Category Archives: best practice

The Media and the Message

Posted on by Posted in best practice, Bremen, cycle paths, cycling, Europe, infrastructure, Road allocation, transport 1 Comment
What with the ongoing Times Cities Fit For Cycling campaign, and the significant debates surrounding the Parliamentary Enquiry into Cycling, it’s easy to forget the typical media take on cycling. 

Yesterday we welcomed members of Cambridge Cycling Campaign to Bremen for a tour of the city’s infrastructure. The fact that the Campaign contacted us, rather than the ADFC or the local authority, is itself a significant reflection of Bremen’s lack of official international engagement. But we were more than happy to offer a semi-outsider’s narrative of why our home city is so cycling friendly.

The tour itself took in a series of examples of infrastructure that explained the historical and cultural stories behind Bremen’s remarkable status as the German cycling city – one of the first cycle paths (early 1900’s) along Am Wall; the rather tired and ageing cycle paths of the 1920’s that are suffering from tree roots, the site of the great battle of the 1970’s, Mozartstrasse, that stopped the building of an urban motorway through a residential district and helped transform the city’s transport policy; the resultant calming of the area through a series of one-way streets for motor traffic, all passable two-way for cyclists; the provision of decent-quality cycle paths along all major routes; and some of the most recent developments, such as a new protected cycle lane on Herdentor, created through the conversion of a full-width traffic lane. 

Throughout the three-hour tour, we were followed by a very friendly camera crew from Radio Bremen, who wanted to produce a short piece for that evening’s local news transmission. Now we were so caught up in preparing the content of the tour – you know the stuff, history, culture, technical standards of infrastructure and so on – that we quite overlooked the media take on what we were doing, and how it might be redacted by our nice TV crew.  Radio Bremen, along with the wider trend in broadcast television, is increasingly interested in populist angles, amusing titbits that make the audience smile, but might not impart much knowledge about the subject in question. But sometimes it works.

Let’s have a bit of fun ourselves, shall we, and consider the piece that went out last night her in Bremen:

Viewers who understand German will have already taken in much of what is to follow, but for the rest here is a brief explanation.

The opening intro describes Cambridge as the city with the highest number of Nobel Prize winners in the world. But here comes a delegation from the city who want to learn something from us, ie German cycling culture. We cut to the first shot from the report – of James, the most eccentric-looking (ie typical English prof type) of the delegation (as it happens I would add one of the most intelligent and thoughtful). Cue Elgar music and the first voice over “This here is for many, many Bremer the worst of all – a bicycle journey around the Stern roundabout….But for the lobby group from Cambridge, it’s a paradise”.

James explains to camera why it is good (the cross-hatching separating cyclists from traffic), and that it’s something worth trying in  the UK. First statement of disbelief from the reporter, given that this roundabout is an accident hotspot. But bear in mind, the whole point of introducing the cross-hatching, which was added just 3 years ago, is to try to reduce these accidents. We filmed previous visitors (from Newcastle Cycling Campaign) to this roundabout last year:

Another member of the Cambridge Campaign, Klaas Brumann, then explains a key point – that Bremen motorists are much more mindful of cyclists than their English counterparts, and this helps at the roundabout.

On to another scene, and another Cambridge campaigner, Martin, marvels at the quality of Bremen cycling infrastructure. Second statement of disbelief from the reporter. “Strange, we Bremer are not so enthusiastic. The cycle paths are too narrow, and haven’t been improved enough”. The dearth of cycling infrastructure in England is then explained.

We then cut to a shot of a row of parked kids bikes, probably outside a kindergarten. We explain how good infrastructure means freedom for kids on bikes, even at the age of 4. And for German viewers, it is explained that young kids “don’t cycle”. Not strictly true, of course, they “play” on their (normally stabiliser-equipped) bikes, but don’t go to nursery on them.

The piece ends with a funny quip about one universal characteristic of cyclists everywhere – their hatred of car drivers. We return to James, who declares that “pedestrians deserve the best surface, cyclists the second best, and motorised vehicles the worst. Motorists don’t need a flat surface.” Even so, the reporter is happy that visitors to Bremen have come, seen, and enthused about cycling in the city.

Did it work? I suspect the piece made Bremen viewers smile at the stereotypical English James. And in between the smiles, perhaps it was helpful to remind people that they’ve got, by international standards, a good quality network of cycling infrastructure. Even we can get too caught up in the internal debates around the Bremen Traffic Development Plan, and forget the solid grounding that underlies much of what is done in Bremen.

What we don’t see in this particular edit is the scene right at the beginning of our tour, when we are showing the map of Bremen cycling infrastructure to our visitors, and the looks of disbelief on their faces.

As we explained, every red line on this map represents a cycle path. And every busy, main road has a cycle path alongside it. This is something that campaigners in the UK can only dream of. Yet it is now built into the DNA of Bremen (though not all German) traffic planners. Busy main roads must provide for good quality, safe and attractive cycling infrastructure. This is what makes Bremen a cycling city. This is what the Cambridge visitors really appreciated.

Reports from a Cycling City2 – Bremen’s Cycling Plan

Posted on by Posted in best practice, Bremen, cycle paths, cycling, Europe, infrastructure, Public transport
The 5 Consultation Areas

Like many European towns and cities, Bremen is in the process of producing its transport plan for the next 10 to 15 years. In the UK it is known as LTP3. Here, using the German language’s love of crushing together a string of words into one, we called it the Verkehrsentwicklungsplan, or VEP for short. Last month, I went along to one of the public consultations to see how they compared with the UK experience. The basis of the presentation is available online here. The consultation process involves 5 sessions for each of 5 areas in Bremen. This particular meeting was for central Bremen, where we live.

The first thing that struck me was that, in this city with around 25% of everyday trips being made by bicycle, cycling was given equal weight throughout the proceedings to all other modes of mobility. For example, following the initial presentations by the officers and their consultants (more on which later), the audience was given four standing areas to visit and comment, one for each of public transport, private motorised transport, walking, and cycling. In a way, it felt as though cycling was a given in terms of such status, and this time extra efforts were being made to give walking a higher status than previously afforded.

The Cycling Stand

At each of these stands, an officer or consultant was on hand to discuss issues with members of the public. Alongside the maps and statistics was a blank canvas. We were invited to fill in different coloured cards with suggestions – blue cards for wishes, green cards for positive aspects of the existing infrastructure that should be build on (Anknüpfungspunkte means something like starting points), and yellow cards for negative comments.

The Cycling Canvas 

The blue “wishes” cards tend to argue for more space for cyclists, the green for more priority for cyclists, and the yellow identified individual problems – cobbled streets, the technical prohibition of cyclists in the city centre pedestrian zone (most cyclists ignore this), and so on. The consensus seems to be that Bremen has done well in the past, but that now a lot more needs to be done. Much of Bremen’s cycling infrastructure dates back 40 years or more – the first Bremen cycle path was constructed in 1897! Sure enough, the statistics show that, when compared to the large German cities, Bremen has the highest cycling modal share of all. But how to progress?

During the initial presentations, it seemed that there was little critical contemporary evidence about cycling figures, whether they were rising or falling, who was cycling where. The available figures date back to 2008, now nearly 5 years old, and make for interesting reading. They show that, in Bremen as a whole, cycling’s share of all journeys stands at a healthy 25%. In our area, Bremen Mitte, this rises to 28%. Moreover all sustainable travel modes are higher than the Bremen average in our area. In contrast, car use in the city stands at 40%, whilst in Bremen Mitte this falls to just 18%. This is significant.

Bremen’s Modal Split. Our area is highlighted in red.

We often hear from politicians in the UK that they are restricted in what they can do for cycling because of the democratic process. The argument goes something like this. “In a democracy politicians have to take the views of the electorate into account. If most voters drive rather than cycle, and cycling is in fact the domain of a few per cent of the population, then clearly the needs of motorists have to take precedence over cyclists. Thus, in a democracy, streets should be designed with the typical voter in mind”.

You would expect, then that in the centre of Bremen, the opposite might be the case. Well here is our street:

Something like 30% of the available street space, once pavement and road are taken into account, is allocated to parking for cars. This is a relatively quiet residential street, and because there are so many cyclists compared to drivers, most of the time cyclists feel safe to use the road, with car drivers accepting they should follow slowly (it is also a 30kph zone). All the same, it does seem rather generous to the 18% to give them so much space simply to park their tin cans.

But the problem becomes acute when we look at the road at the far end of this picture, Sielwall, which is deemed a main through road with a 50kph speed limit.

As this is a busier road with a 50kph speed limit, a cycle path runs along both sides of the road. But as you can see, parked cars tend to edge into the already too narrow path. The blue parking sign at the top of the picture instructs drivers to park partly on the road way and partly on the narrow strip of pavement between cycle path and road. But in practice, drivers move most of their vehicle up on to the pavement, probably in fear of their wing mirror getting clipped. Parking on this stretch of street amounts to around 20 spaces, yet it disrupts the safe flow of traffic for both cyclists and pedestrians alike.

So how does Bremen propose to address these problems? Back at the presentation, there was much talk of cycling as the “new cool”, and of  the phenomenon of car-free living, Autofrei Leben, an increasingly attractive option for inhabitants of large cities like Bremen that have good public transport, car sharing schemes, and reasonable cycling infrastructure. No specific target figure for increased cycling was presented, although 30% was mentioned briefly in passing during a summing up. This perhaps reflects the rather imprecise cycling aims that currently appear in the official VEP Plan document:

  • promote cycling
  • improve cyclist safety
  • improve cycling infrastructure 

Interestingly, there is a clear aim in that document to “shift private motorised transport towards public transport“, but there is no apparent equivalent for cycling. It is fair to say that the VEP’s concrete project proposals will be developed over the coming months, so there is an inevitable vagueness about things to date. Moreover, there are a number of wider aims, for example dealing with environmental and urban planning issues, that suggest that cycling has a wider role to play. But even so, there is surely space for a clearer cycling strategy at this stage.

Bremen is often characterised as a “leading” cycling city, on the verge of becoming classified as a “cycling champion” or “pioneer” (the German national Cycling Plan’s term) by the professionals. Indeed, the EU-funded PRESTO project has already done so. In these circumstances, perhaps two questions  need to be asked. First, how do we keep existing cyclists happy on their bikes? Second, how do we raise that modal share figure further? According to Germany’s current National Cycling Plan, pioneer municipalities like Bremen have little need for promotion – cycling as an everyday means of transport is self-evident – but rather needs to concentrate its efforts on infrastructure projects.

It also makes sense, when so many of the complaints from existing cyclists relate to the inadequacies of Bremen’s ageing cycle paths, that priority is given to upgrades of existing infrastructure. For example, Copenhagen’s Bicycle Strategy 2011-2025  includes a target that “80% of cyclists find the cycle tracks well maintained (2010: 50%)“. So far in Bremen, such an approach, to upgrade existing cycling infrastructure, does not appear to have been adopted. But attitudes towards Bremen’s ageing cycle paths, and how problems such as that highlighted on Sielwall, constitute the key debates around Bremen’s cycling vision. How that debate is resolved will have a major bearing on whether Bremen moves forward as a cycling champion, or sees its long history of everyday cycling eroded just when the wider world has woken up to its significance.

From Road to Cycle Path and Back Again

Posted on by Posted in best practice, Bremen, cycling, Fahrradstrasse, habitus, infrastructure, Road allocation 2 Comments
The meeting of local residents last night on Humboldtstraße

When Objective and Subjective Safety Clash

Last night saw what for me was a remarkable sight – a local authority anticipating the digging up of a road by one of the utilities (in this case water to renew a main sewer), and actually planning to take advantage by developing plans for infrastructure improvements when the work is finished and the road needs relaid. What’s more this is the Viertel in Bremen, an area of the city with higher than normal cycling rates in a city that averages 25%. Our local mayor Robert Bücking, who chaired the event, represents the Green Party that recently won 45% of the vote in our district at last year’s election. Both local government policy and popular will were heavily weighted towards cycling-friendly improvements.

Local utility company HanseWasser will begin work on renewing the main sewer that runs beneath Humboldtstraße in April, and last night’s meeting was called to discuss local authority proposals to convert the street into a Cycle Street following completion of the works. Humboldtstraße has a problem that is increasing in Bremen – cycle paths built in the 1980s that are deteriorating, whilst the numbers of cyclists using them continues to increase. Figures released at the meeting last night show that somewhere around 4,000 cyclists use the street daily, a number that is equal to the number of motor vehicles. Humboldtstraße is a residential street, with a series of small local shops dotted along the its 800 metre length. Though no arterial road, it is often used as a handy alternative link between the main city hospital and the city centre.

Humboldtstraße

The local authority proposal is to convert Humboldtstraße into a Fahrradstraße (Cycling Street), removing the existing cycle paths, narrowing the main road by a metre, and giving more space to the pavements, and car and bicycle parking. The street will continue as a 30kph (20mph) zone, but unlike now will have priority at all side junctions. Currently, junctions use the “priority to the right” system as an alternative to “give way” signs, but it seems in this case many drivers have historically acted as if Humboldtstraße already had priority over side streets.

One principle argument for Fahrradstraße is objective safety. Especially at junctions, cyclists are more visible on the main road when compared with the cycle path. In Germany, cycle paths and pedestrians have priority at side junctions, so any accidents involving a cyclist/motor vehicle collision will almost inevitably be due to the driver failing to see the cyclist. Such collisions are less likely to occur if the cyclist is out on the road. Of course this argument is used regularly by vehicular cyclists in the UK and USA, who have amassed considerable evidence to argue their case. But unlike these studies, the Fahrradstraße discussion last night was primarily concerned with quality issues. How would cyclist priority on the street work in practice? Is the 30kph speed limit respected by all users? What happens at night when there are few cyclists? Clearly on-road cycling here will be quite different to the average UK or USA road.

But most interesting of all, concerns from the audience, and women in particular, revolved around subjective safety. Many said they feared any kind of mixing with motorised traffic, and predicted they would instead cycle on the widened pavements promised in the plan. Others questioned whether the role given to cyclists – to calm motorised traffic – was fair on small children or the elderly. Here, the “experts” from the local authority, the ADFC (German Cyclists Federation), and even one local politician who explained her surprise when she was shown the statistics about Fahrradstraße safety, were unable to reconcile their objective statistics about safety with the subjective feelings expressed by members of the audience.

Yet subjective safety is a widely recognised and important concept. In this case, it raises the question about the “feel” of the street for users, and to what extent it is more of a space for slow moving traffic – pedestrians and cyclists – than for fast, or potentially fast-moving motorised vehicles. Many in the audience felt that giving Humboldtstraße continuous priority over all side streets will only encourage reckless driving, despite the speed limit. Humboldtstraße runs in a straight line from one end to the other. These criticisms seemed to suggest a wish for a street design that better stated the intentions of the planners to “tame the motor vehicle”. One woman suggested taking motorised traffic out of the street altogether. Perhaps here there are even some lessons for Bremen from the UK after all.

It is gratifying that the public debate last night hardly touched on issues of convenience for motorised traffic. Pretty well all who attended agreed on the aim of making Humboldtstraße a better living street by reducing the dominance of the car (although that pesky issue of parking space remains a popular demand). But if our local authority is to properly address residents’ concerns, a range of options from Fahrradstraße to Fussgängerzone (Pedestrian Zone) should now be explored. As one attendee said last night, Bremen is going through a deep cultural change, from car-centricity to liveable streets. But the journey from one to the other is not a simple one, and mistakes could be made on the way.

In a deeply democratic country like Germany, this debate will continue for some time to come here in the Viertel. We’ll let you know how the proposals develop.

Space Reallocation – An Example in Britain

Posted on by Posted in best practice, Cycling Cmbassy of Great Britain, Hessle Road, Hull, infrastructure, inspiration, Road allocation, transport 1 Comment

Cycling Embassy of Britain is asking cycling policy activists to contribute to their debate about infrastructure this weekend, and we are happy to help as much as we can.

There is a very interesting and successful example in Britain, in the city of Hull: Here they dared to take considerable space away from cars by re-organising dual carriage ways: “The project involved reallocating road space on seven busy roads within the city through the introduction of cycle lanes. This was achieved by removing one lane of traffic in each direction which was then replaced by a cycle lane and parking bays.” They also allowed cyclists clear priority at junctions. That was not expensive but they were able to raise the number of cyclists considerably by 100 % in the same year as its installation and to reduce accidents by 55%.

The quality of these cycle lanes is not necessarily the best. But the point of this example is the amount of road space that has been taken from motorised traffic and reallocated to cycling. The allocation of road space is a key factor in any infrastructure development, and as cycling advocates are well aware, the UK’s track record on this is pretty poor. Here in Hull we have an example that shows that even in the UK reallocation of space is possible.

If you want to read more and see pictures, look at this short paper by Hull City Council and Cycling England about one of the roads:

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110407094607/http://www.dft.gov.uk/cyclingengland/site/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/hessle_road_hull.pdf

There is also a report by SQW Consulting to Cycling England from December 2008, where they compare five different projects in England but Hull gets the best results:

http://www.nici.org.uk/downloads/planning-for-cycling-report-10-3-09.pdf

The Hull project is described on pages 30 and 48 to 50, and for a better assessment of the results see page 39.

The cycle paths to happy cycling – digging deeper

Posted on by Posted in academic research, best practice, Bremen, Darlington, habitus, politics

With the launch of our new website, our work now turns to exploring the political, social and economic constraints on cycling. We recently published an article in the new magazine Cycling Mobility, which explored the influence of habitus on cycling policies in the UK and Germany. This set us thinking about the many hours of material that were never used in the final production, and how there are many other stories that could be told by these young women. We featured short portraits of Darlington girls Sofija, Kate and Lauren during their visit to Bremen in 2009, but the Bremen girls, and their perspectives on cycling, are just as interesting. They reveal how there is much more to what David Hembrow calls “subjective safety” than has so far been written. And how our understanding of cycling can be so different.

Ricarda, one of the Beauty and the Bike girls from Bremen, spoke of “cycling” in the UK not being what she understood as “cycling” at all. We later queried her about this, and she talked a lot about cycling on roads with motorised traffic, whether in a lane or without, as being completely alien to her. There was an interesting aside about this when we were filming the two groups of girls in Bremen. Ricarda asks Harri what she thought of cycling along a mandatory cycle lane that had recently been developed on Hamburger Strasse. Harri responds by saying how safe she felt. But Ricarda later stated that she prefers to cycle “on the pavement” – this mandatory cycle lane just wasn’t up to the standard that she wanted from cycling infrastructure.

Of course Ricarda didn’t actually mean that she preferred to use the pedestrian space we call the pavement or sidewalk. What she was saying was that her idea of cycling was very much divorced from roads designed for motorised traffic. Living in Bremen, it was possible to get around most places without actually using a busy road. Yet here was a bit of new infrastructure that contradicted this vision. The road engineer who worked on this project also hinted that it was a “little bit different” for Bremen to be developing cycling infrastructure on the road – historically, Bremen’s cycle paths have been built, as Ricarda says, on pavements.

From an infrastructure point of view, Hamburger Strasse is deemed an advance for cycling. Considerable space was taken away from motorised traffic to create the cycle lanes, and in fact they are often on the pavement as well. Bremen’s older on-pavement cycle paths are often painfully narrow. But from a cycling culture point of view, it seems like a bit of a backward step to be putting cyclists on a road – albeit with some sense of safety provided by the nature of the mandatory lane.

Ricarda’s vision of cycling as having nothing whatever to do with on-road activity has some pretty interesting cultural repercussions. If cycling is less like vehicular traffic and more like walking, well we can chat and take our time, can’t we? We can use umbrellas, stop and window-gaze at every little shop,

 
play at look no hands as we cycle along, the possibilities are endless. And a long way away from the health and safety oriented vision of cycling in countries like the UK and the USA. Yet these contrasting ideas about cycling are shaping how cycling develops culturally. 

I would suggest this is a bit like pedestrians and pavements. In most countries with little or no infrastructure, roads/dirt tracks are shared by all. In most western societies, pavements have developed in urban areas for pedestrians. As pedestrians, we would find it alien to have to share all urban roads with motorised traffic.

Bicycling is a different mode of transport, with its own needs, speed, age ranges, that logically does not tally with the very different needs of motorised traffic. Yet certain countries deem it acceptable to continue to insist on cyclists doing just that. Perhaps for consistency, we should begin to rip up our pavements and insist that pedestrians also share road space. After all, some American cities organise their streets in exactly this way.

How to best integrate different transport modes requires a clear understanding of the nature of each. To take an obvious example, speed. On urban roads with a 30mph (48km/h) speed limit, average free flowing traffic speeds are in fact just that – 30mph (2009).  The average free-flow urban cycling speed in cities with dedicated infrastructure lies between 6.2 mph (10 km/h) and 17.4mph (28 km/h) with a majority of the reported speeds in the literature being between 7.5mph (12 km/h) and 12.4 mph (20 km/h). Average walking speed is about 4mph (6.5km/h).

Clearly, any decision to combine two or three of these modes requires careful consideration about the impact one mode might have on others. Thus mixed cycling and walking space is typically designed primarily around the needs of (slower) walkers, with cyclists treated as invited guests.  Similarly, mixed walking, cycling and motoring space such as Home Zones are designed to make motorists feel that they are a guest in the street, and must make it difficult for them to travel at speeds of more than 10 mph. In both these cases, priority is given to slower, more vulnerable traffic member.

Applying the same principle to mixing cyclists and motorists also makes absolute sense. Thus in countries with a more developed planning approach to cycling, facilities like Cycle Streets are designed as cyclist-priority streets with access for motorised traffic.

Cycle Street in Bremen, Germany

Similarly, the aim of the 20’s Plenty Campaign is to establish a speed limit norm of 20mph (30km/h) in residential areas, as a means of moving towards streets that again can be used by residents and their children. What is particularly interesting is what happens in residential streets when such speed limits are combined with a strong cycling culture – the subject of our next post. But undoubtedly the great exception to these principles is the mixing of cyclists and motorists on busy 30mph roads. The illogic of this is only sustained as long as the number of cyclists is kept to a minimum, or in  some cases legally eliminated altogether. In the vast majority of towns and cities where this is the norm, cycling numbers remain stubbornly low. Dutch style infrastructure, as currently being considered by London Cycling Campaign, and advocated by both Darlington and Newcastle Cycling Campaigns, as well as a host of other online commentators, means good quality cycle paths alongside busy arterial roads.

Without this key strategic understanding, all the well-funded work going on around 20mph speed limits, cycle training, the marketing of cycling as healthy, and so on will have little effect on the levels of cycling in countries like the UK. “Cycling”, as understood by Ricarda in our film, will continue to be a pipe dream.