(cc photo by NicestAlan)

Today I got to go on a bicycle tour of Copenhagen guided by two representatives from the Dansk Cyklist Forbund (Danish Bicycle Federation). It was a great way to learn about Copenhagen’s bike infrastructure by actually riding around and experience it, stopping periodically to have things explained. I’d been to European cities with impressive bicycle infrastructure before—Berlin and Stockholm very recently—but those places seemed like a difference in degree compared to the United States. Copenhagen was a difference in kind. There’s just not—at all—a sense of danger or even competition with the automobile. On streets that are heavily trafficked, there are bike lanes, and the lanes are usually physically separated from the road. On streets where there aren’t bike lanes, there isn’t much traffic. And most of all there are tons of people on bikes wherever you go. Thirty-seven percent of Copenhagen commuters use bikes. And given that presumably some people are walking to work, some people are using the bus, some people are using the Metro, and some people are using the S-Tog the resulting situation is one in which cyclists and drivers are really equals.

It’s actually impressive to a degree that’s somewhat unsettling. Regular bicycle commuting in the United States is, among other things, a somewhat meaningful identity category. Initially it’s thrilling to see so many of “your people” everywhere. But looking closer you start to see exactly what was explained to me—the whole reason you have so many people biking around is that cycling is totally mainstream in Copenhagen and doesn’t constitute an identity at all.

From a policy perspective, what you’re basically seeing in Denmark is path-dependency on steroids. Back in the 1970s there were a substantial number of cyclists in what I guess you would call the “pre car” mode where people ride bikes because the country is too poor for everyone to afford a car. Then came the oil crisis and driving got even more expensive. And alternative policies started to be explored where for the first time the country started consciously trying to encourage bicycling. And the policy was never really dropped. So you have lots of cyclists which creates a constituency for more infrastructure which leads to more cycling which creates a constituency for more infrastructure. Denmark is the country with the highest share of GDP going to taxes, and part of that is very high taxes on cars and on gasoline so even though Denmark is a very rich country today lots of families still have a strong financial incentive to limit car ownership and car use.

I think you can already see embryonic versions of this positive reenforcement cycle in some American cities—New York and Washington to name two—but it still looks very different and I think something dramatic would have to happen to really change the path dependence dynamic. Then again I think that if you look at where oil prices were before the financial crisis hit it’s not all that unlikely that something dramatic will happen, comparable to the oil crisis of the seventies. At any rate, the current center-right government in Denmark hadn’t actually been very interested in bike-promotion over the past eight years (the Copenhagen city government is another matter) but no they’ve changed their tune and are appropriating about $200 million in competitive grants to municipalities for bike projects.

I was considering doing an impressionistic, Copenhagen-inspired post about how urban bicycling in the United States has a kind of “daredevil” quality to it that tends to leave it a male-dominated pursuit versus what you see in Copenhagen or Denmark where it’s common to see mom lugging a kid along at a modest pace in a very safe lane:

Then I sort of thought the better of it since I didn’t have any data and it’s usually best not to just rely on crude stereotypes. Fortunately, Scientific American came to the rescue with a better-supported investigation of this question:

“If you want to know if an urban environment supports cycling, you can forget about all the detailed ‘bikeability indexes’–just measure the proportion of cyclists who are female,” says Jan Garrard, a senior lecturer at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, and author of several studies on biking and gender differences.

There we go! That’s via Courtney at Feministing who comments:

Women, generally-speaking, are less likely to utilize bike lanes set in high-traffic areas, but in parks, low-traffic roadways, and the like, they are nearly 50% of riders. The enduring gender role differences also play a role here. Women who need to strap on some kids, groceries, or other precious cargo, need urban infrastructure that makes that easier (who wants to be carting a toddler around in the middle of honking, dangerous traffic?). European cities, many of which are more consciously planned around safe, cargo-laden biking, have much higher raters of women riders.

Of course, I also know some NYC-based badass women bicyclists (Christy Thornton!), who are neither risk-averse, nor lugging babes, so I wonder how they would feel about assumptions like these. Your thoughts?

Obviously many women don’t have babies. But it’s equally clear that there are a lot of babies in the world and the responsibility for caring for them does, in practice, primarily fall on women. And differential risk-assessment (whatever its origin) is probably the element of gendered psychology that’s most clearly supported by real research. So the causal hypothesis makes sense,.

Lord knows I love seizing bits of the roadway away from motorists but this creation of a separate left-hand turn lane for cyclists strikes even me as overkill:

Not that I mind or anything, but this kind of seems like a solution in search of a problem.

As I’ve noted before, the evidence suggests that as the number of cyclists in a city increases, the level of safety-per-cyclist increases so quickly that more bike riders leads to fewer bike accidents:

Saturday after having spent all week being jealous of the German bike lanes and the large number of German urban cyclists, I finally got the chance to rent a bike and ride around Berlin. You can really experience the safety in numbers phenomenon first hand:

The crux of the matter is that on any busy street there are always cyclists. In many circumstances, this is dealt with through the provision of good bicycle lanes, often physically separated from auto traffic. But where that’s not the case the bikes are in the street and the cars are well-aware that there are bikes in the street and conduct themselves accordingly.

At the same time, German cyclists seem to me to go slower. In part, it’s a matter if the bikes. People typically seem to have hybrid or mountain tires rather than road tires (necessary for going over cobblestones or streetcar tracks) and often their bikes are configured in a European-style upright posture, both of which lead to slower speeds.