Streetfilms shows us what a real cycling city looks like, in the Dutch university town of Groningen:
I can’t help but laugh and sigh whenever someone touts Boulder as a “world class cycling city”. We are so, so far from that. But hey, it’s good to have aspirational goals… like 50% of all trips done by bike. Maybe we just need to elect some young leftists to city council, like Groningen did in the 70s!
In the post-war era (the 1950s and 1960s) the Netherlands started down the car-dependent re-development path. Much of the country needed to be re-built, and the nation became wealthy quickly, and then oil and gas were discovered off shore. Then they realized that designing for the automobile came at far too high a price in both blood and treasure and mass protests nationwide reversed the country’s transportation investment policies, returning to the human powered cities we’ve build for millennia. Change is possible.
David Hembrow looks at the correlation between population density and cycling rate for a range of cities. Or rather, he points out the remarkable lack of correlation. Clearly there’s an intrinsic relationship between population (# of people) the distances people need to travel to access that population, and the density of the population, but even for cities with densities comparable to the US (1000-2500 people/km^2) cycling can be a very convenient mode of transport.
A post from David Hembrow in the Netherlands on what it takes to make pedestrianized spaces work by examining a new living/shopping development in Assen. Make it clear that pedestrians have right of way over everyone, but make it easily accessible to bikes. However, ensure that it isn’t a throughfare for bikes — only cyclists actually coming to the place as a destination should be there. If you exclude both bikes and cars from the space, then you decrease the relative attractiveness of cycling unnecessarily, encouraging people to drive.
David Hembrow’s list of myths and excuses that are trotted out to explain why we couldn’t possibly get our cycling rates to be comparable with the Netherlands. Hills, weather, costs, speed, distance, etc. They just don’t hold water.
In the US we wouldn’t think twice about a young testosterone laden driver endangering the lives of four cyclists with his “monster truck”. If anything, we’d probably blame the cyclists — especially if they weren’t wearing helmets. But how is it different from someone carelessly brandishing a gun in your face? That’s how seriously they seem to take it in the Netherlands:
From David Hembrow via Streetfilms.
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Continue reading Links for the week of November 26th, 2010
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Continue reading Links for the week of August 28th, 2009
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And what will cities look like once everyone has arrived? If we actually reach that day, when the countryside is emptied, and the flow staunched, then how will cities develop going forward? What will their margins look like? Will the slums filled with newcomers vanish? What will they be replaced with? (tagged: technologie urban design economics history technology poverty )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrqbtUKpSjo (tagged: bicycle guatemala appropriate technology human power energy )