For all the techno talk about magnetic levitation trains or personal rocket packs, the urban transport system of the future turns out to be bicycles. Sprockets and chains, seats and handlebars, this 19th century technology may be the best weapon we have for the long campaign to make livable cities in the 21st century. Bicycles take a fraction of the space and materials of cars or buses, are powered by the excesses of our calorie-rich diets, and have the huge advantage for those who ride them of extending both quality and length of life.
If the arguments for increasing urban bicycle use are this powerful, why are so many cities having such a hard time setting aside guaranteed bike routes and lanes - making them the transport mode of choice, for work and leisure?
Filled with Mao-era images of clouds of cyclists on every street, on my first visit to Beijing in 2004 I was astonished to learn that bicycles had been recently banned from many of the Chinese capital's most important streets. Rapidly-growing rates of car ownership had pushed the gas-guzzlers onto every broad avenue, to crawl along at a grid-locked snail's pace, with bicyclists pushed to side streets, or worse, onto smoke-belching buses. As part of the green-washed run-up to this summer's Olympics, Beijing authorities are belatedly getting more bicycle-friendly, but the damage was done.
Vancouver's own transportation planners have developed a system of bikeways that is at best schematic, with riders nearly always having to share carriageways with cars.
Our city was an early adopter of hive-mind pro-bicycle events like "Critical Mass" and all-nude group rides, but less successful in the less-flashy pragmatics of putting a bicycle lane into every neighbourhood, and showers and bike storage rooms into every workplace.
For example, an ill-managed and ill-promoted test for dedicating lanes of the Burrard Bridge to bicycles lasted a matter of mere hours, so intense was the push-back from Westside motorists.
We lack the vision to build an elegant new bridge dedicated to cyclists across False Creek, and heritage advocates are objecting to any widening of the Moderne style bridge's sidewalks.
The net result is that, years later, bicyclists still play a dangerous game of tag with pedestrians and drivers there.
In a series of Vancouver-area public presentations last week, veteran Copenhagen urbanist Jan Gehl had some straight advice about how to increase the proportions of our street space and transportation budgets to bicycling.
Unlike the Burrard Bridge test, "You have do things gradually, so that motorists don't realize what has been taken away from them," said Mr. Gehl to the delight of the 500 citizens who gathered for his talk in Richmond's Lulu Island Lecture Series.
Mr. Gehl showed how Copenhagen - thanks to far-sighted architects, planners and politicians - designs and manages its bike lanes.
Unlike such Vancouver bikeways as Ontario Street or 37th Avenue, most bike lanes in the Danish capital are sheltered from active car traffic by setting the route for bikes inside the line of parked cars, next to the sidewalk. By taking away car-space, mini-plazas are created at intersections, with better sightlines for crossing cyclists, plus extra space for a bench or two for walkers. Yes, the passage of cars is slowed, but that is the point.
Copenhagen compliments its pro-bike policies with some hand-in-glove land use rules. New development zones need to have a 50-50 balance of work and living spaces, which makes for more lively streets, and makes the possibility of bicycle-based commuting much more of a reality. To do what Copenhagen has done, Vancouver would have to ban all further condo construction for the relatively few remaining large sites on the downtown peninsula and in our heritage zones of Gastown, Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside, insisting they be devoted instead to office and studio work-space. Moreover, Vancouver would have to insist that new development along its many arterial streets combine work with living space. Are you up to Gehl's challenge, city council?
Jan Gehl is a soft visionary, an architect, professor and now globe-spanning consultant who continues into his 70s promoting a range of similarly simple-sounding strategies for improving the quality of urban spaces, and with this, the quality of life of city dwellers. Mr. Gehl's urban suggestions are common-sense, un-flashy, deeply democratic, state intervention-heavy, public purse-draining, and more in their sum than they are in their parts. His slide talk is full of telephoto shots of happy Danes acting out a positively Italian public life pursued in piazzas, parks and pizza parlours. Showing an image of outdoor café patrons sitting under heavy blankets supplied by bar owners, Mr. Gehl states with glee, "They said it was too cold and grey and Nordic in Denmark to use streets like this, but look!"
The most important message from Mr. Gehl is that Vancouverites need to invest in their public realm - street furniture, plantings, benches, and yes, lots of bikeways. Our urban debate has been skewed recently about talk of density and density alone, and Mr. Gehl's message in his public and private dialogues with Vancouver-area planners, developers and politicians is that all this building ever higher is wasted if we do not make plazas and streetscapes worth inhabiting.
