World | Other World Stories
The beginning of a global cycling boom
Tachia Taiwanese Antony Lo is one happy biker. He is 60 but looks younger, with a body buffed by commuting 200 kilometres a week on his bike.
- By Blaine Harden, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post
- Published: 23:12 September 5, 2008
- Image Credit: Shannon Smiley/Washington Post
- Michael Abraham, a 35-year-old Berlin engineer who commutes by bicycle, can count on taking 35 minutes to travel 12 kilometres across the city. As petrol prices rise around the world, bicycles are increasingly seen as a plausible transportation alternative.
Tachia: Taiwanese Antony Lo is one happy biker. He is 60 but looks younger, with a body buffed by commuting 200 kilometres a week on his bike. He is also president of Taiwan-based Giant, the world's largest bicycle company, where sales are soaring, helped along by global anxiety over oil prices. With undisguised glee, Lo says: "High-priced gasoline is here to stay. I tell my people we are just at the beginning of a very big cycling boom."
Boom it is. The number of cyclists has doubled in a decade in cities as disparate as Berlin and Bogota. Global bicycle production has increased for six consecutive years, according to a report by the Earth Policy Institute. Sales at Giant have doubled since 2002 and continue to accelerate, up 24 per cent in the first half of this year.
Yet when it comes to using a bike for everyday transportation, the boom appears to have bypassed many countries. While Northern Europe and Japan have figured out how to make bicycle commuting a safe, cheap alternative to driving, the United States, Canada, Australia and Britain have not.
China, India buck trend
And the world's two most populous nations, China and India, are discarding bicycles in favour of cars. A rising middle class in both countries views cycling as an unhappy reminder of the recent past, when nearly everyone was poor.
Still, among the world's most developed countries, a reliable recipe has emerged for making cycling a mainstream means of getting to work.
Commuters in Northern Europe have been lured out of their cars by bike lanes, secure bike parking and easy access to mass transport.
At the same time, steep automobile taxes, congestion-zone fees and go-slow rules have made inner-city driving a costly pain in the neck.
In the Netherlands, where such carrot-and-stick policies have been in place for decades, 27 per cent of all trips are by bike.
"It is very clear how to do this," said John Pucher, a professor of urban planning at Rutgers University and lead author of a global study of strategies that promote cycling. "It is not brain surgery."
In the United States, with the exception of a handful of cities, these strategies have been ignored. Car-centric transport policies and suburban sprawl continue to make bicycle commuting rare, arduous and relatively dangerous. Although millions of Americans use bikes for recreational purposes, they ride them for just 0.4 per cent of their trips to work, according to the US Census.
Germans are ten times more likely than Americans to ride a bike and three times less likely to get hurt while doing so. On any given workday, more commuters park their bikes at train and subway stations in Tokyo (704,000) than cycle to work in the entire United States (535,000), according to the Tokyo government and the US Census.
In recent months, bike shops across much of the United States have been flooded with new customers fed up with high gasoline prices, said An Le, the Los Angeles-based global marketing director of Giant.
Yet without major changes in US transportation policy and infrastructure, an earnest desire to save money on petrol is not enough to turn American bike owners into everyday cyclists who ride to work, according to urban planners, transport experts and bicycle company executives.
"In the United States, we simply have not figured out how to fit the pieces together for a coordinated package that puts people on bikes," Pucher said.
When cities do fit the pieces together, they often see an almost instantaneous surge in cycling.
In Britain, a country whose nationwide transportation system is nearly as inhospitable to cycling as that of the United States, London has emerged as 'Exhibit A' for the quick infrastructure fix that gets commuters out of cars.
In 2003, the city imposed a steep "congestion charge" of about $16 (Dh58.72) for cars driving into the city centre. Within a year, inner-city cycling had increased by about 25 per cent. In the past eight years, there has been a ten-fold increase in city spending on bike lanes, bike parking and education programmes.
The effort has nearly doubled cycling throughout London.
Cycling is 'cool'
There also seems to have been a fundamental change in the way Londoners think about cycling. It's become cool. Model Elle McPherson, Mick Jagger and Madonna have been spotted on bikes.
Angela Simoes, 55, sold her car seven months ago. The mother of two rarely uses the subway, but when she does, she locks her bicycle to one of the many bike rails provided outside the station. She also has a folding bike, which she carries on like an oversized handbag.
As much as she can, she rides in London's new bike lanes and uses bus lanes that have been opened to cyclists. But Britain still has a long way to go before it connects the cycling dots.
There is "no one long path we can call our own" in London, and roads outside the city are dangerous, she said. "A cyclist has to keep her eyes peeled."
Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands have been connecting the dots for three decades. They started in the mid-1970s, in the wake of the world's first oil shock and after 25 years of American-style, car-centric traffic management that had coincided with a sharp decline in cycling.
There is now an integrated system of safe bicycling routes in most cities in all three countries. It allows cyclists to go almost everywhere on paths that are separated from automobiles and in "traffic-calmed" neighbourhoods.
Besides pampering cyclists, these countries punished drivers with fees and restrictions intended to make commuting by car expensive, slow and frustrating.
Japan's approach
While the northern European model for promoting cycling certainly works, it is costly and requires lots of government intervention. There are other ways to get people on bikes. Japan does not pamper cyclists, but it does provide easy access to mass transit.
In greater Tokyo, where 35 million people live in the world's most populous metro area, there are almost no bike lanes. Guided by vague laws about what cyclists can and cannot do, police tend to ignore them — except for confiscating illegally parked bikes.
Traffic chases most Tokyo cyclists onto sidewalks, where they periodically bump into pedestrians. Mothers are forbidden by law to carry more than one child on a bicycle, but tens of thousands do it.
"The manners of Tokyo cyclists are very poor and sometimes suicidal," said Nobuyuki Tsuchiya, director general of public works in Edogawa, a Tokyo ward with 640,000 people, most of whom ride bikes. As for government transport officials in Japan, Tsuchiya said it is difficult to find one who does not show some "negative thinking about bicycles. We are far behind our counterparts in Europe."
Still, a bicycle is an essential component of life in Tokyo. Its chaotic ubiquity is a result of several factors including population density and the high cost of driving.
Can cycling provide a practical alternative for transport considering the rising oil prices? How can more people be encouraged to take up cycling? What solution can be reached for countries with warmer climates?
More from Other World Stories
More from World
News Editor's choice
-
6,000 cups and counting: Addicted to that tea
This cafeteria in Al Mamzar attracts thousands of customers daily, including the rich and not so rich
-
Swimming pool horror: Twins hospitalised
Twins rushed to hospital after collapsing from chlorine inhalation at swimming pool in their villa
-
Play your cards right with credit card interest
UAE Central Bank plans to cap interest rates, but are you paying thirty-five per cent now?
