Morning rush hour in Utrecht, the fourth largest city in the Netherlands, and there’s no traffic jams — just bikes. Lots of bikes.
Like most Dutch cities, bicycles enjoy pride of place in Utrecht, where they are used for roughly one-third of all trips made each day. What impresses me most about this video is not the sheer number of bicycles you see in this video, it’s what you don’t see: collisions, cyclist-pedestrian conflicts, helmets.
In North America, where cities like Montreal and New York are aggressively promoting bike use, there are constant complaints from drivers about unruly cyclists. What those drivers don’t seem to understand is the extent to which the rules of the road are stacked against cyclists. If someone on a bike is riding the wrong way down a one-way street, it’s because the street runs in a single direction for the benefit of drivers and no one else. If they fail to come to a complete stop at a stop sign, again, it’s because those stop signs exist to control the movement of cars — bicycles would do far better with a yield.
Utrecht suggests that having streets that are designed with cyclists in mind, as well as cars, buses and pedestrians, leads to a far better environment for everyone involved.
The following essay appears in the August 2010 issue of Muse, a Hong Kong arts and culture magazine.
I still remember bicycling up Mount Royal. It was a warm summer night and there were five of us riding through the streets of Montreal, looking for something to do. Somebody suggested heading up the mountain that rises like a crouching giant from the middle of the city. The path uphill was surprisingly level but completely dark. Our eyes rendered useless, we relied on our other senses to guide us forward, listening to the gravel under our tires, the wind in the trees. The air smelled damp and earthy. I looked up at the treetops silhouetted against the bright city sky.
Martin Turner has a way of getting to work that is faster than the MTR and much cheaper than a taxi: he rides a bike. For most of his ten years working at a marketing firm in Wan Chai, Turner has commuted from his North Point home by bicycle. “It takes about 15 minutes door to door,” he said. “That’s about half the time it would take by public transport.”
Across the harbour, Charlie Wong Liang-yih works as a graphic designer from his home in Mongkok. When he leaves his flat to visit friends in other parts of Kowloon, he often takes his bike. “Before, people thought it was ridiculous to ride a bicycle around Hong Kong, but more and more people use them to get around,” he said.
People in dozens of neighbourhoods across Hong Kong use bicycles to commute to train stations, work and to run daily errands, but the government officially recognizes cycling only as a form of recreation, not as transport — something cycling activists are fighting to change.
Every day, according to a 2004 Transport Department study on cycling, more than 65,000 bicycle trips are made, mainly by people biking from their homes to train stations, schools, workplaces and shops.
Other studies suggest the number of daily bike trips is actually much higher. Last year, the Shatin District Council commissioned a study on cycling in the district, which is home to more than 600,000 people, and found that 33.5 percent of the population cycles more than once a week. The study also reported that 65 percent of residents perceive cycling as “an important mode of transport” and that each Shatin family owns, on average, about two bicycles.
The launch of Bixi, Montreal’s new bike-sharing system, has been nothing short of spectacular. Despite early problems — faulty lock mechanisms have led to the theft of dozens of bikes — it has been more successful than anyone imagined. In fact, Montrealers have taken so well to Bixi that Stationnement de Montréal, the municipal agency that runs the system, has decided to bump up an expansion that wasn’t planned until next year. Next month, an additional 2,000 bikes will be added at 100 new stations in Villeray, Little Burgundy and Côte des Neiges.
Just as the public has quickly taken to Bixi, the bike-sharing service has already engrained itself in the city. “Bixi has truly changed the urban landscape here,” notes On Two Wheels, the Gazette’s cycling blog. “There is a new, yet already familiar ‘blink’ on the bike paths; downtown it seems like every third bike is a Bixi. This program is clearly doing some heavy lifting toward getting more people using bikes that might not have otherwise.”
I spotted my first ghost bike — a memorial to a fallen bicyclist — on Second Avenue in the East Village, chained to a signpost sprouting from the quiet little park in front of the the old stone St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery church. Perhaps that’s why it seemed both dissonant and appropriate — despite the proximity of the street, it seemed unlikely that the tranquil square could have been the site of so many bicyclists’ deaths. At the same time, it was wholly natural to memorialize them near an 18th century churchyard. A closer look revealed that may have been precisely the thinking behind this ghost bike, dedicated to all the New York bicyclists who had lost their lives on the streets over the last year.
The ghost bike movement began as the solo effort of San Francisco artist Jo Slota in 2003. By the next year, a full memorial project was underway in St. Louis. Several artists groups’ ghost bike initiatives coalesced into The New York City Street Memorial Project in 2007, one of 87 ghost bike projects documented in 14 countries worldwide. In New York, the memorials have an impressive geographic scope, spread from the southern tip of Staten Island to reaches of eastern Queens far beyond the end of most subway lines.
Sam Javanrouh, the Toronto photographer who often collaborates with Spacing, has a talent for riding a bike without hands, which he often uses to take photos for his blog, Daily Dose of Imagery. This time, he’s gone one step further and made a video. Forget for a moment that riding without hands on a city street is dangerous; this video captures, more than anything else I’ve seen, the real sense of freedom that set bicycles apart from other modes of transportation. Javanrouh speeds past cars, pedestrians and streetcars with the help of nothing but two wheels and his own energy. In Montreal, I could bike downtown from my apartment in about 10 minutes, about the same time as a taxi, 5 minutes faster that the bus and one-quarter the time of walking. It was like having the speed of a car without any of the additional baggage.
When it first launched, Urbania magazine had a pretty useless Flash-based website that replicated selected content from its print magazine. I’m glad to see it has embraced the full potential of the web. 14 “channels” of video, images and text add a new, more dynamic aspect to the quarterly magazine. One of my favourite features is the Urbania Minutes series of videos: one-minute vignettes of Montreal life.
Above is L’exil, rue Sainte-Catherine Est, a brief portrait of a Chinese dépanneur deliveryman in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. Despite the annoying synopsis, which exoticizes Chinese immigrants (“En quête d’une vie meilleure, désireux d’offrir un avenir à leurs enfants, les ressortissants de l’Empire du milieu sont prêts à trimer dur pour réaliser leur rêve. Travailler 18 heures par jour dans une buanderie ou un dépanneur, ce n’est qu’une manière d’acheter sa liberté”), it’s a worthwhile glimpse into both immigrant life and the peculiar tradition of dep delivery, which has disappeared from other parts of the city.
Le métro de Montréal s’éveille, below, is one of those always-interesting behind-the-scenes looks at something we take for granted. We see the metro come to life in all of its antiquated glory, a 1960s flashback that begs to be seen as an old episode of Batman or something.
I’ve never had much use for bike lanes. While I appreciate them in certain situations — like when they let you ride legally against the flow of traffic — they generally strike me as a half-measure that lull both drivers and cyclists into complacency. They give the illusion of safety when they are in some ways more dangerous than ordinary street riding. Bike lanes have their place in the city, but they’re less important than developing a universal cycling culture and a street environment that is safe for cyclists in any situation.
But what if you were to bring your own bike lane? “Instead of adapting cycling to established bike lanes, the bike lane should adapt to the cyclists,” write the guys behind the Light Lane, a laser-based safety light that projects the image of a bike lane onto the street behind a moving bicycle. “Our system projects a crisply defined virtual bike lane onto pavement, using a laser, providing the driver with a familiar boundary to avoid. With a wider margin of safety, bikers will regain their confidence to ride at night, making the bike a more viable commuting alternative.”
It’s a nice idea, one that enshrines the notion that a bike is an equal partner in traffic, not just a toy that can be relegated to a handful of recreational paths and bike lanes. For now, though, it remains just that—an idea—and even if the concept is workable, I’m not sure how effective it would be. Something tells me it isn’t so easy to make a lightweight, high-powered laser that can be visible even on rough and uneven pavement. But please, feel free to prove me wrong.
En arrivant pour la première fois à Karlsruhe, en Allemagne, j’ai été surprise par le nombre de bicyclettes aux alentours de la gare centrale. Il faut dire qu’avec ses 65 millions de cyclistes, l’Allemagne – et ses villes – se doivent d’être adaptés aux vélos. Et la majorité des villes le sont ; Karlsruhe est une des ces villes adaptées aux bicyclettes, ce qui, concrétement, ce traduit par des facilités pour les cyclistes : pistes cyclables et parkings à vélos.
Biking around at night is a uniquely satisfying experience. You begin to feel ownership as you pass through shadows and empty streets: for once, you have the city all to yourself, and it becomes a fantasy landscape, a blank slate for adventures and flights of fancy.
Earlier today, while poking around the National Film Board’s online archives, I came across a film that captures this experience. The Tomorrow(s), a short video by Gabriel Allard Gagnon, André Péloquin and Guillaume Marin follows the musician Matt Fuzz as he rides his bike through nighttime Montreal. “Through the street lights and cityscape the urban elements begin to answer the beat of his Game Boy-made music, and fluid forms of reality bubble to surface,” reads the synopsis.
For years, I ignored the brooding hulk of Mount Royal at night, pausing only occasionally to contemplate the shape of its silhouette or the glow of the cross atop it. It was only recently that I actually began to venture onto the mountain after dark, well after most park-goers head home, and when the woods become especially dark and spooky. Sometimes I would head up to its lower reaches, alone or with friends, to lie on the grass, drink some beer and look out over the city. On a couple of occasions, I biked all the way up to the top.
Cycling up the mountain at night is a sensual experience: the sound of gravel under my tires; the strange, damp coolness that descends upon my skin as we head deeper into the woods and higher up the hill; the darkness of the path in front of me, marked against the red glow of the city sky. My friends and I always start at the Cartier monument, taking Olmstead’s broad path, which twists its way up the mountain on a gentle slope and a series of switchbacks. It isn’t long before the darkness overwhelms our vision and we rely on sound and instinct to avoid plunging down some rocky escarpment. It’s a completely disorienting experience, travelling along the path at night, and I enjoy the unique sensation of being guided forward without actually knowing where I’m going. Except for a brief moment when the back of the Royal Victoria Hospital is visible, I never really know where we are, and the increase in ambient noise from the city is the only indication that we have come around the front of the mountain and are biking above downtown. Soon, and always rather unexpectedly, we arrive at Beaver Lake.
Beaver Lake is an interesting place at night. On weekends, there are usually groups of people sitting near the water, chatting and drinking. People often set off fireworks near the pavilion, and in the distance, I sometimes hear street racing along Remembrance Road. On the hill overlooking the lake, my friends and I like to relive our childhood by rolling sideways down the grass slope, trying and failing to get up when we come to a stop, drunk on dizziness. It’s even more fun now than when I was a kid.
