal with head right down between her handlebars. Only they were dutch style handlebars, the grips a good foot back from her nose.

Could this strange (in our eyes) cultural phenomenon be simply a result of our having spent too many years in small, provincial Darlington, the "quiet town" of 1970s fame? Or is said birthday (shit, 59!!!!!) a watershed in the ageing process, when suddenly everything and everyone around you seems so young, fit and fast (ok, drop that last remark when applied to the young of Darlo)?

Maybe the Copenhagen Cycle Quick movement is related to the thousands of joggers we've also spotted around the city. There seems to be a positive plague of jogging going on here, and not just in the obvious places like parks and waterfronts. We sat outside our hotel last night here in quiet suburban Gentofte until just before midnight, and the two wildly exciting events were either a bus passing or a jogger jogging on the main street. But then I suppose hectic metropolitan life doesn't stop for silly things like sleep, so maybe we should expect such sights, even in Gentofte at midnight.

As for the serious stuff, cycling infrastructure, well we've done the videos, both in the city and out here in the suburbs, and we'll be editing them together over the next few weeks. Having cycled in to Copenhagen from the countryside, and before that from Germany, there are interesting comparisons to be made between the German rural/urban and Danish rural/urban approaches, and we'll be aiming to do that with the video material. Suffice to say right now, Copenhagen still has its car-centric legacy (motorways going right into the city, traffic jams, appalling noise) in many areas. But this simply illustrates the historical urgency of the pro-cycling policy. Much had to be done, much has been done, and much more is and will be done. And at its core, this involves taking space from motorised transport and using this to create substantial cycling infrastructure to a high standard. A standard, in fact, that needs to accomodate we pootlers, the cycle chic of the city, and the permanent rush-hourers.

Video report to come!

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The cycle paths to happy cycling - digging deeper

With the launch of our new website, our work now turns to exploring the political, social and economic constraints on cycling. We recently published an article in the new magazine Cycling Mobility, which explored the influence of habitus on cycling policies in the UK and Germany. This set us thinking about the many hours of material that were never used in the final production, and how there are many other stories that could be told by these young women. We featured short portraits of Darlington girls Sofija, Kate and Lauren during their visit to Bremen in 2009, but the Bremen girls, and their perspectives on cycling, are just as interesting. They reveal how there is much more to what David Hembrow calls "subjective safety" than has so far been written. And how our understanding of cycling can be so different.

Ricarda, one of the Beauty and the Bike girls from Bremen, spoke of "cycling" in the UK not being what she understood as "cycling" at all. We later queried her about this, and she talked a lot about cycling on roads with motorised traffic, whether in a lane or without, as being completely alien to her. There was an interesting aside about this when we were filming the two groups of girls in Bremen. Ricarda asks Harri what she thought of cycling along a mandatory cycle lane that had recently been developed on Hamburger Strasse. Harri responds by saying how safe she felt. But Ricarda later stated that she prefers to cycle "on the pavement" - this mandatory cycle lane just wasn't up to the standard that she wanted from cycling infrastructure.

Of course Ricarda didn't actually mean that she preferred to use the pedestrian space we call the pavement or sidewalk. What she was saying was that her idea of cycling was very much divorced from roads designed for motorised traffic. Living in Bremen, it was possible to get around most places without actually using a busy road. Yet here was a bit of new infrastructure that contradicted this vision. The road engineer who worked on this project also hinted that it was a "little bit different" for Bremen to be developing cycling infrastructure on the road - historically, Bremen's cycle paths have been built, as Ricarda says, on pavements.

From an infrastructure point of view, Hamburger Strasse is deemed an advance for cycling. Considerable space was taken away from motorised traffic to create the cycle lanes, and in fact they are often on the pavement as well. Bremen's older on-pavement cycle paths are often painfully narrow. But from a cycling culture point of view, it seems like a bit of a backward step to be putting cyclists on a road - albeit with some sense of safety provided by the nature of the mandatory lane.

Ricarda's vision of cycling as having nothing whatever to do with on-road activity has some pretty interesting cultural repercussions. If cycling is less like vehicular traffic and more like walking, well we can chat and take our time, can't we? We can use umbrellas, stop and window-gaze at every little shop,

 

play at look no hands as we cycle along, the possibilities are endless. And a long way away from the health and safety oriented vision of cycling in countries like the UK and the USA. Yet these contrasting ideas about cycling are shaping how cycling develops culturally. 

I would suggest this is a bit like pedestrians and pavements. In most countries with little or no infrastructure, roads/dirt tracks are shared by all. In most western societies, pavements have developed in urban areas for pedestrians. As pedestrians, we would find it alien to have to share all urban roads with motorised traffic.

Bicycling is a different mode of transport, with its own needs, speed, age ranges, that logically does not tally with the very different needs of motorised traffic. Yet certain countries deem it acceptable to continue to insist on cyclists doing just that. Perhaps for consistency, we should begin to rip up our pavements and insist that pedestrians also share road space. After all, some American cities organise their streets in exactly this way.

How to best integrate different transport modes requires a clear understanding of the nature of each. To take an obvious example, speed. On urban roads with a 30mph (48km/h) speed limit, average free flowing traffic speeds are in fact just that - 30mph (2009).  The average free-flow urban cycling speed in cities with dedicated infrastructure lies between 6.2 mph (10 km/h) and 17.4mph (28 km/h) with a majority of the reported speeds in the literature being between 7.5mph (12 km/h) and 12.4 mph (20 km/h). Average walking speed is about 4mph (6.5km/h).

Clearly, any decision to combine two or three of these modes requires careful consideration about the impact one mode might have on others. Thus mixed cycling and walking space is typically designed primarily around the needs of (slower) walkers, with cyclists treated as invited guests.  Similarly, mixed walking, cycling and motoring space such as Home Zones are designed to make motorists feel that they are a guest in the street, and must make it difficult for them to travel at speeds of more than 10 mph. In both these cases, priority is given to slower, more vulnerable traffic member.

Applying the same principle to mixing cyclists and motorists also makes absolute sense. Thus in countries with a more developed planning approach to cycling, facilities like Cycle Streets are designed as cyclist-priority streets with access for motorised traffic.

Cycle Street in Bremen, Germany

Similarly, the aim of the 20's Plenty Campaign is to establish a speed limit norm of 20mph (30km/h) in residential areas, as a means of moving towards streets that again can be used by residents and their children. What is particularly interesting is what happens in residential streets when such speed limits are combined with a strong cycling culture - the subject of our next post. But undoubtedly the great exception to these principles is the mixing of cyclists and motorists on busy 30mph roads. The illogic of this is only sustained as long as the number of cyclists is kept to a minimum, or in  some cases legally eliminated altogether. In the vast majority of towns and cities where this is the norm, cycling numbers remain stubbornly low. Dutch style infrastructure, as currently being considered by London Cycling Campaign, and advocated by both Darlington and Newcastle Cycling Campaigns, as well as a host of other online commentators, means good quality cycle paths alongside busy arterial roads.

Without this key strategic understanding, all the well-funded work going on around 20mph speed limits, cycle training, the marketing of cycling as healthy, and so on will have little effect on the levels of cycling in countries like the UK. "Cycling", as understood by Ricarda in our film, will continue to be a pipe dream.

New Research Confirms - It’s the Infrastructure

High quality, dedicated infrastructure will be required if Britain is to become a mass-cycling country, according to new research. Academics from Lancaster University, the University of Leeds and Oxford Brookes University have just released the results of a three year in-depth study of cycling in four English towns (Lancaster, Leeds, Leicester and Worcester). The work is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Key findings are summarised on the Bike Hub blog.

The research found that, broadly, two cycling cultures existed. In more affluent communities where people largely understood the message that cycling is “a good idea”, there is none the less widespread reluctance to use the bicycle on an everyday basis. As Dr. David Horton, one of the researchers, wrote, “The idea of it is too hard, too strange, and far too dangerous. They do cycle though, predominantly for pleasure, and especially on sunny summer Sundays. Away from the roads.”

In the second cycling culture, predominantly amongst less affluent working class communities, the bicycle is simply seen as irrelevant to transport, a child’s toy. Here, the bicycle is used more as a second-rate substitute for a car due to lack of affordability of the latter. As Dr. Horton writes, “although people from these communities tend not to rate cycling very highly, some do nontheless ride, through necessity, and on the footway. They ride on footways for two main reasons: first, because they feel safer there; and second, in order to stay out of the way of cars, which they don’t want to delay”.

The research concludes that our towns and cities have, over the past 50 years, been successfully developed for car use. Now we need to re-develop them for bicycle use. And the clear and well-tested policy of slow-speed residential streets combined with high quality separated cycle infrastructure on busy urban roads is confirmed as the way forward:

“We need radically to restructure our urban mobility systems in ways which will get people out of their cars and make them cycle. Half of the infrastructural change required is underway – the push for a maximum speed limit of 20 mph on residential streets is gaining momentum. But the other half of the key infrastructural change required needs a similar push, and this push should be for very high quality and continuous segregated cycling infrastructure on our biggest and busiest urban roads, the kind of roads on which almost everyone today refuses to cycle”.


The emphasis on infrastructure is made because of successive government and local authority decisions to support some of the easier requirements for a mass cycling culture - improved cycle parking, cycle training, bicycle coops and shops, promotional events and activities, bike hire. And 20’s Plenty campaigns around the country (including in our own Darlington) are gradually succeeding in moving local authorities to accept 20mph as the default speed limit in residential streets.

But the key need to address the quality of the cycling experience on busy main roads is consistently avoided, for fear of offending “the motorist”. With endless technical examples of best practice available from countries like the Netherlands, the problem is clearly political. Yet even in this sphere, inspiring examples of successful political action to radically transform cities, such as Seville in Spain, can be found.

But in the end, it may well be down to who our politicians listen to, rather than any technical expertise or ideas of best practice. One positive sign is that cycling’s national organisations appear to be slowly coming round to the same conclusions of Beauty and the Bike, the EPSRC, and an increasing number of cycling campaigns around the country. Whether UK politicians take any notice, though, is another matter.

Motorist Behaviour - From Darlington to Porto Alegre

Two problems stood out when the Beauty and the Bike group from Bremen visited Darlington - the lack of good quality infrastructure, and the aggressive behaviour of motorists towards cyclists.
This is a world-wide phenomenon in car-centric societies. First, roads are designed for the motorist. Second, cyclists are “invited” to share them. Third, motorists get frustrated with non-motorised traffic getting in the way on “their” road. Usually, these manifest themselves as isolated incidents between individuals. But a more serious event hit the headlines last week.
Twenty cyclists were violently struck on Friday February 25 while participating in a Critical Mass ride in Porto Alegre, Brazil. An angry motorist attacked a section of the ride, hitting dozens of vulnerable cyclists. After being arrested, the driver Ricardo Neis, claims that he did this in self defence.
Tonight, a ride will be organised entitled SACA LA BICI. RUTA POR LA PAZ (Use the Bike, the Path to Peace), in Querétaro, Mexico, is one of a number of international protests seeking justice for cyclists, and the freeing of public spaces currently overrun by the irresponsible culture of the car.

A Sense of Safety

This great little video has just been posted on YouTube by Leigh Andrews. It explores how young women in London take on crap infrastructure and the need to share road space with motorised traffic by building their self-confidence and taking road space.

Beauty and the Bike-What Happened Next?

The excitement of the film premiere is over. Back we go to "normal" life in Darlington. We've managed to keep the beautiful dutch bikes - in fact we're going to buy 40 more this year and expand the bike hire scheme. But how many girls will keep on cycling? We know that cycling is still "uncool" for many UK teenagers - perhaps because it feels so unsafe on our meagre infrastructure? Here, one of the girls from Beauty and the Bike, Lauren Pyrah, comes behind the camera to ask what is happening to the Darlington girls now. Kate, one of the original group, is joined by Francesca to shout the praises of everyday cycling. But Ashley has stopped. Why? And will politicians listen?

Project on Councillor Wallis's Blog

Richard Grassick, one of Darlington Media Group's producers of the Beauty and the Bike project, is interviewed by Councillor Nick Wallis, Darlington Borough Council Cabinet Member for Climate Change.