CHAPTER 4

A Happier, More Prosperous World

We Try to Think About a Good Life

Directly opposite Odense’s Italianate nineteenth-century city hall sits a squat and considerably less elegant temporary boxlike structure, dropped amid a mass of ongoing construction work. This is an information bureau for people to learn more about the huge reconstruction project transforming Denmark’s third-biggest city. Inside, the centerpiece is an enormous, carved-wood scale model of the city center, with every street and building. But show this to an observant local and they might soon spot a few differences.

In the world outside, just north of here, runs Thomas B. Thrige Street, named after a businessman who founded a firm making electric motors in 1890s—part of an industrial boom which transformed Odense into the manufacturing center of Denmark. The street carrying his name was built in the early 1960s and is typical of the urban freeways of that era—a rapid, four-lane route built across what was the old city. But on the wooden model, Thomas B. Thrige Street looks very different. The cars are gone. It is now a tree-filled route for pedestrians and cyclists, lined by new cafés, shops, and apartments.

This is part of a radical and locally controversial plan to more or less banish cars from the city center. Anker Boye, Odense’s veteran mayor—a somewhat unconventional politician who began his working life as a house painter—describes the rationale behind the $4 billion plan, which will be completed in 2020. Yes, he says, encouraging more people to cycle and walk will bring the usual improvements to public health, pollution, and the like. But the primary motivation is something less immediately obvious: keeping Odense, a small and relatively obscure city in international terms, economically competitive in the globalized world.

“In this little country we are one of the big cities, and for generations we were the industrial center,” Boye says. “But that has all changed. In the global market we’re small. So we’re concentrating on the clever parts of industrialization, like technology.”

These new industries include a European center for testing drones and medical research connected to the city’s university. The mayor’s bet for the future is that with heavy industry now more or less gone—Odense’s shipyard building huge container vessels finally closed in 2012—there is no longer an economic need for mass road capacity to carry trucks and cars. The newer, high-tech firms, he hopes, will be drawn to the city more for its quality of life, particularly lots of green spaces and safe cycling.

“We no longer need all the cars in the city center,” Boye says. “More and more investors are coming here, because they believe in the way we’ve transformed this old, industrial city into a new city. We try to think about people living here all their life, and having a good life here.”¹

By the standards of most places, Odense is already very welcoming to bikes. With just under two hundred thousand people, it has almost 350 miles of bike lanes and 123 cyclist-only bridges.² But Boye and his colleagues say they need to exploit this advantage to the full. The rebuilt city center will see drivers obliged to head to either underground parking garages or park-and-ride systems. A lot of people, the designers hope, will choose instead to cycle or use a new tramline.

Boye says the focus is also on adding cultural centers and cafés, and ensuring enough of the new housing is affordable for people on lower incomes. “We know we need to live from private businesses, so we need to have good conditions for that,” he says. “But we care about the whole life of people. It’s many things together.”

Odense epitomizes a relatively recent shift in the way people think about urban cycling. For a long time, bike advocates tended to be from the political left, from green movements, or both. But in the last decade a new set of arguments has emerged that contend that building better bike infrastructure is as much about boosting the local economy. This is billed as a new model for competitive cities—that they are these days judged less on busy roads than people-friendly streets lined with pavement cafés. It is, however, about more than just ever-rising GDP figures. As with Odense, this philosophy aims to bring about a happier, healthier, more human-scale city. And at the heart of these changes is cycling.

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The high priest of this doctrine, you won’t be too surprised to know, is another Dane.

Jan Gehl, now in his eighties, is an architect and urban planner who is best known for his ideas about livable cities. Gehl argues that people are happiest when they are able to engage with their surroundings on a human level. City dwellers, Gehl argues, should feel “they are invited to walk as much as possible and to bicycle as much as possible.”

I met Gehl when he was on a visit to London in 2013. At the time, the city had yet to build much in the way of safe cycling infrastructure, and Gehl was visibly less than impressed by a local bike culture he described as “for the extreme sport enthusiasts, the freaks who think, ‘It’s a good day if I survive.’”

London, he argued forcefully to me, was being left behind in the “new set of paradigms” on which cities were judged. “In the past they competed on who had the most parking spaces, or the biggest freeways, or the highest skyscrapers,” he said. “But now there are many more questions about quality of life and livability.”

There are, Gehl noted, three well-respected annual lists of the world’s most livable cities, each with dozens of places on them. No UK city features anywhere. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s because you have a very, very strong tradition of letting the traffic planners rule,” he said. “They are still in a very strong position. They think that what you see out here is given by God. It’s not. We are realizing that if you have people walk and bicycle more, you have a more lively, more livable, more attractive, more safe, more sustainable, and more healthy city. And what are you waiting for?”³

We Do Not Want to Lose Any More

So what was London waiting for? In part, it was waiting for the then-mayor, Boris Johnson, to stop building bike lanes marked only by paint, and embark on a network of better-designed cycle routes. This he did, and fairly soon: work began on the city’s first major separated lanes in early 2014. The complex and fascinating political battle behind this process is told in chapter 6, but one element in particular illustrates the changing attitude of big business to mass cycling.

The two lanes were fairly modest by most standards, one running a few miles north to south across the city center, and another longer lane bisecting it east to west. But this was a politically charged moment. It was the first time a mayor in the city had definitively taken small if noticeable chunks of space from motor vehicles and given them to bikes, and some groups were not happy at all.

The opposition was relatively small, but extremely noisy and quite influential, including the trade organization representing London’s famous black taxis. Equally outraged were some members of parliament, whose regular drive to work was delayed for a period by the construction of the east–west route. As well as being the mayor, Johnson was also a member of parliament. Some of his fellow MPs would harangue him on a virtually daily basis about the inconvenience, he said later.

The volume of complaints rose ever higher, and all conveyed the same message: such bike lanes were bad for business. They might be okay in a Utrecht or an Odense, but London was a global city and relied on the free road movement of deliveries and people. The city would grind to a halt.

Then a slightly surprising voice emerged in favor of Johnson’s plans. Dozens of companies, among them corporate behemoths like Microsoft, Coca-Cola, the bank Santander, mobile phone firm Vodafone, and Tesco (the UK’s biggest supermarket chain) combined to form a lobby group called CyclingWorks. This argued that new bike infrastructure in London was utterly necessary for the efficiency of the companies. There was another reason, they said: all their staff had a right to expect to get to work safely, however they traveled.

“We have tragically lost employees in the past who have been killed while trying to cycle to or from work,” wrote Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch household goods multinational. “We do not want to lose any more. Our sister head office building in Rotterdam is surrounded by cycle lanes and an efficient urban tramway system. We see the benefits to urban mobility and quality of life.”⁴

Not all businesses signed up. One major property group secretly paid for the taxi drivers’ union to make an expensive and doomed legal challenge to the bike lanes. It later emerged that the company’s main concern was that visiting executives would face longer limousine journeys to and from the airport.⁵

Speaking to me as he officially unveiled one of the new lanes just before his mayoral term ended in May 2016, Johnson said CyclingWorks had been an important movement. “I think there’s been a big change in London, and London businesses increasingly understand this,” he said. “One of the reassuring things about this whole exercise is that, even though we got very heavily attacked, businesses all the way along the route have pretty much all supported it.”⁶

It’s worth noting that Johnson, while a politically brave supporter of cycling facilities, is a Conservative, and by no means a champion of wider questions of equality and environmental change. During his eight years in office, air quality in London deteriorated,⁷ while a laissez-faire attitude to property speculation contributed to massive social changes in many neighborhoods. Similarly, it’s hard to argue that companies like Coca-Cola and Tesco have an all-pervading interest in public health, let alone a commitment to social justice. But their interest in cycling as an economic force, or even just something they should be seen to support, is nonetheless fascinating. There are still those in big business who argue that a vibrant and competitive city is based around roads choked with cars, taxis, and vans. But they are increasingly starting to look like dinosaurs, clinging to a bygone era.

Rewriting the Code of the Streets

Boris Johnson was not the only mayor of a major global city to recently push through new cycling infrastructure amid noisy opposition, despite holding avowedly free-market opinions.

Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City, predated Johnson in becoming serious about cycling, and was something of an inspiration to his London counterpart. While in many ways an unusual (not to mention late-joining) Republican, with his sidelines in philanthropy and environmental issues, New York’s mayor from 2002–13 is arguably even more a devotee of unfettered, unregulated economics than Johnson—he is a multibillionaire entrepreneur who nonetheless vetoed a “living wage” bill to give some local workers a statutory pay increase.⁸

It’s also fair to say Bloomberg is probably not a sentimentalist about cycling, the type to wax about the pleasure of feeling the wind in your hair. His vision for bikes was rational, a direct response of his awkwardly named PlaNYC, a 2007 document that sought to prepare the city for the expected arrival of another million residents in the coming years.

Bloomberg’s commissioner for transport and, for good or ill, the public face of the city’s new bike lanes and associated car-free public plazas, was Janette Sadik-Khan. While a technocrat rather than a politician, Sadik-Khan talks in similarly free market ways about the city’s previous overreliance on the car and how this meant it was “getting diminishing returns” from its infrastructure.

“Transportation is not an ideology, it’s not a left or right thing,” she told me. “It’s about taking a look at the capital asset we have and using it in the most effective way possible. For so long the way we measured transportation, the way we measured our streets, had been about the flow of traffic, how fast was traffic going, which ignores all the other ways a street is used.

“The future of our cities depends on the decisions that we make today. These changes are not amenities, they’re investments. It’s not about a crunchy, green, granola approach to our streets, it’s about economic development strategy for cities.”

The mission, Sadik-Khan said, is to “rewrite the operating code of the street,” or more specifically, “put a hole in the myth that more lanes and more parking spaces are better for business.”⁹

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It is a curiously enduring myth, the idea that businesses can thrive only with free-flowing cars and easy, cheap parking. One factor seems to be that business owners continually overestimate how many of their customers drive to reach them. One much-cited study from Graz in Austria asked shopkeepers to estimate what proportion of customers arrived in a car. They guessed 58 percent, when the real figure was about half that.¹⁰ Studies from places including Copenhagen have shown that while shoppers on a bike will tend to purchase less per trip than those in a car, they visit more often, and so tend on average to spend more overall.¹¹

All this, you might argue, is all very well in a Graz or a Copenhagen, but what about really big cities?

New York is a fascinating example here. When the city started to earmark certain streets for the first protected bike lanes and car-free plazas, some shops and other businesses along the routes complained vociferously. How would customers get to them? they asked. They claimed it would be disastrous for trade. They were completely wrong.

In 2013, the city’s transport department commissioned a series of detailed studies about the impact on businesses along some of the city’s new bike routes, and the findings were striking. The researchers discovered that by the third year of a protected bike lane on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, business revenues there had risen 49 percent, against 26 percent along a trio of comparable streets without bike routes. The picture was similar in Brooklyn, where a cycle route on Vanderbilt Avenue near Prospect Park saw sales double over three years, compared to a local average of about 60 percent. This was a pattern repeated almost wherever the researchers looked.

“It is clear that rolling out safer, more inviting and sustainable streets is rarely detrimental to local businesses and in the great majority of cases can be a boon to them,” the report concluded. The research, it added with some justified smugness, “offers a significant contribution in the US and around the world to the advancement of a 21st-century approach to urban street design.”¹²

Thanks in part to research like this, the pro-business case for more cycling has become increasingly well known in recent years. This is, however, only half of the argument. What is less commonly appreciated is the huge and often unnoticed damage to an economy when roads are dominated by motor vehicles. Too many cars are very much bad for business.

Everything You Know About Parking Is Wrong

“My father never paid for parking, my mother, my brother, nobody,” says George Costanza in one episode of the New York City–based sitcom Seinfeld. “It’s like going to a prostitute. Why should I pay when, if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free?”

This quote is used in a New York Times article¹³ by Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA. Shoup has devoted much of his career to a single subject, penning two dozen papers on it as well as an eight-hundred-page book, described by its publisher as a “no-holds-barred treatise.” The subject? Yes, parking.

Parking, especially free, on-street parking, is one of those areas that many people seem somehow to take both entirely for granted and very, very personally. People in New York seem to “treat every parking space like it was their firstborn child,” says Janette Sadik-Khan, recalling the battles she endured over it. Her near-equivalent, Andrew Gilligan, Boris Johnson’s mayoral commissioner for cycling in London from 2013 to 2015, once confessed he never even tried to properly tackle the subject. “Parking is the third rail of politics,” he said, referring to the live power line that runs between the tracks of many subway systems. “If you touch it, you die.”¹⁴

If any thought is given to the economics of easy on-street parking, the assumption is often that its impact is generally neutral. Some spaces are paid for, and even the free ones contribute by assisting a constant shuffle of consumers. Shoup disagrees. He sees it as a vast waste of resources, pointing to research showing that in Manhattan, almost a third of drivers at any one time are looking for on-street parking, a figure that rises to 45 percent in Brooklyn.¹⁵

A study by Shoup and his students around a fifteen-block area of Los Angeles found the average person drove half a mile looking for parking, making for a combined annual 950,000 wasted vehicle miles in just that area. “If all this happens in one small business district, imagine the cumulative effect of all cruising in the United States,” he wrote.¹⁶

Shoup’s anger is also directed at free off-street parking lots, calling them a huge subsidy to the generally richer population of car owners. He estimated that in twelve US cities, the average construction cost for an aboveground parking space is $24,000, almost four times the median net worth for black households.¹⁷ Overall, he has calculated, such free parking amounts to a subsidy of about $500 billion a year, meaning that for every dollar a motorist spends directly on their car, there is a fifty-cent cost connected to parking that is met by others.¹⁸

The idea of car use being subsidized by such a sum might seem shocking. But it’s just one of the hidden costs imposed on society at large by car use. Calculating the figure for these costs, known as externalities, is a fascinating if occasionally opaque process, one open to endless debate and estimates. A 2012 study by German academics worked out that just road crashes, pollution, and noise from cars cost $420 billion a year across the EU, or about $850 per man, woman, and child, much more than was raised in motoring-related taxes.¹⁹

The most exhaustive, almost borderline-obsessive, chronicling of the hidden costs of cars has been carried out by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, an independent research organization based in the Canadian city of that name.

It’s an extremely dense report on the issue that runs to five hundred pages, and covers all sorts of costs, many of which might well have never occurred to you. A few are borne just by vehicle owners, such as running costs and travel time. But the list of externalities is longer, including safety, parking, congestion, the construction of roads, the land value of roads, traffic law enforcement, air and water pollution, noise, resource use, and the disposal of car-based waste like old batteries and tires.

Altogether, the institute concludes, people who are not car owners pay about 35 percent of the total costs of vehicle use, or anything from twenty-seven cents to fifty-five cents per mile driven. For the United States, this totals $1.15 trillion a year in externalities. If you add together internal and external costs, the study concludes, it amounts to about 25 percent of American GDP.²⁰

Of course, vehicle use doesn’t only impose costs on an economy. Trucks do move vital goods, every minute of every day. Cars get millions of people to and from work. The main problem is that the economic efficiency of a car-dominated transport system is often wildly overstated, especially for cities.

Why You’re Driving More Slowly Than You Think

Part of this excessive belief in the economic efficiency of the motor vehicle is based around one area that many people have most likely never considered: their car almost certainly travels much more slowly than they think.

This can be a strange notion to introduce. But fear not, I’m not about to describe some shadowy global conspiracy. This isn’t about actual speed, as shown on the dashboard. This is the concept known as effective speed.

“Effective speed” means, in its simplest form, considering a vehicle’s speed as also being a factor of its cost, and thus how long we need to work to pay for it. Paul Tranter, an academic at the University of New South Wales in Australia, uses the analogy of someone living in a village who spends an hour a day fetching water on foot. Imagine they could construct a clockwork machine to get the water for them, but it needed to be wound up for an hour every morning. Would they take this into account when deciding if the machine was worthwhile? Of course they would.

Tranter argues that the modern equivalent of this is the time people spend earning the money needed to pay for a form of transport. And you need to spend a lot more time at work to pay for a car and its running costs than those of a bike.

He has calculated effective speeds for a hypothetical cyclist and the owners of various cars living in Canberra, Australia’s capital city, a place deliberately chosen to the advantage of cars with its generally free-flowing roads. Even here, Tranter calculates, the effective cycling speed of 11.3 mph is quicker than any but the cheapest car. The tiny and now defunct Hyundai Getz managed 14.4 mph, although for younger drivers the higher insurance premiums dropped this to 9.3 mph.

In contrast was the Holden Monaro, with its 5.7 liter V8 engine and top speed of 150 mph, which was so expensive to run it had an effective speed of just 9.1 mph.²¹

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This can seem a bit like a theoretical game, and of limited use to the real world. But it’s worthwhile for two reasons. The first is individual. Studies have shown that people consistently underestimate the cost of driving and overestimate how much they need to pay for public transport. It’s thus a worthwhile exercise to show how using a car is often a far worse economic deal than generally billed, especially in a city, so people can make an economically rational choice if they want.

I spent a fair few years as a car owner in London, figuring that once bought, the vehicle was a reasonably good deal, even for the very occasional use it got. But the moment I totted up a year’s combined bills for fuel, insurance, parking, and servicing and repairs, even driving a couple thousand miles a year came to the same cost as buying a pretty expensive bike.

The other use comes when politicians discuss the economic benefit of building new roads, based on the idea they will cut journey times. But as Tranter notes, even if a new road made it somehow possible to double average in-car speeds—which is very unlikely in itself—their effective speed would remain almost unchanged.

Tranter stresses he is by no means the first person to think of travel in this way. He quotes the US writer and thinker Henry David Thoreau, who in his 1854 book Walden described the varying merits of getting to the next town on foot or by train.

“I start now on foot, and get there before night,” Thoreau wrote. “You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you.”

How More Cycling Means More Friends

The economic argument might seem pretty comprehensive, especially when it comes to encouraging more cycling in towns and cities. But, if you remember, the aim for Odense in almost ridding its city center of cars is not just to become more rich, but for its people to have a better life. This is where the arguments get more personal.

I’m as convinced as I can be that cycling makes me happier. On the occasional days I take the train to work, I generally arrive much as I left home—slightly fuzzy-headed and not yet fully engaged with the day. When I cycle, I get to the office not just physically invigorated but more cheery, with a greater sense of mental balance and well-being.

In part this is just the magical effect of exercise. The mood-lifting role of endorphins, released by physical exertion, is very well-known these days, and a fairly central element of many treatments for depression. With cycling, there is something else. It’s the personal element. On a bike you’re very clearly a human, and other humans can interact with you. Scientists estimate that people’s ability to make proper eye contact with someone else becomes impossible at speeds beyond about 20 mph, above which few urban cyclists travel.²² It’s one of the many reasons why motor vehicles tend to be an impersonal, cut-off way to get about. And it helps explain why cycling doesn’t only improve the happiness of the people who do it. It can have a transformative effect on the communities they live in.

Donald Appleyard was an English urban designer who spent his academic life teaching and researching in the United States. He is best known for Livable Streets, a 1969 study and later book, which created considerable publicity at the time. At the center of this was an in-depth comparison of three residential streets in San Francisco which were broadly similar but for levels of motor traffic.

One, which saw about two thousand vehicles pass along it a day, was referred to in the book as Light Street. Medium Street saw eight thousand vehicles a day, with sixteen thousand on Heavy Street. Appleyard found that Light Street was viewed by locals as a close-knit community, in which people’s “territory”—the area they saw as their own—encompassed the entire road. People would stand on the sidewalk or on the front steps of homes to chat; children would play.

In contrast, Heavy Street saw very little sense of community, with people mainly using it as a conduit to go from their home to somewhere else. Appleyard found that on average, people living on Light Street had three times more friends and twice as many acquaintances among their neighbors as those on Heavy Street. As the volume of traffic increased, he found, people’s perceived territory shrank.²³

Appleyard’s opportunity to further his research was cut short: in 1982, the year after the book of his studies was published, he was struck and killed by the driver of a speeding car in Athens, Greece, at age fifty-four.

However, later studies have reinforced the findings. Research from 2008 in Bristol, a city in the west of England, focused on three otherwise similar streets with an even greater variance in traffic, ranging from about 140 vehicles a day to 21,000. Again, the contrasts were stark. People on the lightest-trafficked road reported a sense of community. In contrast, a man living on the busiest street described twenty-one thousand vehicles a day as a “mountain range, cutting you off from the other side of the road.” Those on the quietest road had more than twice as many acquaintances and five times as many friends than did those on the road with the most traffic.²⁴

It’s no surprise that homes on car-dominated roads tend to be considerably cheaper to buy or rent than those on more quiet thoroughfares. Again, as we saw in the last chapter, this is the population of car owners disproportionately visiting the social costs of their transport habit onto poorer people. And these costs can be very high. Studies have shown social isolation correlates with poorer mental and physical health.²⁵ A lack of social support has even been demonstrated to increase the chance of dying prematurely.²⁶

Perhaps the world’s leading expert on what makes people happy is Professor John Helliwell, a Canadian academic who coedits the UN’s annual World Happiness Report. He is very clear about one key reason behind contentment: “The single biggest factor is the extent to which people think their neighbors can be trusted. Neighborhoods that work, in the sense of producing trusting neighbors, are ones where they spend a lot of time with each other, thinking about each other and doing things with each other. In places where that’s natural or easier to achieve, it happens more readily.”²⁷

Tourism by the Centimeter

For the best description I’ve ever heard about the happiness-inducing impact of riding a bike, let me introduce you to Cesare. When he was eighty-three, he was interviewed as part of an entrancing and illuminating study in the journal Medical Anthropology. The wonderfully titled “The Bicycle Makes the Eyes Smile” saw a US academic, Elizabeth Whitaker, chronicle in depth the physical and mental well-being of a group of road cyclists in the north of Italy who, despite being between fifty-two and eighty-four, undertook rides up to fifty miles or more several times a week.

These were leisure cyclists, not commuters or people running chores, fetching shopping or children, and thus arguably a bit outside the scope of this book. They were also, as Whitaker concedes, “positive deviants” who exercised far more than most modern people, let alone those in older age. They were in fantastic physical condition, almost all of them with a body mass index well below the Italian average, which is in turn low by global standards. One of the men, eighty-three-year-old Alvaro, who went on fifty-mile rides two or three times a week, said his lungs remained so strong, “I could sing on the climbs.”

It is, however, the mental and emotional impact of the cycling which is expressed so lyrically, and makes the study such a joy. “It makes you feel good, both physically and mentally. This is no small thing, to feel well with oneself,” said Ernesto, sixty-one. Daniele, who was the same age but only started to ride at age fifty, expressed the sentiment that gives the paper its title, while seventy-five-year-old Giovanni merely said, “The bicycle gave me life.”

And what of Cesare? He rode seven days a week, for only about ten miles at a time, albeit with three uphill sections. The retired teacher, now a painter and poet, is very likely my favorite subject in any academic research, ever. He boasted of never having had his blood pressure checked, as he only cares about the pressure in his bicycle tires. Of his cycling he said: “I do it because it is my passion, because it is a habit; it is a habit that attached itself affectionately to me.”

Cesare told Whitaker he had ridden exactly the same route every day for several decades, saying this allowed him to fully see and appreciate the surroundings, which provide inspiration for his poems and pictures. He described the process as “tourism by the centimeter.” Whitaker continues her portrait of Cesare: “He describes the things that animate the countryside for him: a rooster that crows every time he approaches; a daffodil he fell in love with for three months before it ‘betrayed’ him by dying; a pair of road signs in a ditch, which he saw as a male and female fallen in an eternal embrace. He says the route never bores him for he always sees it differently. And while he seems to live in an enchanted world, the cycling is of concrete value since, in fact, he paints many of the things he sees on his rides, including road signs.”²⁸

Most of us can but aspire to live in Cesare’s enchanted world. But one thing seems clear: you’re more likely to see it from the saddle of a bike than the seat of a car.