As this study abroad program comes to an end, I find myself sad to say goodbye to these incredible cities and the amazing people I’ve met, but I am also excited go home and apply what I have learned. This trip has been full of bike rides in places that you can’t just see pictures of or read about. I have experienced cities in ways I could only do by bike. I have talked to the people that live there. They do not think about the infrastructure or the benefit of bikeable cities, they just bike. We can come in and study their city, but they don’t study their city, they just experience it. I spoke with a man in Copenhagen who never thought about bike infrastructure or whether or not he should bike until he studied abroad in America a driver hit him, broke his leg, and then asked him if they could deal with this later because she was in a rush. I spoke with a couple folks in Utrecht and they explained that biking was the easiest option for getting around, so why would they take another mode? I spoke with a woman in Amsterdam and she had biked for her entire life but now she is 86 and she can’t bike so she has just started to driving. These are just a few of the people I’ve spoken with and most people said the same thing: we don’t think about biking, we just do it. Without being there, and biking there, I couldn’t have experienced bike cities in the way I got to. Although I have learned an unbelievable amount on this trip, but I think these are my top 5 takeaways:
Bike culture affects car culture. Back home, I am very used to drivers being needlessly aggressive towards cyclists. that’s not to say that every driver is aggressive, but the one that are and the ones that make cyclists feel unsafe leave the biggest impressions. And yes, there are a lot of them. In the cities that we have biked in, most people driving cars also frequently bike. While there were still a few instances that we observed with drivers being impatient, they were fewer and farther between. When more people bike, more people accept biking as prioritized mode of travel.
Rules don’t always matter. Rules are made to tell people what to do, but often times, there’s more than one way to do it. Rather than getting mad when someone breaks a rule, we should ask if it hurt anyone. If not, then they’ve just found a new way to do something and we should ask ourselves what we can learn from it.
We can design vehicles to fit smaller streets rather than widening streets to fit vehicles. Streets here can be pretty narrow, but rather than taking space from other modes to fit large vehicles, vehicles are designed to be smaller. We have seen ambulances that look like sedans a bulb out above the trunk. We have seen mini fire trucks and street sweepers that fit in bike lanes. We have seen delivery companies shift towards delivery bikes rather than vans. We have seen cars the size of a cargo bike. We shouldn’t shape streets around the largest vehicles that use them, we should shape vehicles to fit in the street. Why would you need a bigger mouth if you could just take smaller bites?
The bigger the street, the better the infrastructure should be. This the first thing that struck me in Copenhagen. We shouldn’t be designing bike infrastructure so that there is a bike route every mile or so, we should be designing bike infrastructure so that every single street is accessible to bikes. This doesn’t mean every street should have a 4 foot painted bike lane, though. The infrastructure needs to scale with the street. Just because there is a painted bike lane on 18th doesn’t mean it is enough. On busy streets, there needs to be better bike infrastructure.
Bike infrastructure makes cities a pleasant place to be. When people aren’t sitting in their private metal boxes, streets become social spaces. When there aren’t walls of cars filling the streets, you can see shops and restaurants across the road and you easily access these destinations. When you drive down a road, you’re moving too fast to see all of the destinations and it is too hard to park so you can interact with theses destinations. Cities need bike infrastructure to reduce reliance on cars. Biking is what makes cities social and human scale. Cars move you through cities, but bikes move you in cities.
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