Velo City Conference - Day 2

Before we try to build Copenhagen-style bicycle infrastructure and promote Copenhagen’s bicycle culture in cities around the world, we must ask whether all cities are able to receive this sort of infrastructure and receptive to this sort of culture. In short, Copenhagenization requires Copenhagenizability.  Copenhagen, to be sure, is an internationally-recognized leader in sustainable transportation and bicycle use. But can Copenhagen’s model be exported on an international scale?

Copenhagen, as well as several other Danish and Dutch cities, is a world leader in urban cycling. But other nations are catching up, with Sevilla increasing the modal share of biking, London implementing new bike-sharing program, and France promoting its extensive biking networks. The United States (and Australia) is a more difficult case, since the country is larger, the distances greater, and the urban sprawl more intense. But promising initiatives have already begun to appear, perhaps most prominently the recent increase in bicycle trips taken in New York City--an increase of 28 percent from 2008 to 2009 alone. Instead, it is in developing cities where bicycle advocates tend to encounter the most resistance. How well can Copenhagen’s city of cyclists be adapted—adapted, not replicated—in these areas?

For one, bicycle infrastructure issues are often more complicated in developing cities.  Often compromises must be made from the outset simply because the financial resources are not available in developing countries to use the models created in developed ones. Bike lanes might need to be separated from the road by a painted line, as in Bogotá, Columbia, rather than by a difference in elevation, as in Copenhagen. But in many cases, expert planners can determine the most essential elements of a bicycle transportation system, implement those, and leave the remaining elements for the future. Many infrastructure issues can eventually be resolved.

Cultural issues, I would argue, are far more complicated. As urban planners so often lament, cities in countries such as China and India are following a transportation trajectory that is exactly the opposite of what bicycle advocates would urge. Car culture is infectious, and owning cars seems to be the best way to cement one’s position in an emerging elite class. Is it possible to convince people to renounce not only owning and driving a car, but also the dream of owning and driving a car? How can we keep bikes in places like India and China, where bicycle use is widespread, to be sure, but widely regarded as the poor man’s form of transportation?

One of the most important elements of cycling in Copenhagen—and in Europe more generally—is that bikers are proud of their bikes. Copenhageners have given up cars by choice, not by necessity, and that freedom manifests itself in the care with which they decorate their bikes with baskets and flowers and fresh coats of paint—in their insistence on biking at any time of year and in any weather conditions—and in the naturalness with which they use their bikes as "just another form of transportation."  I think that this pride in bicycle ownership is what developing countries need to create in order for a positive bicycle culture to become entrenched in cities around the world.

One solution might come from targeting the emerging wealthy class: convince them that biking, too, has a particular status associated with it. As Vandana Shiva, an internationally famous Indian environmentalist and philosopher, noted in her closing lecture, it is the wealthy who are acquiring more and more motorized vehicles in India, not the majority of the Indian population. Hundreds of millions of cars were added to India’s streets last year, but only 0.7 percent of the Indian population owns them. The rest of the population continues to depend on bicycles and cycle rickshaws for transportation and, by extension, for their livelihoods. Convince the wealthiest to return to bicycles—convince them that bicycles are trendy—and you will have taken an important step towards convincing the rest of the population to continue using their bicycles by choice, rather than by necessity.  To some extent, this value shift occurred in Europe's biking cities: even though biking serves as an important equalizing force in many European societies, bicyclists continue to be, on average, wealthier and better educated than their non-bicyclist counterparts. In Europe, however, this shift proceeded slowly, and a larger portion of the population was able to taste car culture before rejecting it. In places such as India, the number of cars on the road is growing so quickly that the luxury of changing at a slow pace is not available. The key issue here, then, is making sure that shifts in attitude keep pace with shifts in on-the-ground realities.

Another solution might come from convincing that vast majority of the population to regard biking as a tool for their emancipation. Biking, after all, is a source of mobility that is almost universally accessible, provided that sufficient social and physical infrastructure exists to support it. Turn the bicycle or cycle rickshaw into a celebrated item of cultural heritage, into a symbol of people reclaiming their power as citizens. Transform it, like certain linguistic expressions, from derogatory to affirmative.  Again, we can look at the European example for some inspiration: in Copenhagen, biking has become a celebration of the equality of all citizens, evidence of a functioning democratic society.  But again, the necessary rate of change is an additional complication in the developing world. The democratization of the bicycle must happen on a large scale and must happen quickly in order to be effective in cities around the world.

And so we arrive at a tentative answer to our original question. Cities around the world may be “Copenhagenizable,” but that change will depend on culture just as much—if not more—as on infrastructure. Copenhagen is internationally recognized not for the smoothness of its bicycle tracks but for the sheer number of ordinary citizens riding their bikes as an ordinary form of transportation. Connecting bicycling with certain values—with a particular status or with a particular freedom—may be an important first step towards transforming bicycles into sources of pride for cities around the world. But in the end, these associations must also fade away, as bicycling moves from the realm of status symbols or assertions of freedom into the realm of the ordinary. Once bikes cease to make a statement, then we know that bicycling is here to stay.