Velo City Conference - Day 4

On the last day of the Velo-City 2010 conference, I traveled with my bike to Ballerup, a municipality located about 20 kilometers northwest of Copenhagen. Home to 48,000 inhabitants, Ballerup has been named this year’s “cycle city of the year,” an award granted to one Danish municipality each year as a means of promoting bicycle-friendly planning throughout the country. Though official Danish planning lexicon classifies regions as either “urban” or “rural” but not “suburban,” Ballerup is effectively a suburb of Copenhagen, and I was eager to learn about bicycle infrastructure in Denmark’s suburbs.

I find biking in the suburbs to be an interesting issue for several reasons, not the least of which is my childhood spent in a suburb of Boston. I also believe that in my country, addressing issues surrounding bicycle infrastructure in the suburbs can bring far greater reward than planners would find in targeting only cities. After all, at least half of the American population lives in a suburb, and despite the recent resurgence of urban living, the dream of single-family homes in the suburbs continues to exert a powerful hold on our imaginations. Plus car culture is more deeply entrenched outside of America’s cities than in the cities themselves, and the distances traveled in suburbs tend to be greater than in cities. Combine more people with greater distances, and we have an enormous number of vehicle miles that could one day become bicycle miles. At the same time, however, the task of developing a strong biking culture in the suburbs does not hang low on the tree: while the potential reward may be greater, the process certainly poses greater challenges. 

I would like to offer Ballerup’s approach to cycling in the suburbs as a model to be adapted and applied to other suburban areas. In addressing our group, Ballerup’s Minister of the Environment explained that the municipal government works to target three groups of potential cyclists: commuters to work or school, residents making individual trips within the municipality, and recreational cyclists. Obviously, he explained, the first and second groups receive more attention because they collectively represent many more potential bicycle trips. 

Perhaps the greatest lesson that we can draw from Ballerup’s efforts to encourage these groups to cycle is the importance of integrating bicycle infrastructure with public transportation networks. As we traveled around the municipality, we saw impressive bicycle paths surrounding office parks and schools. But we also experienced first-hand the ease of bringing bicycles, for free, on Copenhagen’s regional trains as we arrived, bikes in tow, on an S-train. We learned about Denmark’s national regulation that office buildings of a certain size must be built within a certain distance of the nearest train station in order to facilitate employees’ use of public transportation. And we heard the accounts of several individuals who told us that they relied on regional trains in the event that they were unable, for whatever reason, to bike 20 kilometers or more to reach work or home.

So too did we see the extent to which Ballerup - and similar municipalities around Copenhagen - had not managed to integrate fully biking with public transport. We learned how public transportation in Copenhagen’s metropolitan area is organized according to Denmark’s famous “finger plan,” with transportation networks running along each finger, in the form of S-trains or buses, and between fingers, in the form of local buses. Suffice it to say that this approach differs markedly from the concentric rings of development that characterize many cities in the United States, places in which public transportation might travel from the city to the suburbs but almost never travels between the suburbs themselves. Nonetheless, these inter-municipality buses in Denmark still do not accommodate cyclists. So if you happen to be traveling by bike from Ballerup to Copenhagen and find yourself caught in a storm, then the S-trains are available to help. If you happen to be traveling from Ballerup to the next municipality, say Værløse, then you are stranded. Sorry, no bikes on board!

The integration of cycling and public transportation is an interesting issue because it matters both for regions with little to no bicycle culture and for regions such as the Copenhagen metropolitan area with a deeply entrenched bicycle culture. In the former, integrating these different modes of transportation helps existing bicycle infrastructure, however limited it may be, to be accessible to a larger number of people. Once you convince people to view biking as an essential element of at least part of their transportation routines, you will have made considerable progress towards developing that critical mass essential for a strong biking community. In the latter, integration can make the difference between a place in which some people bike some of the time and a place where everyone bikes nearly all of the time. Just as car culture could not have expanded as it has without gas stations, breakdown lanes, or roadside assistance, bicyclists, too, need an outlet when something goes wrong. Give bicyclists the option to hop on a bus or train - and make those buses or trains easy to reach - when their bikes break down or the weather turns or they simply feel too tired to ride tens of kilometers to reach a destination. Make bicycling an easy option to choose.

In the end, integrating bicycle infrastructure and public transportation networks is about smart planning—it is about holistic thinking—it is about planning for life as it is actually lived, with all of its messiness and complications. As the presenters at the Velo City conference never ceased to emphasize, bicycling is one of the few modes of transportation that operates on a human scale. At the very least, bicycle infrastructure should reflect that.