Cycling for Everyone: Lessons for Vancouver from the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany

John Pucher, professor of planning and public policy, Rutgers University


May 15, 2008

http://www.sfu.ca/city/city_pgm_video020.htm

Well as you can see from the title of my presentation I would like to present to you some ideas policies and programs that cities in Germany and the Netherlands and Denmark use to promote cycling to make cycling safe convenient attractive and possible for everyone and when I say everyone I mean everyone for

Women as well as men for the young or the old for the middle-aged for adolescents even for people to some extent with disabilities to the extent that it’s possible we need to also facilitate cycling for people with disabilities various income levels various degrees of skills so that is

Certainly the goal that is set by cities and also by the countries themselves in the Netherlands in Denmark and in Germany cycling is not seen there as being just for young men it is not seen as being something for people with a very high degree of physical ability it

Is not seen as being something for people who are extremely risky they love cycling on busy streets with lots of traffic it is seen as being something as a practical way to get around sure for recreation as well but for the most part for daily travel for going

Shopping for going to school for visiting friends for the whole range of daily activities so these Dutch Danish German cities they really set as a goal making cycling possible for everyone and I would argue as you might know TransLink is now coming up with a new bike plan for the metropolitan area here

At Vancouver and I would argue that one of the most appropriate goals in that plan would in fact be to make cycling possible for everyone convenient make people comfortable cycling whether you’re old or young whether you’re a woman or a man no matter what your social status might be so on the one

Hand I think that ought to be one goal making cycling possible for everyone and at the same time by the way by making I think possible for everyone you’re also going to increase the overall share of trips by bike I don’t know of a single country anywhere in the world

That has an extremely high level of cycling where cycling is not for everyone and so if you want to achieve the goal of a high overall mode share of bikes then you also have to achieve simultaneously the goal of making cycling possible for everyone so this is

Why I put this forth as the title of the presentation it’s also I suppose expresses one of my own value judgments I really am very very passionately dedicated to environmental sustainability and to social justice and I think as part of this aspect of social justice I think it’s really really

Important to make cycling possible for everyone why isn’t it going forward there we go we want to make cycling possible for everyone but another possible title for this presentation would be everyone for cycling and it’s important to get the support of everyone in society for cycling because you need that political

And public support to get the financing to get the space to get the time to get traffic priority for example at various intersections for cyclists to take away car lanes and turn them into bicycling paths to take away car parking and turn it into bike parking you really need a

Tremendous amount of public support for that to occur and that is one of the keys to the success of cycling policies and programs in Dutch German and Danish cities there are many many many strategies we need to all be thinking about and promoting and marketing to the

Public as a whole as to why everyone should be in favour of cycling and it’s really important for one thing cycling is one of a range of alternatives to the car that improves mobility options for everyone it means you’re less likely it’s just one more thing you can walk

You can cycle you can take public transportation it’s one of the three environmental moons of Transportation and it increases our ability to avoid card dependence it gives us we got one more alternative especially for medium distance trips say one kilometer two kilometers three four kilometers for many people that might

Seem a little bit too far to walk but it’s a perfect distance for cycling say between one three four kilometers and so by making cycling convenient and safe it really does and especially to the extent that you make it possible for all segments of society it really does give

Everyone increased mobility options and so I would argue that the public as a whole and politicians should support cycling because it really does enrich the mobility options for everybody second it’s certainly by making conditions safer for cyclists by removing cars from the street by discouraging people driving through the

Centres of cities and through residential neighborhoods it’s certainly going to make our neighborhoods safer and more livable as well Public Health one of Larry’s areas here clearly there’s no question both in Canada and in the United States we desperately need to integrate more physical activity into our daily lifestyles you cannot depend

On people going to the gym or using the exercise equipment they have in their basements on a daily basis just not going to happen you will always find an excuse not to go to the gym not to use the exercise equipment not to go to the

Track but if you on an everyday basis are cycling to get to work to go to shopping to visit friends or for whatever reason you are going to automatically get that physical activity and it’s going to give you improved mental health physical health it’s great

For you so in that respect as well it’s great for Public Health and that’s something that the public as a whole and politicians should be supportive and not only does it directly improve public health it then reduced s– health care costs so even as tax payers or as contributors to

To medical insurance plans you’re benefiting even if you are not cycling yourself but if you can increase the person Phipps bicycling you’re going to increase overall health levels and reduce healthcare expenditures obviously environmental advantages if you’re cycling you’re not really creating any air pollution or water pollution environmental impacts of any kind

Destruction of ecosystems almost nothing used in the way of non-renewable resources in making or using a bike reduce traffic congestion reduce parking deeds reduce energy use wow those are a lot of weapons in your arsenal to get that public and political support and you need to use every single one of them

We really do need more funding more space for our cycling facilities to really make them first-class a real network of cycling facilities but you need to use all of these arguments I really have convinced we haven’t done enough to get this message through to the public and to politicians to get

That truly widespread public and political support for cycling and then the last one remember Kyoto we seem to have forgotten it in the United States I think you’re much more on to it here in Canada but it’s clearly one thing that we need to work on and if for no other

Reason and there’s many many many reasons but it’s certainly one of you know eight ten whatever reasons to why the public as a whole should in fact be supporting cycling oops wrong direction now the good news is there’s lots of potential for increased cycling many many many trips here in Greater

Vancouver are short enough to cover by bike I mean each individual has different distances you’re willing or able to cycle but we’re talking about roughly 1/3 to 1/4 of all trips right here in Greater Vancouver are certainly short enough to cycle you have a third of all trips shorter than 3 kilometers a

Fourth of all trips shorter than 2 kilometers those are really easy distances to bike so the good news is there’s a huge potential for more cycling here in Greater Vancouver and the other good news is and I will show you this I’ve already claimed it several

Times but the other good news is almost air has the potential to psycho both the physical and I suppose even the mental potential to cycle it’s certainly possible almost every age and all again show you this later that it’s true it is physically possible at almost every page

Women can certainly cycle as well as men and if you don’t believe that I’ll show you some really great women cyclists I mean women can cycle every bit as well as men have not better cycling is possible for a wide range of skills you do not have to be Lance

Armstrong to get on a bike you really don’t maybe some people are gonna start gonna cycle very slowly for short distances that’s fine but there’s a wide range of skills that allow you to cycle in different conditions and it’s also certainly affordable by anyone I don’t know anyone who’s gone broke well I

Guess you could buy a really expensive bike and then have it stolen several times but for the most part you can get a bike for a very very low amount of money and it certainly doesn’t cost much to operate in to maintain so it’s certainly in that respect it’s very

Socially sustainable that is bicycling is something that is possible and affordable by a very wide range of the population and that’s what I would define as social sustainability so we already know it’s very environmentally sustainable but it’s also socially sustainable and it’s also economically sustainable these are the three

Dimensions of sustainability at Cana economically sustainable environmentally sustainable and then socially sustainable and at every single index cycling is just about the most sustainable of all your transportation modes but unfortunately we don’t do enough of it in North America we do even less in the United States than here in

Canada you’re at about 2% the United States is actually somewhat less than 1% but as you look at these different countries the main point I suppose I like to make with this slide is to show you just how much potential there is for increased cycling rather than looking at

It from a depressing point of view zoo Canada solo look at it you could go so much higher let’s look at a positive ‘we look at the the netherlands 27% trips by bike and if you look at just local trips it’s 35% in some cities it

Goes at 45% in denmark we have about 20% of all trips by bike look at Germany Belgium Finland roughly 10 to 12% of trips by bike these countries are not poor countries these are not developing countries they are not backward countries they are not technologically undeveloped countries Danes and Germans

And the Dutch are cycling because cycling there is fast convenient it is a practical and safe way to get around they can afford cars they are not cycling because they are poor and the reason that are cycling is because the policies and the programs that are in

Place in their cities make cycling a practical and feasible thing to do but again I would just like just look at the difference there it’s a difference of ten to one thirty to one in some cases much much much higher levels of cycling in these northern European countries in

Particular and so that might lead you to ask the question well what are those countries doing that makes so much more cycling possible and I’ll go through those policies now the other thing I wanted to note here is some of you might think as I really think that cycling to

Me there’s really only successful when it really does make it possible for all groups Society and so on when I see a lot of women’s cycling I’m thinking well that’s a good indicator and in fact in this slide this is my colleague Susan handy at the University of California

Davis took this shot last summer in Copenhagen and you can see there’s more women than men cycling there I mean they could be and they no one’s wearing a helmet by the way I’ll make a comment about that later but just lino one’s wearing a helmet I mean these are

There’s no special lycra they’re not riding fancy bikes those are perfectly normal people they could be your next-door neighbor your friend your your wife your daughter your mother grandma when I guess not your grandmother they don’t look like grandmothers to me but at any rate clearly you

In places such as Denmark Germany the Netherlands women cycle every bit as much as men and in fact in the Netherlands they cycle even more 55% of all bike trips in the Netherlands in fact or by women in Germany it’s 49% in Denmark it’s 45% but roughly just say

50/50 Rafi as many women as men cycle if you look at Canada it’s 30% the United States is even lower 25% and then really low in Australia 21% I guess in Australia cycling is more of a macho sort of a thing but at any rate again

Just to show you that those of you who think that cycling is up indefinitely more for men than for men just wrong it depends on the facilities you provide and if you provide safe and convenient cycling facilities you will get as many women women cycling as men in terms of

Age groups you can certainly start cycling at a very young age and continue to do it until you’re very old and I got to tell the story now that I’ll tell you show you the next graph the the man and his name is the core vendor Clow who’s

The bicycling coordinator of a Groningen in the Netherlands said I want you to tell everyone in your audience that my mother is 94 years old and she cycles every day to do her shopping and it’s about a kilometre back and forth to the shopping because she thinks it’s a waste

Of energy to get there any other way so those of you who think you can’t cycle when you’re over 90 you’re wrong and in fact this next graphic demonstrates that sort of with numbers you can see here if you look at Germany Denmark the Netherlands very high percentages of the

Germans the Danes and the the Dutch elderly actually cycle if you look in Germany what’s really astounding here is as Germans get older and older in fact they make a higher and higher percentage of their trips by bike look at Denmark it’s it falls somewhat from 17% down to

12% in the Netherlands it goes up again from 22% to 24% clearly the most cycling the highest percentages by bike is in the lowest age category but then after you get some sort of middle age and getting older and older I think it’s just and how much higher the percentage of

Bike trips gets as people gets get older perhaps the most astounding thing in this entire graphic and it’s one of my favorites so that’s why I’m spending so much time on it we look at the Dutch elderly 24% of all trips by the Dutch elderly are my bike I just consider that

One-fourth of all trips by the Dutch elderly 65 65 and older are my bike in Denmark 12% Germany 12% clearly it is not the case that getting old means you can’t bike it’s an important very important source of mobility of Independence of physical activity I think in every respect it’s really

Important to give people this mobility option as they get older and the most important demographic change in our societies in all of North America also in Europe by the way is the aging of our societies a higher and higher percentage of our populations are older than 65

Older than 75 open an 85 and we need to be thinking about what kind of mobility options we’re going to give those elderly people and I know when I get older I want to be able to walk and to still cycle and take public transportation and not be dependent on

The auto appeal which would be impossible anyway because I can’t drive one of the key approaches that these German Dutch and Danish cities take to making cycling possible for everyone is our making it safe it’s absolutely key if you do surveys of the general population and you ask them why don’t

You cycle the number one reason by far is the perception that cycling is unsafe this is particularly true among the elderly among the parents of children among women and this is what just surveys and what they most want when you ask them what would most make you cycle

The answer always about 80% of cases is give us separated facilities help us get away some degree of protection from the motor vehicle traffic give us good parking facilities connected through a public transportation give us good sort of interchanges with public transportation but above all give us safe places to cycle so anyway

Increasing the safety of cycling and increasing the perceived safety of sightings absolutely crucial in cycling policies now you can look at this either positively or negatively Traffic Safety cycling safety here in Canada is almost three times greater than it is in the United States this is showing the

Cycling fatality rates per 100 million kilometers cycled but it’s still about twice what you have in the Netherlands and Denmark’s so you could make cycling a lot safer so on the one hand you can sort of say oh well where are doing a lot better than the other state which is

True but more cycling and safer cycling and again I think the two things go hand in hand but you could do a lot better so I think could be at least twice as safe as it is now because you can see how much safer it is there in the

Netherlands and in Denmark now this is a rather controversial topic the next one is I know here in British Columbia there’s a helmet law and adults as well as children everyone is required to wear a helmet when cycling and I personally when I cycle in New Jersey or anywhere

In the I Sates I also wear a helmet but I can tell you the Dutch don’t wear helmets that even the children the Danes don’t wear helmets and a very very small percentage 5 or 10% even maybe not even that of Germans wear helmets so they have much higher degrees of safety in

Those countries without wearing helmets so at least in those countries the key to greater cycling safety does not appear to be the helmets but rather much much safer cycling facilities I must say it’s a little bit controversial here I know but the director of cycling for the

City of Amsterdam also for the city of Groningen and for the the nationwide Cycling Federation all said we’re so much against helmet use law because we feel they discourage cycling they’re not against helmet use but they are for whatever reason but you can agree with or disagree with they’re

Against helmet use law so whatever another interesting statistic here this was a city Munster Germany where I lived for two and a half years it’s the most cycling oriented city in all of Germany about a third of all trips by bike no one wears helmets but they have the most

Extensive and most separate cycling facilities of any German city in look at the results here one cycling injury per roughly 600,000 trips not a fatality and injury one injury for 600,000 bike trips given that statistic you can understand why everyone in Munster perceives cycling as being totally safe and

Perhaps because of that reason knowing where is a helmet but again totally aside from your views on helmets I just think it’s astounding how safe you can make cycling that really is the point I would like to make with this slide cycling can be extremely safe if you do

The right things moreover it turns out a colleague of mine Peter Jacobsen in California has done a number of people as well Terry Rutter at Oxford University have done studies and they’ve shown that as cycling levels increase slightly become safer and safer as cycling levels decrease cycling becomes

Less and less safe so that if we succeed here for example in metropolitan Vancouver to reach this goal of I think it’s 5% trips by bike currently we’re about 2% it’s almost inevitable that cycling will become safer there are two reasons for this I’m still oversimplifying here but one reason is

The more people who are cycling the higher the likelihood that a motorist will at some time or other also had been on a bike and be more sensitive to the needs of cyclists and drive with more consideration and care these are the cyclists the other reason is as more and

More people cycle you have more demand so supply of the necessary cycling facilities whether that be separate bypass by playing by parking and so forth but anyway this is a very very important concept I think because those of us are were advocating more cycling often get criticized by saying well

You’re on the one hand you’re showing us a safety problem here there’s a relatively high traffic fatality rate among cyclists and yet you’re advocating more cycling what are you really advocating but the point is you have time just as we if we succeeded in raising the cycling Moe chair we ram

Inevitably going to reduce the fatality rate and make cycling safer overall moreover there was a study done in Great Britain which showed that whatever the traffic dangers there’s a public health of cycling fatalities and injuries they are offset by a ratio of at least ten to

One by the health benefits of cycling so I’m not saying cycling is perfectly safe but even even given the less than perfect cycling facilities we have now and the behavior of motorists even given those negative situations that the health benefits the cardiovascular health benefits of cycling are so great

That they exceed by a ratio of ten to one the risks of cycling so again think about that now what did these European cities do tomorrow cycling and make it safer they completely reversed their public policies in the 1970s there had been a huge decline in cycling many of

You probably assume well cycling has been booming in Europe forever and forever and forever it’s just not true if you look at the 1950s 1960s huge declines in cycling seventy percent 80 percent in some countries even ninety percent declines in cycling why because of the increase in car ownership

Increasing car use expansion of roadways and really nothing being done to facilitate walking or cycling neglect of the public transit NOAA efforts to integrate these various green modes of transportation then what happened in the 1970s in every single one of these countries at the city level at the state level and at

The national level a complete turnaround of policies increasing year by year by year by year more and more Auto restraint policies restrictions of car parking traffic calming of residential neighborhoods car free zones more and more of them and bigger and bigger areas of the car free zones at the same time

So there’s our the stick policies the auto restraint policies on the other hand vastly improving public transportation systems bike waste systems pedestrian systems and in particular in terms of cycleways we have again many of you think well the Netherlands was always perfect for bicycling not true they had a triple in

A tripling in their bike way network between the 1970s and the 1990s they didn’t just they didn’t have the appropriate facilities back in the nineteen seventies they tripled the extent of their bike way network in Germany also they tripled the kilometers of their bicycle bike way network and in

Vastly improved it year by year even now they are not sitting on their laurels every single year in every single German city I know at every Dutch city every Danish city they’re constantly trying to figure out how can we make these facilities better and as a result of

Doing this by the way they dramatically increased levels of cycling these are various German cities and if you look at the wind I guess the next of the last column here you can see that these are large cities Munich is a probably almost two million people they more than

Doubled the mode share of cycling more than doubled in Nuremberg they double did it in Cologne and so forth so even in really large German cities neither community is probably just about the same sort of population size but Rapala tan area as Vancouver I mean imagine

You’re trying to achieve a goal of going from 2% to 5% and look what they did in Munich they went from 6% to 13% it’s a huge increase had not been and then probably a bigger increase in the total number of bump trips but even in the

Bike share it’s more than a doubling and the share of trips by bike so this is a really dramatic accomplishment and I want to sort of illustrate just how dramatic the shift in policy was this is Asha a city here’s balloon Rock in southwest Germany it’s pretty near basel

Switzerland actually but this is the view of the city in 1953 before the onslaught of automobiles and you can see lots of people cycling and notice that well right there because it’s key in the shop so this was the 1953 before all the cars came this is what it looked like to

1970 exactly the same intersection and that’s that same fountain ugly ugly ugly car oriented you see one cyclist and otherwise it’s sort of dominated by cars a very unpleasant urban environment 2006 exact same intersection that’s the fountain look at that no more cars they admitted into a car free zone you see

Lots and lots of sight bicycles parked there at the bike at the fountain and all along this pedestrian zone I might also know I know there’s some opposition to car free zones here in Vancouver there was a lot of opposition in almost every one of these cities initially as

Well all the merchants that know you’re gonna drive us out of business we’re gonna go bankrupt we’re gonna lose all our customers our customers will insist on getting to us door to door by car and instead what they found was they had booming business and the retailer’s

They were outside the car free zone demanded to be included in the car free zone as well so it just shows that there’s this sort of a false perception that car free zones are somehow going to be harmful to business in every single case I know about in these three

Countries these parkway zones are thriving they’re booming economically and more and more merchants want to be part of it another sort of dramatic example this is for the I book Germany again in the southwest part of Germany this is the scene you mean of all this

Is in the 1950s 1960s you can see was a car bridge basically to the right this is the scene today and you can see it’s Trump and turned into a by sleeping bridge now this didn’t take any money I mean if you look at those two I mean

There hasn’t really been anything done to the it’s just that the space has been taken away from the cars and given to the bicyclist why not do that here in Vancouver I mean why not honest everyone talks about it what’s so expensive to provide facilities for cyclists well

Just didn’t cost anything just take it away from the cars and give it to the cyclists I mean there’s a very simple solution to that another example here is it a case of the 1960s where you have eaten from my point of view a very ugly sort of a

Streetscape you have cars parked on the sidewalk you have a very unpleasant environment it’s been tricky every residential street in freiburg has been trafficked home in exactly this way so that becomes a vital street without any they have lots of bike lanes and bike paths as well but for all residential

Streets you have maximum speed limit of 30 kilometers an hour you have as you can see various kinds of infrastructure changes on this street which is not the case for all streets but it has made it a very very pleasant Street again this is not by chance this is not historical

This is a deliberate policy shift where this City said we’re four people were four cyclists where for pedestrians and we’re against cars sort of or at least we’re in favor of taming the car it’s not that we want to banish it completely from the face of the earth actually I

Would like to but I dare not admit this publicly but what you do need to do is tame the automobile control the automobile and say there are certain places situations at times when you just don’t want the car to be dominating your entire life your entire neighborhood and

This has now been turned to a very pleasant and safe residential neighborhood one of the reasons that the Danes the Germans and the Dutch cycle so much and also walk and take transit so much is because it costs a lot more to fill up with gasoline and it’s about twice as

Much as it costs here in Canada these prices have all increased as you know in the last year I actually wouldn’t know because I don’t have a car but in any rate I know they have increased but there you’re the Europeans Northern Europeans are paying roughly twice as much per litre gasoline about

$2 per litre and it’s about $1 per litre I guess here but again more and this is in US dollars by the way and we’re paying you and less in the United States now imagine though if you were paying say 2 $3 $4 a litre for gasoline I’ll

Bet you’d think twice about getting in that car I mean people for better or worse they’re selfish I mean every single one of us is self-centered to some extent we’re gonna do things that are in our own self-interest and let me tell you if you make the cost of parking your car

Buying your car running your car and so forth very expensive you’re certainly going to encourage more walking cycling and transit use as well so that certainly is another key and I think Americans as well as Canadians are terrified somehow politically of restricting car use of imposing higher

Taxes on car use I mean in every American state it’s like as you know two of the three major presidential candidates now want to eliminate the tax on gasoline altogether to get more votes so it’s a very difficult political thing to do but it’s certainly in in both the

UK and in Germany and some of these other countries as well they explicitly impose an annual increase in the gasoline tax they called it the environmental surcharge every single year so there was a regular increase in the tax on gasoline so that people could predict this they would do well in ten

Years gas leads gonna be more and more and more expensive and they could then learn how to ride a bike or walk more by better walking shoes and almost all the differences by the way in the price of gasoline is due to taxation it’s not because of differences in the base price

Of petroleum it’s because these countries have made the explicit policy decision of making gasoline more expensive and by doing that discouraging car use and encouraging walking cycling of transit and using the humongous revenues from that to help finance those facilities so sort of a doubly beneficial impact okay Wow we better get

Going here well one of the other things that countries do to encourage more cycling and making it safer well the obvious one go to each of these in more detail better cycling facilities more cycling facilities and better cycling facilities which I will go to jail but also that

Includes making all roads more bikable fixing up the potholes fixing up the drain grates wider curb lanes and so forth and so on traffic calming of residential neighborhoods I will show you some examples of this integration of cycling with public transport restrictions on car use I would like

Really to ban it completely but in any rate restrictions especially in central areas and in residential neighborhoods of car use traffic education is key traffic regulations and enforcement absolutely key mixed use zoning and improved urban design why is that important because if you have relatively compact development with mixed uses

You’re going to have shorter trip distances getting from home to work to school to shopping and so forth so it’s really really key to have effective land-use planning that ensures mixed-use development and compact development that I will not be illustrating but the other ones now I will illustrate ok better

Cycling facilities car free zones car free John of course has to be in favor of car free zones well this is the main street in Munster Germany sitting in about a quarter of a million people and you can see no cars but you have bicyclists you have pedestrians and in

The background you’ll see a bus as well so they really allow all three of the so-called green modes of transportation but they eliminate the car it’s simply not possible to drive a car on the Main Street this is an Amsterdam and here you have in the middle of the car free zone

You have a special two-way a bi-directional bicycling facility and you have pedestrians on both sides and as I noted yesterday that’s sign that coffee shop you do not go in there it is not Starbucks do not expect coffee in the coffee shop no no you get something else actually I

Must tell you had a colleague who went into one of those Amsterdam coffee shops and she ordered a glass of wine and the person you know who was at the counter said we don’t serve hard drugs here oh well that’s sort of an aside okay anyway this is another example of a

Car-free Zone in Freiburg oops again that they allow these three modes together they coexist in harmony public transportation if you have a tram line you have a cyclist you have the pedestrians it’s a very pleasant zone almost no injuries of any kind somehow they manage to get together along it’s

Not like we get along together either it’s not like with cars that are running over everyone another kind of a cycling facility which I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere here in North America and that is a so-called THAAD Oxford ass or a bicycling street these are in many many

German cities and also in Dutch cities in Munster alone I think 25 of these bicycling streets entire streets that are mainly devoted to cycling not my pass but entire streets as you can see here on the slide and this is generally a narrow street not built this way but

It was just always this way historically a narrow street and cyclists have priority over the entire width of the street cars are allowed on these streets at the mercy of cyclists they may not rush the cyclists they may not beat their horns at the cyclist and if you

Hit a cyclist on this street you’re in trouble so this is again this you can see the sign here thought-out Strasse that cars are allowed but they’re mainly meant for cyclists Berlin an example this is a city of about three and a half four million people the biggest city in

Germany in the capital of course they have about a thousand kilometres of cycling facilities they have quadrupled the extent of their cycling network over the past 20 years or meant very similar to what Germany as a whole has done but the interesting thing about Berlin that they have 4000 kilometres of

Traffic calm streets now when I say traffic calm this is a speed limit of 30 kilometers or less so something like 90% of all the residential neighborhoods in a big big city such as Berlin our traffic calm so you have a thousand kilometers of separate cycling facilities plus four

Thousand kilometers of very cyclone traffic calm streets you’ve got five thousand kilometers of very very good cycling routes this was my favorite bike path of all the bike paths that I’ve ridden on in Germany this was a circumferential Beltway in Germany what they had done they tore

Down the old town wall six kilometers in circumference and they built this instead of building a roadway which most Americans or any Canadians would also do they built a bike way and then on both sides of the bike way as you could see here there are separate pedestrian paths

And just to show you how thoughtful they are on the left-hand side is a hard walking surface and on the right-hand side is a soft walking surface just to give pedestrians the choice one or the other this is not recreational cycling I would say 95% of the trips on this facility

And I think it’s 70 or 80 thousand trips a day are to get to the University to get to school to go shopping to visit the theater or whatever it might be it’s not recreational it connects many many many different cycling paths and lanes from the outskirts of the city into many

Many paths and lanes going into the center of the city so it basically serves the same sort of function as a highway would of this sort of a Beltway but of course it’s in the form of a cycle a very very pleasant facility as you can see you have something like this

Is that I think this is the which is its isn’t this on the seawall so it’s somewhere every tier in Vancouver and so this is also a good example of a good facility in that it separates the pedestrians and the cyclists I mean you can’t always do this obviously but it

Avoids certain conflicts that may arise when you try to mix the pedestrians and the my clothes this is one of my favorite ones I couldn’t believe that they do this and this is an Odin to Denmark and they had this special vehicle with laser technology that actually detects in

Advance possible problems with the underlying surface of bikeways and bike lanes you can see here if you look very carefully if you look very carefully you can see in front of this the bicycle symbol on the lane and they actually have this go around regularly to detect in advance sort of proactively

Any possible problems with the bike way Network in addition to which they have a team of four cyclists who are paid to find obvious Detex defects in the cycling network so again I don’t know about Vancouver but we don’t have those sorts of things in Americans every thing

Another thing you can do to in terms of cycling facilities introduce contraflow lanes so where cars can only go in one direction introduced to allow bicyclists to go in both directions and when the bicyclist is going in the reverse direction to the motor vehicle traffic introduced the special sort of a

Contraflow lane these are examples in Toronto and Melbourne you have sort of adjustments like this to give more flexibility to cyclists in this case it’s in Burnaby and it allows the cyclists to go over through the arterial and get on to the other side where as cars cannot go through that passageway

This is an example this is in Munster again a city I loved as I lived up for two and a half years but the point is bicyclists are allowed to do almost anything and cars are a lot to do almost nothing I think that’s sort of a good

Balance there but this is an example the lower right here of a very very typical it’s called in german polish i’m bunch casa which is a false one-way street it means almost all of the one-way streets in these cities are two ways for cyclists and that’s exactly what the sign says

That cars cannot go in that particular direction bicyclists can go in either direction likewise there are many false dead ends for the cars whereas the cyclists can go through so basically giving as much route flexibility and directional flexibility as possible for the cyclists and restricting car use as

Much as possible this is another example of that kind of a thing cut through here four cyclists in Melbourne was there two years ago when you left some these sorts of cut roots here in Vancouver as well so you can certainly do it but do maybe a little

Bit more of it other kinds of cut throughs the one on the left I think is sort of interesting it’s a special kind of a shortcut for cyclists normally in Munster you have one directional bike paths on the sides of every single arterial almost without exception in

This case it turns out because of the particular routing of most cyclists they made it bi-directional on one side to avoid detours by cyclists which which raises an important point how is it that cities for example in Denmark or whether the Netherlands or Germany come up with

All these great ideas it’s because in this city the mayor who’s a woman is also a cyclist the majority of the town council is cyclists and they get to their town meetings by cycling all the transportation planners for the city are cyclists now folks you got to understand

If the mayor is a cyclist the town council gets to the meetings by cycling and all the town planners and transportation planners are cyclists they are going to be very sensitive to what works and what doesn’t work they’re going to have all sorts of natural ideas because every single day they’re using

These facilities if something doesn’t work they’re going to make it better that it’s going to correct it they’re going to experiment with things and in advance the state of the art that further and further this slide I wanted to show because my European colleague in

Sistah that I do it he said I want you to show your audience there in Vancouver that we have excellent cycling facilities not just in the center of the city but that is a matter of local ordinances they’re required in every single new suburban development so that

From the very GetGo from the very beginning of the development you have sidewalks you have bike ways bike paths and so forth and that’s really important so even in these suburbs as part of the local ordinance you’re required to have these facilities another important point that I think makes cycling facilities

Especially high quality and usable and convenient in all of these European cities and that is they form a copper pensive integrated complete cycling Network this is Freiburg Germany maybe 180,000 population and what’s shown here in red are only the completely separate facilities the paths and the completely separate lanes it’s not showing the

Traffic calm streets of which almost all streets are traffic calm you can see it’s a complete network there’s almost no gaps in the network you can get from almost any point in the city almost any other point in the city on a completely separate facility that’s your preference

You also have to provide crossovers of rivers so forth with very nice bicycling facilities I think you might consider putting in bridges like this I I sort of like these ped bike bridges are very very convenient and both in Germany and also here in Melbourne we’re always cycling you have some of

These going over arterioles here this one is a New Westminster and I I understand it helps you to get from one side of the arterial to the other and their case but I somehow don’t like the idea of facilitating sort of cars just staying at the same of it’s almost

Anymore for they can mean to the cars than it is for the convenience of the cyclists cyclist having to go up and around and down and around again better than nothing that’s for sure because you really want to be able to cross over the arterial why not make the cars go under

Hoops or over I get very dramatic sigh getting involved in this just an idea here’s the bike path it’s really important to let bicycles get across bridges such as here on the Lions Gate Bridge another idea here if you have a lot bodies of water and you want to

Facilitate cycling don’t have room on the edges of the water for example here in Brisbane and they did they simply that they got along the river was already very dense development and they simply didn’t have space to put in to tear something down and put in a new

Bike lane or a bike path what they did instead is they instituted this very very nice floating bike way traffic signals as I’ve said before encouraging cycling is not just a matter of funding it’s also a matter of giving priority and time to whom do you want to give

Priority why not give the advanced green light to the cyclists because that’s what’s done in all of these cities almost all the intersections the cyclist gets the advance green light and the motorist has to wait you can’t tell that just from looking at all of these lights but that

Is the point of all of these slides that in every case the cyclist is getting the advanced green light and is getting through the intersection before the car that is certainly something and exciting safer and more convenient it’s safer because the cyclist is in the line of sight of the motorist it’s faster

Because you’re getting through the signal you’re getting the amount screen lights are getting through the intersection faster now the Dutch have experimented with various different designs of bicycling facilities every facility knows no facilities perfect every facility has advantages and disadvantages one of the problems with

Bike ways that go along the side is that if you’re making a right-hand turn as a motorist you might not see the cyclist soon enough to avoid a collision so in this particular case the Dutch have experimented with this design they have the sort of the bike path veers a little

Bit to the right and then you see the motorist is forced to make a very very sharp right turn those are those yellow bollards there are forcing the motorist to make a very sharp right turn forcing the motors to slow down the cyclist is forced to slow down

So both the motorist and the cyclists slow down they have more time to see each other and to avoid each other the Dutch have found this to be very very effective at reducing the problem of collisions in this sort of an intersection the other thing you can do

Though the kind of an innovation as it were and the doctor full of innovations when it comes to cycling and that is you put the bike path around the back of the bus stop does you’ll have a conflict between bus passengers getting off a bus and the cyclists coming along the side

This is really a problem in many American cities I’m not sure if how much of a problem it is here and Canada it’s certainly a big problem in the US this is the one of my favorite intersections here in Munster and you can see there are two aspects to this particular

Design again one of the key things you want is i-4 it’s not just the bike path along the street but also what do you do at intersections really really key well what is done here in Munster Germany is first of all the cyclists get an advance stop line so you

Can see they they they can go much much closer to the beginning of the intersection than the cars you can’t see this but the sign just to the right you see they have a special Lane first of all they have a special bike access line to get to the front of the intersection

There’s a sign there with a little red dot and it says when there’s a red light cyclists should fill up the entire space in front of the cars then cyclists get an advance green light as you can see in the right-hand part of this picture they are then almost through the

Intersection before the cars can even start again it’s safer it’s more convenient it’s more pleasant it’s a much much much better situation as to how you’d handle intersections and these kinds of intersection modifications are done all the time in all of these cities you do have bike boxes here in Vancouver

As well but I don’t think I’ve seen any I think we’re told there’s one advanced green light for cyclists somewhere here in Greater Vancouver but not many of them I don’t think I would say to every intersection the other thing you can do here in terms of highlighting safety is

When a bike path crosses the intersection and has to be obviously then a bike lane over the intersection they highlight this with a very very bright red coloring of this Lane again as a signal to motorists watch out cyclists are crossing here do not hit them and they don’t they’re unlike unlike in

New Jersey where motorists aim for cyclists actually German motors are trained not to do that but even in North America in Portland here you have some very nice bicycling intersection facilities where you have cyclists triggering the green light for the to go through the intersection and in fact

They call this the I think the bike scrambling because they call it but you can go to the right to the left it’s an all red light for motorists and so basically the cyclists can go anywhere they want to go there’s been very very effective very popular you have

Something similar not the bike scramble but you have also these sensors in the pavement for cyclists here this one in particular is in Richmond these are two examples of cut shortcuts for cyclists these are in both in Odense Denmark instead of forcing the cyclists to come

All the way to the intersection you have these shortcuts so they before they even get to the intersection they can take a right and turn and they interviewed the cyclists and they loved it they say you know they think it’s safer it’s more convenient and so they’ve been putting

More and more and more of these sort of shortcuts at the intersections for the right-hand turns and then when you have a t-intersection they of course allow the cyclists to go through the red light but one of the neatest things is the Green Wave because this is a in Denmark there are several

Cities that have the so-called Green Wave they synchronize the lights such that at the average cycling speed that the cyclist will always get the green light but one of the neatest things is if you see those bollards to the right of that bike path what you’ll see is

That the green lights pulsate at exactly the speed the cyclist needs to keep up in order to get green at every intersection now you’ve got to admit that’s pretty neat or as my friend Peter Jacobsen in California is cool but I think that’s the me not only that you

Have it but then they actually facilitate you to keep that speed and then on the right they actually have a digital readout of exactly what your speed is and so forth and they have different speeds by the way for different kinds of routes so for long distance commuter routes they tend to be

A higher synchronized speed for shorter distance routes in the city they’re short at lower speeds this is the same sort of a thing but without the fancy technology this is the the Green Wave in Copenhagen very as you can see very intensively used traffic calming is also an extraordinarily important form of

Bicycling facility as it were I’ve already mentioned this before but of course you can you can do it either with just a sign that says okay maximum speed is such-and-such or you can try to force cars to slow down through various kinds of physical infrastructure measures speed humps and

Bumps and mid block closures and and I’m not advocating all these things because they’re not all bicycle friendly but many of them are bicycling friendly and you can certainly design traffic calm streets such as they are bicycling friendly just some examples a very very simple inexpensive forms of traffic

Calming this is probably the most typical kind of traffic calming in German cities I mean there’s very little done here look at that that’s not an expense of anything all they’ve done it with these two big bollards and other than that the sign on the bottom they

Painted on the roadway surface this sign actually indicates that the speed limit is seven kilometers an hour now truly this is the sign as you can see there’s someone you know there’s a kid playing with the ball there’s a pedestrian there’s a car that it’s implicit that

The cycling is possible but what it’s saying is everyone has the equal right to use this road this is not a road for cars we will tolerate cars but it’s also for children playing in the street for pedestrians for cyclists and folks what they found in German Dutch English and

Danish cities is that when you introduce traffic calming it reduces pedestrian and cycling fatalities by a range of 60 to 80 percent so even if your goal is not to increase cycling if you care about kids and they’re the ones by the way who are most injured on residential

Streets if you care about kids and you really want to focus on increasing the safety of children traffic calm your it’s a dramatic safety improvement but of course it also fertility cycling and every study I have seen shows that it increases both the amount of cycling and

The safety of cycling so this is again a very cheap very simple way of making your neighbourhoods more livable less noisy less polluted you know so much safer and bicycling friendly and by the way she’s not wearing a helmet either this is another example of traffic calming this one’s only thirty

Kilometres an hour so it’s not as extreme traffic calm but you can see it’s a very nice design to that street it certainly has narrowed the street they’ve taken away some entire lane actually away from the cars and they’ve forced them to slow down lots of cycling on this particular sort

Of a street this is another design of a traffic Kama street like this one again that sign is up there so it’s an in German it’s called an espionage which means literally a play street but it means a street that’s shared by all of these different users and you can see

That you don’t even have to have a sidewalk that it’s understood the motorist has to respect this is if the whole thing is a sidewalk or a mixed-use path makes use for all modes of transportation and they found this is really really important in every single case where they have introduced this

Sort of traffic calming it is so dramatically dramatically reduced fatalities of every time here you have an example of sort of pro bike traffic calming here in Vancouver so the bike basically can go I believe here in both directions and the car is only in one direction another example of traffic

Calming in Vancouver something you can also do this is something they’ve been doing in Portland the bicycling boulevards very very little in the way of infrastructure modification but they’ve been very successful actually Portland has our lives tripled its share of bike trips over the past ten years or

So and one of the techniques they’ve used is this notion of a bicycling Boulevard so rather than having they also have vastly expanded their separate cycling facilities but they’ve also had this whole system now of bicycling boulevards very very convenient and inexpensive way to promote cycling bike

And ride really important so you have provide bike parking spaces at train stations key bus stops like we’ll take their bikes on the trains on the buses and so forth this I’ve got a show this is the main bike station at the main train station and Minster 3,500

Bikes they have medium term parking long-term parking short-term parking bike repairs bike rentals and they also have a bike wash now folks that’s pretty neat I think that’s pretty and this is bike parking at one of the bus stops in Munster so I mean it’s not just at a main train

Station that’s actually I think very very attractive bike parking you do have to pay I’m not sure exactly what it cost it’s not much whatever it’s like a monthly fee sort of rendered by the month but at the same you have you’re given alternatives you don’t have to use

A pay parking you can use some of the regular parking to the upper left there it’s also fairly high quality parking sheltered you have parking here two bus stop and as in Burnaby and in this case it’s secured parking down here but it’s not quite as attractive I don’t think is

What I just showed you in Munster this is parking it Odense Denmark same thing very normal but one thing that’s sort of weird is this very very few bike racks on buses in these European cities for the most part people will ride their bikes to a major bus stop then get on

The bus get off the bus and then have another bike at the other end and ride from there same thing with train stations this is your these are your I think I believe all buses now with translate have the bike rack which is a good thing that’s for sure the other

Thing is that again this sort of my theme here is take take away from the car and give to the bike and in this case for every parking space for the car you can create 10 parking spaces for bikes so why not do it I mean you’re

Getting ten for the cost of one and the mayor of Munster who was a cyclist said I don’t like cars and I believe we should send the signal that we prefer cycling cycling is more environmentally friendly its energy efficient it’s better for our town it makes us more

Livable more sustainable and so she deliberately as a matter of policy was able to get lots of car parking space was taken out and substitute for them bike parking and you can do this this is done in San Francisco the same sort of ideal but more modern another idea is

Once you have these facilities in place whether they’re bike lanes by paths traffic palm streets now you have to give people the information okay where are those facilities and what’s the best way to use them in Berlin just as one example there are many German cities

That offer this but as one example in order to take into a now the different needs the different preferences of different kinds of cyclists they let you input your preferences so what is your desired speed of travel do you have to go very fast are you perfectly happy cycling very

Slowly do you want to cycle on the most direct arterial streets or you would prefer the quiet residential sort of secondary streets what kind of pavement does it have to be a paved facility or can be unpaid facility what kind of mix of traffic do you feel comfortable with you want on street

Lanes and you insist on off street paths you input each and every one of those and of course your origin your destination and this is what you come up with it shows you in red this is given your preferences which may be very different from someone else’s given your

Preferences this is your preferred route you then click on this is all in German sorry but you click on the icons and it tells you exactly where the bike parking is it tells you where all the transit connections are it tells you what the total time of your trip will be it tells

You what the average incline of your trip will be and so forth and it the number of traffic lights it tells you that as well I mean that’s pretty nice and if that’s not good enough and/or there’s a Denmark you can do it on your cell phones which is very handy

I think because I mean you know on the one hand you can sit at home and plan your whole trip out but isn’t it handier to have the cell phone there and while you’re under on the way you can sorry but well maybe I change on my I want to

Go here now Susan handy took these photos again last summer when she was in Copenhagen I think it’s really really important to have good signage I mean not just good maps and good internet planning but once you’re on the route to have really clear attractive consistent uniform signage for bike routes and

Bikeways and so forth and this is very clear it also shows then the connections to mass transit here on the bottom the nearest bus stop the nearest train station and so forth on the right I think is also a neat feature here you have a bike counter

So every time a bicyclist goes by that particular column you have it that goes up and it counts up 799-801 and so forth and it’s sort of neat I mean okay it’s not absolutely necessary to get people cycling but it’s certainly it’s sort of one of the neat promotional

Gimmicks or gadgets or whatever it also gives them information it helps them plan it counts the number of cyclists so they can determine okay you need to expand this facility so it’s it’s attractive it’s it’s sort of interesting it’s intriguing for the cyclists and it also as you get a higher and higher

Number you sort of see the success but it also does help in trance ikely planning the facilities giving people free air pumps here I think is a really convenient thing especially when you get a flat tire now cycling can also travel to make cycling possible for a wide range of

Social groups we want to make it possible for a lot of different trip purposes in the United States almost 80% of bike trips are recreational most of those what happens is Americans sort of put their bikes on the top of the car and they go out to the countryside and

Then they feel good about themselves you know they say oh my senior something good for the environment of course they’re driving out to the countryside to use the bikes and you know I understand recreational cycling could be a lot of fun but that’s not the kind of cycling this is going to reduce

Greenhouse gases if you really want to do something to meet the Kyoto Protocol and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help the environment and reduce congestion and parking needs and so forth you’re really going to have to deal with serving more utilitarian trips daily travel trips to work trips to

School trips to shopping and so forth and that’s what if you look at the Denmark or the Netherlands something like 70% of their trips in Denmark 90 percent of their trips are utilitarian trips and we didn’t believe that figure Linda Kristensen who’s the head of statistics for the Danish Ministry of

Transport we email back and forth and back and forth I just don’t believe it how can 90% of your bikers be utilitarian don’t you do any recreational and she said here in Denmark we take bicycling seriously we want to do things with it you know we just don’t go bicycling for recreation

We want to get places so whatever so I still can’t believe it but you said the overwhelming majority at any rate from bike trips in these European cities is in fact for practical utilitarian purposes and those are the kind of trips they’re going to help subsidize

For the car trips so from that point of view they’re really important this is an example this is called the Christie idea bike but I had to show this it’s sort of neat you see these all over Copenhagen a number of dangerous cities bicycling police on bikes I hope they bring these

Back here in Vancouver they still have them in Toronto and a number of lots and lots of cities in Europe have the police on bikes but I think it sends a signal it’s saying cycling is legitimate and we’re even going to put police on bikes hopefully to catch the motorist not

Other cyclists but Nate I think it’s important to send that signal deliver mail on bikes there’s lots of things you can do with by even UPS by bike that’s a lot better than these diesel fumes I get from the UPS trucks coming by you also know I’m almost finished now but you

Need to provide these facilities give people the information integrate cycling with public transportation but then also explicitly market cycling to different groups because different groups have different needs and you need to realize those different needs and focus on those different needs by a differentiated marketing campaign so to the youth yeah

This is an old ins of Denmark they have the cycling duckie now come on folks doesn’t that turn you on look at that I mean balloons and the cycling duckie five bennykenny gonna turn me I’m at any rate and so kids are very young they sort of already at that very very young

Age trying to attract his disciple when kids get a little bit older they get a little bit competitive they want on you know being contest and so then you have these sort of cycling contests with metals and certificates and so forth the other key thing here in terms of targeting into different groups

You’ve got to be sure that kids are able to cycle effectively and safely and one of the ways that German Danish and Dutch cities do this is they require that every kid almost in almost every school by the third or fourth grade has to complete a course in safe and effective

Cycling and what happens is there’s actually a real traffic policeman who takes the kids first to a test course which this is in Berlin here to the four left so then you don’t see anyone there because it’s all fenced off it’s really just a test course but first the traffic policeman takes

The kids on this course explains all the signs the ways to turn where to look and so forth then takes the kids out on to the real streets with live moving traffic and they do the same sorts of things once the kids have a little bit of experience then the kids get tested

They get a certificate they get a pennant they get a sticker for their bike it’s a big deal but what does it mean the Orani by the third or fourth grade every Danish German and Dutch kid whether a girl or a boy knows how to cycle safely and effectively so from the

Very youngest age these kids are able to get around by bike and they better be able to because almost all of them get to school by bicycling or by walking and that’s an important thing also getting kids sort of into the habit of cycling what about when we get older like oops

Get too excited about these things you can see here in Vancouver and not just in Vancouver Toronto many other cities here in Canada as well there are special cycling courses for adults who want to either relearn cycling or learn cycling for the first time don’t just write them

Off just because we’re older doesn’t mean you know you can throw us out take into account also these people who are getting older but who have these mobility needs I mean really as we’re getting older and older many people keep driving their cars when it gets more and

More and more dangerous and sorry you really have to ensure that as we get older we do have options whether it’s walking or cycling or taking public transportation but at least make this a possibility and offer older adults this possibility of taking up cycling at an

Older age and this is done here in Vancouver another important aspect of making cycling possible and safe for everyone is make sure motorists don’t want you to have and we’re almost at an end now but each of these photos is actually from the official German driver’s license test my German doctoral

Student and one of the co-authors actually of this PowerPoint downloaded this from the official website of the driving test so writ an example there are a set of multiple choice questions that associated with each and every one of these photos and they asked what are you supposed to do as a motorist these

Are the each of these photos in every case the right answer is yield to the cyclist yield to the pedestrian yield to the cyclist the lower-right might be a puzzle it was pretty obvious to me these three the lower right I was puzzle I said Ralph what’s that about

I don’t understand that we have a kid on a bike who’s over there on the sidewalk I don’t understand what’s the point of that what kind of a question is that and he said in Germany in Denmark also in Belgium by the way turns out by law

That it is your responsibility as a motorist to anticipate possibly dangerous situations where a child or an elderly cyclist could dart out into that roadway and you might hit them it is your fault as a motorist if you hit that child cyclist and it is your responsibility in advance proactively to

Anticipate the possibility that that kid might dart out into the roadway and it is your fault by law if you hit that kid and Ralph this German doctoral student of mine failed the German driving test twice because he did not actively demonstrate that he was taking into account the possibility of maybe

Endangering a child or elderly cyclist I I wish that motorist training were that strict in New Jersey where the motorists are truly homicidal but this is important it really is important it’s one thing to train cyclists to cycle safely but equally if not more important is training motorists to drive in a way

That does not endanger cyclists I mean in some cases motorists are driving because of they’re not aware of the needs of cyclists or they’re just they’re not on the radar screen or whatever it is in other cases as in New Jersey you have some truly nasty motor

Who are trying to drive the cyclists off the road they think it’s their roads whichever it is I think that motorists really need this sort of very strict motorist training before they get their license and by the way the license ought to be taken away if they’re ever caught

Endangering cyclists in this way and in terms of other uses of our ways of promoting cycling give free bikes to employees I mean you know we give free parking to employees and that costs 10 times more than giving someone a free bike why do we give employees free

Parking but we don’t give employees free bikes that’s what I’d like to know I mean it’s the perfect zero-emissions be a great for the environment and it’s much cheaper for the firm giving police free bikes with showers parking and so forth and so on but let Blatt learn less lights here is

Some of us have a little bit of a potbelly and in Denmark they actually had this campaign aimed at middle-aged men with pot bellies and they actually had this person going around in a sack and there’s also a television campaign by the way and billboards and so forth

It was get rid of the sack and so the sack would go up to every middle-aged man with a potbelly and point at the potbelly and say get on a bike I mean I couldn’t believe this but actually Truls anderson who is the head of cycling

There in denmark he said yes this was a very effective campaign men were so embarrassed that he told boy in new jersey that sack would not last long no no no no no you can also have special guide in bicycling tours for seniors again you people have different interests

Seniors maybe they’re not going to work every day so take into account their interest maybe they want to have social contact with other seniors have a little outing enjoy the outdoors why not mean again tailor the programs to the different needs of people okay finally we get to the conclusions here

First I am absolutely convinced that cycling is possible for a very wide range of the population why am I convinced of this because just look at Denmark the Netherlands and Germany you have all age groups cycling you have women cycling as well as men you have everyone cycling for a wide range of

Trip purposes so there’s absolutely no question that it is possible to design cycling policies and programs so that virtually everyone in your society will be able and want to cycle second point separate cycling facilities whether they be bike ways bypass special intersection modifications by parking and so forth

And so on all of those are absolutely essential I do not know of a single country where you have a high percentage of bike share of all trips and where you have a wide variety of wide spectrum of the population cycling where you don’t have extensive separate facilities

That’s only part of the solution but in every one of the countries and cities that I know of where you have a high bike mode share and a wide spectrum of the population cycling you also have an extensive integrated system of separate facilities and that I think is also key

But that’s not everything you really do as I mentioned on one of the earlier slides like seven categories of measures that you really need to undertake to complement those separate facilities whether that the traffic calming of residential neighborhoods the integration with public transportation traffic edge and training programs promotional

Programs and all those sorts of things mixed-use zoning for example is also key in terms of making trip distances short enough to cover by bike so there’s lots of soft measures that must complement those hard infrastructure measures and I think they’re equally important they’re really really key

Another point is the need for sticks as well as carrots one of the reasons that in both the United States and in Canada we have had such a problem increasing cycling in spite of vast expenditures in it well not relative to car not towards the highways even though we spent a lot

Of money trying to promote cycling it’s been very difficult actually to increase the mode share of cycling in the United States we’ve had something a 10 fold increase in expenditures at the state federal and local level on cycling facilities and yet we’ve had almost no increase in the share of bike mode trips

But the reason is we make parking free 95% of all parking spaces for cars in the eye states are free of charge we have very low price for gasoline we have so many implicit subsidies of auto use that it makes auto use almost irresistible it makes it very difficult

And expensive then to get people into other modes of transportation I think that one of the lessons of these European countries is one of the most effective ways to get people into their bikes is by increasing the cost of car use and restricting its use making it

Less convenient whether it’s a system of one-way streets or dead ends or turn restrictions or car free zones or traffic calm neighborhoods all those things in one way or another are restrictions on car use while at the same time making it more expensive so the combination of those stick

Approaches stick measures with the carrot measures of improved bicycling facilities and lots of promotional programs is what’s been so effective in these European cities in tremendously increasing than the percentage ships by bike and making bike shares such as 20% 30% 40% possible Copenhagen is continual increasing the percentage drips by bike

They’re not resting on their worlds they’re continually doing everything they can to restrict car use and at the same time encourage cycling finally last point I really do believe it’s important I think it’s my first point and it’s my last point if you want to get cycling programs and policies implemented you

Have to be politically savvy you have to understand you need widespread public and political support that means you to explain to the public at large and to politicians why should they support cycling and going back to I think was my second slide there are a lot of good reasons environmental reasons social

Reasons economic reasons I mean let me just give you one example of that and that is it’s so good most people as I mention at the beginning are sort of a little bit self-centered or selfish and so tell people the result of this study of the British Medical Association for

Every hour you spend cycling you add more than an hour to your expected healthy lifetime that’s your lifetime without a major disability and let me just repeat that for every hour you spend cycling you are adding more than an hour you’re expected healthy life time so if anyone ever

Tells you you’re wasting your time cycling you tell them it by cycling every time you’re cycling you’re adding to your expected healthy lifetime while they’re sitting in their car for every hour their City there was very subtracting from their healthy life time so you are in effect in the long run

Saving time plus one last issue do you know that the average Canadian works two months a year just to finance your cause two months you are enslaved to your car but not me I’m Park free and so that’s also time folks I have a colleague in Australia and he’s

Calculated that what he calls the effective speed of modes of transportation but he takes into account the amount of time you have to work to finance that mode of transportation and when you do that guess what he calculates that the bicycle is the fastest mode of transportation so even

And that’s not even considering the issue of the impact on your healthy lifetime but just taking you to account the cost of owning and operating a car when you take that into account the effective speed of cycling is faster than the effective speed of driving a

Car so on that note that’s a really good reason to convince people I mean use every conceivable argument you can and form coalition’s with environmental groups and public health groups you really need as much public and political support as possible to get these measures implemented ok let me stop

There and ask the questions on I’m here today to talk about trans links Regional Bicycle Plan which seeks to develop strategic directions and propose roles and opportunities for trans link and other public and private and nonprofit sector partners to guide investment in infrastructure and programs in Metro Vancouver for the next

20 years there we go transit is entering a new era with the new governance model and an expanded mandate with the enactment of the south coast transportation authority of BC Act cycling path networks were recognized as part of the regional transportation system that TransLink is responsible for TransLink is required to report to

Support the regional and provincial goals for emissions reductions and the regional growth strategy which emphasizes transit cycling and walking as priorities over the private automobile Trans League is also required to establish a system which moves people and goods in an efficient and effective manner thus supporting economic development objectives for the region

Translate thus has a clear mandate to continue to grow as a leader in regional bicycle planning under than under the new governance legislation TransLink is required to develop a 30 year strategic plan called Transport 2040 and a rolling 10-year implementation plan that will translate the goals and strategies into

Plant programs and projects the regional bicycle plan will be informed by Transport 2040 and will identify goals objectives policies and programs to feed into Trans links rolling 10-year plan so in this way they all should theoretically work together translating consulted with key stakeholders completed opinion polling and conducted focus groups to develop

The goals and strategies of transport 2040 it’s captured a broad range of ideas and policy direction to lead all of Trans links mandate as a multimodal agency the goals ensure that by 2040 GHG emissions from transportation are aggressively reduced but most trips are by transit walking and cycling the

Majority of jobs and housing are along the frequent transit network the transport is safe secure and accessible for all and that economic growth and efficient group Goods movement through effective management of transportation network development is established all of these efforts again are consistent with efforts to make Metro Vancouver a

More attractive place to bicycle the cycling mode fits well into the 2040 goals and strategies in a number of ways and these elements John went over so I won’t belabor them the last long-range cycling plan that TransLink produced was a five-year bicycle plan back in 2000 that plan had some ambitious goals at

That time bikes were not permitted on skytrain and only a small portion of buses had bike racks bikes now have access to the entire transit system and all buses have bike racks capital spending into sow 2000 was less than a million dollars this year translate will invest over 6 million dollars in its

Capital programs this year translate will also invest over 600 thousand and operating programs and that includes a comprehensive program of Education promotion research and planning efforts what was a one-person show led by Helen Cook has grown to include staff from throughout the agency who have an understanding of and an involvement in

Cycling on a daily basis the efforts that we that we put in and that we planned within the 2000 bicycle plan regional bicycle plan was meant to achieve 5% mode share by 2005 and of course we didn’t achieve that goal in fact it remains stagnant at 2% there

Was however an increase in cycling and I’ll explain that in a sec in 2004 Metro Vancouver residents made about 6 point 4 million trips per day or 3.2 trips per person out of these trips 2 percent were bicycling 11 percent were by transit 11 by walking and the remaining by motor

Vehicle between 1999 and 2004 the number of daily bicycle trips in the region increased by about 22 percent however bicycle mode share remained stagnant and there’s a number of factors that explain that there was significant population growth and much of that incurring in the outlying areas of the region there was

An increase in the average number of daily trips per person there was a decrease in bicycle mode share in the auto oriented parts of the region and there was increasing cycling mode share in the City of Vancouver where they have developed at least in the northern part

Of the city a fairly continuous bicycle network while 2% mode share may seem insignificant this number of trips made every day is equivalent to the population of North Vancouver City traveling about taking all of its trips by bicycle so the number of trips in the fact is quite substantial bicycle mode

Shares vary significantly throughout the the sub area of the sub areas of the region bicycle use is considerably higher in Vancouver and UBC with cycling all the share of trips there being at 3.6 percent in Vancouver and 5.7 percent in UBC the number and UBC has actually dropped because of the introduction of

You passed there but the number in Vancouver has risen significantly since 1994 and and that is due largely to the construction of a continuous cycling network North Vancouver meanest holidays are next with 1.4 to 1.5% of work trips made by bike and Richmond and Langley are the only other

Municipalities that have a mode show that’s higher than 1% the rest of the municipalities in Metro Vancouver have a mode share of 1% or less there is however a potential strong potential to explain expand the cycling market share within Metro Vancouver 60% of Metro residents about 1.3 five

Million people own or have ready access to a bicycle 30 percent of Metro Vancouver residents cycle at least and that actually should be went to what a year I’m sorry I was a little bit optimistic there half as John mentioned and this is certainly the case in Metro

Vancouver half of all of our trips are under five kilometers in distance and this is certainly a distance that one can easily cycle so it is it will be possible if we do the right things to increase cycling mode share within the region the regional bicycle plan will guide investment priorities and provide

Direction for the development of a coordinated regional effort to increase bicycle use this is a responsibility that TransLink shares with municipalities as well as other agencies in delivering specific programs and services and the plan will identify areas where there is synergy and cooperative partnerships are beneficial to achieving our goal the financial

Commitment to implement the bicycle plan comes through TransLink Stan year plan and the bicycle plan will influence resource allocation at a corporate level through this process oops we’re currently in the first phase of developing the regional bicycle plan the process of developing the plan began in January when translate Commission to

Background studies the first one was called setting the context and Richard the dual and urban systems are undertaking that work and that involved study of best practice and in from jurisdictions throughout the world that have managed to achieve Civic significant mode sheriff bikes and it also looked at policies and plans at the

Municipal level at trans links regional level and also at the provincial level it will now in the next month or two Richard will take the the information that we’ve gathered through our the first stage of our public consultation that got underway yesterday with the workshop involving stakeholders from a

Whole range of backgrounds from business environment health advocacy education and government sectors and this that information that we gathered will work its way into a gap analysis that looks at where we are right now where we’d like to be in 20 years and how to bridge that gap the discussion that we had

Yesterday mirrored I think very nicely the words of inspiration that we heard today from John Puka stakeholders would like to see an increase in cycling mode share and cyclists would like to soar these stakeholders would like to see infrastructure and supporting programs available which make cycling safe comfortable and attractive to everybody

In the fall will present the stakeholders the preliminary findings from the background studies a summary of what was heard through public consultation efforts and we will present a plan outline for comment this would be the most challenging step in the plan as we’ll have to face the reconciliation of

The resources that we have available with the expectations and hopes and demands that people would like to see in phase 3 which will begin over the winter and into the spring we’ll prepare and distribute a draft plan and collect stakeholder comments this will involve additional public consultation including market research and another workshop

Based on feedback from the general public and stakeholders and taking into consideration available resources we’ll finalize the plan and submit it then to translates board for approval in the fall of 2009 thanks very much for listening and look forward to your questions so are there any questions yet for John and I for

Garden if you want to drag him into the discussion of salt please there are some microphones there you can you could just shout but that will be recorded I guess if we speak into the mic so that would be helpful thank you John for a very inspiring presentation I just got back

From Copenhagen myself and finding it quite hard to adjust to Vancouver cycling again better of course you’re preaching a bit to the converted in this room right and our problem is public education and I’m sure someone has told you about the very sad and long story

About the broad bridge and the the issue there is I was really glad to hear you’re talking about sticks as well as carrots because the issue there it’s an unsafe bridge and the issue there is whether or not we should be taking ashphalt away from vehicles and a

Previous council yeah I’m sure you know some of this story but a previous council came up with a wonderful idea to have a trial for two lanes and taking away and the current council used that as a wedge issue to in my opinion to win the election and say if you vote for

This other council they will take ashphalt away from cars and there’ll be terrible gridlock and they were out there on the broad bridge saying this is what will happen so the within weeks of winning the election they canceled the trial and now the current mayor is saying it’s better

To spend 63 million building out that the the sidewalks rather than taking away asphalt which will course cost about two million for a lane reallocation so we’ve done all that you suggest we’ve met with politicians we’ve written letters to the editor we’ve heard except that all of that and my

Question to you is do you have any humorous and/or creative ways that we can educate the public that this is actually a good idea because it’s going to be an issue in the next election and most of the letters to the editor now except from the people we know are saying we

Can’t ever take away asphalt from cars so I want something creative and humorous from you I’m not sure how humorous it will be but I can tell you that in a number of cities in Europe they have actually not either not expanded roadways or actually contracted the roadway supply and the prediction

Everyone’s saying all can’t do that there’s gonna be gridlock instead what happened is the traffic went away there wasn’t the gridlock there is so much induced demand I mean there’s two directions this goes in if you expand roadway supply it increases the demand for car travel and so you

Never reduce congestion and maybe they I think one one way to do it would be to maybe find four or five key instances where in fact roadways had been taken away from the motor vehicles given to cyclists pedestrians transit and how in fact there was not gridlock in fact

Actually I think young Gail from Copenhagen was here I’m not sure exactly how long ago because it’s exactly what they did in coconut exactly I mean he has pictures that show it you know nothing tells a picture more convincingly than a picture of them nothing tells a story makes a point

I got nothing it’s go late in the evening folks nothing makes a point more clearly I think than a picture and he actually shows how they took C’s major arterials reduced by I believe was at least 50% the numb out of space for cars and devoted that space instead to

Transit and to cyclists and what he found is the number of people that was actually transport not vehicles but the number of people transported on that roadway dramatically increased the number of cars of course decreased and so in fact if you’re if your point is your if your objective is to move people

And it should be I mean I think ejectives should be moved cars it should be to move people and what he showed is by reallocating space in just this way you actually facilitate more passenger movement than you do in the current situation and so I mean if you

Could show this somehow with pictures and actually demonstrate this is before and after these were the benefits this was the you can show for air pollution levels before and after safety levels before and after I think if you can make it as concrete and understandable and as convincing as possible and use

Photographs that actually would make the point more clearly it’s tough it’s really I’m not going to say it’s easy I mean and it’s even more difficult by the way in the United States than it is here in Canada you’re more civilized than we are I must tell you and but it’s the

Problem is it’s getting started how do you get that inertia to get you going in the first place but the hopeful thing is and you would just came back from Copenhagen where they did this and Yann Gale gives this talk all the time and shows pictures about how things were and

How they are now it took a period of three decades 30 years for them to transform their overall transportation policy into one that was much more cycling friendly pedestrian friendly and transit friendly they totally revolutionized their travel behavior but it wasn’t overnight and so again I don’t think that Google right should be

Frustrated that things aren’t happening I mean you had this nice goal of going from 2% to 5% but realized you know that wasn’t only six years I guess it was for seven years I mean Copenhagen took 30 years to really have the success so I think there’s a certain amount of patience but

I’ll tell you it takes persistence I mean it’s it’s don’t give up keep writing those letters making those phone calls button holding those politicians I mean it has to be a concerted ongoing effort and and the other issue is as I said before you’ve got to form

Coalition’s I mean it can’t just be cyclists trying to remote cycling you have to have form coalition’s with public health groups with environment lists with Oh everyone who could possibly be on your side and you need that political power to get things done and then threaten the fraud of office

Anyone who doesn’t do it please nice hey John yeah um I guess my question is kind of related to that in terms of the history of deals deliberate deliberate policy shifts that you mentioned in Germany and Holland salon I know well so yeah it was done it was not edible and

It was and it’s in the 70s I was just wondering about like I guess my question is if you know anything about the any studies or any the social history behind like what what drove the like you mentioned that the the the the mayor and the council councilors in Munster

Germany were cyclists but was that actually like a major platform and what was that wizard was there a coalition like you know the the social history behind that wizard is citizens coalition that made that like an explicit you know um there was a movement behind that or

There was some kind of like liveable Cities movement in because I know in Amsterdam there’s that like the Provos movement which was kind of a situation it’s inspired political movement that gave away free bikes and that kind of that failed that that initial program failed but it kind of got the ball

Rolling like this idea of you know bikes are related to a more humane livable city so I’m just wondering if you know anyone doing that kind of research on that kind of stuff on the social history behind these policy shifts well unfortunately I’m not a political scientist but it has been studied first

Of all there is the green political party which actually did play a pretty important role for example the environmental tax that was imposed on motor fuels in Germany regularly increasing the tax on gasoline fuels that was really implemented by this coalition of the greens and the Social

Democrats in Germany so I mean there was actually a party it was especially in favor of environmentally-friendly modes such as cycling and in fact in Munster the mayor was a member of the Green Party and the ruling coalition the majority of the councillors were also green so the whole

Green Party and that moving and this is true also I mean if you look at Denmark look at the Netherlands the Green Party played politically a very important role but it wasn’t just it really it was much more widespread than than just having one political party supporting this

There was fairly widespread support on the part of most of the public because first of all you got to understand in these European cities resources are scarce er I think one of the problems we have in North America is for many many decades we’ve at least imagined that we

Have unlimited resources whether it’s land or water or air or whatever it is and in Europe I mean for centuries and centuries you’ve had very scarce land you have problems with energy supplies and so forth and I think that there’s maybe a more of an underlying mentality

Of the need to conserve resources again whether that’s water or energy or land in clearly cycling walking in transit or in those respects much more energy concert than sorry resource conserving than the automobile in addition to which you have at least the older parts of cities were already more compact and so

The car just didn’t fit a gate even more of a problem than it creates maybe in Canadian or American cities where they were built more so around the automobile with all sorts of problems as well but cars in dense cities are really a disaster and I think maybe these sorts

The many different kinds of problems that cars caused were more obvious more visible perhaps in European cities when they came on the scene it was very clear that cars especially created these severe problems and European sees on the one hand I think there was more consciousness of this on the part of the

Public but there was also a lot of them public coalition’s that were forming environmentalists and the governments as a whole said you know we’re importing virtually all of our energy supply and this was in the in the beginning of the 1970s you had both the beginning of the environmental movement you have the

Energy crisis so all these things came together and now I don’t have really an easy answer to your question is a very complicated issues too politically how all these forces came together yes Gordon let me just add to that it’s relevant to a city program exercise that

We’ve really tried to conduct in the last half-year many of you have attended the Paradise makers and you’ll know we’re looking at that period in the early 70s when Vancouver did have that experience of the coalition emerging responding to the conditions at the time we’re really trying to document that so

We’re doing the interviews we’re going to podcast them we’re going to accompany them by many of the policy documents that were created at that time but I would note yes it was a coalition it was a time of significant social change and those policies resulted in well I can

Think of at least three things no freeways and all councils I think is it consistent on that traffic-calming we were the first to do it in North America in the West End creation of Granville mall which is definitely taking asphalt away from the car and an emphasis on

Transit didn’t go far enough that the city was limited so we have had that experience it’s important history for Vancouver aids to understand if we’re going to try and revisit that kind of occasion again city program will be trying to document more and more of that on our website

So we’ve got about five minutes left so we’ll have to keep both the questions and the answers short question I was quite impressed with the creativity that went into the development of the European facilities I’m particularly interested in in the next step what happens when your two standard

Deviations from the mean I quite agree with your second for everyone my tests up a bike facility is will it handle bike trailers will it handle tandems without having to get off and and walk around the bollard I notice all your photos of the European facilities were

In bright sunlight on a nice warm sunny days I want to know what happens in the winter one of my big complaints about Vancouver is when I come riding my bike at downtown in the dead of winter I’m slipping and sliding through a foot of snow do they plow the streets in Europe

Um I wish I hadn’t taken out about the 50 slides I took out to make this halfway and presentable I actually had slides they have special snow removal plows for bike paths in the German and the Danish cities and it’s a wonderful and not only that they remove the snow

From the bike paths before they remove the snow on the streets in Copenhagen about 70 percent of cyclists continue riding through the winters that’s the stop the other issue is and this is hopeful again for Vancouver this is not Southern California and it does indeed

Rain here as we saw on Tuesday but guess what you know the Netherlands and the Denmark and also Belgium have an extremely similar climate means to say it’s not as if they get downpours with thunderstorms they get exactly the sort of rain that you had on Tuesday and just about as

Much of it I mean spread out over the that the only difference is you get yours during a long winter they get theirs pretty much spread out over the whole year so that’s the one difference in the climate but they have a relatively mild climate I mean depending

They do get some of the winter days but not not as extreme as a Scandinavian but at any rate that the Dutch climate the northern German climate is by no means ideal and they still cycle when it rains they really do okay so we’re not going to take any more questions of beyond

Those that are in line right now sorry about that we’re we’re already at nine so we’ll just run through the last folks that are here thank you I’ll try to keep this short but you mentioned a little bit in a couple questions ago I’m curious about about

Sprawl and how sprawl fits into your conceptions of bicycling or cycling specifically because you mentioned salience in in a dense city environment that’s where people notice where the problems are at so so how does suburban sprawl and sprawl in general fit into the mine frame it’s a very very important

Question and as I sort of alluded to before land isn’t very scarce supply in Germany the Netherlands Denmark and so forth they have much much stricter land use zoning controls and development controls and we have certainly in the ice States and stricter than you have in

Canada as well so in just as an example the way they prevent sprawl is it is assumed you do not have the right to develop land unless you have get the explicit permission to get an exception to develop that land that is you can only develop land that is immediately

Adjacent to already developed land so leapfrog development is impossible in Germany unless you get a huge exception and second and that in general they will try to increase the density of development and any new development that occurs must then be served by public transportation and must have cycling and

Pedestrian facilities so German Danish and Dutch cities are also experiencing suburbanization but the suburbanization that you get is much more compact it tends to be more focused around transit facilities and the development around those transit facilities is then very walkable and very psychical but it’s by a delivered public policy of forcing

Development to be compact forcing it to be adjacent to existing development these questions are free Gavin the you said that the budgets trans links bicycling budget has gone from 1 million to 6 million in recent years is 6 million for the current year yes what are the projections for the next 5

Years for the next 5 years it remains steady at 6 million dollars a year there is a process that we’re going through right now in developing that 2040 plan and the 10-year plan and I think that over the next couple of years we could expect that there will be a significant

Amount of discussion in the region around funding of transportation because the plans that the provincial government has outlined for transit spending over the next 12 years imply a fairly substantial increase in the amount of money that would be required to finance that plan thank you and what is the

Status of the study for a shared bike program for Vancouver well the the research has been completed and it does show that there is feasibility for implementing a public bike share system within the metropolitan core of Greater Vancouver it’s it’s the challenge is that the executive is facing that our

Senior management is facing is that they they want to understand really more clearly what are the risks that we face in trying to implement such a system as this and they also want to get a clearer understanding of how this relates to our mandate there’s also many other demands

That are preying upon their time at the moment so it’s very difficult for us to to put those arguments in front of them you know in a coherent manner because it requires time to explain that in fact this this really is a form of public transport that functions that can

Function extremely well in a dense metropolitan core where there are many trips short trips occurring in Paris the cycling mode share in in Paris before this this was undertaken was 1.5 percent the each one of the bikes is being used maybe five to 20 times a day and those

Those trips that that they’re logging have actually increased the the cycling mode share in Paris to about 5% so this has huge leveraging potential this is a form of you know technology or what have you a system that that could really make a huge difference here in a very cost-effective

Manner but I do think that it’s it’s it’s not something that you’ll see established within the next year it’ll take time to to really gain the I think that you’ll need to see funding from the municipal level from the regional level from the provincial level in order to

Make it happen but there’s some very strong arguments behind it and I think that it is possible that we’ll see something within the next couple of years here in the Lower Mainland thank you when will the study be publicly available and when will we have the

Opportunity to comment on it and to the TransLink board we are hoping to bring a report forward to the executive within the next month and once they’ve heard that then I assume that the report could be made public my contact information is there you’re welcome to email me and we

Will provide you regular updates as we learn more ourselves about what the expectations are of senior management thank you hi my name is Bonnie Fenton and I work with the Vancouver area cycling coalition and you talked about encouraging more people to ride bikes and the one thing well I should confess

Up front I don’t really have a question what I’ve got is a promotion but I think it’s I was trying to twist it into a question and I couldn’t but what one of the things that happens particularly here is people so often say I’d like to

Ride a bike but I’m scared or I don’t know when we talk about all the rules that people don’t understand about riding a bike because we don’t learn when were 5 years old like they do and the countries that you talked about so what we do at the Vancouver area cycling

Coalition is we offer a one-day cycling skills program that gives people the skills and confidence they need to ride a bike safely for transportation the results have been fabulous so if anybody ever tells you I’d love to ride a bike but I can’t but I won’t but I’m scared

But but but let them know that something does exist and I have information about it if anybody would like to see it Thanks I just like to say TransLink does sponsored that program and having taken the course myself I was really surprised because I’ve been commuting for years

And I found it was extremely useful both in terms of improving my my skills I do have one question after all oh you do how many people in the room have taken the course already whoa not at all how many of you liked it