Category Archives: cycling in Europe

Velo City – from Copenhagen to Seville

Posted on by Posted in cycling in Europe, infrastructure, politics 2 Comments


Velo-City Global 2010 from Velo-city Global 2010 on Vimeo.

Velo-City, the annual international conference about everyday urban cycling, provides an excellent focus for cycling advocacy best practice from around the world. Last year’s event in Copenhagen was, not surprisingly, wowed by that city’s track record in encouraging more people to cycle as part of their everyday lives. Though it must be repeated, much of the wowing can also be put down to PR. We ourselves have worked in Bremen, which has more than twice the amount of off-road cycle paths as Copenhagen – and that excludes green areas like parks and riverbanks. And of course it has been well documented elsewhere that much of the Netherlands has far superior standards than Copenhagen.
The 2011 event opened yesterday in the Spanish city of Seville. To coincide with this year’s event,  a new magazine called Cycling Mobility is being launched there. Darlington is featured in the publication via an article about Beauty and the Bike. But there is also a substantial piece about Seville itself, and how the city transformed itself in just a few years from a car-dominated and congested regional capital to a cycling-friendly place to live. In less than six years, Seville has increased cycling’s share of journeys from 0.2% to 6.6%, with the number of people cycling daily from 2,500 to 70,000. This compares with Darlington’s figures, regarded in the UK as a great success, of 1% to 3% over five years.

Spain is not noted for its cycling-oriented mobility culture. So how come Seville has been so successful?  The article lists seven action points that were central to the plan:

  • DO have a thoroughly researched master plan that develops cycling as an integral part of the transport system
  • DO create a fully linked network of routes that offers the public a practical, pleasant and convenient means of transport
  • DO ensure that cycle lanes are safe, and physically separated from cars where necessary
  • DO make sure that cycle lanes follow main routes where there are shops, public transport points and people
  • DON’T go for the easy option. Creating routes around the back streets is straightforward but not always best. 
  • DO expect stiff political opposition when trying to fund projects like these.
  • DO remember that the alternative is to continue to spend billions on new roads which will simply add to the problem.

Seville offers an example of what can be done with strong political will. Most of these action points echo exactly what Darlington Cycling Campaign has been advocating for our own town. With local elections looming here in May, there is precious little sign that such political vision will be on offer for the voters of the borough.

Cyclist Safety – Two Approaches

Posted on by Posted in accident, cycling in Europe, infrastructure, Northern Echo, safety 13 Comments


View Larger Map

Ever since the death on the A167 Darlington to Croft road in June 2008 of cyclist Norman Fay, and the serious injuries sustained by his friend and fellow cyclist John Stephenson, I have been meaning to blog about the circumstances, and the wider ramifications, of this tragedy.  The Cycling Campaign has for some years now been calling for a separated cycle path along this stretch of road. As is clear from the picture above, for most of the length of the road, this is eminently possible on the grass verge. It is widely recognised as one of the most dangerous for cyclists in Darlington, and indeed discourages many residents of Croft and Hurworth with whom we have talked in the past from cycling at all.

When Norman and John’s accident occurred, the Cycling Campaign raised the incident at the following Borough Council’s Transport Forum (which has now, by the way, been abolished). The response was appalling. One death, and another life-threatening injury it seems, was not enough to justify considering any kind of cycling facility. Some members of the committee took it upon themselves to laugh at our concern.

We also attended the inquest into the tragedy, which took place in September 2009 in Chester-le-Street. The inquest was extensively reported here in the Northern Echo. As the article noted, in this accident the driver of the car involved never faced prosecution.

This incident reflects the two core problems for cyclists in the UK – lack of infrastructure where it is actually needed, and motorist behaviour. But it also reflects a third and related problem – the attitude of our establishment to cyclist safety. This was brought home to us all, literally, in last night’s episode of Top Gear, when cyclists’ “favourite” Jeremy Clarkson jokingly suggested that cyclists deserve to be “cut up” because they don’t pay road tax. Top Gear is one of the BBC’s top income earners from sales abroad. A campaign of complaints to the BBC about the show has already been initiated, and follows hard on the heels of comedian Steve Coogan’s attack on the programme’s presenters for their casual racism.

Disinterest in cyclist safety locally, and institutionalised backing for aggression nationally, reflects a deeper belief in the UK that cyclist safety is something the cyclist should worry about, not wider society. So the one element of Cycling England that gets retained following its demise next month will be Bikeability, the cycle training programme – training, that is, for survival on our car-oriented road system. If cycling safety was really deemed a collective concern, society at large would take much greater responsibility for developing safer infrastructure. Now, what little that was being developed nationally is to be dropped. Cyclist safety will be strictly a private affair.

Contrast the reaction in Darlington to the Croft tragedy, and the BBC’s love of Top Gear, with how the media in the Netherlands dealt with an accident involving cyclists and a car, as described in this great little video from Mark Wagenbuur.

EDIT: In the light of all the Jeremy Clarkson hoo-ha today, one member of the Cycling Campaign has suggested we jest back:

Learning from Copenhagen (and elsewhere)

Posted on by Posted in beauty and the bike, cycling in Europe, politics 2 Comments


More evidence that informed thinking about successful cycling policies is coalescing around the Cycling Campaign’s call for a move towards high quality and safe infrastructure on our arterial routes, couple with traffic calming on all residential streets. An interesting exchange of letters between Richard Lewis, a principal town and transport planner at the London Borough of Newham, and Dave Horton from Lancaster University, asks how much we can learn from the “Copenhagen model”, a somewhat PR-influenced shorthand for “best European practice” as spelt out lucidly and repeatedly by our friend from Assen, David Hembrow.

Dave Horton visited Copenhagen at the beginning of December as part of a wider piece of research called On Our Own Two Wheels, documenting the experience of riding a bicycle in cities around the world. The exchange of letters followed that visit.

As David Horton concludes:

I think increased provision of specific and segregated cycling infrastructure might be key to getting the velorution rolling. The current and massive problem with otherwise wonderful initiatives such as Bikeability (a UK cycle training scheme, not to be confused with the Danish research project of the same name!) is that, given the existing cycling environment, we’re destined to lose the vast majority of those we train. However well we train them, only the hardy minority will stay on their bikes for long. We have strategically to crack, and then mine, the current dominance of car-based urban automobility, and the establishment of cycling corridors – a la Copenhagen and (in a fashion) London – on key, highly visible arterial routes seems one way of doing so.

This echoes the conclusion of Darlington Cycling Campaign following the completion in our town of the Beauty and the Bike project, which we published a year ago. What is becoming clear is that such policies cannot be delivered at a purely local level, whatever the new government rhetoric about localism. Local cycling policies are dominated by the DfT’s and CTC’s hierarchy of provision, which ironically puts infrastructure at the bottom of the list in a table of “considerations” for local authorities to follow. Unlike the fate of Cycling England, this particular policy is likely to survive for some time.

Dave Horton concludes his post with notice of a gathering of like minds at The Phoenix Digital Arts Centre in Leicester on Saturday 4th and Sunday 5th June 2011. Perhaps this will come up with strategies for making national in the UK, cycling policies that clearly are “best practice” elsewhere.

Cycling in the rain of the Netherlands

Posted on by Posted in cycling in Europe, infrastructure, inspiration 5 Comments

This last week, cycling to work has been an absolute pleasure. The weather has been perfect for cycling on a morning (cool but dry and sunny); in fact, since the snow cleared, we’ve had pretty much perfect cycling weather in Darlington for the last three or four months.

But I still see the same few cyclists on the roads and bike paths. maybe three or four other riders on a good day, on my 2.5 mile to work that goes through the town centre.

Meanwhile, on a rainy day in Utrecht in the Netherlands…

(Mark Wagenbuur’s excellent video found via David Hembrow’s excellent blog: A view from the cycle path – Utrecht in the rain

Child Traffic Safety – Compare and Contrast

Posted on by Posted in accident, cycling in Europe, schools 3 Comments

Netherlands-based Mark Wagenbuur has just uploaded another fascinating video on his youtube channel, this time about child traffic training in the Netherlands. Little needs to be said, except that Mark states towards the end that there were 15 child traffic deaths last year in the Netherlands. This compares with 124 in the UK in 2008. The UK population is 61.4m, the Netherlands 16.5m. Do your maths. Then have a look a look at this video and think for a second about how it differs from the UK.

The vast amount of energy, money and peoples’ focus on self-defence measures for cyclists in the UK appears to be diverting us from the real problems.