Critical Design
David Hembrow’s talking about Critical Mass today - a subject that’s been picked up by Andy Cline over at Carbon Trace.
Neither of these two are big fans of Critical Mass, and I’ve got to agree. I’ve never seen a critical mass demo here, but what I have seen online doesn’t fill me with a sense of “Yeah, this is the way to change the world!”. It’s too confrontational, too much “You’re either with us or against us”. And the lesson I’ve taken from the last 7 years is that that sort of absolutism just creates more enemies than it eradicates.
David makes the point that it’s infrastructure that makes the biggest difference to the uptake of cycling as a serious mode of transport - not the near-mob mentality of Critical Mass.
As I’ve already mentioned, I went to a cycling / transport conference in That London last week. One of the speakers was Patrick Joyce from Cambridgeshire County Council. He’s the County’s Cycling Officer, and responsible for much of the infrastructure in and around Cambridge - one of the most pro-cycling places in the UK. Algernond lives there, and whenever we visit, I’m always astonished at the number of bikes. Patrick’s message was clear for anyone who wants to increase cycling:
- Cut vehicle speed & the number of vehicles allowed to enter an area
- Skew infrastructure design towards cyclists
- Make it REALLY hard to drive. Really hard.
On this last point, he spoke about how they’ve progressively cut the routes across Cambridge that cars can take. Cyclists can still use these roads (which are closed with bollards, and hence “cycle permeable”), while cars have to take the long way round.
To demonstrate the fact, he showed this short film from Houten in the Netherlands. It’s a town that’s been designed for bikes and people. If you live there, you’re still welcome to have a car, but using it within the town boundaries is frankly a pain in the butt. To make a trip of a few hundred yards, you’re forced out of town and onto it’s ring road to go right around the perimeter. If you want to ride or walk, you can just take the direct route:
It looks to me like just the kind of bold design that requires real political leadership to turn into reality. It’s also probably one sure way to create a genuine critical mass of cyclists.
We used to live in Cambridge too. I’ve met Patrick Joyce, who is a great guy, sadly working with too small a budget. That’s all too common in the UK.
With some colleagues from the City Council he came on the 2006 Study Tour that we organised and we took him to Houten. It is a remarkable place, but not so unusual as you might expect as the lessons learnt there have been applied widely in this country.
If you’re impressed with the number of bicycles there, then you really ought to come over here and take a look. While Cambridge has high cycle usage for the English speaking world, it’s actually very low compared with anywhere in the Netherlands.
Cambridge claims around a quarter of commuting journeys by bike within the city. Commuters generally use bikes more than other people (cycle commuters in the UK tend to be 20s and 30s, mostly male, the demographic most likely to take on traffic on a bike). On the other hand, another place we visited on the 2006 Study Tour was Den Haag, where we were told that the cycling rate was “Very Low” at just 30% of all journeys. This is measured not just in the city centre but in the area within 7.5 km surrounding it. That really is low for the Netherlands, and a great deal of money is being spent to increase it.
You can find a blog post including the same video (that’s where Patrick found it) and a discussion of cycling rates in Houten here:
http://hembrow.blogspot.com/2008/09/eco-town.html
http://hembrow.blogspot.com/2008/10/influence-of-spatial-planning-on.html
[...] author of Do the Right Thing, picks up on the “critical” meme to discuss how to promote a vibrant bicycle culture. He focuses on critical design and the [...]
I was born in Houten, figure that. I saw the transformation happening before my very own eyes. They started reconfiguring this town when it needed a great deal of expansion, back in the late 70’s (hardly the time of the ‘Green Movement’, I’d say). In the media it was a big deal, and I remember bumping into camera crews (from as far away as Japan) who were filming in the middle of the bike lane :).
It’s obvious this is a very family friendly town and I’m glad it has stuck to its own (daring) bicycle/urban plan for so many decades. Now it’s certainly paying off.