The Bicycle Mayor – Klaus Bondam from Colville Andersen.
Above is the man in charge of developing and implementing the cycling strategy for Copenhagen, filmed by Mikael Colville. Notice that before mentioning the City’s 3x50x15 targets, he affirms the importance of getting children to ride their bicycles as early as possible, “the Danish way”.
Contrast this to Boris Johnson’s transport strategy document, full of waffle but only a brief mention of ‘kids cycling to school’.
A customer came to the shop yesterday with his nine year old daughter, riding five kilometres from home. It was a beautiful day but not a pleasant experience: he was harassed by bus drivers and unable to find a quiet route [I advised him on an alternative for his retun journey]
Rather than spending millions on grandiose projects with uncertain returns, I would urge Transport for London to adopt a single simple goal:
“Make any three kilometre cycling journey in the city safe for a nine year old to ride by him/herself.”
I assure you that if that is achieved, you will have cycling’s modal share in the 30′s (which is where Copenhagen is now).
That is investment rather than speculation.
UPDATE 27.2.9 – In this post, Karl applies the goal to Newcastle and equates it to a Kennedyan challenge. If we were able to put a man on the moon in 9 years, safe cycling for children in 20 years seems an achievable goal.
Ah, but that's Denmark: a silly insignificant little Legoland country which never won the World Cup and which has neither nuclear weapons nor Jeremy Clarkson. We do things differently in this great country of ours.
Only yesterday I went out to reconnoitre the route for a Slow Bicycle ride which I propose holding in March. It was the bit of National Cycle Route No.1 which runs from Colchester train station to the open country just north of the A12: about three miles on the map and with a clearly marked trail of green dots winding across the paper through the town's suburbs. The reality on the ground, however, was somewhat different: most of the waymarking signs plastic labels stuck to lamp-posts at just the right height for them to be scraped off or obliterated with spray paint by the vandals; the few enamel signs broken or twisted round; long sections of the route completely unmarked; the path littered with broken glass; the whole thing, in a word, such a complete dog's breakfast that an Aborigine tracker would have got lost trying to follow it. In the end, after ending up back where I'd started from, I gave up and went by the main road until I reached the appropriate turn-off.
Compared with the cycle-path marking in Holland where I once lived – and by all accounts Denmark where sadly I didn't – it was a bad joke. And I dare say entirely typical of the situation in the rest of the country: a poor, pitiful, half-baked, typically English effort which in the end was rather worse than having no trail marking at all. No money put into it; no brains; no organisation; no real will to do anything, “because there's no demand for it.” (yet the Colchester borough had still managed, I saw, to waste a few thousand quid on entirely pointless installation sculptures along part of the route). It really makes you despair.
The bottom line is, the queen of Denmark has often been seen on a bicycle. Could you imagine ours ever mounting one?
[...] reading Velorution’s blog a few days ago, I think I’ve found the words: [By 1st January 2030], Make any three kilometre [...]