One sits on it either straight-backed, as though at a festive dinner party, or hunched painfully forward, as though one just failed an exam. All according to the situation, your inclination, or your inborn characteristics.
Afternoon traffic on the world’s busiest bicycle street, Nørrebrogade in Copenhagen.
The bicycle, since its invention, has had an amazing transformational effect on city life. The rising number of cyclists in our cities may seem new to many, but the parallels to the first rise of the bicycle in the late 1800s and early 1900s are important to highlight. To be honest, reading a book like Bike Boom: The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling, by Carlton Reid, is absolutely the best way to get into the subject of the rise of the bicycle in history. I want to cover the role of the bicycle in our cities and our societies. While it may seem glaringly obvious to some, there is still a great deal of misunderstanding, which is regrettable now that we’re trying to figure out how to weave the bikes back into the spectacular urban fabric.
We suffer collectively from short-term urban memory loss, and that is the first challenge to deal with. The entire NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) approach is firmly rooted in the conception that “This is new. This has never happened before. I don’t want it.” I hear the same thing all over the world. That cycling won’t take off since “we never cycled here.” (Look forward to the Mythbusting chapter later in the book, where I tackle comments like that.)
Two friends having a conversation as they ride through the city. Photo: Zane Kraujina
A musical ride.
It is no secret that bicycles were shoved out of the way by the bullying influence of American traffic engineering standards that were exported from the 1940s through the 1960s. Not to mention pedestrians and public-transport users. We tend to see what is right in front of us, or in the recent past, or near future. Not much else.
The story of the bicycle is being retold. How it transformed human society and transport more quickly and more efficiently than any other invention in human history. From being a fun and expensive toy for rich boys, the bicycle morphed into something quite remarkable after the diamond frame was invented. Mass production began and the price plummeted. I doubt that anyone at the time could have guessed what lay ahead in the last couple of decades of the nineteenth century. The bicycle liberated women and the working class, providing them with an affordable form of independent transport that radically increased their mobility radius. Women no longer needed to be reliant on their husbands to get around. Workers could travel farther to get to work or to look for it. As well as being able to ride farther in search of a mate. There is strong evidence that the bicycle improved the human gene pool. In birth and death records in the United Kingdom, surnames that had been locked to one small town or county for centuries started appearing farther away, thanks to the bicycle.
Where horses were a luxury transport acquisition, bicycles were accessible to The 99%. It’s interesting to ponder just how society regarded the bicycle back then. It was a freedom machine as well as the ultimate symbol of modernity. The future was glorious and the bicycle proved it to be so. You can imagine my surprise, then, when I first visited the photo archives of the Copenhagen Museum several years ago. I had put it off for a while but finally found the time to be there during their brief opening times. Damn, I was looking forward to it. I donned the requisite white gloves and ceremoniously requested “The Bicycle Material.” The employee shrugged and wandered off, returning with just three archive boxes.
Heading home with the family tree on a cargo bike.
“That’s it?! Three boxes for over a century in one of the world’s great bicycle cities?!” She explained that the archive was categorized according to streets or squares. I could get the material for certain places and there would probably be bikes in them. Talk about anticlimactic. Sure, I found some amazing photos and documents in those three boxes, but I was still surprised that the massive influence of the bicycle on the city’s history was not somehow better recorded. It was like discovering a lack of material about ships while researching the history of ports. I have heard the same from friends and colleagues elsewhere in the world who go exploring bicycle history in their local archives. When you dig deeper, you find a lot of material, but photos of bikes were never archived in any great detail. As archives and museums digitize, the search is getting easier, but for more than a century, photos of bicycles in cities lay largely undiscovered. The answer as to why is simple. The bicycle was so completely ordinary and unremarkable in cities that we never thought to record or preserve its history.
Through my network, photos have emerged from a number of cities around the world. Perfect ammunition for the increasingly tiresome “we never cycled here” discussions. Armadas of bicycles outside a cinema in Cairns, Australia, in the 1940s. Office workers cycling to work in Singapore in the 1950s. Bicycle cops keeping the peace in 1920s Los Angeles. Quotes emerge that reveal how normal it all was, like this one from John Woodeforde’s book, The Story of the Bicycle (1970): “In the late nineteenth century, large numbers of women were already using bicycles to get to work, women office workers and shop assistants wending their way each weekday morning from the suburbs to the town. They found the bicycle a convenient form of transport for distances up to, say, ten miles.” Meh. Easy peasy. The bicycle was just there. Doing its thing. Serving its purpose in making our daily lives easier and more convenient. A humble and yet integral part of our urban narrative. It just was.
Understanding the role of the bicycle in cities is merely an extension of understanding the role of pedestrians. The gap in time since the bicycle was a normal sight on city streets has caused us to forget this simple fact. Bicycles operate at street level and at speeds that are conducive to both urban life and the human ability to gauge speed. Homo sapiens lose the ability to visually register things they are passing when they move faster than 30 kilometers per hour (about 20 miles per hour).
For those living in Copenhagen, it’s easy to see how it works. How the bicycle contributes to daily life. Some days, I ride along in my own thoughts. Going quicker if I am late for a meeting. Most of the time, I am experiencing my city without being conscious of it and I see hundreds of examples of my fellow citizens doing the same. Checking the time on clock towers, window shopping as they pass storefronts, waving at friends and stopping to chat with them. Doing everything pedestrians have done for millennia, just at a quicker pace. The average speed that 400,000 daily cyclists in Copenhagen settle upon in their collective subconscious is 16 kilometers per hour (a little less than 10 miles per hour). In Amsterdam, it has been measured at about 15 km/h (a little more than 9 mph).
Bicycles parked outside a cinema in Cairns, Australia in 1937. Photographer unknown. Courtesy State Library of Queensland
The bicycle was just there. Serving its purpose in making our daily lives easier and more convenient. A humble and yet integral part of our urban narrative.
It all seems so simple. All that potential and opportunity. And yet therein is a fundamental flaw in the perception of urban cycling that is rife in many parts of the world. In Danish and Dutch planning, cyclists are regarded as a species of the same genus as pedestrians in the unwritten taxonomic hierarchy of urban dwellers transporting themselves. In other parts of the world, where traffic engineering dominates, cyclists are wrongly lumped together with cars and trucks and are separated from pedestrians. It’s as though someone thought, “Hmm. Wheels. Everything with wheels should go together.” It was a mechanical decision-making process that excluded any human considerations. And once this flawed categorization was established, what followed was subjecting cyclists to all manner of car-centric traffic laws. Traffic laws are necessary, of course, but many of the laws that were spawned to serve the automobile back in the day fail to consider the transport psychology of the urban cyclist. It’s like forcing badminton players to use the rules of rugby in their tournaments—which is quirky, but it doesn’t make much sense.
Homo sapiens lose the ability to register visually things they are passing when their speed increases.
The flawed categorization goes hand in hand with the perception, largely in regions like North America and Australasia, that if the bicycle isn’t used for sport or recreation, then the only possible use for it is commuting. It’s all a macro-scale perception based on longer distances and an extended product of a bicycle industry that only produces bicycles for a demographic that only uses them for speed, without many of the accessories of daily urban cycling. For example, when it rains in Copenhagen, the most socially unacceptable behavior in traffic is not having a fender on, at least, the rear wheel. You want to roll up to the person at the light and give them money to buy one. But I digress.
The bicycle belongs in cities. It’s transport, it’s a shopping cart, it’s a family adhesive, it’s an analog dating app.
The bicycle can get you to work, absolutely. What needs to be part of the discussion is how the bicycle can do everything else as well.
We can look to traffic engineering—as ever—in order to identify our primary antagonist, but challenges also appear where you don’t expect them. It is apparently the nature of our modern culture to invent a whole bunch of phrases to explain stuff that was the norm in cities for seven millennia, and one of them is the American concept of placemaking. According to Wikipedia: “Placemaking is a multi-faceted approach to the planning, design, and management of public spaces. Placemaking capitalizes on a local community’s assets, inspiration, and potential, with the intention of creating public spaces that promote people’s health, happiness, and well-being. It is political due to the nature of place identity. Placemaking is both a process and a philosophy.”
Man, that sounds cool, doesn’t it? A bit over-the-top academic-y. But it is cool. What I have noticed, however, is that modern placemaking, especially in the United States, has failed miserably in recognizing the role of the bicycle in cities. It is rarely mentioned. Every time I see a presentation about the subject at conferences, I count the bikes in the images. Actually, to be fair, there are often bikes featured—bikes always look great in dreamy city shots—but that is where it ends. The placemakers don’t know how to proceed from there. Or perhaps they don’t want to, having grown up in a society that has misunderstood the bicycle’s full potential for a couple of generations.
I’ll get into the nature of subcultures later in the book, but it’s interesting to consider how the placemaking community is built around and focused on their gurus: namely, Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte. Apparently Jacobs rode a bike around, which is awesome. But back when they penned their holy scriptures, bicycle planning just didn’t feature at all, so maybe that’s why it gets the short end of the stick. Placemaking has an enormous focus on pedestrianism, which is important and fantastic, but I sometimes feel that the bicycle is seen as competition to this specific focus on walking. But hey. Placemaking is a self-described movement that claims its goal is to change the world. What could possibly have more impact across all aspects of urbanism than the bicycle?
One thing is moody academics pondering paving tile designs and bench aesthetics in creatively cluttered NoHo offices, another is “starchitects” who suddenly stick their noses into urban planning. Yes, you, Norman Foster. A couple of years ago, a fanciful idea came out of the British architect’s office. It was originally a student’s idea, and Norman dusted it off and thrust it rudely onto the Internet. He suggested that London build cycle tracks atop the city’s many elevated railways—he called it SkyCycle.
Now of course this isn’t a good idea. It’s classic “magpie architecture.” Attempting to attract people to big, shiny things that dazzle but that have little functional value in the development of a city. Then again, Foster is a master of building big, shiny things.
Ideas like his are city killers. Removing great numbers of citizens who could be cycling down city streets, past shops and cafés on their way to work or school, and instead placing them on a shelf, far away from everything else. All this in a city that is so far behind in reestablishing cycling as transport that it’s embarrassing. With most of the population already whining about bicycles on streets, sticking them up in the air, out of the way, is hardly going to help us to return bicycles to the urban fabric of the city.
Now more than ever before, when urban planning is heading back to the future—back to when cities were life-sized places with rational and practical solutions for moving people around—ideas like SkyCycle stand out like a sore thumb.
As Canadian author Chris Turner, whose book The Geography of Hope is a must-read, responded on Twitter when I criticized the idea: “You say that as if Foster and the starchitect league have ever attempted to understand how streets work in general.” Indeed. We’ll get into that later.
Foster grew up in Manchester, back in an age when that city had around 30 percent modal share for bicycles. Instead of realizing that modern urban planning is seeking to return our cities to their pre-car state, he insists on dishing up city-killing Blade Runner fantasies. You would hope that Foster would harken back to his roots and embrace the kind of city he grew up in. His bizarre idea has spawned a flurry of others. A floating cycle track on the Thames. Bikeways in disused subway tunnels. All ideas that fail to address the basics of a bicycle-friendly city and that continue to cement the car-centric status quo that has failed our cities—and us—so miserably.
My colleague Marie Kåstrup, head of the City of Copenhagen’s bicycle office, says that even if Copenhagen had the money to build the Skycycle solution above our railways, it wouldn’t. Taking bikes away from street level is not a goal for the Danish capital.
The bicycle can get you to work, absolutely. What needs to be part of the discussion is how the bicycle can do everything else as well.
The bicycle belongs in cities. It’s transport, it’s a shopping cart, it’s a family adhesive, it’s an analog dating app. With the rise of the cargo bike, it’s an SUV. It’s everything you can imagine, anything you wish, and whatever you want it to be—and it’s been all that for 130 years. This most human form of transport represents the perfect synergy between technology and the human desire to move. It is the most perfect vehicle for urban living ever invented.