Great bike cities feel like they have a "culture" of cycling. But I've often wondered if it's culture or opportunity that creates this urban vibe — can you h...
I think it’s a “build it and they will come” situation.
He mentions Copenhagen in the video, and I can safely say that the majority of cyclists in Copenhagen do not consider themselves part of a specific cycling culture. Of course there are cycling clubs and such, but the average person on a bike is just trying to commute without giving any consideration of whether it’s normal in other places.
Copenhagen also has decent public transport, busses, trains, metros, so it’s not like people need to ride a bike to get around even without cars.
Copenhagen is very flat geographically and had a high density, so it’s fast and easy to get anywhere on a bicycle. Other even smaller cities in Denmark have fewer cyclists, either due to hills or longer distances between points of interest, so while there is a general bicycling culture in Denmark, Copenhagen is something else.
In the second largest city, Aarhus, they recently build a city train hoping to lower the quantity of car commuters, but the result turned out to be that it actually lowered the quantity of bicycle commuters as well. Probably because they have the longest hill bicycle lane in the country. It goes to show that the ease of transport is more important than the culture.
Traffic management is difficult like that. The population moves very fluidly between methods of commuting. When something is build, the users will come.
That’s also how Tokyo managed to get rid of the cars in the city. They invested heavily in mass public transport before it was needed and it just works so well. There are very few cars in the world’s largest city. There are also very few bicycles though. You could say that Tokyo has a public transport culture, but that obviously didn’t exist without public transport. Same with bicycles.
I think it’s a “build it and they will come” situation.
He mentions Copenhagen in the video, and I can safely say that the majority of cyclists in Copenhagen do not consider themselves part of a specific cycling culture. Of course there are cycling clubs and such, but the average person on a bike is just trying to commute without giving any consideration of whether it’s normal in other places.
Copenhagen also has decent public transport, busses, trains, metros, so it’s not like people need to ride a bike to get around even without cars. Copenhagen is very flat geographically and had a high density, so it’s fast and easy to get anywhere on a bicycle. Other even smaller cities in Denmark have fewer cyclists, either due to hills or longer distances between points of interest, so while there is a general bicycling culture in Denmark, Copenhagen is something else.
In the second largest city, Aarhus, they recently build a city train hoping to lower the quantity of car commuters, but the result turned out to be that it actually lowered the quantity of bicycle commuters as well. Probably because they have the longest hill bicycle lane in the country. It goes to show that the ease of transport is more important than the culture.
Traffic management is difficult like that. The population moves very fluidly between methods of commuting. When something is build, the users will come.
That’s also how Tokyo managed to get rid of the cars in the city. They invested heavily in mass public transport before it was needed and it just works so well. There are very few cars in the world’s largest city. There are also very few bicycles though. You could say that Tokyo has a public transport culture, but that obviously didn’t exist without public transport. Same with bicycles.
Absolutely right. I’m Dutch and nobody thinks about car culture vs bike culture. It’s not until I moved to NZ that I got introduced to this.
Induced demand applies to any mode, it’s as simple as that. Just one more bike lane bro!