You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.
If you don’t see cyclists yawning in your city, you’re doing something wrong.
Yeah, so, we have the blueprints. We can design and build the macro infrastructure. It’s right there for the taking. But before we drop the mic and exit stage left, there are a number of important elements to consider. By definition, cycle tracks do prioritize cycling, of course, but let’s get into the details about what else we can and should be doing.
Setting goals is important, so let me put this one out there: if you look around your city and don’t see urban cyclists yawning, you’re probably doing something wrong. Nothing says “mainstream bicycle city” like citizens rolling along and yawning. I see it every day in Copenhagen. I see it in cities in the Netherlands and in cities that are taking the task seriously. I never yawn when cycling in cities that make me think too much, or worry, or even fear. For all the urban-planning talk and professional considerations, let’s make yawning cyclists our goal.
In my perfect world, anyone working on bicycle infrastructure or planning should be handed a bicycle and told to ride it in their city for a month. The first step in bicycle urbanism is to think bicycle first, and that would certainly force the issue in the minds of the inexperienced or skeptical. We have been thinking car first for decades, and that worked out pretty well for motorists and the engineers who cater to them. Now it’s time to switch it up. It’s time to change the question.
It’s time to change the question about transport in our cities. The model on the bottom has ten times the capacity for moving people down a street than the last-century model at the top.
At the end of the day, it seems that policymakers exercising top-down leadership are the catalysts for real change.
There are many questions we need to change now that we’re looking at our cities differently for the first time in more than a century, but there is one question regarding transport that needs to be changed first. For decades we have only really asked one question of our traffic engineers: “How many cars can we fit down this street?” Having explored the traffic-engineering curriculum in a number of countries, I can’t even see that any other questions have ever been posed. We know that a car lane, when flowing smoothly, can move a measly 1,300 vehicles per hour, at best. There’s your answer right there. But the question itself is loaded. The wording of it seems simple enough, but really, the desired answer would explain how capacity can be increased, flow improved, congestion reduced. Sadly, there is no real answer to this.
If we could somehow calculate how much money has been spent, globally or even just nationally, on roads, highways, asphalt, studies, and research, etc., over, let’s say, the past 75 years, I think we would collectively throw up in our mouths. While I would love to know that number, I probably don’t need to know it. Add to that equation the lives lost or ruined in car crashes and the injuries suffered—about 1.2 million people a year around the world. Every year. You get my point.
So let’s change the question. Let’s ask instead how many people we can move down a street. Using all the transport options at our disposal. All that cool stuff we’ve invented. Trains, trams, buses, and bicycles. In the illustration, based on capacity standards, the design on the bottom has ten times more capacity for moving people down a street than does the design on the top—a design that we just inherited from a previous century without thinking about it. With urbanization accelerating rapidly everywhere, we must do the rational math and place our focus and investment on a combination of transport forms that can move a whole bunch of people through our cities. There is a new puzzle to solve. New answers to be sought. Let’s reverse the pyramid, placing other useful professions first before getting down to the construction.
When I look around the world at the growing list of cities that are once again taking the bicycle seriously, I can identify one primary factor: political leadership. Advocates and activists continue to do their part, pushing from the bottom upward. At the end of the day, though, it seems that policymakers exercising top-down leadership are the catalysts for real change. On the one hand, it is positive that an increasing number of politicians are getting on board. On the other hand, it could be depressing that progress seems to hit a bottleneck in city halls.
It is hardly a news flash that investment prioritizes cycling as transport. Politics is complex, and while some politicians are going all in, others, despite wanting to move forward, are limited by budget constraints or their political systems. My rational brain always finds it odd that the cost of building bicycle infrastructure and facilities is considered high. It is rare that the price is compared to the price of roads or highways for cars or public transport such as trams, metros, or trains. The misconception that a city has to build infrastructure for the people cycling now, as opposed to the 20–25 percent of the population that could be cycling, still reigns supreme. For the price of 5–10 kilometers of six-lane highway, my team and I could copenhagenize an entire city in five years. When you compare the cost, cycling always comes out on top. It is inexpensive and has an amazing cost/benefit return and ROI.
So let’s change the question. Let’s ask instead how many people we can move down a street. Using all the transport options at our disposal.
Instead of using only traffic engineering to plan transport, we need to use a variety of schools of thought.
There are many ways of measuring a city’s commitment. Actual cash spent is one thing, but another great indicator is how much a city is spending per capita. For example, since 2004 the City of Copenhagen has invested €39.60 per person per year (about US$46) on improving the bicycle network. Feel free to have a grain of salt handy when politicians announce that they are spending x dollars over the next y years. Calculate how much the amount is per person before you get excited—or angry.
The politicians who are prioritizing cycling effectively may notice something curious happening to their careers. I’ve joked that nobody ever remembers politicians who build highways. Internationally, there are really only two. American president Dwight D. Eisenhower is one such politician. He championed the Interstate Highway System in the United States and was inspired by the other politician, Adolf Hitler, who built Germany’s Reichsautobahn (later just “Autobahn”) system. As political legacies go, this might not be a club you would wish to be a member of.
What we see now is that politicians, primarily in municipalities, are enjoying a personal brand boost when they take matters to the next level, whether it is urban cycling or modern city development. Klaus Bondam served as mayor of the Technical and Environmental Administration in the City of Copenhagen between 2005 and 2010. He came to power as one part of a dynamic duo, the other being Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard. Social issues like housing were important to them, but Bondam saw early on that cycling for transport, such an integral part of life in Copenhagen, could be improved. He changed the question from How do we maintain our cycling levels? to How can we take them to the next level? It was a curious new question. There was a respectable status quo in place. Cycling was a primary transport form—indeed, the main one for the citizens of the city. What was this “next level” that Bondam sought? Perhaps he didn’t have the answers himself, but he found the money to set the wheels in motion. He was instrumental in creating the first cykelpakke—“bicycle package”—which earmarked €4 million (US$4.7 million) for improving the development, quality, comfort, and connectivity of the Copenhagen bicycle network. While the City had a budget for maintaining the infrastructure and adding to it, this extra injection of funds was exciting and it kickstarted many of the projects I’ll explore in the chapter, “Design and Innovation.” Because of his work in his own city for his own fellow citizens, Bondam is invited to speak around the world about his work and legacy.
Elsewhere, Enrique Peñalosa had a massive impact on improving the quality of life in Bogotá, Colombia, when he was mayor between 1998 and 2000. In a transport context, he developed better public transport and constructed bicycle infrastructure with an impressive vision and drive. His brother, Gil Peñalosa, was appointed commissioner of parks, and both brothers are still asked to speak about their work. Enrique was again elected mayor in 2016, and Gil heads the 8 80 Cities NGO out of Toronto.
A street in the heart of Copenhagen.
Janette Sadikh-Khan, as commissioner for New York’s department of transportation between 2007 and 2013 under Mayor Bloomberg, worked tirelessly to form the foundations of a bicycle-friendly city in the Big Apple. Luc Ferrandez was elected mayor of the Plateau borough in Montreal in 2009 for the political party Projét Montréal and promptly transferred his ideas for a better city onto the streets of his neighborhood. Keep an eye on the new kids on the international block. Morten Kabell occupied the same mayoral post in Copenhagen as Klaus Bondam for four years until 2017 and he placed a massive focus on further improving urban cycling in his policy. He left politics after the municipal election in November 2017 and will continue working with bicycle urbanism. Mayor Ayrat Khayrullin from Almetyevsk is fast becoming the darling of Russian urban development, thanks to his vision for his city.
Choosing to be a visionary urbanist politician seems to be a cool gig with long-term benefits.
Perhaps the simplest way to prioritize cycling is to show that you’re doing it. Show that you’re doing something. One great indicator is seeing your leading politicians, whether the mayor or key councilors, ride bikes in their city. The best thing would be to see them cycling to work and meetings every day or as often as possible. There is no credibility in failing to invest in bikes as transport, but there is also little credibility in not getting out there and showing how it can be done. To support the citizens cycling now and to encourage those who are hesitant. Luckily, I have met a number of mayors all over the world who realize that this is a part of the game and of their responsibility. It’s a no-brainer for politicians in cities in Denmark and the Netherlands, and it is of utmost importance in emerging bicycle cities. I remember seeing a news clip from Philadelphia in 2009 about the city opening a crosstown bike lane. The reporter was interviewing the mayor at the time, Michael Nutter, who was preparing to ride it, about the project. The reporter was comically astonished. To the camera he said, “And he’s wearing a suit! In a light drizzle!” As though he were about to base-jump off a cliff naked and holding an umbrella. Mayor Nutter, cool as you like, just shrugged and hopped on his bike.
Another mayor who stands out in my mind is Betsy Price from Fort Worth, Texas. The state cycling NGO, Bike Texas, encouraged her to use the city’s bike-share system, and she took them up on it. Even more, she instituted rolling meetings on the bike paths along the river. If you wanted face time with her about an issue—any issue—you were welcome to find yourself a bike and go for a ride with her.
Choosing to be a visionary urbanist politician seems to be a really cool gig with long-term benefits, even after you leave politics. It’s as though we want to hear stories about people with convictions and passion who bucked the trend and got work done in cities. We never seem to tire of it and we’re hungry for more. Prioritizing cycling, it turns out, is good for the city—and your personal brand.
In prioritizing cycling, we have to identify where, how but also who. When I was working in Ferrara, Italy, I was studying a map with a colleague who works for the City. He was filling me in about the various bicycle-friendly initiatives in place. For example, Ferrara doesn’t have a congestion charge for its historic center—it has a congestion ban. Nonresidents are not allowed to enter by car, and trucks transporting goods must pay a fee. Eight cameras are installed around the city to photograph number plates. If you’re caught in the city without a permit, you are fined €100. Ah, simplicity. Ferrara enjoys a bicycle modal share of around 30 percent.
My colleague was telling me about a main route through the city—outside the historic center—and the plans to tackle the motorists who use it. He called them parasites and kept using that word to describe the motorists. Finally, I had to ask why. He looked at me quizzically and said that it was simply the word they use in Italian urban planning. Parasites.
What a great word. The host organism is, of course, the city off which they feed. The streets outside my apartment as I write this on a Tuesday evening are relatively free of parasites. The ones that plague Copenhagen aren’t nocturnal. They desert their host organism on migratory patterns, scurrying back to their nests in the afternoons, only to return to feed upon their host in the morning. To continue their infestation, causing all manner of illnesses that the host organism is unable to defend itself against: traffic pollution with its toxic emissions and noise pollution, a lower perception of safety for pedestrians and cyclists, traffic crashes that kill and maim, reduced property prices, and so on.
Parasites. It’s a brilliant way to describe the motorists who roll down these streets, contributing nothing to the liveability of my neighborhood, hardly making a dent in the economic well-being of the shops and paying their taxes in other municipalities. They don’t stop at my hair-dresser, local hardware store, café, or supermarket. They do all that closer to their homes. They just rumble on past, spouting the residue of their combusted fossil fuels behind them to the funky tunes on their radio while they check Facebook on their smartphones. It’s an epidemic.
Forests and green spaces are often referred to as “lungs” in countries and cities. Cyclists are the transportational lungs of a city. I certainly don’t mean that my body is used to convert carbon dioxide, but nevertheless it’s true that the 63 percent of my fellow citizens who choose to ride a bicycle each day are a rolling metaphor for photosynthesis—as are all cyclists in any city. Photosynthesis—from the Greek φώτο- (photo-), “light,” and σύνθεσις (synthesis), “putting together” or “composition.” Using the energy from sunlight to do their magic.
Forests and green spaces are often referred to as “lungs” in countries and cities. Cyclists are the transportational lungs of a city.
In Copenhagen, as in many cities, when we talk about reducing traffic we hear the same arguments from—and about—people who live in the surrounding municipalities: “But we have to go to work in the city!” As though that negates all calls for reducing pollution and improving traffic safety from those of us who live in the city. It’s tough being a major metropolitan center surrounded by suburbs. Sure, people need to get to work and home again. Providing competitive transport alternatives is the way forward. As it is now, my taxes go to providing asphalt for people who use it twice a day and who contribute little. That simply doesn’t make sense to me. Put those parasites onto trams and bicycles and you turn the parasitic relationship into a mutualistic one, by increasing their opportunity to contribute to the local life in the neighborhoods they pass through.
Various examples of accommodating cyclists during roadworks and maintenance.
The measuring car from the Danish Road Directorate.
Do you want to know what my favorite car in the whole world is? It’s yellow and cute and drives on a cycle track. This is a rare example of a car you really want to see on any bicycle network. The happy logos on the sides read: “Cycle Track Measurer—we measure for your sake.” A small armada of such cars are deployed on a regular basis by the National Road Directorate around the nation, equipped with all manner of equipment that measures the quality of the infrastructure. The smallest cars fit perfectly on the cycle tracks. Two lasers measure how even the asphalt is, supplemented with photos taken every 10 meters. In addition, the equipment can register roots or grates that are sticking up. The data is converted into a comfort rating.
It doesn’t make much sense to build bicycle infrastructure and then not keep it clear. To take care of this beautiful thing. In addition to the cute measurement car, a number of pint-sized maintenance vehicles are used to keep cycle tracks clear of debris or snow. The bicycles must roll on.
It is standard practice in Copenhagen not to block the cycle tracks at any time, whether there are road-works or construction on buildings. It simply doesn’t happen. Prioritizing cycling is important, but here an understanding of transport psychology also comes into play. Bicycles are flexible chameleons. If cyclists are faced with a barrier, they will find a way to flow around it, be it on the sidewalk or popping out into the car lane. In the interest of both mobility and safety, cyclists are always accommodated.
I see examples on a daily basis. If a large maintenance truck needs to occupy a space on the street for a while, the roadway will be used or it will straddle the curb but still provide space for cyclists to pass. Signage is required, informing the various traffic modes about the obstruction. In cases of more permanent obstructions like construction work or renovation of a building with scaffolding on the façade, the contractor and/or City will think bicycle traffic into their solution. Containers used for construction material storage or as offices for the workers are placed on the street. Any cables or wiring must be raised up and over the cycle track or under bike-friendly plastic ramps if they are led across the cycle track. When motor vehicle traffic volume is high, solid separation solutions are put into place. Many of these temporary solutions are better bike infrastructure than the permanent ones in many other cities.
This is a rare example of a car you really want to see on any bicycle network.
Whether temporary like a façade renovation or semi-permanent like metro construction sites, cyclists are given the opportunity to maintain their pursuit of A2Bism. Data from the City is taken into consideration. If the volume of pedestrian traffic is low, pedestrians are instructed to cross and use the opposite side. On occasion there are situations where cyclists must share the sidewalk with pedestrians or the roadway with motor vehicles for short stretches. That’s when the standard Cyclists on Sidewalk or Cyclists on Roadway signs are deployed. Roadworks do have a distinct advantage, though. They allow bicycle users to lean against them while waiting for red lights.
Keeping the cycling citizens rolling is paramount. Year round. Winter, as you might expect, is the most challenging season, but Copenhagen has your back. The work starts before you even know that snow is forecast. I live on a busy street, and on a dark winter evening, if I hear the cycle track sweepers buzzing back and forth, I check the weather forecast and, sure enough, snow is on the way. They salt preventively before the flakes fall. When it starts to snow, they’re back at it. Sweeping from the front and salting from the back. In heavy snowstorms, I have seen them zip back and forth six or seven times even before the first plows hit the car lanes.
Farmers from rural areas come into the city to assist with snow clearance during snowstorms.
One of the City’s many cycle-track sweepers keeping the path clear.
One of the City of Almetyevsk’s snow sweepers in action in the first snowfall after the city constructed bicycle infrastructure. Photo: City of Almetyevsk
I really find it impressive. The dedication to keeping the cycle tracks clear but also the logistics involved. The City employs its own armada of sweepers, but when the going gets tough and the snow really intensifies, there is an arrangement—many decades old—with farmers from the rural areas outside Copenhagen. They come into the city and assist the snow-clearance work. If there is snow falling, it’s getting cleared. At all hours.
If you let me hop back to best-practice infrastructure for a moment, snow clearance and maintenance are made easy when you have a raised, dedicated space to work with. A painted lane is rather ineffective in keeping snow from being pushed, sprayed, or splashed from a car lane. Oslo is a city that is currently working hard to build bicycle infrastructure and raise their bicycle modal share. In 2016, they increased their budget for snow removal and tried to approach the Copenhagen standard. The prevalence of painted lanes running along the wrong side of parked cars proved to be the challenge. (They are currently working on upgrading their design to align with best-practice.) The bike lanes were nicely swept from early in the morning, but then motorists left for work and the lanes were covered in snow again from the cars crossing them. Rookie mistake.
Other cities have geared up for winter maintenance as the realization dawns that cycling is a year-round commuter option. That darling of bicycle urbanism, Almetyevsk, proudly sent us photos of one of their new cycle-track sweepers at work when the first snow fell after construction.
While bicycles need the momentum generated by our muscles in order to move, they are frightfully inanimate after we walk away from them. Whether you are planning to build or have already built a cohesive and connected network of safe and logical cycling routes along the major streets in your city, and you’ve committed to maintaining them year-round and shown your residents that you value the bicycle as a powerful transport tool, then you have to ask yourself: What next? Parking, of course. Where will all of your cycling citizens place their chariots by their workplaces or at their homes? Or along their local shopping street? Logical measures for bicycle-parking capacity need to be taken seriously to make cycling work for people in large numbers.
In Copenhagen, when looking at a metro transit hub, for example, the City is expected to build parking capacity for 10 percent of daily ridership. So, if 15,000 people use that metro station daily, the City will build 1,500 bicycle parking spaces at that station. They are usually at or near full capacity. Compare that to many other cities in the world where you are lucky to find one or two measly bike racks that hold maybe 20 bikes. And this isn’t even the best example of quality bike parking. While there is a plan for bike parking in Copenhagen, it falls short of the massive and impressive parking facilities at Dutch train stations. Even Antwerp, Belgium, has huge interior facilities for safe, long-term, weather-protected bike parking for thousands at their central station—more spots than at Copenhagen Central Station. Even Washington, DC, invested in an architecturally splendid building dedicated to bike parking at their main station. It is bizarre how the Danes lag so far behind the Japanese, the Dutch, and others when it comes to bike parking at stations. There is no decent excuse, but it’s worth mentioning that, in the Netherlands and Japan, taking bikes on trains is discouraged, whereas in Denmark and certainly the Copenhagen Capital Region, it is the modus operandi.
Where will all of your cycling citizens place their chariots by their workplaces or at their homes? Logical measures for bicycle-parking capacity need to be taken seriously to make cycling work for people in large numbers.
Still, I try to push the issue when I can. I designed, with the help of my team, a proposal for 7,500 bike parking spots in the dead air above the train tracks immediately behind Central Station in Copenhagen. Simply to slap some visuals on it and move the debate forward.
When you look around your neighborhood and see bikes attached to everything—trees, poles, fences—clearly there is a deficiency in bike parking; the people are shouting at their local government to build good facilities. And it isn’t even that space-intensive. One car parking space can hold more than 10 bikes with enough space to access them easily. If we only took out two car parking spaces for bike parking—or “bike corrals,” as they are also called—on every city street, we would have over 20 new spots per street for bikes. Let’s do the math. That’s a start. Build it and they will use them.
Secure bicycle parking in a dedicated facility outside the main train station in Washington, DC.
Bicycle parking outside a train station in Japan.
Bicycle parking at Groningen Central Station.
Copenhagenize Design Company’s design for 7,500 bike parking spots behind Copenhagen Central Station. Design: the author and Steve Montebello
If we want to build cities that are truly life-sized, that promote parents to get up in the morning and comfortably get their kids onto bikes and get about their days, we need to make sure that people are safe and feel safe. If you imagined walking to work, having to weave between cars and dodge trucks because you didn’t have a curb-separated sidewalk, I’m not so sure you’d feel great about getting around on your own two feet. The same can be said about getting around on two wheels. And no place is more of a perceptual and real concern than an intersection. If we build good intersections we’re more than halfway there. Every signalized intersection in Copenhagen has clear blue paint guiding bikes through this zone of potential conflict, with stop lines ahead of motorists to ensure they stay visible, and dedicated bicycle signals where they are needed. When we see a large number of cars wanting to make turns onto another major street, we protect these intersection corners with additional signals, concrete barriers, and painted crossings. When we force two-ton boxes of steel to slow down their turn and tighten their movements so that they can see and must wait for vulnerable cyclists and pedestrians, we make intersections safer for everyone. The Dutch have become internationally renowned for their protected intersections, and in the last few years this has begun to create a buzz in even North American cities. Salt Lake City has put one in, for example. People are talking about this once again in urban planning and transportation circles, but many don’t realize that protected intersection plans have existed in an American context for decades.
Davis, California, had plotted out Dutch-style intersection designs in the seventies, but much of this work did not catch on nationwide.
Davis, California, had plotted out Dutch-style intersection designs in the seventies, but much of this work did not catch on nationwide due to a lack of political will and pushback from engineers. None of these designs are new. While many cities worldwide, at the mercy of short-sighted politics, bicker about testing out smart design incrementally, the cities of Northern Europe are trotting ahead with even more innovative solutions. Look at the Dutch city of Eindhoven, where they stopped scratching their heads about what to do about a large, chaotic roundabout and just elevated the cycle tracks above the roadway with their floating roundabout. It’s a beautiful architectural marvel. If this doesn’t entice bicycle use just for the sheer joy of getting to use this intersection on your commute, I don’t know what does.
Proposed protected intersection design from the early 1970s in Davis, California based on Dutch designs. Illustration: De Leuw, Cather & Company
There is one aspect of the bicycle boom that engages my rational brain in a confusing dance. Electric bicycles. If we are wishing to prioritize cycling, do we include them? There has been a thick cloud of hype surrounding e-bikes, most of it stemming from the massive e-bike industry. Where there is hype, there is often another side to the issue that is being neglected, especially when there is a huge follow-the-money background to it.
But in densely populated urban centers with bicycle traffic and pedestrians? Nah. Nobody wants more scooters.
E-bikes serve a purpose. Absolutely. They are a great niche addition to the existing armada of bicycles that have served citizens for 130-odd years. They have the potential to increase the mobility radius of cycling citizens—especially the elderly. All good. The first point of interest to anyone working in urban mobility, active transportation, or whatever they call it where you’re from should be the safety aspect. The average speed of cycling citizens in Copenhagen and Amsterdam is around 15–16 km/h (9–11 mph). Putting vehicles zipping along at 25 km/h (16 mph) or more into that equation would not seem to be wise.
If you’ve been to Amsterdam, you know the scourge of the scooters—fast-moving vehicles that cause injury and death to the riders themselves and to others in their path. Adding more scooters to the cycle tracks and bike lanes is hardly beneficial to the development of better traffic safety. Especially when these new electric scooters—which is what e-bikes are, essentially—appear suddenly and silently, whereas at least the older gas-powered scooters make an infernal noise.
So e-bikes to increase the mobility radii for people “cycling” from greater distances are generally a good thing. But in densely populated urban centers with bicycle traffic and pedestrians? Nah. Unwise. Nobody wants more scooters. Unless they use the car lanes. Fortunately, there aren’t many e-bikes in Amsterdam, or in Copenhagen, either. I only see a few here every week. You can spot them easily. They’re the ones braking hard and abruptly at intersections. The City of Groningen has even taken the step to start building e-bike lanes parallel to existing bike lanes, in order to separate these two different forms of transport.
Apropos of Groningen, I spoke to a city planner there and he outed himself as an e-bike skeptic. He was concerned about the speed factor—about casting faster-moving vehicles into an existing flow. He mentioned that 11 percent of cyclist fatalities involved cyclists on e-bikes. They were going too fast and lost control, or motorists were surprised by a speed faster than that of the average cyclist. He was also concerned about the lack of interest in such matters. Twenty percent of e-bike crashes send the cyclist into intensive care. Only 6 percent of crashes on normal bikes end up in intensive. According to Statistics Netherlands, in 2016 629 people died in road accidents in the Netherlands, of whom 189 were cyclists and 28 were on e-bikes. Since 2014, at least 79 people have been killed in road accidents while using e-bikes, of whom 87 percent were over the age of 60. Similar stats are emerging in Denmark, where 10 percent of cyclist fatalities were on e-bikes. Going too fast, losing control, etc. A Swiss national study about e-bike safety cites “the most important findings: according to official statistics, e-bike accidents are more serious than bicycle accidents, and serious single-vehicle accidents are more frequent than serious collisions.”
The point here is that there is clearly an issue. One that isn’t mentioned in the Hype Cloud. The solution is a call for training courses for e-bikes. How long will that take? How many people will die or get seriously injured until it happens?
In October 2015, the head architect of the City of Copenhagen, Tina Saaby, stated that she had tried an e-bike for three months—and hated every moment. Motorized vehicles go against all the knowledge we have about how to create liveable cities. She referred to Jan Gehl’s body of work about the necessity of slowing a city down to a human speed.
They are a great niche addition to the existing armada of bicycles that have served citizens for 130-odd years.
E-bikes inhabit a gray area. They are often labeled as “green.” I would think that anything that needs to be hooked up to power plants should not be labeled as “green.” Let alone the whole ethical issue of how we get lithium for the batteries. The e-bike industry is quick to slap the GREEN label on their products but, as always, a grain of salt is required.
Another point that is invisible in the Hype Cloud is the Chinese experience. They have had large numbers of e-bikes and e-scooters for over a decade. Almost every month, another Chinese city bans all forms of e-bikes, simply because of the alarming rise in accidents and deaths. We don’t often fancy looking to China for inspiration, but in many cases we should. Beijing is now desperately trying to get its citizens back onto normal bikes instead of cars and electric-powered bicycles.
When you have a powerful industry looking to make some cash behind any product line, you have cause to be skeptical. Unlike the bicycle industry, the e-bike industry is pushing hard to make their products mainstream. A man named Hannes Neupert, founder and president of ExtraEnergy, an electric-vehicle lobbying organization based in Germany, has declared that “Electrification will kill the mechanical bicycle within a few years, like it has killed many other mechanical products. Bicycles … will remain as historical items hanging on the wall.” He isn’t the first. Many e-bike websites feature similar claims. It’s odd to see that there are clear battle lines drawn.
The average speed of cycling citizens in Copenhagen and Amsterdam is around 15–16 km/h. Putting vehicles zipping along at 25 km/h or more into that equation would not seem to be wise.
I first noticed e-bikes on my radar back in 2010. A rumor that pro bicycle racer Fabian Cancellara used an e-bike in a professional race went viral on the Internet. The rumor led to a frenzied flock of journalists around the world trying to find out if it was true. I remember saying at the office when the story hit that “within a week, a company name will emerge.” Sure enough, journalists who were fed the rumor found out that, indeed, such a motor did exist but it was a couple of millimeters too thick to fit into Cancellara’s frame. He was then free from suspicion. The Austrian company that produced the motor was all over the press, however.
I have no idea if this company was behind it all. This is probably unlikely. I remain convinced, however, that it was one of the most brilliant guerrilla marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen, regardless of who started it. Since then, I’ve been wary of the massive e-bike industry—like any other massive industry—and their tactics.
Many people have an anecdote to tell me. About themselves or someone they know who now uses an e-bike. I know some stories myself. My main problem with anecdotes is that they are often presented as the complete story and the end of the conversation. Just because one person’s dad or grandmother hopped onto an e-bike doesn’t mean that everyone is doing so. But the neo-religious Hype Cloud fogs up the lens sometimes. Another grain of salt, please.
Sales are booming! This is the primary rallying cry heard by e-bike proponents and the industry. “Look at the sales numbers!” All sorts of stats are thrown around like confetti at a wedding. One million e-bikes sold in the Netherlands, where 28 percent of bike sales are e-bikes, they say. It is 9 percent in Denmark and rising. And so on.
When working in Bergen, Norway, I spoke with a guy working at a bike shop. He knew about my skepticism regarding the e-bike hype. He said they sold many of them but, he added with a wry smile, they never saw them again. They leave the shop, but never come back. “They’re just standing unused in a garage somewhere,” he added. Interesting. I started asking about e-bikes at other bike shops around Europe, and every time the answer was the same. They make a quick profit on the sale, but many of the bikes are unused and therefore require no maintenance. Sales statistics are not usage statistics. The health benefits of cycling are well documented. We get it drilled into our heads here in Denmark that we need to exercise regularly and to get our pulse up. E-bikes reduce the health benefits of cycling by up to 70 percent. Then there is the issue of elitism. Expensive e-bikes are becoming the chariot of the privileged middle and upper class—quite possibly the laziest demographic in history. It is important that we keep a cool head regarding electric bicycles as we go forward.
