Traffic Feels the Love From the U.K.’s Department of Transport
The name Lord Adonis, were one to see it Brooklyn, conjures a Bed-Stuy middle-weight boxer, or maybe one of the dance-hall reggae performers ones sees on posters cruising along Flatbush.
But for the uninitiated, he’s the U.K.’s new Secretary of Transport and, it turns out, a fan of Traffic, as he notes in a recent talk. (I just hope he didn’t purchase it with taxpayer funds!)
The speech makes a number of worthy points, including the idea of connecting various travel modes.
One key factor is the ease of interchange between cycling and other forms of travel. Let me take the specific issue of the interchange between cycling and rail travel. While some 60 per cent of the population lives within a quarter of an hour cycle ride of a railway station, only two per cent of journeys to and from stations are made by bike. By contrast, in Holland, cycling accounts for roughly a third of all trips to and from rail stations. This massive difference isn’t in the different genes of the British and the Dutch; it has a lot to do with the provision of facilities for cyclists at stations.
I’ve just returned from the Netherlands, and was struck, as always, not just by the cycling numbers but the cycle parking. As it is with car traffic, parking is an often overlooked factor in the whole traffic equation; needless to say, the presence of a safe, convenient space at the end of a trip is of incredible importance to the desirability or even possibility of making that trip (more so than some cultural disposition to mode choice). As I looked at the long rows of bikes outside shops and train stations (where, David Hembrow notes, there is an actual crisis of parking) in Utrecht and Rotterdam, I couldn’t help thinking: What if all these were cars? Well, of course, those tidy, compact, well-populated streets wouldn’t exist. I suspect someone, somewhere, has crunched the numbers on how many bicycles can fit inside an average car parking space, I’d estimate the factor must be something like 15 to 1?
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This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Bicycles, Book News, Cars, Cities, Etc., Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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June 29th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
If you turn one car space in a lot into bicycle space, I’d think more like 5. If you turned the whole lot into bicycle parking, you wouldn’t need the huge extra space for turning and backing up that cars need, so you could fit in a lot more. If you, as is often the case, decide that bicycles aren’t very important and obviously are either too cheap to care about or else invulnerable to damage or theft and want them parked all tangled together with the cyclists climbing over other people’s cycles just to get access (no one suggests parking cars literally scraping against each other with the drivers climbing over the hoods and roofs to get in and out), then even more, sure. Here’s my chance to note that people who install bike racks often seem to think they need space only for the rack itself, and forget about the actual bicycles. Bicycles are a lot smaller than cars, but they do have size. No one designates car parking spaces smaller than any car, or a space that can only be parked in by lowering the car in with a crane.
June 29th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Bike corrals (parallel parking spots turned into bike parking) in Portland and Seattle have space for 12-20 bikes, so your intuition is right on.
June 29th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Ah, from the side you’d fit more than from the end, which is what I had in mind, at least if you aren’t thinking about having enough space for a trailer. The very earnest all organic food co-op I frequent just finally decided to turn one car space into bicycle space. Previously they had the rack right up against the building (too little space) right in front of the door (bicycle obstructs access). Now even with the trailer there is space (it is a grocery store, the trailer is useful).
June 30th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Our “need” for carspace is overwhelming. A small parking lot designed for 50 cars supports at most 200 car traveling customers or potentially 750-1000 bike customers. In addition, the bike customers have more to spend as they haven’t wasted their income- wealth on auto expenses.
July 10th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
This connects nicely with the burgeoning bike-sharing programs. Take a train downtown and hop on a bike, which you ride to work or where ever.