How do we get beyond the dependency-inducing trap of car culture? After 100 years in which auto-oriented infrastructure has dominated public works spending and reshaped civic life, how can we make our streets safe and healthy spaces?
Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism (200 colour illustrations, 296 pages), March 2018, Island Press
These questions were suggested in discussion with a reader following my last post, Speeding Down a Dead End Road. There are many ways to approach this subject – and one of the best is to read Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism, a just-released book by Mikael Colville-Andersen which fortuitously landed in my inbox last week.
Colville-Andersen is a Canadian-Danish designer who started photographing people on bicycles in Copenhagen in 2006. This pastime quickly became the popular Cycle Chic blog, and then grew into Copenhagenize Design Co., which has now helped scores of cities improve their urban transportation mix. Copenhagenize, the book, is a great summary not only of the lessons learned by Copenhagen over the past forty years, but also the lessons learned by Colville-Andersen and his associates in many cities over the past 10 years.
First a brief word about what is both the book’s major limitation and its great strength: this is a guide to “bicycle urbanism” – it doesn’t pretend to cover cycling in rural or small-town areas.
In a move away from car culture, urban cycling is definitely the low-hanging fruit. Short trips under about 7 km make up a large proportion of trips within cities. Furthermore, the many costs of car culture – especially air pollution, and crashes that kill and maim – are readily evident in cities, while much-touted benefits such as speed and convenience are typically negated by gridlock. So it should be easy to persuade many average citizens to get out of cars and take to the streets on bicycle – if those streets can be made convenient and safe for human-powered transportation.
Let’s start with “convenient”.
A simple motivation
Extensive surveys have found that most Copenhagen cyclists are not motivated primarily by health concerns, or a concern for the environment, or a desire to save money – they ride bike because it’s the most convenient way to get around their city. This leads Colville-Andersen to stress a basic principle:
“I know exactly what you want. It’s the same thing that I want. Indeed, it’s what every homo sapien who has ever lived wants: a direct line from A to B when we’re transporting ourselves. … This is the most basic principle in transport planning. I call it A2Bism.” (Copenhagenize, pg 146)
Taking the most direct line is especially important when we’re getting around under our own steam. Yet for seventy-five years traffic planners concentrated on giving the best routes to cars, while introducing detours for foot-powered residents. Colville-Andersen sums up both this history of mistakes, and the simple solution, in these simple “traffic planning guide” graphics.
The two graphics on the left summarize the rupture of an ancient pattern of city life by car culture – including, he emphasizes, in cities such as Copenhagen and Amsterdam.
On the right is the guide used by bicycle-friendly cities in recent decades. While cities in Denmark and the Netherlands have seen tremendous growth in cycling since they adopted this approach in the 1970s, a significant uptick in active transportation has also begun in many other cities, including a few in North America.
All too often in North America, however, new bike routes are added in out-of-the-way locations where they, predictably, serve few riders going about daily tasks like getting to and from work.1 If we were serious about encouraging rather than discouraging cyclists, we would allocate safe space for them on the most direct routes.
The Copenhagenize approach is illustrated at the right side of the graphic above: safe and healthy modes of active transportation are given direct routing, while polluting and dangerous cars and trucks get the frequent jogs and detours.
Safe space
Cycle-friendly planning isn’t quite as simple as drawing lines on a map or on the streets. While Colville-Andersen emphasizes that good urban cycling infrastructure is far cheaper than what we routinely spend on car infrastructure, we do need to budget for something besides a little paint:
“Hastily painted pictograms in the middle of car lanes are not infrastructure. They are the awkward watermark of lazy politicians and lazier transport professionals.” (Copenhagenize, pg 77)
Where streets must be shared by pedestrians, cyclists, and cars, trucks and buses, and motorized traffic will move more than 40 km/h, mere painted bike lanes will not provide an adequate measure of safety – some sort of physical separation is required. Having a row of parked cars between the cycle lane and the moving traffic is one good strategy. (In North America, however, the order is often reversed, with cycle lanes between the parked cars and moving traffic, precisely in the “door zone” where a driver opening the door of a parked car might knock a cyclist directly into the passing traffic.)
If Copenhagen now illustrates everything in Colville-Andersen’s chapter “Best Practice Design and Infrastructure”, it’s not because the Danes have always got it right. In fact, he says, all the cycle-planning mistakes frequently being made in other jurisdictions have also been made in Copenhagen. Other cities can save a lot of time and money if they don’t try to “reinvent the wheel”.
Waiting at a signalized intersection on a bike lane in Almetyevsk, Republic of Tatarstan
Colville-Andersen gives advice on many specifics: what is the minimum width for separated bike lanes, and when is it time to widen them further; what kind of intersection spacing works to keep cyclists safe from right-turning cars; under what circumstances is a bi-directional cycle lane a good option; how can cycle lanes be safely routed past bus stops. Yet the basic typology for bike lanes is based on just two data points: how many cars does a road carry, and what is the speed. Based on these two issues, he says, there are a grand total of four basic designs:
“Four. There are only four basic designs in Danish bicycle planning. One of these four fits every street in the Danish Kingdom and, indeed, every street in every city in the world.” (Copenhagenize, page 176)
In North America, in spite of a resurgence in urban cycling over the past ten years, no major city yet enjoys a bicycle “mode-share” of 10%. In Copenhagen and in Dutch cities such as Groningen, meanwhile that mode-share is now more than 40% – with the remainder split between buses, trains, cars, and walking.
Colville-Andersen emphasises, however, that “Copenhagen wasn’t always Copenhagen …. This city was as car-clogged as anywhere else on the planet through the 1950s and 1960s.” (Copenhagenize, page 64)
The growth of cycling culture there required massive public demonstrations in the 1970s, decades of work, and leadership by municipal officials with real vision. A key barrier is to get beyond the idea that we shouldn’t invest in cycling, because only a few people are willing to ride bike in our current urban environments:
“That 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.” (Copenhagenize, page 199)
Perfect synergy
Copenhagenize is a superb manual on all the important details of bike infrastructure design and operation. It’s a great ‘how-to’ guide for making cities safe and convenient for active transportation. Indeed, it’s a great book on the factors that, in the millennia before the destructive onset of car culture, made cities very attractive places to live:
“We have been living together in cities for more than 7,000 years. By and large, we used those seven millennia to hammer out some serious best-practices about cohabitation in the urban theater and the importance of social fabric. We threw most of that knowledge under the wheels of the automobile shortly after we invented it ….” (Copenhagenize, page 13)
In the struggle to redemocratize our streets, he says, the bicycle will play a key role: “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.”
photos and illustrations by Mikael Colville-Andersen courtesy of Island Press
1A recent example in my area is the stalled plan to shrink car lanes and add bicycle lanes on a section of Toronto’s main through street, Yonge Street. The mayor and many councillors want instead to send local cyclists on a detour to the west, while preserving the direct route for motorists.
