In June, cycling advocates from all over the world descended on Copenhagen for the Velo-City Global 2010 Conference. This offered a chance for folks to share what they’ve been doing to make transportation cycling safer and more accessible. It also provided Copenhagen as a venue for what can be done and how far a city can come to get majority population adoption of the bicycle as a valid form of transportation as you can see in this StreetFilms documentary on the conference.

Tom Wald, the Executive Director of Austin’s League of Bicycling Voters, attended the conference and filed this report for us. Tom will also be doing a presentation on his trip at Mellow Johnny’s Bike shop on Saturday, August 7 as part of The Hottest Day of The Year Ride: A Benefit for The League of Bicycling Voters.

My Trip to Copenhagen and Velo-City Global 2010

The participants at Velo-City Global 2010, the first world bike conference, included participants from about half of the world’s countries — Spain, Mongolia, USA, Uruguay, China, Netherlands, Hungary, Turkey, Germany, Mexico, Denmark, to name a few.  Each part of the world has its own challenges and successes.  This conference and the experience of being in Copenhagen was there to spread the knowledge and inspiration to cities across the globe.

The major value of my professional experience in Copenhagen came in three ways:
* via the content of the conference itself,
* through conversation with colleagues in USA, Canada, and elsewhere, and
* by experiencing a world-class bicycling city for myself.

The valuable plenary presentations were too numerous to describe them all here.  The architect Jan Gehl, highlighted five things that cities want that the bicycle can provide: a lively city, an attractive city, a safe city, a sustainable city, a healthy city.  Indeed bicycling and walking serve transportation functions, but they must be seen as tools to improve quality of life as well.  Mikael Colville-Andersen of Copenhagenize.com emphasized positive promotion of the bicycle as the key to increasing bicycle use.

I attended various workshops at Velo-City. From the research of the PRESTO Project of numerous European cities, I learned what cities at different stages of bicycle use should concentrate on in order to increase their numbers.  Cities with less than 10% bicycle use should focus on creating a safe environment for people to get around by bike.  In the 10-20% range, cities should focus on promotion of bicycle use.  Those with over 20% modal split, should focus on maintaining their bicycle use.  I’ve thought about how this could apply to Austin.  In some neighborhoods, bicycle use already exceeds 10%, while some places see less than 1% usage.  Clearly the edges of our city have numerous gaps in safe bicycling infrastructure that dissuade many from going by bike.  It seems that in many central Austin neighborhoods, bicycling could be a part of many people’s lives, but they don’t yet realize how well it would work for them.

I’ve developed some relationships with staff of other bicycle advocacy organizations over the last year at training events and conferences.  These trips are prime opportunities for us to share with each other what is working and what isn’t working.  It’s encouraging to hear from others that they are experiencing similar challenges as I am in Austin, and we can share our solutions.

Sometimes the lessons came from putting together the stories from multiple organizations to understand what worked.  In the San Francisco Bay Area, there was recently a controversy about limiting bicycle access to CalTrain commuter trains.  Several bicycle advocacy organizations had “jurisdiction”, and I had the opportunity to talk with staff from two of those orgs.  Both advocacy groups suspected that their own org was responsible for the successful outcome, yet there was strong disagreement about whether the other org had helped out significantly.  One had energized the public to write letters and attend meetings, and had an aggressive media campaign, while the other used their face-to-face working relationship with CalTrain officials to talk through the issue to maintain good bike access to commuter trains.

Bicycling in Copenhagen felt very normal, and that was a good thing.  This is something a visitor notices without even knowing the figure that 37% of Copenhagen trips are by bike, more than by any other mode, including private automobile.  I knew that I was always welcome.  I knew that if the heat made me a little sweaty that it would make all other normal people sweaty too.  If it rained, everyone else would be a little wet too.  I figured that I could get on the bike and start riding without worrying about coming across a road abhorrent to bicycling.  Bicycling became about as easy and straightforward as walking.  Most of my biking in Austin is as transportation, so I figured that I knew most of the basics that I’d need to.  After being informed of a few local standards — left turns are usually made as wide left turns, or “box” left turns, locking your bike to itself is adequate security — biking in Copenhagen was as natural as walking.

In case you aren’t familiar with images of Copenhagen, such as those on Copenhagenize.com, I’ll mention that people on bikes looked like they wore everyday European clothes.  Some clothes were casual, some more nicely dressed either for work or personal choice.  Many women rode bikes, there were few helmets, and there were young and old on bikes — perhaps 8 to 80 years old.  For kicks, I snapped a photo of a group of four lycra-clad roadies heading right through the middle of town, which was a rare sight among the everyday people.

While elderly people rode bikes, of course, some also used motorized personal mobility devices along the cycletracks and sidewalks.  When I saw this, I scrapped any serious concerns that the elderly would have less mobility in a bike and pedestrian friendly environment — it was evident that the transportation-worthy cycletracks _increased_ their mobility.

I saw numerous passengers, young and old, in the front box of cargo bikes.  I saw a woman toting a man, a man toting a pregnant woman, and numerous children riding as packaged passengers.

I rode upon the back of a bike, Danish style (apparently the Danish tend to straddle the rack, while the Dutch tend to ride side-saddle), while my driver weaved about the street to the point where a police officer shined a warning light at us.  Bicycling in Copenhagen is more orderly than in Amsterdam, for example.  A typical high-traffic street will have a motor traffic area down the middle of the right-of-way, then 6-7′-wide cycletracks to the side of that, and then a pedestrian sidewalk on the edge next to the buildings.  My casual observation was that people tended to stick with their proper area.

Contrary to what some people may say, “But that’s Europe, bicycling could never be that popular here”, I really think that a steady focus on making Austin more biking and walking friendly could make our city as friendly as just about any European city.  I don’t think it’ll happen by 2011, or even 2020, but it’s ridiculous to wish it to happen by the next year unless we work at it, year after year.  We’ll have affordable, safe, clean, human-scale, human-powered transportation as the norm in Austin, but we need to recognize the value in it for everyone and we need to dedicate ourselves — those who already see the high value in it — to making it happen.

I thank those who made my attendance at Velo-City Global possible.  Pete Wall, Chris Riley, Joel & Eileen Schaubert, Al Bastidas, Alonso Á. de Araya, and Lane Wimberley covered my conference registration, and my mother spotted me for the plane ticket.  Mike Librik of Easy Street Recumbents, and the 145 other members of the League of Bicycling Voters continue to make my work on behalf of Austin bicycling possible.  The support of these people and their work in itself help create the background of a bicycling Austin that 99% of Austin bicyclists can take for granted.

As Austinites and Americans, even if we don’t own or drive cars, we each give a large amount of our income to the oil, car, and, highway industries.  That money includes our support for those industries to promote oil, gas, and highway sprawl to lobby our neighbors and our government at every level.  We can’t expect a less car-dominated culture without spending our money and/or time supporting human-powered transportation, and as pioneers in seeing the better way of biking and walking, our city will miss the opportunity if we fail to act.

And despite the ubiquity and plurality of bicycle use in Copenhagen, the Danish Cycling Federation still finds works to be done to promote and defend bicycle access.  For example, one can imagine that an opera house would generate hundreds or thousands of trips, including bike trips, for any given performance, but a recently built opera house neglected to provide bicycle parking for either their customers or employees.  And even despite there being more bicycle trips than car trips, the automobile still dominates most of the city.