Copenhagenize.com - The Copenhagen Bike Culture Blog

2010 Copenhagenize Bicycle Infrastructure Fetish Calendar

2009-11-21T14:13:00.004+01:00

I just launched the 2010 Cycle Chic Calendar over at Cycle Chic [see the cover below] and that's all well and good.

Nice photography from Copenhagen featuring elegance and bicycles. All well and good. It'll be popular as it always is.

BUT... Copenhagenize just went one step further into the smut trade. I hereby launch:

The 2010 Copenhagenize Bicycle Infrastructure Fetish Calendar!

Probably the kinkiest calendar for 2010 on the market if you're a traffic planner, bicycle advocate or urban planner with a untameable fetish for bicycle infrastructure. Copenhagenize.com offers up its hottest photos to keep you satisfied throughout the year wherever you are.

Each month of the year you'll be caressed by steaming hot photos of cycle tracks, bike-to-train facilities, bike parking prototypes, you name it. You can't swing a blow-up doll around without hitting the infrastructure or bike facilities.

Buy it if you dare. Ask for plain, brown wrapping paper. Give it as a gift to your favourite, infrastructurally-frustrated traffic planner. Hang it up by the coffee machine in DoTs around the world. Spread the word. Spread the love.

Check out the preview over at Lulu.com quicksmart. Buy now. Operators are standing by. Se habla espanol.

If you're odd, then you can always just go for the 'girls on bikes' thang.

Bicycles and Large Hadron Colliders

2009-11-21T09:32:00.003+01:00

Photo: Maximilien Brice, © CERN
I like the simple contrast in this photo. A man working on the CERN Large Hadron Collider - one of the most impressive engineering projects in history with it's 27 km long circular tunnel that is 175 metres underground beneath France and Switzerland. It is built to carry out one of the boldest scientific experiments in history.

And the man pedalled to work on that bicycle there on the left.

Or as Evan, who sent us the link, puts it:
"Seeing this photo of a fellow member of the world's scientific community, I can't decide if I'm more jealous of the trails he gets to ride or of the fantastic LHC he's repairing."

Indeed.

A propos nothing, CERN has quite a cool kids website with science games 'n stuff.

Marketing Bicycles Sensibly

2009-11-19T13:29:00.003+01:00

MBK Cykler is one of the many, many Danish brands of bikemakers. What I like about them is that they are one of the best at marketing bicycles for a mainstream crowd.

These three photos were from their 2009 website and their current site for 2010 is much the same.

They choose to show photos of regular citizens in regular clothes and a selection of bicycles that are designed to compliment their lifestyle. They're saying what we often say, "Open your closet and it's filled with bicycle clothes. Now all you need is a bike."

MBK Cykler is the proud winner of the Copenhagenize Bicycle Marketing Award of Excellence for 2009.

If such an award actually existed, of course.

Environmental Czechmark

2009-11-19T12:53:00.003+01:00

The Danish Ambassador in Prague, Ole Moesby, has decided to walk the walk to back up talkin' the talk on the environment. The Danish Embassy in the Czech capital has just purchased a Christiania cargo bike for the ambassador to use on offical business in the city, complete with Danish flag.

So if you see an elegant looking man on a rolling Danish icon in Prague, you know who it is. The Czech press seem to get a kick out of the story.

Copenhagenize is happy to have played a modest role. I was lecturing in Pardubice earlier this year - Czech Republic's leading bicycle town with 18% trips by bike. The ambassador was present and he gave me a lift back to Prague. I told him that Christiania bikes are made in Czech Republic - he wasn't aware of this - and I put the Embassy in touch with Christiania bikes. In no time, the ambassador got a new ride.

I wonder if they painted the doors of the embassy building red to match the bike? :-)

Opinion Piece Comedy

2009-11-17T13:49:00.002+01:00

A reader in Indiana sent us this brilliant clipping from the Indianapolis Star in 1980.

This is brilliant. Have a read. It includes such classic quotes as:

"Not only are bicycles dangerous, they are as antiquated a form of transportation as the rickshaw. In no advanced city on earth will you find civilized people cycling to work. The urban cyclist is generally a crank, either profoundly antisocial or hopelessly narcissistic and following the strenuous life in hopes of achieving immortality or a legendary sex life. When you encounter him give him a wide berth and never turn your back on him."

Bike Theft Profiteering

2009-11-16T08:01:00.003+01:00

Hi-tech protection. It reads: "Fingerprint scanner" - on the wheel lock - "Theftproof", "GPS Monitoring", "Neighbourhood Watch".

Bicycle theft is a hot topic at the moment in Copenhagen. There has been an increase this year in the number of bicycles stolen in Denmark. 7000 more bicycles have been nicked in the year's first three quarters than at the same time last year.

Actually, 222 bicycles are stolen in this country every day.

Two students from Denmark's Technical University [DTU] have, in their thesis, described how Danish insurance companies profit from bicycle theft and do little to stop it. It's great business for them.

First, a bit of background. In Denmark, bicycles are covered under your household insurance. If you have storm damage on your house, break a vase or get your bike stolen somewhere in the city, it's the same policy that covers it. You may have to pay an extra fee for bicycle insurance, but it's not excessive.

When I buy a bike, the bike shop registers the frame number and my name into the system and my insurance company thereafter registers it in their system.

If my bike gets stolen, I register the theft on the police website - takes a couple of minutes - and then call or email my insurance company. I'll usually get a pay-out within the week. It's quite a fluent system.

On the other side of the coin, if I get caught stealing a bike, I am required to pay a fine of 1400 kroner [$280 / €186]. Not that anyone is looking for the perps. In 2008, the police caught the thief in 0.46% of all cases.

Fair enough, when you have so many bicycles in a country or city, the police can hardly be expected to run around looking for the stolen ones. There's more important things for them to do.

What is rather odd is that the insurance industry is not all hot and bothered about the many bike thefts in Denmark.

As twisted as it may sound, bicycle theft is profitable for them. Sure, back in 1993 the insurance industry was involved in implementing rules regarding approved locks on all new bicycles sold - the wheel locks that most of us use in Denmark - which caused a massive fall in the number of bicycle thefts. But the industry is not active in working towards reducing the number of stolen bicycles.

Why? Bicycles are covered by household insurance policies. Many young people don't bother with household insurance but the insurane companies, for obvious reasons, wish they did. Funnily, they are active in sending out press releases that hype the rise in bike theft and one company, for example, published a brochure in August with the title "School start is high season for bike thieves". They wrote a list of preventive steps to take to avoid bike theft and one of them was, not surprisingly, "Cover your bicycle with household insurance".

Insurance industry pay-outs for stolen bikes make up 5.6% of all pay-outs on household insurance cases. Bike theft costs the industry 170 million kroner [$34 mil. / €23 mil] a year in pay-outs. The average pay-out is only 3,356 kroner [$670 / €450]. In comparison, the average pay-out for a burglary is 23,360 kroner [$4700 / €3100] - seven times greater.

Apart from selling household insurance policies, pay-outs for bike theft are great for customer service and customer loyalty. A quick, efficient pay-out for a stolen bike is something that people appreciate.

Paying for stolen bikes is a small amount compared to storm damage on houses so insurance companies are happy to do it. Especially since it's profitable. Crime pays.

If you look further along the food chain, bike shops profit from stolen bikes, too. They sell new ones and they buy stolen ones cheap from police auctions.

The people behind the City of Copenhagen's current test of RFID chips that will help in tracing stolen bikes were hoping for support from the insurance industry, but they were disappointed.

Via: Politiken

Cycle Logical Election Choice

2009-11-13T13:13:00.004+01:00

Photo: Troels Heien - Copenhagenize Consulting

We go to the polls on Tuesday in our city and regional elections. There are the usual big parties, the usual smaller parties and then, unique to the local elections, there are the tiny parties.

The photo, above, is a campaign poster for the Cykel Logisk [Cycle Logical/Psychological... geddit?] Party. We've blogged about the man behind the Cykel Logisk Institut previously. Nice to see he's running again in Copenhagen.

These small parties add flavour and sometimes much-needed humour to the local elections.

I like the Nihilist People's Party. "It's all meaningless anyway so waste your vote on us."

They have hilarious posters on the streets. At left: Stop church bells! Fuck your salvation, we have hangovers. At right: Nothing Matters: except small, cute animals.

93 Page Bicycle Manual for Police

2009-11-12T16:44:00.004+01:00

Bicycle policemen.

"The Police Cycle Training Doctrine" is a 93 page instruction manual, produced by 'well-meaning officers' in the UK.

Basically, 93 pages - in two volumes! - about how to ride a bicycle. Needless to say, the British press are having a field day.

The Daily Mail's article is titled: Police officers get 93-page guide ... on how to ride a bike (and it cost thousands of pounds to produce) and The Guardian has its Police beat off criticism about 93-page manual on how to ride a bike article. The Sun is ... well... rather 'Sunnish' by writing, "The bonkers bike book for bobbies"

Taxpayers' Alliance campaign director Mark Wallace said: "This is an absurd waste of police time and thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money.

"Police officers are perfectly capable of riding a bike. It's no wonder we haven't enough on the beat if they are having to spend time and energy wading through this nonsense."

A Home Office source added: "Most of the red tape the police complain about is actually created by the cops themselves. This is a particularly bad example."

Giggle.

Thanks to readers Kevin and Padhraig for the tip.

Helsinki Bicycle Calming Measures

2009-11-12T15:04:00.001+01:00

Now this is my kind of bicycle calming speed bump. I have three options:
Ride to the left of it.
Ride to the right of it.
Hit it and fly up in the air and say "whee!"

As seen in Helsinki.

Behavioural Challenges for Urban Cycling

2009-11-11T22:40:00.001+01:00

When I was invited to speak in New York recently, one of the lectures was about behaviour and the challenges of changing it. I figured I'd slap the lecture onto the blog.

Behaviour is a tricky subject and getting groups of people to change their behaviour is never easy. Lately, behaviour is a hot topic in Emerging Bicycle Cultures. Many people who ride bicycles are generating bad press because of the way they're cycling and many other cyclists are getting branded negatively by association.

Generally, bad behaviour is a sign that cyclists don't have adequate infrastructure. Increasing cycling's infrastructure and profile is a good way to calm the traffic in more ways than one.

We're at an interesting point in the reestablishment of urban cycling as a norm. Bicycles have been a fad, a trend, for almost two years now. There is every indication that we are finally returning to a place where the bicycle is regarded as a respected, accepted and feasible transport form in our cities and towns.

Nevertheless, the trend nature of it all means that it could just as well disappear again, as quickly as it came. We need to accelerate the rush to mainstream urban cycling - Bicycle Culture 2.0 - before we lose it again.

This is a drawing by one of Denmark's most loved satirical cartoonists and writers, Storm P. He published a book with his newspaper cartoons about cyclists and he almost always took the piss out of them. He rode a bike every day himself. This cartoon is targeted at Copenhageners. The caption read, ”In Copenhagen, if you are going to turn, you extend your arm straight down and stick one finger out to the left. This tells everyone in the traffic which way you're NOT turning.”

This drawing is from 1935. In a way, little has changed.

Copenhageners signal when it tickles their fancy, usually a vague wave of the hand. I've discovered that to outsiders these hand movements are hardly recognizable but when you spend your days surrounded by hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of cyclists, these vague signals are read, registered and understood. We've created our own visual language.

It's the same with shoulder checks. Cycling around the city with visitors from Portland, one of them commented on how nobody did shoulder checks. I asked him to look again and he saw them. Subtle cocks of the head, using a combination of periphial vision, hearing and instinct. Very subtle but very effective.

On the question of 'bad' behaviour, it exists although it's rather dull. When you have so many regular citizens on bicycles, the infractions are hardly provocative. Still, we see letters to the editors by older citizens complaining about 'those cyclists' rolling casually across pedestrian crossings or turning right on a red light, which is not allowed in Denmark - for cars or cyclists. Buy hey. Arrest me. I turn right on red if there are no pedestrians.

In three years of documenting Copenhagen's bicycle culture I have acquired an ability to see details that no one else sees. I've been staring intently at this bicycle culture every day for three years and interestingly, I have only seen four accidents involving bicyles. Two were people falling off at low speeds and landing on their asses. One was a Norwegian who roared through a pedestrian crossing and got smacked and broke his leg. Then, only a couple of months ago, I saw a bike messenger get right hooked.

It was at a busy intersection. He braked but hit the car and flew over the hood, with his bike, and landed on his side. He flew up and stormed towards the car. The woman driver was on her way out to make sure he was okay, but then shrunk back at the sight of him coming at her like that.

In the meantime, several cyclists had rolled up to the light. One of them, a woman, called out, "Hey! YOU ran the red light!" Then two others chimed in. "I saw it, too!" They were actually speaking to the bike messenger. He was instantly deflated and the motorist came out of her car to ask him if he was okay. He was. They pulled off to the side to exchange insurance details.

We're in a different place in Copenhagen. It's mainstream and the 'bad apples' stand out, but it all started somewhere.

This is where we are today in Copenhagen. The bicycle is an equal partner in the transport equation. A goal, indeed, for every city.

When Copenhagen started on the journey to reestablish the bicycle on the urban landscape thirty odd years ago, and battle the onslaught of car culture, there were no sub-cultures at the point of departure. Women were cycling in fewer numbers than men, but there were no bike messenger tribes or what have you to influence our bicycle culture. We made the jump directly to mainstream and the democratization of urban cycling for every citizen.

The results were simple enough and are seen on the cycle tracks and streets today. Urban cycling is public domain. What happened when we mainstreamed it was that there was a growth in the number of sub-cultures and this continues to this day. Mainstream cycling brought on the rich diversity of bicycle culture. BMX, mountain biking, racing clubs and later on fixies and all that. A positive side effect to focusing on the general population was the growth of the peripheral groups.

This development is what we're seeing in cities like Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, et al. Urban cycling has returned suddenly and definitively to cities and the First Movers are regular citizens who only wish to get from A to B quickly. The absence of any sub-cultural influence means that the bicycle is regarded primarily as transport and something you can do in your regular clothes. In Paris, for example, most of the people using the Vélib bike share system have arrived from the Metro. As a result, the people you see cycling about the city are the same as you would see on the underground trains.

In order to ride a bicycle in Paris or these other cities it is not necessary to make a conscious decision to become part of a 'group' or 'tribe'. It doesn't require anything other than a bicycle.

As in Copenhagen, the blossoming mainstream bicycle culture has spawned growing interest in sub-cultures, adding to the rich fabric of a bicycle-friendly city.

Two million bicycles have been sold in Paris since the Velib system started. Interestingly, most of them are practical, classic upright bikes or city bike designs and this is due to the lack of influence of a fixie/messenger culture. There are no 'urban cycling clothes' or anything like it. Irritating if you have a "urban cycling clothes for profit" company, but great for urban cycling.

If you look at the situation in other Emerging Bicycle Cultures, there has been a strong prescence from various sub-cultures, be it the messenger crowd in cities like New York or the racing crowd in many countries. Most of them would continue to ride bicycles even without this current and intense period of interest in urban cycling and without the growing network of bicycle infrastructure.

Decades of monopoly on cycling's image has caused the populations of many of these countries to regard cycling as a fringe activity and they associate riding a bicycle with 'uniforms' and clubs or tribes, as opposed to being something for everyone.

The reemergence of the bicycle on the urban landscape has brought New Cyclists onto the streets and many of them are influenced by the pre-exisiting sub-cultures, be it 'gear' or attitude. Their role models are clearly defined, whether they adhere to them or not. By taking to the bicycle they become, in the eyes of the general population, members of the sub-culture. Often against their will.

The success of Copenhagen Cycle Chic and all the copycat blogs around the world is the surest sign that the general population has hungered after other role models with regards to cycling. Role models are of utmost importance if growth is to be experienced.

Sub-cultural influence on the mainstream is nothing new. Sub-culture influences culture every day of the week but there are few examples of a fringe tribe completely dominating the mainstream. We've all licked stamps and sent letters but very few of us are members of a stamp collecting club.

The question is how much sub-cultural cycling groups are limiting the growth of urban cycling with their dominant fringe attitude. How can we separate cycling's image from sub-culture and normalise it? That's the challenge.

We're seeing behavioural campaigns pop up wherein cyclists are being told to 'behave'. There is no doubt that if urban cycling is to gain respect as an equal partner in the traffic, simple things like stopping at red lights are important. [Worth noting that in cities like Paris cyclists stop at red lights and behave rather well]

Unfortunately, the dominant nature of cycling's sub-cultures makes it hard to transform urban cycling and sell the concept of the bicycle as a part of traffic to the sceptics. Many people in Emerging Bicycle Cultures only see the aggressive attitude of the fringe groups and judge cycling based on the way these individuals ride in the city. Have gone from being pioneers to being dead weights if redemocratizing cycling is the goal?

When you produce behavourial campaigns for cyclists, there is also the problem of defining your target group. Who are you speaking to? Can you really throw everyone on a bicycle into the same box? The mother with her child on the back of the bike together with an adrenaline-driven 'urban warrior'? Nah. Campaigns aimed at 'all' cyclists risk alienating the New Cyclists who really are the key to redemocratizing cycling. The most fertile buds on the rose bush.

If this is our goal, then it may be necessary to distance the image of urban cycling from the sub-cultures, in order to show the general population that the bicycle belongs and that it is just regular citizens who are using it as a transport tool. Without a doubt this may be a painful step given the small, tightknit character of the cycling community in many places. When the Common Good is in play, however, it is a necessary step.

Producing behavourial campaigns focused on cyclists only serves to continue the marginalisation of cycling and just hammers home the misconception that cycling is not something for everyone and is still just a sub-culture.

Pointing behavourial fingers at cyclists serves no good purpose if you don't point the fingers at the other traffic users at the same time. Behavourial campaigns aimed at everyone remove this focus on cyclists and also serve to place the bicycle on an equal footing in the public psyche.

If pointing fingers is your thing, then point them at the most dangerous and destructive elements in cities and towns. The automobiles. By recognising that there is a Bull in Society's China Shop and taking measure to tame it, you place focus logically and correctly on the largest problem.

Lowering speed limits, building traffic calming measures, etc. all help cycling as well as public health through reduced pollution, fewer accidents and less severe accidents, creating more liveable cities, and so on.

When you start speaking to a sub-culture, it gets tough. Sub-cultures - and cycling is no exception whether it's fixies or spandex-clad racers - have their own codes and language. Sub-cultures are proud of being different and have often defined themselves on their unique identity in the cityscape. Their external environment – car culture etc. - has dictated in many ways their percieved - or real - attitude and demonstrative role.

You don't get very far when you tell them to behave. And the new cyclists, with a lack of alternative role models, will perhaps feel like you're speaking to them. You'll either strengthen their links to the underground or you'll push them away.

Treating cyclists as equals is more beneficial than highlighting that they are strange or aparte, expecially when you're dealing with so many new cyclists that perhaps don't wish to be 'underground'.

There's an important sociological angle worth considering. When an underground group sees their chosen culture going mainstream, it often breeds resentment. "I've been doing this for years, now everyone's doing it!" It's not helpful for mainstreaming urban cycling. This is a quote in a recent New York article:

“There is definitely a downside to biking when bikes become a fashion fad,” If you unleash a herd of teetering, wobbly fashionistas into city streets without any real knowledge of how to ride a bike in traffic, accidents can (and likely will) happen.”

Experience is important, sure. But this is a 'purist' attacking other people riding bicycles. This is a stamp collector mocking people who lick stamps on their christmas card to grandma but who don't place them thoughtfully on the envelope, like stamp lovers do.

You know what? The people who are new to the wild ride at the amusement park hold on tightest. Wobbly doesn't need to be dangerous. If you ask me, the Copenhagen Cycle Chic slogan - Style over speed - is the greatest traffic safety slogan in the history of cycling. It may be irritating to the purists who now have to ride crazier to avoid new obstacles on their previously sacred urban landscape. But really, who cares. Such is democracy and democratization.

I have recieved countless emails from readers on my blogs who tell tales of animosity. Just read this rant against the Cycle Chic movement. Segments of the underground are revolting against the mainstream. Just like they did over 100 years ago when the rich saw their prized toy - the bicycle - go mainstream. They mocked, ridiculed, spit upon the labourers and women on bicycles. History is repeating itself it seems.

All the more reason to stick to our guns and continue to work towards giving the bicycle back to the people. It worked the first time. It'll work again.

-

In the next installment I'll highlight how we communicate with cyclists in Copenhagen and discusss various behavourial campaigns my company Copenhagenize Consulting is working on for other cities.

7000 New Parking Spots for Bicycles

2009-11-11T16:03:00.002+01:00

The Copenhagen Central Station has been the most massive bicycle magnet in the country for a century. The streets around the station are flooded with bicycles.

Plans were revealed today for a new parking complex with room for... 7000 bicycles! behind the station.

»Now more than ever there is a need for bike parking at the train stations and the problem won't get better with the coming Metro extension construction around the city", said Klaus Bondam - Mayor in charge of the Dept. of Transport.

The idea is to widen the bridge behind the station - Tietgensbroen - so that it covers more of the railyard.

The design for the new bicycle parking will be decided through an architecture competition that will start in the new year. The parking complex is expected to be finished in 2013.

It will be financed by the City of Copenhagen, Danish State Railways and Banedanmark.

7000!

Meet Carl Scully - Mr Headwind

2009-11-11T09:46:00.006+01:00

That's Carl Scully on the right.

We know all too well what we're up against in the battle to mainstream urban cycling. There are all manner of obstacles, not least individuals, who act as a stiff headwind on the road to Bicycle Culture 2.0.

Let me introduce you to Mr Headwind, Carl Scully. Former minister for roads in New South Wales, Australia.

In this opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald he starts with the title: Cyclists do not have the same rights as motorists on roads.

He begins by stating: "I have always respected cycling as a healthy means of exercising and socialising with others. In fact in my earlier years, I too, enjoyed cycling as a way of relaxing and exercising."

Right there, we see where we're going. The bicycle isn't transport for this man. It's a plaything. In a way, this is all we need to know about him and his antiquated views about infrastructure and facilities.

He thinks catering to 'cyclists' is catering to hobby cyclists in clubs and people who fancy a ride on the weekend. He hasn't realised that the bicycle is also meant for transporting large segments of the population to and from work and on short trips around their city or town. He hasn't dropped the ball, he didn't even bother picking it up. He prefers to ignore the bull.

He claims to have invested in off-road infrastructure and then doesn't understand why cyclists aren't using it.

Maybe because the infrastructure doesn't go where people want to go. Maybe it's badly designed, unhandy and incomplete.

You should read the whole piece, but here's an indication of what else Mr Headwind 'thinks':

"...they [cyclists] should consider not only how unsafe it is to be sharing the roadway with vehicles, but also acknowledge that it is motorists who pay fuel levies, tolls, registration and licence fees, as well as the huge cost of buying and running a motor vehicle. Apart from a negligible amount of GST on their equipment, cyclists pay nothing towards the cost of the roads they wish to use and rely on motorists to fund most of the cost of cycling infrastructure.

Being more aware of this may make more cyclists a little more sensitive to the needs of the motoring public".

Read that last line again... Hmm.

Full article: Sydney Morning Herald: Cyclists do not have the same rights as motorists.

Thanks to several readers for the link.

Cycling is Booming Again - Part Two!

2009-11-11T09:40:00.001+01:00

Another cracking film from Clarence at Streetfilms.org about how bicycling is booming in New York.

Copenhagen Cycle Town 1910

2009-11-11T08:17:00.002+01:00

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Here's a little silent archive film from Copenhagen called 'Cycle Town'. There's no date given but I'm guessing that we're around about 1910-ish, based on the style of the clothes and cars.

Love the little boy on his bicycle tipping his hat and the girls smiling and giggling.

This film from British Pathé has an embed code but it doesn't work on my computer. Can anyone else see it play directly on this page or does it open in a new window and send you to Pathé?

Cycling is Booming Again!

2009-11-11T08:06:00.004+01:00

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We all sense that cycling is booming again. Apparently they were of the same impression back in 1933, in Birmingham, 'the hub of the cycle industry'.

Ironically, the area went on to become the hub of the car industry. Did they just nick the factories from the bicycle companies? :-)

It's a brilliant little archive film from the West Midlands. Interesting to see the style of bicycles ridden at that time in Britain. The country has a long tradition for cycle touring and this is reflected in the bikes.

Compare the bicycles in the above film from 1933 with the bicycles in Copenhagen in 1937:

The Copenhagen Cargo Bike 'Car'

2009-11-10T20:24:00.007+01:00

Now we're talking. The City of Copenhagen's Bicycle Office launched an exciting pilot project today in the Vesterbro neighbourhood of the city.

Enter: The Cargo Bike Car.

Secure parking for four cargo bikes in the same space on the street that one car takes up. The symbolism speaks for itself. You park your cargo bike inside a car. Brilliant.

Copenhagen is cargo bike heaven. Copenhagenize.com's Flickr set - Danish Cargo Bike Culture - will attest to that. The City's Bicycle Office is keen to improve conditions for the city's cargo bike owners. The number of cargo bikes on the streets has exploded and 6% of all households in the city own at least one cargo bike. Copenhagenize.com estimates that there are roughly 30,000 cargo bikes in the city.

Actually, 25% of families with two or more children have a cargo bike and 50% of all Copenhageners with a cargo bike use it to transport children. Interestingly, only 2% of Copenhagen cyclists find cargo bikes irritating.

In addition, 22% of cargo bike owners in the city have the bike instead of a car and 24% use their cargo bike as a supplement to their car.

This cargo bike craze is positive because people are using the cargo bikes to replace cars and car trips in the city. At the same time, the development is an interesting challenge for the city's traffic planners. Including how to park them effectively. They can be tricky to get through the doorway to the back courtyard and you can't really leave them on the sidewalk like a normal bike as they take up too much space.

The Mayor in charge of the Technical and Environmental Administration, Klaus Bondam, is thrilled about the project:

”The many Copenhageners who invest in a cargo bike help make Copenhagen a more sustainable and liveable metropolis. We must, of course, take the cargo bikes into consideration when planning. And we do that by offering them some proper parking spots".

Here's how it works. The new cargo bike 'car' is a pilot project running for six months, after which the experiences of the users and neighbours will be evaluated, as well as the condition of the fiberglass 'cars'.

The shell is made of fiberglass and is comprised of four separate cabins, each with room for one bike. This means that four bicycles can park in the space normally taken up by one car.

The 'car' has four solar powered 'headlights' that turn on in the dark hours. In addition, a solar powered light turns on inside when one of the doors is opened. Hooks and a net are mounted on the walls of each cabin, for hanging up rain clothes and other gear.

During the test period, selected cargo bike owners will recieve a key for a cabin. In the long run, the idea is that cabins will be available for a parking fee, much like we now have for local car owners.

The model at the top is one of two prototypes. The location for the other one is not yet decided. The current test takes place at Krusågade 24, in Vesterbro.

Dance for the Climate

2009-11-10T12:39:00.002+01:00

There's a host of climate NGO's and initiatives out there which is great. But this video from the newly launched Dance for the Climate campaign will knock you out.

Brilliant stuff. My friend Stefan, who runs Cycle Chic Belgium worked on the project. Bono and U2 happily gave them the rights to use their song.

I got goose bumps watching it.

It's available in 20 languages from their YouTube page here.

Energy and Equity by Ivan Illich

2009-11-09T16:00:00.001+01:00

This essay by Ivan Illich was first published in 1973, in Le Monde. In the previous guest essay The Social Ideology of the Motorcar by André Gorz, a number of references were made to Illich. This is the essay he was referring to. Thanks to our reader, John, for the link.

Read the whole thing but I'm going to just jump right to the last sentence. It's quite brilliant.

"Participatory democracy demands low-energy technology, and free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle."

Energy Crisis
by Ivan Illich
First Chapter of Energy and Equity, first published in Le Monde in early 1973.

It has recently become fashionable to insist on an impending energy crisis. This euphemistic term conceals a contradiction and consecrates an illusion. It masks the contradiction implicit in the joint pursuit of equity and industrial growth. It safeguards the illusion that machine power can indefinitely take the place of manpower. To resolve this contradiction and dispel this illusion, it is urgent to clarify the reality that the language of crisis obscures: high quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu.

The advocates of an energy crisis believe in and continue to propagate a peculiar vision of man. According to this notion, man is born into perpetual dependence on slaves which he must painfully learn to master. If he does not employ prisoners, then he needs machines to do most of his work. According to this doctrine, the well-being of a society can be measured by the number of years its members have gone to school and by the number of energy slaves they have thereby learned to command. This belief is common to the conflicting economic ideologies now in vogue. It is threatened by the obvious inequity, harriedness, and impotence that appear everywhere once the voracious hordes of energy slaves outnumber people by a certain proportion. The energy crisis focuses concern on the scarcity of fodder for these slaves. I prefer to ask whether free men need them.

The energy policies adopted during the current decade will determine the range and character of social relationships a society will be able to enjoy by the year 2000. A low-energy policy allows for a wide choice of life-styles and cultures. If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist.

At this moment, most societies---especially the poor ones---are still free to set their energy policies by any of three guidelines. Well-being can be identified with high amounts of per capita energy use, with high efficiency of energy transformation, or with the least possible use of mechanical energy by the most powerful members of society. The first approach would stress tight management of scarce and destructive fuels on behalf of industry, whereas the second would emphasize the retooling of industry in the interest of thermodynamic thrift. These first two attitudes necessarily imply huge public expenditures and increased social control; both rationalize the emergence of a computerized Leviathan, and both are at present widely discussed.

The possibility of a third option is barely noticed. While people have begun to accept ecological limits on maximum per capita energy use as a condition for physical survival, they do not yet think about the use of minimum feasible power as the foundation of any of various social orders that would be both modern and desirable. Yet only a ceiling on energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high levels of equity. The one option that is at present neglected is the only choice within the reach of all nations. It is also the only strategy by which a political process can be used to set limits on the power of even the most motorized bureaucrat. Participatory democracy postulates low-energy technology. Only participatory democracy creates the conditions for rational technology.

What is generally overlooked is that equity and energy can grow concurrently only to a point. Below a threshold of per capita wattage, motors improve the conditions for social progress. Above this threshold, energy grows at the expense of equity. Further energy affluence then means decreased distribution of control over that energy.

The widespread belief that clean and abundant energy is the panacea for social ills is due to a political fallacy, according to which equity and energy consumption can be indefinitely correlated, at least under some ideal political conditions. Laboring under this illusion, we tend to discount any social limit on the growth of energy consumption. But if ecologists are right to assert that nonmetabolic power pollutes, it is in fact just as inevitable that, beyond a certain threshold, mechanical power corrupts. The threshold of social disintegration by high energy quanta is independent from the threshold at which energy conversion produces physical destruction. Expressed in horsepower, it is undoubtedly lower. This is the fact which must be theoretically recognized before a political issue can be made of the per capita wattage to which a society will limit its members.

Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving. A community can choose between Methadone and ``cold turkey''---between maintaining its addiction to alien energy and kicking it in painful cramps---but no society can have a population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy slaves and whose members are also autonomously active.

In previous discussions, I have shown that, beyond a certain level of per capita GNP, the cost of social control must rise faster than total output and become the major institutional activity within an economy. Therapy administered by educators, psychiatrists, and social workers must converge with the designs of planners, managers, and salesmen, and complement the services of security agencies, the military, and the police. I now want to indicate one reason why increased affluence requires increased control over people. I argue that beyond a certain median per capita energy level, the political system and cultural context of any society must decay. Once the critical quantum of per capita energy is surpassed, education for the abstract goals of a bureaucracy must supplant the legal guarantees of personal and concrete initiative. This quantum is the limit of social order.

I will argue here that technocracy must prevail as soon as the ratio of mechanical power to metabolic energy oversteps a definite, identifiable threshold. The order of magnitude within which this threshold lies is largely independent of the level of technology applied, yet its very existence has slipped into the blind-spot of social imagination in both rich and medium-rich countries. Both the United States and Mexico have passed the critical divide. In both countries, further energy inputs increase inequality, inefficiency, and personal impotence. Although one country has a per capita income of $500 and the other, one of nearly $5,000, huge vested interest in an industrial infrastructure prods both of them to further escalate the use of energy. As a result, both North American and Mexican ideologues put the label of ``energy crisis'' on their frustration, and both countries are blinded to the fact that the threat of social breakdown is due neither to a shortage of fuel nor to the wasteful, polluting, and irrational use of available wattage, but to the attempt of industries to gorge society with energy quanta that inevitably degrade, deprive, and frustrate most people.

A people can be just as dangerously overpowered by the wattage of its tools as by the caloric content of its foods, but it is much harder to confess to a national overindulgence in wattage than to a sickening diet. The per capita wattage that is critical for social well-being lies within an order of magnitude which is far above the horsepower known to four-fifths of humanity and far below the power commanded by any Volkswagen driver. It eludes the underconsumer and the overconsumer alike. Neither is willing to face the facts. For the primitive, the elimination of slavery and drudgery depends on the introduction of appropriate modern technology, and for the rich, the avoidance of an even more horrible degradation depends on the effective recognition of a threshold in energy consumption beyond which technical processes begin to dictate social relations. Calories are both biologically and socially healthy only as long as they stay within the narrow range that separates enough from too much.

The so-called energy crisis is, then, a politically ambiguous issue. Public interest in the quantity of power and in the distribution of controls over the use of energy can lead in two opposite directions. On the one hand, questions can be posed that would open the way to political reconstruction by unblocking the search for a postindustrial, labor-intensive, low-energy and high-equity economy. On the other hand, hysterical concern with machine fodder can reinforce the present escalation of capital-intensive institutional growth, and carry us past the last turnoff from a hyperindustrial Armageddon. Political reconstruction presupposes the recognition of the fact that there exist critical per capita quanta beyond which energy can no longer be controlled by political process. A universal social straitjacket will be the inevitable outcome of ecological restraints on total energy use imposed by industrial-minded planners bent on keeping industrial production at some hypothetical maximum.

Rich countries like the United States, Japan, or France might never reach the point of choking on their own waste, but only because their societies will have already collapsed into a sociocultural energy coma. Countries like India, Burma, and, for another short while at least, China are in the inverse position of being still muscle-powered enough to stop short of an energy stroke. They could choose, right now, to stay within those limits to which the rich will be forced back through a total loss of their freedoms.

The choice of a minimum-energy economy compels the poor to abandon fantastical expectations and the rich to recognize their vested interest as a ghastly liability. Both must reject the fatal image of man the slaveholder currently promoted by an ideologically stimulated hunger for more energy. In countries that were made affluent by industrial development, the energy crisis serves as a pretext for raising the taxes that will be needed to substitute new, more ``rational,'' and socially more deadly industrial processes for those that have been rendered obsolete by inefficient overexpansion. For the leaders of people who are not yet dominated by the same process of industrialization, the energy crisis serves as a historical imperative to centralize production, pollution, and their control in a last-ditch effort to catch up with the more highly powered. By exporting their crisis and by preaching the new gospel of puritan energy worship, the rich do even more damage to the poor than they did by selling them the products of now outdated factories. As soon as a poor country accepts the doctrine that more energy more carefully managed will always yield more goods for more people, that country locks itself into the cage of enslavement to maximum industrial outputs. Inevitably the poor lose the option for rational technology when they choose to modernize their poverty by increasing their dependence on energy. Inevitably the poor deny themselves the possibility of liberating technology and participatory politics when, together with maximum feasible energy use, they accept maximum feasible social control.

The energy crisis cannot be overwhelmed by more energy inputs. It can only be dissolved, along with the illusion that well-being depends on the number of energy slaves a man has at his command. For this purpose, it is necessary to identify the thresholds beyond which energy corrupts, and to do so by a political process that associates the community in the search for limits. Because this kind of research runs counter to that now done by experts and for institutions, I shall continue to call it counterfoil research. It has three steps. First, the need for limits on the per capita use of energy must be theoretically recognized as a social imperative. Then, the range must be located wherein the critical magnitude might be found. Finally, each community has to identify the levels of inequity, harrying, and operant conditioning that its members are willing to accept in exchange for the satisfaction that comes of idolizing powerful devices and joining in rituals directed by the professionals who control their operation.

The need for political research on socially optimal energy quanta can be clearly and concisely illustrated by an examination of modern traffic. The United States puts between 25 and 45 per cent of its total energy (depending upon how one calculates this) into vehicles: to make them, run them, and clear a right of way for them when they roll, when they fly, and when they park. Most of this energy is to move people who have been strapped into place. For the sole purpose of transporting people, 250 million Americans allocate more fuel than is used by 1.3 billion Chinese and Indians for all purposes. Almost all of this fuel is burned in a rain-dance of time-consuming acceleration. Poor countries spend less energy per person, but the percentage of total energy devoted to traffic in Mexico or in Peru is probably greater than in the United States, and it benefits a smaller percentage of the population. The size of this enterprise makes it both easy and significant to demonstrate the existence of socially critical energy quanta by the example of personal mobility.

In traffic, energy used over a specific period of time (power) translates into speed. In this case, the critical quantum will appear as a speed limit. Wherever this limit has been passed, the basic pattern of social degradation by high energy quanta has emerged. Once some public utility went faster than 15 mph, equity declined and the scarcity of both time and space increased. Motorized transportation monopolized traffic and blocked self-powered transit. In every Western country, passenger mileage on all types of conveyance increased by a factor of a hundred within fifty years of building the first railroad. When the ratio of their respective power outputs passed beyond a certain value, mechanical transformers of mineral fuels excluded people from the use of their metabolic energy and forced them to become captive consumers of conveyance. This effect of speed on the autonomy of people is only marginally affected by the technological characteristics of the motorized vehicles employed or by the persons or entities who hold the legal titles to airlines, buses, railroads, or cars. High speed is the critical factor which makes transportation socially destructive. A true choice among practical policies and of desirable social relations is possible only where speed is restrained. Participatory democracy demands low-energy technology, and free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle.

The Social Ideology of the Motorcar

2009-11-09T09:36:00.005+01:00

This essay by André Gorz, the French philosopher who pioneered ideas of political ecology, was first published in 1973 in Le Sauvage. Much of it is still applicable today and well worth a read.

The Social Ideology of the Motorcar
by André Gorz

The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people. Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don't have one. That is how in both conception and original purpose the car is a luxury good. And the essence of luxury is that it cannot be democratised. If everyone can have luxury, no one gets any advantages from it. On the contrary, everyone diddles, cheats, and frustrates everyone else, and is diddled, cheated, and frustrated in return.

This is pretty much common knowledge in the case of the seaside villas. No politico has yet dared to claim that to democratise the right to vacation would mean a villa with private beach for every family. Everyone understands that if each of 13 or 14 million families were to use only 10 meters of the coast, it would take 140,000km of beach in order for all of them to have their share! To give everyone his or her share would be to cut up the beaches in such little strips-or to squeeze the villas so tightly together-that their use value would be nil and their advantage over a hotel complex would disappear. In short, democratisation of access to the beaches point to only one solution-the collectivist one. And this solution is necessarily at war with the luxury of the private beach, which is a privilege that a small minority takes as their right at the expense of all.

Now, why is it that what is perfectly obvious in the case of the beaches is not generally acknowledged to be the case for transportation? Like the beach house, doesn't a car occupy scarce space? Doesn't it deprive the others who use the roads (pedestrians, cyclists, streetcar and bus drivers)? Doesn't it lose its use value when everyone uses his or her own? And yet there are plenty of politicians who insist that every family has the right to at least one car and that it's up to the "government" to make it possible for everyone to park conveniently, drive easily in the city, and go on holiday at the same time as everyone else, going 70 mph on the roads to vacation spots.

The monstrousness of this demagogic nonsense is immediately apparent, and yet even the left doesn't disdain resorting to it. Why is the car treated like a sacred cow? Why, unlike other "privative" goods, isn't it recognised as an antisocial luxury? The answer should be sought in the following two aspects of driving:

1. Mass motoring effects an absolute triumph of bourgeois ideology on the level of daily life. It gives and supports in everyone the illusion that each individual can seek his or her own benefit at the expense of everyone else. Take the cruel and aggressive selfishness of the driver who at any moment is figuratively killing the "others," who appear merely as physical obstacles to his or her own speed. This aggressive and competitive selfishness marks the arrival of universally bourgeois behaviour, and has come into being since driving has become commonplace. ("You'll never have socialism with that kind of people," an East German friend told me, upset by the spectacle of Paris traffic).

2. The automobile is the paradoxical example of a luxury object that has been devalued by its own spread. But this practical devaluation has not yet been followed by an ideological devaluation. The myth of the pleasure and benefit of the car persists, though if mass transportation were widespread its superiority would be striking. The persistence of this myth is easily explained. The spread of the private car has displaced mass transportation and altered city planning and housing in such a way that it transfers to the car functions which its own spread has made necessary. An ideological ("cultural") revolution would be needed to break this circle. Obviously this is not to be expected from the ruling class (either right or left).

Let us look more closely now at these two points.

When the car was invented, it was to provide a few of the very rich with a completely unprecedented privilege: that of travelling much faster than everyone else. No one up to then had ever dreamt of it. The speed of all coaches was essentially the same, whether you were rich or poor. The carriages of the rich didn't go any faster than the carts of the peasants, and trains carried everyone at the same speed (they didn't begin to have different speeds until they began to compete with the automobile and the aeroplane). Thus, until the turn of the century, the elite did not travel at a different speed from the people. The motorcar was going to change all that. For the first time class differences were to be extended to speed and to the means of transportation.

This means of transportation at first seemed unattainable to the masses - it was so different from ordinary means. There was no comparison between the motorcar and the others: the cart, the train, the bicycle, or the horse-car. Exceptional beings went out in self-propelled vehicles that weighed at least a ton and whose extremely complicated mechanical organs were as mysterious as they were hidden from view. For one important aspect of the automobile myth is that for the first time people were riding in private vehicles whose operating mechanisms were completely unknown to them and whose maintenance and feeding they had to entrust to specialists. Here is the paradox of the automobile: it appears to confer on its owners limitless freedom, allowing them to travel when and where they choose at a speed equal to or greater than that of the train. But actually, this seeming independence has for its underside a radical dependency.

Unlike the horse rider, the wagon driver, or the cyclist, the motorist was going to depend for the fuel supply, as well as for the smallest kind of repair, on dealers and specialists in engines, lubrication, and ignition, and on the interchangeability of parts. Unlike all previous owners of a means of locomotion, the motorist's relationship to his or her vehicle was to be that of user and consumer-and not owner and master. This vehicle, in other words, would oblige the owner to consume and use a host of commercial services and industrial products that could only be provided by some third party. The apparent independence of the automobile owner was only concealing the actual radical dependency.

The oil magnates were the first to perceive the prize that could be extracted from the wide distribution of the motorcar. If people could be induced to travel in cars, they could be sold the fuel necessary to move them. For the first time in history, people would become dependent for their locomotion on a commercial source of energy. There would be as many customers for the oil industry as there were motorists-and since there would be as many motorists as there were families, the entire population would become the oil merchants' customers. The dream of every capitalist was about to come true. Everyone was going to depend for their daily needs on a commodity that a single industry held as a monopoly.

All that was left was to get the population to drive cars. Little persuasion would be needed. It would be enough to get the price of a car down by using mass production and the assembly line. People would fall all over themselves to buy it. They fell over themselves all right, without noticing they were being led by the nose. What, in fact, did the automobile industry offer them? Just this: "From now on, like the nobility and the bourgeoisie, you too will have the privilege of driving faster than everybody else. In a motorcar society the privilege of the elite is made available to you."

People rushed to buy cars until, as the working class began to buy them as well, defrauded motorists realised they had been had. They had been promised a bourgeois privilege, they had gone into debt to acquire it, and now they saw that everyone else could also get one. What good is a privilege if everyone can have it? It's a fool's game. Worse, it pits everyone against everyone else. General paralysis is brought on by a general clash. For when everyone claims the right to drive at the privileged speed of the bourgeoisie, everything comes to a halt, and the speed of city traffic plummets-in Boston as in Paris, Rome, or London-to below that of the horsecar; at rush hours the average speed on the open road falls below the speed of a bicyclist.

Nothing helps. All the solutions have been tried. They all end up making things worse. No matter if they increase the number of city expressways, beltways, elevated crossways, 16- lane highways, and toll roads, the result is always the same. The more roads there are in service, the more cars clog them, and city traffic becomes more paralysingly congested. As long as there are cities, the problem will remain unsolved. No matter how wide and fast a superhighway is, the speed at which vehicles can come off it to enter the city cannot be greater than the average speed on the city streets. As long as the average speed in Paris is 10 to 20 kmh, depending on the time of day, no one will be able to get off the beltways and autoroutes around and into the capital at more than 10 to 20 kmh.

The same is true for all cities. It is impossible to drive at more than an average of 20 kmh in the tangled network of streets, avenues, and boulevards that characterise the traditional cities. The introduction of faster vehicles inevitably disrupts city traffic, causing bottlenecks-and finally complete paralysis.

If the car is to prevail, there's still one solution: get rid of the cities. That is, string them out for hundreds of miles along enormous roads, making them into highway suburbs. That's what's been done in the United States. Ivan Illich sums up the effect in these startling figures: "The typical American devotes more than 1500 hours a year (which is 30 hours a week, or 4 hours a day, including Sundays) to his [or her] car. This includes the time spent behind the wheel, both in motion and stopped, the hours of work to pay for it and to pay for gas, tires, tolls, insurance, tickets, and taxes .Thus it takes this American 1500 hours to go 6000 miles (in the course of a year). Three and a half miles take him (or her) one hour. In countries that do not have a transportation industry, people travel at exactly this speed on foot, with the added advantage that they can go wherever they want and aren't restricted to asphalt roads."

It is true, Illich points out, that in non-industrialised countries travel uses only 3 to 8% of people's free time (which comes to about two to six hours a week). Thus a person on foot covers as many miles in an hour devoted to travel as a person in a car, but devotes 5 to 10 times less time in travel.

Moral: The more widespread fast vehicles are within a society, the more time - beyond a certain point- people will spend and lose on travel. It's a mathematical fact.

The reason? We've just seen it: The cities and towns have been broken up into endless highway suburbs, for that was the only way to avoid traffic congestion in residential centres. But the underside of this solution is obvious: ultimately people can't get around conveniently because they are far away from everything. To make room for the cars, distances have increased. People live far from their work, far from school, far from the supermarket - which then requires a second car so the shopping can be done and the children driven to school. Outings? Out of the question. Friends? There are the neighbours.. .and that's it. In the final analysis, the car wastes more time than it saves and creates more distance than it overcomes. Of course, you can get yourself to work doing 60 mph, but that's because you live 30 miles from your job and are willing to give half an hour to the last 6 miles. To sum it all up: "A good part of each day's work goes to pay for the travel necessary to get to work." (Ivan Illich).

Maybe you are saying, "But at least in this way you can escape the hell of the city once the workday is over." There we are, now we know: "the city," the great city which for generations was considered a marvel, the only place worth living, is now considered to be a "hell." Everyone wants to escape from it, to live in the country. Why this reversal? For only one reason. The car has made the big city uninhabitable. It has made it stinking, noisy, suffocating, dusty, so congested that nobody wants to go out in the evening anymore. Thus, since cars have killed the city, we need faster cars to escape on superhighways to suburbs that are even farther away. What an impeccable circular argument: give us more cars so that we can escape the destruction caused by cars.

From being a luxury item and a sign of privilege, the car has thus become a vital necessity. You have to have one so as to escape from the urban hell of the cars. Capitalist industry has thus won the game: the superfluous has become necessary. There's no longer any need to persuade people that they want a car; it's necessity is a fact of life. It is true that one may have one's doubts when watching the motorised escape along the exodus roads. Between 8 and 9:30 a.m., between 5:30 and 7 p.m., and on weekends for five and six hours the escape routes stretch out into bumper-to-bumper processions going (at best) the speed of a bicyclist and in a dense cloud of gasoline fumes. What remains of the car's advantages? What is left when, inevitably, the top speed on the roads is limited to exactly the speed of the slowest car?

Fair enough. After killing the city, the car is killing the car. Having promised everyone they would be able to go faster, the automobile industry ends up with the unrelentingly predictable result that everyone has to go as slowly as the very slowest, at a speed determined by the simple laws of fluid dynamics. Worse: having been invented to allow its owner to go where he or she wishes, at the time and speed he or she wishes, the car becomes, of all vehicles, the most slavish, risky, undependable and uncomfortable. Even if you leave yourself an extravagant amount of time, you never know when the bottlenecks will let you get there. You are bound to the road as inexorably as the train to its rails. No more than the railway traveller can you stop on impulse, and like the train you must go at a speed decided by someone else. Summing up, the car has none of the advantages of the train and all of its disadvantages, plus some of its own: vibration, cramped space, the danger of accidents, the effort necessary to drive it.

And yet, you may say, people don't take the train. Of course! How could they? Have you ever tried to go from Boston to New York by train? Or from Ivry to Treport? Or from Garches to Fountainebleau? Or Colombes to l'Isle-Adam? Have you tried on a summer Saturday or Sunday? Well, then, try it and good luck to you! You'll observe that automobile capitalism has thought of everything. Just when the car is killing the car, it arranges for the alternatives to disappear, thus making the car compulsory. So first the capitalist state allowed the rail connections between the cities and the surrounding countryside to fall to pieces, and then it did away with them. The only ones that have been spared are the high-speed intercity connections that compete with the airlines for a bourgeois clientele. There's progress for you!

The truth is, no one really has any choice. You aren't free to have a car or not because the suburban world is designed to be a function of the car-and, more and more, so is the city world. That is why the ideal revolutionary solution, which is to do away with the car in favour of the bicycle, the streetcar, the bus, and the driverless taxi, is not even applicable any longer in the big commuter cities like Los Angeles, Detroit, Houston, Trappes, or even Brussels, which are built by and for the automobile. These splintered cities are strung out along empty streets lined with identical developments; and their urban landscape (a desert) says, "These streets are made for driving as quickly as possible from work to home and vice versa. You go through here, you don't live here. At the end of the workday everyone ought to stay at home, and anyone found on the street after nightfall should be considered suspect of plotting evil." In some American cities the act of strolling in the streets at night is grounds for suspicion of a crime.

So, the jig is up? No, but the alternative to the car will have to be comprehensive. For in order for people to be able to give up their cars, it won't be enough to offer them more comfortable mass transportation. They will have to be able to do without transportation altogether because they'll feel at home in their neighbourhoods, their community. their human-sized cities, and they will take pleasure in walking from work to home-on foot, or if need be by bicycle. No means of fast transportation and escape will ever compensate for the vexation of living in an uninhabitable city in which no one feels at home or the irritation of only going into the city to work or, on the other hand, to be alone and sleep.

"People," writes Illich, "will break the chains of overpowering transportation when they come once again to love as their own territory their own particular beat, and to dread getting too far away from it." But in order to love "one's territory" it must first of all be made liveable, and not trafficable. The neighbourhood or community must once again become a microcosm shaped by and for all human activities, where people can work, live, relax, learn, communicate, and knock about, and which they manage together as the place of their life in common. When someone asked him how people would spend their time after the revolution, when capitalist wastefulness had been done away with, Marcuse answered, "We will tear down the big cities and build new ones. That will keep us busy for a while."

These new cities might be federations of communities (or neighbourhoods) surrounded by green belts whose citizens-and especially the schoolchildren-will spend several hours a week growing the fresh produce they need. To get around everyday they would be able to use all kinds of transportation adapted to a medium-sized town: municipal bicycles, trolleys or trolley-buses, electric taxis without drivers. For longer trips into the country, as well as for guests, a pool of communal automobiles would be available in neighbourhood garages. The car would no longer be a necessity. Everything will have changed: the world, life, people. And this will not have come about all by itself.

Meanwhile, what is to be done to get there? Above all, never make transportation an issue by itself. Always connect it to the problem of the city, of the social division of labour, and to the way this compartmentalises the many dimensions of life. One place for work, another for "living," a third for shopping, a fourth for learning, a fifth for entertainment. The way our space is arranged carries on the disintegration of people that begins with the division of labour in the factory. It cuts a person into slices, it cuts our time, our life, into separate slices so that in each one you are a passive consumer at the mercy of the merchants, so that it never occurs to you that work, culture, communication, pleasure, satisfaction of needs, and personal life can and should be one and the same thing: a unified life, sustained by the social fabric of the community.

Le Sauvage September-October 1973

Copenhagen's Green Bicycle Lanes

2009-11-06T13:00:00.000+01:00

I do some blogging over at Denmark's official website Denmark.dk, run by the Foreign Ministry. If you read this blog, you'll recognize the content over there.

But they have some films, too, and this little film is quite lovely. It's all about our bicycle culture here in Copenhagen.

Sue, Mr Rubbo and Australian Bixis

2009-11-06T09:30:00.003+01:00

Some of you may remember Sue Abbott, the Australian woman fighting her ticket for cycling with a helmet. The Australian documentary filmmaker Mike Rubbo made a film about her getting ready for court, which we blogged here.

Mr Rubbo made a film following Sue on the day she showed up in court, which you can see above. She lost her case, which wasn't really a surprise, but the judge didn't really take her position seriously, which really is his job. Sue has now decided to appeal, taking her battle for bicycling freedom to the next level.

Good luck to her. We haven't had bicycle 'activists' in Denmark for many years but we certainly used to and anyone fighting to ride a bicycle as they see fit gets our respect. Not least because it's also about questioning society's tendency to ignore the problem - the automobile.

Mr Rubbo was also present at a bicycle conference in Melbourne where a bike share programme was presented. With this film he explores the problems of implementing a bike share programme in a city with mandatory helmet laws. The woman interviewed calls it a 'vexing problem' and she proposes making cheap helmets available FOR SALE at convenience stores and fast food outlets that are open late.

Basically, you want a bike. Before - or after - you get a bike the idea is that you go to a shop or fast food joint somewhere [hopefully] nearby and buy a cheap helmet. Then off you go.

Kind of defeats the purpose of ease of use and accessibility. Making helmets available for borrowing doesn't work due to the issue of sanitation. Lice and happy-sounding skin diseases like Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus are among the reasons that make sharing helmets undesirable in such schemes. There is no cost efficient way to sanitize helmets in bike share programmes. Australian authorities have known this for ages and don't really know how to tackle the problem. Buying a helmet for a short trip from A to B seems a bit far-fetched.

We'll see how things turn out in Melbourne.

Elephant in the China Shop

2009-11-06T08:07:00.005+01:00

I can only see a blue plastic thing and a tree branch...

The classic excuse from motorists when getting into accidents, including those involving cyclists, is "I didn't see him!"

It hammers home the fact that the bull in the china shop isn't attentive and therefore we need to take measures that tame the bull. This story takes it to a whole new level:

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS November 5, 2009

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- It's not unusual to see a deer or a cow crossing Oklahoma's rural highways. But an elephant? An Oklahoma couple driving home from church nearly slammed into a giant pachyderm that had escaped from a nearby circus late Wednesday.

''Didn't have time to hit the brakes. The elephant blended in with the road,'' driver Bill Carpenter said Thursday. ''At the very last second I said 'elephant!'''

Carpenter, 68, said he swerved his SUV at the last second and ended up sideswiping the 29-year-old female Asian elephant on U.S. 81 in Enid, about 80 miles north of Oklahoma City.

I hope that elephant-sized pedestrian flags will be set up quicksmart at this location and all elephants - and other large mammals - will be given courses in how to wave those flags more aggressively.

Read the full story here. Thanks to Jeff from the League of American Bicyclists for the link.

Addendum: Brett just added this to the comments section. It gets better.

Hit-and-run driver claimed he didn't see 6-foot-tall orange rabbit on the pedicab
By Aimee Green, The Oregonian
October 28, 2009, 8:58PM
Pedicab driver Kate Altermatt still can't believe the driver of a Mercedes didn't see her pedaling down Northwest Fourth Avenue last Easter. Altermatt, who is 6 feet tall, was wearing a bright orange bunny suit, and the Cascadia Pedicab was lit up with reflectors and a blinking red light.

"I was very visible," she said.

The crash sent her flying and totaled the pedicab. She lay stunned on the pavement for a minute, then walked over to the driver's side window. She said she smelled alcohol on his breath.

"He was like '$100! $100 and I leave,'" Altermatt recalled. "And I was like, no. I started screaming. I said 'You're drunk! You're going to go to jail! I don't want your money!'"

Wednesday in Multnomah County Circuit Court, Altermatt finally got to confront the driver, who testified that he didn't see the pedicab because he was fumbling for a dropped cell phone.

After a daylong trial, Judge Karin Immergut found Edward Cespedes-Rodriguez guilty of hit-and-run driving for leaving the scene of the crash.

But Immergut cleared the 34-year-old Southwest Portland man of recklessly endangering another person. That disappointed Altermatt, who testified that Cespedes-Rodriguez looked her in the eye and intentionally hit her a second time as he sped away sometime after 2 a.m. April 12.

***
Brett adds: "The punch line is, he won't even go to jail. Sentence: 25 hours of community service. The judge was a Republican federal attorney under GW Bush. Whatever happened to "personal responsibility" and "law and order" and all those other Republican campaign slogans?"

The Prime Minister's Strategy Unit

2009-11-05T22:37:00.006+01:00

Cyclist in Hackney, London. July 2009.

A review of urban transport from the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit came out yesterday is kind to Copenhagen as a source of inspiration for what may be possible for the UK. It's a big document - 131 pages - and chock full of information. Copenhagen features on two pages of the document.

According to the British CTC, "it’s pretty critical and honest in it's assessment of UK transport policy and recommends a massive expansion in cycling and reduction in parking capacity for cars."

What they say in the report about Copenhagen is this:

Copenhagen has a long history of cycle use. A comprehensive and growing segregated cycle network and widespread facilities has helped establish a strong cycling culture.

In 2006, 36% of commuters cycled to work, and a target has been set to be the world's top cycling city by achieving at least 50% of people to commute to work or school by bicycle by 2015.

The abundance of cycle infrastructure is often cited anecdotally as the reason for the high level of cycling in the city. In the main the network is made up of segregated cycle paths separated from the carriageway by a physical barrier or grade-separation. These have been used in preference to cycle lanes because it is thought to create a feeling of greater safety for cycle uses. Plans are to build a further 51km of cycle tracks by 2016.

In addition to the construction of cycle routes, current cycling policy in Copenhagen advocates maintenance and cleaning of infrastructure to improve the comfort of cycle journeys.

In addition, integration with public transport is also cited as important and feedback collected as part of the Bicycle Account identifies the need for improved cycle parking at railway stations.

The report also mentions Copenhagen in relation to developing a pedestrian-friendly city by creating positive city space since the first street pedestrianisation in 1962. As the graph shows, Denmark is one of the most pedestrianized countries in the EU15.

The report states:

Copenhagen introduced its first pedestrianisation scheme in 1962. Since then it has employed a range of measures to develop an urban realm that is supportive of walking, including:

– the introduction of car-free zones and the development of public spaces, such as public squares and urban strollways.

– the redesign of older areas to facilitate increased use, including a programme of courtyard renewal.

– the reallocation of parking areas to cycle lanes, wider pavements and pedestrian space. The total number of public parking spaces in the inner city decreased by 12% from 1995 to 2005, despite a significant increase in car ownership (11% from 1999 to 2004).

In addition to changes in the physical environment, simple measures have been taken to encourage the use of streets throughout the day and evening: for example, shop fronts remain visible beyond opening hours so that streets don't 'close down' when shops finish trading.

The whole report is available for download as a .pdf: An analysis of urban transport - November 2009.

Thanks to Chris at the CTC for the link.

Wave Your Flag, Pedestrian!

2009-11-05T16:00:00.004+01:00

A reader mentioned pedestrian flags in Berkeley, California in a comment and added "I'm serious!" so I thought I'd check out this fantastic example of victim blaming in Bubble Wrap Society.

He was serious. Is that scary or funny or both? Not sure. Flags are placed near intersections and the idea is that pedestrians pick one up and hold it when they wish to foolishly exercise their human right to safe urban mobility.

Most of the flags have been stolen and few use them apparently. Ironically, 48 hours after these went into [non]use, a pedestrian was hit by a car. Here's what Berkeley City Councilwoman Polly Armstrong said about it at the time:

"We hope over time - when drivers are paying a little more attention than that driver was - that the flags would be helpful." She added that, "Pedestrians have to be on guard and aggressive with their flags."

"After hitting the pedestrian, the driver swerved into the oncoming lane and collided with another vehicle. The driver was cited for failure to yield to a pedestrian. While saddened by the news, Berkeley officials saw the accident more as a testament to intersection's danger than the flags' effectiveness."

Read that first paragraph again... she hopes drivers will become 'a little more attentive' but pedestrians have to be "on guard and be aggressive with their flags."

Ignoring the bull. I don't know why Berkeley doesn't just go all out and legislate mandatory all-ages pedestrian helmets.

Or just ban walking altogether. Nevermind lowering the speed limits on the streets or installing traffic calming measures. Nah. Blame the squishy traffic users who are only stunting society's progress by showing up sans car.

The San Francisco Chronicle has an article about these pedestrian safety flags from 'back in they day' - 2002. Are they still in use in Berkeley?

Political Endorsements from Copenhagenize

2009-11-05T12:46:00.012+01:00

Some of the indoor bike parking at City Hall in Copenhagen.

So a friend asked me a question the other day. "If there was a 'cyclist vote' in Copenhagen, which parties would top the bill?" The reason he asked was that we're going to the polls on November 17th in municipal and county elections here in Denmark.

Good question. Never really thought of it before. Personally, I look at a variety of issues when considering who to vote for, not just bike stuff. But having a finger on the pulse, I'm willing to give it a shot. Not least because I was just in the States where everyone is keen to make political endorsements, so here goes.

Bicycle infrastructure is a hot topic these days. It's a kind of rebound effect. The whole world has had their eyes on Copenhagen for the past 18 months, having opened their eyes to what we've achieved here. This has bounced back to us and made [some not all] politicians and the press aware of the importance of maintaining our bicycle culture.

This is a local election, so I'm going to stick with my 'hoods. Firstly, I live in Frederiksberg. It's an independent city surrounded by Copenhagen. It's small, with about 90,000 citizens. The city has been ruled by the Conservative party for 100 years. Uninterrupted. It's a great little city with loads of bicycle infrastructure, mostly because they've had to follow Uncle Copenhagen's lead for the past 30 years.

The mayor quiet earlier this year and the vice-mayor took over. For the first time in ages, it looks like the Conservative dominance is wobbly. It's neck and neck at the moment, with the Social Democrats breathing down the right-wing necks.

Here's the funny thing. With many of the other parties mentioning bicycles, infrastructure and safer routes to school, etc., the mayor Jørgen Glenthøj is running these ads all over town:

It reads: "Families and businesses need parking spaces". Seriously. It's hilarious. He's playing the parking card. It's either incredibly stupid or quite clever - given the fact that the competition are talking bikes.

Then again, this is the man who has brought us various campaigns that ignore the bull, as you'd expect from a right-wing party.

These warning stickers showed up recently on zebra crossings. "Watch out!" or "Take care of yourself". Nevermind the cars, place the responsibility on the soft, squishy people. And note the thick sticker isn't even glued down properly so a pedestrian is likely to trip on it. Nice one! He is also the man who brought us this traffic 'safety' campaign:

"She checked her text message and died in the process". We mentioned it in the post about The Sacred Bull in Society's China Shop.

So basically, he's hardly a candidate for the Copenhagenize vote. His competition is a young woman from the Social Democrats, Katrine Lester:

Some of her ads read: "More bike lanes in Frederiksberg" and she goes on about safer routes to school, too. Given the fact that her party is large enough to challenge the Conservatives, I'm going with her. Plus if her party DO manage to defeat 100 years of Conservative rule, I want to be a part of THAT action.

One party that won't be attracting my vote, from a bicycle perspective, is the Socialist Peoples' Party - SF. They make a lot of noise about bicycles but after their ridiculous - and flopped - attempt to get a helmet law passed in the national parliament - and after I conversed with them about it and discovered their lack of research - I won't be making an 'X' anywhere near their candidates.

If we look at Uncle Copenhagen, it's same same but different. The Social Democrats have occupied the throne for a million years and it looks like they'll stay there. The Lord Mayor is quitting so another candidate, Frank Jensen, is running for the spot. Actual quote from this man about one of his goals, "Less 'fuck you' attitude, more sense of community". Cool.

They're not really threatened, but what is interesting is who they're going to rule with. Here, it's the aforementioned Socialist Peoples' Party that are looking to win a load of votes. The coolishly-named Radical Left [De Radikale] were princes to the throne last election but now they are lagging way behind, which sucks.

From a bicycle perspective, anyway. Klaus Bondam has profiled himself as The Bicycle Mayor and many of the fantastic initiatives we've been seeing in Copenhagen are thanks to him. Nørrebrogade closed to cars, the Green Wave for cyclists, 117 intersections with the stop line pulled back 5 metres for cars, etc.

Whatever you may think of him, he is the visionary we've been waiting for with regards to urban cycling. He risks losing his post as mayor of the department of transport, which would not be pleasing.

The Radical Left, in my opinion, are running a cool, fresh campaign and they seem to be talking sense on all matter of environmental issues. It would be a shame to see Klaus Bondam lose the Department of Transport gig.

So. In Copenhagen, vote for The Radical Left [de radikale] or the Social Democrats. The latter because I think Frank Jensen is keen to profile himself with some great projects, among them bike infrastructure. I saw him and Klaus Bondam out for a bike ride around the city not long ago, so that's a positive sign.

For Danes there is an interesting poll on DR's website where you answer the same 15 questions that all the politicians have and you can see which party/person you are in most agreement with - or farthest from. One of the questions is actually about bicycles. "We need to invest in more bicycle lanes/cycle tracks instead of developing the road network". Needless to say I "completely agreed" with that one.

Meanwhile, back in Frederiksberg like most places in Denmark, campaigning by bicycle is a given.

This is also amusing. You have a candidate from the Social Democrats on the left with his bike and one from The Radical Left on the... uh... right with his bike. In the middle, with a campaign car is a candidate from... hmm... let me guess... The Conservatives. It's all right there in one simple photograph.
Right. We're done. Local Danish politics is probably not the most exciting thing for most of you out there, but thanks for putting up with it.