The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.
One of many demonstrations for safer cycling conditions and infrastructure in Copenhagen. The sign reads: “City traffic is bicycle traffic.” 1980. Photo: Søren Svendsen
After those 7,000 years of urban democracy, we have suffered 70-odd years of transport dictatorship in every corner of the globe. Our streets were expropriated in favor of what we now know to be a flawed transport form in our cities. The bicycle, that most democratic of inventions that had transformed human society in such spectacular fashion, was declared persona non grata and exiled to suburban driveways, parks, fragmented stretches of infrastructure, and remote country roads. It was oppressed, humiliated, and ridiculed, but despite best efforts it could not be eradicated. Bicycles remained hidden in garages, in summer houses, and in cellars, like dusty but sturdy musical instruments awaiting a new orchestra, without ever knowing when it would arrive. Cycling is like music—you will never be able to rid the world of it.
The bicycle is a darling of both sides of the political spectrum. For the left, it is a dreamy vehicle that embodies all the potential for social equality and cohesion and achieving environmental goals. For the right, it is the ultimate freedom machine, providing unrivaled independent mobility with a watertight return on investment. Ride a bike for society. Ride it for yourself and no one else. The bicycle doesn’t care. It serves as it always has. It always will.
I actually don’t know much about bikes, but I know a great deal about people riding bikes. No matter how much I try to maintain a cool, Nordic pragmatism about the role of bicycles in cities, I feel emotion well up inside when I think about what the bicycle has done for us and what it continues to do.
The moment I learned to ride a bike is so completely and deeply embedded in my memory as a defining moment in my life that just sitting here and writing this brings tears to my eyes. I piggyback shamelessly on the memories of my children, remembering in brilliant detail the moment their brains mastered the physics and coordination and achieved the momentum required to ride. Remembering all the hard work leading up to that moment, practicing with them, sharing their trials but focused on that singular goal. My parental pride at teaching them to ride a bike was happily relegated to second place in order to allow their glorious moment of true independence to take the pedestal. This non-cyclist cyclist could have left it at that, but now I have wedded my life not to teaching people to ride but to teaching cities how to embrace the bicycle as transport in order to afford their citizens a second wave of freedom and independence.
I think I have lost track of how many cities I have visited through my work. Combine the client cities I have worked in with Copenhagenize Design Company and the ones where I have given a keynote, and we’re well over a hundred. The common denominator is the people in all those places who share the vision of using bicycle to make cities better.
After delivering a keynote in São Paolo, Brazil—my first in that country—I was standing with a group of audience members who were asking me questions. A young woman stood off to the side, waiting patiently for her turn. Finally, she interrupted the flow, saying she only had a quick comment. “I just want to say that I have been reading your blogs for years, and you are the reason I now ride a bike in São Paulo. Thank you.” She shook my hand and left. Just like that.
Without bicycles Denmark would grind to a halt, which would negatively impact the production of food and risk riling up the population.
I have the privilege of meeting people all over the world who share my passion and inspiration, but for me, that one woman sums it all up. Sao Paulo is not a city I would want to ride in every day—or any day, really. It’s so far behind the curve. And yet the bicycle persists. A musician has picked it up and played it. The orchestra is forming once again. For decades, nobody needed to ask who “owned” cycling simply because everyone did. The bicycle was a humble tool, anonymous in nature, that just helped us get things done. On occasion, the power of the bicycle was regarded as a threat.
Hitler, despite having been an army bike messenger during the Great War, did what he could to pass anti-cycling laws in favor of cars, and he banned cycling clubs if they had socialist leanings. During World War II, the German occupation force in the Netherlands first prohibited Jews from riding bikes in July 1942, but a week later this prohibition was extended to everyone. The Germans would confiscate all bikes during raids, even children’s bikes. For many years, when the Netherlands played Germany in football, the Dutch fans had a tradition of taunting their opponents with this chant: Ik wil mijn fiets terug—“I want my bike back.” The bicycle simply provided a dangerous level of mobility for citizens and the resistance. Farther north, the German occupiers in Denmark were faced with a similar problem. Cyclists were hard to control and catch, and the resistance always had a head start on their bikes. The Germans at the highest level discussed whether or not bicycles should be banned altogether, as in the Netherlands. After much discussion, though, it was decided not to ban them. The Germans exploited Denmark as a breadbasket to feed their armies, and without bicycles Denmark would grind to a halt, which would negatively impact the production of food and risk riling up the population. The bicycle was considered dangerous … but kind of like Mahatma Gandhi was considered dangerous.
Massive demonstration on City Hall Square in Copenhagen where citizens demanded safer cycling conditions in 1979. © Søren Svendsen
We all owned cycling. It was universally anonymous. This continues today in countries like the Netherlands, Denmark, and Japan. Bicycles are tools. You invest in them, sure, with the purpose of using them, and of course it is frustrating if they get stolen—although it is often the sudden reduced mobility that is frustrating, rather than the loss of the object.
I once made a mistake in Copenhagen when I left my Bullitt cargo bike parked in front of my apartment instead of in my back courtyard—and I only locked it with a wheel lock and not with a chain around a fixed object. Cargo bikes are expensive and the quality Danish brands maintain a high resale value, so I was asking for it. I schlepped down the stairs with my kids the next morning. It was Saturday. Felix had to go to football practice and Lulu-Sophia was off to a birthday party. Afterwards, I had errands to run. When I realized that my bike had been stolen, my first thought was My entire day is screwed … In my mind’s eye I only saw logistics—all the places I needed to go and things I needed to do. I got on the phone to borrow another bike from a friend. When I was close to figuring out the logistics, Lulu-Sophia, who was four years old at the time, said, “I liked that bike.” Which then made me think, So did I. It was an afterthought. I needed that tool and it was gone. But it was a nice tool. The story ended well. Through my social media network, the bike was found and I took it back.
That magical moment when the author’s daughter, Lulu-Sophia, learned to cycle was a joy for the whole family. Learning to ride a bike is the first act of independence in our childhood that we remember.
Around 18,000 bikes are stolen each year in Copenhagen. For a couple of decades, the standard myth has been that Eastern European gangs round up random bikes into trucks and ship them home. It’s a flawed myth in that run-of-the-mill upright bikes are all but worthless on the Eastern European market, since very few people ride them, until recently at least. Sporty racing bikes? Sure. They are pretty universal and have a resale value all over the continent.
The fact is that most bike theft in Copenhagen is done by Copenhageners who don’t have a bike at that moment but need one. Through the years, I have seen many a survey where Danes were asked if they have stolen a bike. Such a question, of course, yields only declared-preference answers, which is tricky. One of the more recent surveys tells us that 20 percent of Danes between the ages of 18 and 29 have stolen a bike. Just over 8 percent of citizens between 30 and 39 have done it, and for Danes between 60 and 74 years in age, the number is 2.4 percent.
I asked my teenage son if his friends have stolen bikes, and he shrugged and said yes. He doesn’t need to because I can always get ahold of a bike for him, but bike theft isn’t regarded as odd behavior among his 15-year-old friends. He added that, as a rule, it is unlocked bikes that are nicked. I asked if they stole other people’s smart-phones or stuff like that, and his face changed. No way! Not stuff like that! He was indignant on behalf of his friends.
The bicycle as a tool and symbol for demonstrations.
In a way, it’s built into the system. I have a friend who has a drinking bike that he uses on weekends when painting the town red until the wee hours. I adopted the idea, and when heading out on the town I would take an old black upright bike with a step-through frame, rusty chain, and stickers all over it. Sturdy, reliable, but completely anonymous. I never locked it. After two years of nocturnal excursions, I walked out of a bar at four in the morning and discovered that it was gone. Somebody needed a bike to get home and found one. My 10-minute bike ride turned into a 30-minute walk, but I had been waiting for the day—or night—so I shrugged and got on with it. Many people I know will slap stickers on a new bike or add an ugly basket in order to make it less attractive. Still, they accept the odds that it might be expropriated to serve the transport needs of a stranger at an inconvenient moment.
Yes! It’s wrong! We can all agree on that. Bike theft is also a huge problem in emerging bicycle cities. Bikes are a shiny new commodity with the potential for a quick resale. But this is Denmark. This is not the Wild West. This is the world’s happiest nation. The world’s least-corrupt nation. A pillar of prosperity and social welfare. My son’s friends live in an affluent neighborhood and want for nothing. And yet there is a sense under the surface that bicycles belong to all of us.
Another contributing factor is that there are so many bikes. There are 5.6 million people in Denmark and they buy 500,000 new bikes each year, but 400,000 bikes are scrapped. That is one million extra bikes in the country every decade. Cities are in a constant circle of clearing herreløse—ownerless—bikes from bike racks. I live next to a bar popular with young students. At least twice a day, I walk past the small square where they all park and make a mental note of the bikes. Many of them are parked permanently. Three months. Six months. Until the City, together with the police, comes and removes them.
Photo shoot for Madmoiselle magazine during an actual cycling demonstration in San Francisco in 1972. Photo: Jean-Pierre Zachariasen/Mademoiselle © Condé Nast
Even in my back courtyard, shared by around 80 apartments, we clean up unused bikes twice a year and there are 15–20 bikes every time, some completely trashed but many perfectly fine save a flat tire or rusty brake cables. Interestingly, if the cluster of unused bikes are not shipped away and are allowed to remain leaning up against the wall, they slowly either disappear or start losing seats, wheels, or baskets. They are put back into circulation either whole or in part. Even this is illegal, of course. A bike is always someone’s property in Denmark. Either the owner or the insurance company. And yet my own neighbors will see these bikes, wait for a while, and then start recycling the parts for personal use.
You and I can share our anger and frustration about bike theft, but I remain fascinated about how, on some deep, social level, bicycles are perceived as things that belong to all of us. How they became some binding element and a democratic tool for sharing—long before the sharing economy was a thing. Maybe it’s just the world’s largest bike-share system. I have a little pocket full of poetic to pepper up my indignation. It’s all very confusing. I have also confused others by saying that you can measure the success of reestablishing the bicycle as a mainstream transport form by counting how many bikes end in the harbors, lakes, and rivers of a city. The more there are, the better. The bicycle is a vital tool, but also one that is completely ordinary and not fetishized.
The global bicycle boom in the 1970s, during the oil crises, brought the bike back. In Denmark, this was the catalyst to rebooting our infrastructure. In many parts of the world, the bicycle was virtually forgotten as transport, and the boom had a narrower focus on sport and recreation. The result is that cycling has an elitist feel to it. The enormous focus on having the right gear, the right bike, the bragging rights for the latest, coolest stuff. All this objectification doesn’t serve making the bicycle an accessible object.
I clearly remember speaking to two New Yorkers, both Caucasian males in their late twenties or early thirties, after a keynote in the city. I commented on how amazing it is that there are so many deliveries made by bike and added that I regarded these people as amazing working-class heroes. They should be regarded as an important piece of the puzzle in making New York more bicycle-friendly. The two dudes with whom I was speaking were taken aback. One said, “But they’re not like us. They have to ride, because they’re immigrants and have little money. We choose to ride …” Cue my realization that urban cycling has an extra layer that only impedes our goal of not only bringing the bikes back but also regarding it as a democratic tool.
The same perception can be seen in cities in Central and Latin America where, bizarrely and fantastically, bikes and cargo bikes are still used for deliveries in great numbers. The Brazilian cycling NGO Transporte Ativo calculated that there are over 11,000 deliveries a day by bike or cargo bike in the Copacabana neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. Everything is moved by bike there. Dry-cleaning, mattresses, pet food, groceries. The hip young cultural elite I have spoken to in the city are just as surprised as the guys in New York when I put all these delivery bikes in both cities into the same democratic box.
The response I received regarding the Copenhagen Cycle Chic blog that I started in 2007, on the other hand, showed me the power of the bicycle. Most of the readership are women from around the world, and I have received scores of inspirational comments and emails over the years. The bicycle was instrumental in the emancipation of women when it first appeared in our societies in the late 1800s.
I can understand why many people feel that the subcultural fraternity of avid cyclists is an entry barrier, but I have learned firsthand that many women feel particularly alienated. Here are four examples:
On some deep, social level, bicycles are perceived as things that belong to all of us.
“Thanks to your wonderful blog, I’ve finally started wearing proper work clothes while riding my bike. I started bike commuting by necessity in May, and now I love it. All of your photos convinced me to try wearing a dress, which I did last week. Today, I wore a dress and heels. It’s much easier than I expected, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. People are shocked when they see me, but I tell them it’s easy and fun. Style Over Speed is my new mantra.”
“You’re converting people, one photo at a time. Your comments and photos offer a glimpse into something so beautiful, and I am very jealous. I love this website, I really do. Cycle Chic influenced my decision to ride in the winter, to ride in a dress, to ride in heels and not care what anyone else said about it.”
“In my small city, I ride my bicycle(s) almost exclusively for transportation. Your Cycle Chic movement has inspired me to celebrate being a woman and celebrate bicycling by wearing skirts and dresses on my bike.”
Let’s be clear. It is the women and men of Copenhagen who are the source of inspiration. I was just the messenger bringing photos to the Internet. But if the blog helped in some way to broaden the democratic and demographic appeal of urban cycling, then it achieved a great purpose.
It’s great that people regard cycling as a hobby, sport, recreational activity, passion, or lifestyle. But it shouldn’t stop there. It never used to. For decades, citizens around the world never gave their bikes names or fetishized them. Personally, I find it bizarre, this anthropomorphism. Attributing human traits and emotions to inanimate objects. And, man, don’t even get me started on object-oriented ontology. I don’t pull out my friend Archie, plug him in, and vacuum the floors, lamenting to friends on Facebook how he just doesn’t seem to like having to go under the sofa and how I’ll need to have a talk with him about it. I don’t employ the services of Princess the power drill—I hope she’s not moody today—when building a new table (I think I’ll call her Brigit). No. Wait. Brigitte—because she just feels French, you know? I suppose I reserve a place wherein I understand how a fantastic invention like the bicycle inspires some people to give them names and talk about them as though they were alive. Sure, people do the same thing with cars and trucks. I just think the goal should be a return to a place where the bicycle is considered a powerful, useful tool that we can’t live without but that garners little attention. In Danish, we still use generic and affectionate nicknames for bikes like jernhest or havelåge—“iron horse” or “garden gate”—which sums up the bicycle nicely for us, without the need for anthropomorphic naming.
Do you want to know what the most popular bike on the planet is? Any old bike. The massive rise of the vintage bicycle market is a testament to both the quality design and construction in the past as well as the desire of regular citizens to get into the game. The corporate bicycle industry has been late to the party. Countless small bike brands have emerged around the world in the past decade, and they largely draw upon classic designs akin to most vintage, upright bikes. Fair enough, the big bike brands are huge. They need more time to launch new products, adapt production schedules, and whatnot. It was comical, though, to see new corporate fixies appear at bike fairs two years after the cool kids stopped riding them. Despite a century of readily available blueprints for the design of upright bikes, Big Bike has struggled to reinvent itself and respond to the amazing emerging market.
Do we not have the inherent right to move about the urban landscape as we see fit? It has been so for most of human history.
Bikes are being produced called hybrids, which I think tries to marry the desire for speed and performance with utility. Apparently, 40 years of making bikes solely for sport and recreation is a big monkey to get off your business back. This is why vintage bikes are rocking it. They are filling a void with their solid, no-nonsense build and sensible functionality. The price is attractive as well, especially in a market with a focus on performance, weight, and tech bling. I read articles now and then about how, in order to get Americans to ride bikes, speed is a major factor. No, it’s not. Comfort, safety, and functionality are. Homo sapiens are the same everywhere.
I have been hired by a number of bike companies, including Batavus and Biomega, to produce trend analyses of the growing market in order to help them target their products better. As an extension of that, I have done a market survey that ended up with a few thousand responses from around the world and which included questions about what type of bike the person would buy, what color it should be, and what accessories they would choose. Most of the respondents were not sporty cyclists, just regular citizens. The results were clear-cut. Even though the list of colors was long, black overwhelmingly won the day. A black upright bicycle with either a basket or pannier bags. The most utilitarian choice in history is a desired object. In many regions, such a normal bicycle is still difficult to get ahold of. It is clear that the market for bicycles is populated by people who are ready and willing but who don’t have the option of buying such a bike.
Look at the ease with which bike-share in over 1,000 cities has rooted itself in our transport habits. To regular citizens, these are practical and efficient bicycles. To the avid cyclists, they’re heavy and cumbersome tanks. Anyone who actually knows how much their bicycle weighs is probably not someone you want advocating cycling for The 99%.The day that one of the huge American bike brands like Trek puts in an order in Taiwan for 50,000 basic, black upright bikes, you’ll know that change is right around the corner.
It’s all about the redemocratization and reallocation of our urban space—and it’s about the bikes themselves. It is also about something as grand as basic human rights. Do we not have the inherent right to move about the urban landscape as we see fit? It has been so for most of human history, after all.
If the answer to that question is yes, then surely this means that we need to bend over backwards to make our streets safe for all users, including those who wish to cycle. Reluctantly squeezing the bicycle into a car-centric Matrix serves very few. A massive effort to redemocratize our streets and our cities is the greatest urban challenge we face.
The bicycle. Freedom machine since the 1880s.
The author and his son, Felix, on holiday on the Danish island of Bornholm.