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When you read this, I’ll be on a plane flying back to Germany, a country which has become home and where we are very happy, despite me grumping occasionally about poor local bike infrastructure. There are lots of other reasons to loke the country. Besides, Stuttgart isn’t representative of Germany, so while I’m getting bored on an endless plane flight, let’s look at Tübingen, where countless tourists have made the pilgrimage to see where Goethe threw up in an alley. Tübingen is about 50 kilometres from Stuttgart and a million miles away in philosophy. The mayor is part of the green party and is following in the way of places like Copenhagen and Amsterdam by encouraging cycling and aggressively taking space from cars for bikes. And here’s a surprise: even in the steep narrow medieval streets and squares central Tübingen there is lots of space when we keep cars out of the way, showing contrary to the claims of drivers, roads are congested because cars simply take up a ridiculous amount of space. But I digress. Opening a city to bikes brings its own problems: chief of these are more cyclists. It seems -and anyone from Stuttgart may want to sit down before reading this- that when you make good quality infrastructure so it’s it safe and convenient to cycle you get more people riding bikes as transport. These ‘Utility Cyclists’, moreover, don’t just want to ride around and take their bike home on the back of an SUV, they want to do things like shopping or attend lectures during which time they will want to park their bikes in the city, and preferably not have it disappear before they want to go home. This is awkward because even with small objects like bikes there come a point where there isn’t any more space, and to make matters worse people often leave bikes locked up to solid objects for a long time -I had one friend who seemed to keep his by the railway station- or forget about them. As there isn’t a handy canal to build an Amsterdamesque multi storey bike park over, Tübingen simply has lots of parking where ever there’s space, and regular cleaning sessions to get rid of the abandoned bikes currently rusting away in the racks to make room for more. Of course, chucking out old bikes is a tricky matter: You take an ancient rust bucket with oval wheels and throw it in the truck, and the next thing you know some professor is threatening to sue because you’ve destroyed a family heirloom. So what do you do?
Tübingen tells people when they’re going to do a sweep: the town has a web page informing cyclists when the next cleanup will be and what to expect: on a certain day council staff will go around the city and mark abandoned or broken bikes with yellow tape, and a week or so later they’ll go and will pick up any marked bikes that haven’t been taken home. Notice that the main point of this is to provide parking for bikes, so they don’t inconvenience everyone else by demanding that all bikes be removed, simply the ones they think are probably abandoned anyway. In fact, much of the press release is to reassure cyclists that they won’t lose their bike, like this concluding paragraph:
“If, despite the care taken by the clean up teams, you find your prized transport has been removed in error, don’t panic. Just go along to the collecting centre [Withing a couple of weeks] and you can pick up your bike free of charge.”
I like that: No threats, no snarling at people for daring to park for too long, just simple information and help if you need it.
Unsurprisingly Ostfildern doesn’t have this problem, so I’ve yet to see this operation up close. How do other cities deal with it?
Bristol (UK) has just become the first city in the country to start a bike share scheme, and it’s getting all manner of flak for it. The main argument against seems to be that “Bristol is hilly” which is hardly an astute observation if you’ve ever been there, but apparently a shock to journalists from London.
Germany has several bike share schemes: I know this will annoy the French, but several cities in Germany had quietly embraced the idea years before it caught on in Paris. Stuttgart, which is possibly even more hilly than Bristol, has a successful bike share system run by German Railways (Deutsche Bahn, or DB). The ‘Call-a-bike’ network was launched in 2007 with 400 bikes at somewhere between 50-65 hubs around the city depending on who you ask. It works using mobile phones which has the advantage that they know who is using any bike at any time, Despite this Stuttgart is fussy about you bringing the bike back to the hub you got it from, but on the other hand the first half hour is free. The system has been an instant success and it’s been was expanded since it opened. (I guess that’s where the different numbers come from, so much for Teutonic accuracy).
Stuttgarts traffic is probably a bit safer for cycling than Bristols, but we also have tramlines on a number of streets, and other streets that are so steep they give up and become staircases. So can Stuttgarters handle hills better than Bristolians? I doubt it, especially after a few beers. The major difference in the two systems is the numbers of bikes. Stuttgart has 400 bikes in 60 Hubs. Now Wikipedia says the centre of Stuttgart (where the bikes are) is home to 590 497 people (or at least, it was on the first of June 2008). My maths is a bit fuzzy but I think that works out as a bit less that one bike per 1500 people living the centre. And you thought talking about bike parts was as boring as I can get.
‘Hourbike‘, Bristol’s foray into the brave new world of bike share, involved much fanfare and eighteen bikes in four stations. Yes you did read that correctly. Eighteen. According to Wikipedia and my fuzzy maths, if the population of central Bristol all decided to join, over 23000 people would be lining up for each bike. That’s bad enough, but the four locations don’t include the main railway station. Now call me obtuse, but if I was going to make a bike share system, I’d make darn sure it feeds the main public transport hubs. Last time I was in Stuttgart I found four hubs of about twenty bikes around the main station in the city, or to put it another way, more bikes than serve the whole city of Bristol, and there’s still 61 hubs elsewhere.
Bristol has a chance to prove everyone wrong and become a flagship city like Paris -and for the record, I hope they do- if it starts taking it seriously and stops faffing about. To get the same ratio as Stuttgart only requires 300 bikes, give or take, and perhaps a lot of publicity, and you have a prestige project begging for a politician to sponsor it. Any takers?
I knew I should have written this post earlier: Christoph Chorherr’s German language blog recently linked to a survey of the residents residents of Floridsdorf, a car-free section of Vienna which was built about ten years ago, to see how the place was getting along. I was going to read the report a couple of times then impress you all by telling you about it, but I’ve been busy lazy over the last week and the highly readable “Cycling is good for you” blog got there first with a great translation and summary, and a vast amount of ‘further information’ links all of which you can read by clicking on this link. Go on. I’ll still be here when you’re finished.
Welcome back. By now you’ll have worked out that Floridsdorf was planned carefully: it’s not just about not having parking, but a whole different approach to mobility and livability. It’s also good to persuade people not to get a car and park it around the corner on the sly. I especially love the idea of the shared spaces, so instead of the rich people living on top in a penthouse flat with their own pool, the pool is shared by everyone, as are the community gardens, workshops, and other facilities.
Yet whenever this sort of thing is proposed, it’s accused of ‘Social Engineering’. or worse. It seems that making public transport available or a building a walkable neighbourhood is ‘forcing’ people to live a certain way, instead of allowing people the choice of living how they want, and apparently that’s mile after mile of car-dominated sprawl, which where residents choose to be forced to own an expensive car or be sentenced to virtual imprisonment in in the suburbian gulag. Of course all those people driving require more roads: , so we “choose” to make cities car friendly, and the people who live in them have streets polluted and clogged by car traffic, because that’s What People Want: and forcing them to live otherwise would be ’social engineering’ after all. Get off my car yer socialist.
One thing: I don’t see one of these around Floridsdorf or Vauban to keep the discontented masses or from leaving. In fact as Anna of “Cycling is good for you” attests, free apartments in Floridsdorf are almost impossible to get hold of because of the high demand. Hmm… Perhaps ‘What People Want’ is a bit more a case of ‘Not wanting to change’.
Either way those pesky socially engineered places are catching on. Vauban caused a little stir a few months ago on the Blogosphere, but very similar schemes exist or are being planned in a few places- Amsterdam has one just around the corner from Henry’s workbikes, Düsseldorf and Tübingen are planning similar and there’s a brand new one in Köln, just off our route along the Rhine. Perfect for a visit in fact, so we’re going to drop by and see what it’s really like.
I’ll let you know if they have to surround the place with Razor Wire and hunt down escapees trying to breathe the heady exhaust-tinged air of suburbia.
Watch me get scooped on this one.
There’s been a lot of blog-based discussion of This article in the New York Times about the car-free suburb of Vauban in Freiburg, which I’m all for: much as I moan about how hopeless Ostfildern is, I live in Germany because I love the country, so it’s good to see some all-too-rare positive reporting about Germany in an English language newspaper, and with a slide show, no less. Mind you, they really should have checked their facts: Vauban isn’t just an ‘Affluent Suburb’ but has different income groups (It just looks affluent because it’s pleasant), and a sign showing a bike and ‘Frei’ written underneath actually means bikes are permitted, but there we go.
I’ve not been able to post about it as quickly as I’d like, but on the other hand I can now include this video of the place and its place in Freiburg as a whole, along with an interview with the mayor, who is part of the Green Party, about how they have worked to make Freiburg a more sustainable/pleasant/livable city.
(Thanks to ‘Cycling is good for you’ for the video)
Ostfildern had the opportunity to do the same, but of course decided to build a new road and make it easy to drive through, but it does at least show that when we do this sort of thing in Germany, we do it well.
Vauban’s English-language website, showing their aims and ideas is here.
Low point.
It’s tax time in Germany, which means that the ranks of the self employed have been carefully getting our information ready for the tax office, or in my case putting it off as long as possible. Most people will post their taxes off but I decided to take mine this year. I like to be sure the paperwork is with the tax advisor and isn’t in a sorting office in Ulm, and South Germany has a relational culture so it’s good to connect with people. The fact it gave me a good reason for a bike ride on a sunny day is entirely irrelevant.
I had to go through Hohenheim, which as I’ve said before, is the other side of a deep valley. I know some readers envy the hills, but the problem is that when you go down, you have to go back up, and in this case, it’s straight back up. Mind you, this time I was able to winch up without wondering if my lungs would explode, so I think I may be getting fitter.
The tax advisors office is stuck around the back of a delivery entrance, and the front has a slightly down at heel look, as if the door will be opened by a gentleman in a trench coat saying: “Mr. Tortellini is unavailable”, and the sounds of someone getting beaten up in the back room, but unfortunately for the purposes of a good story nothing of the sort happened. I dropped off the tax forms, spoke briefly with the tax advisor and as I wasn’t feeling up to a climb up the 25% hill back home, continued towards Stuttgart.
Möhringen-the future is easy.
In Germany there’s relatively little sprawl, which can throw up surprises: you’re minding your own business riding along a forest trail which could easily be on the edges of the Black Forest, and then suddenly a you look left and across the valley there’s a glass and concrete skyscraper looking like that mysterious monolith out of ‘2001, Space Odyssey’, and then you turn a corner and you’re in a large town. It happens all the time, and it happened to me on this occasion: I turned a corner and there was the town of Möhringen. and suddenly I’m surrounded by high-rise buildings, lines of taxis and expensive suits -even a casino. The cycleway leads directly into the centre of the town and the metro station, which is a hub for metro trains serving this side of Stuttgart. Möhringen has caught up with the notion that public transport and bikes are a vital part of keeping the cities liveable and the Metro/bus station is in a pedestrianised area with cars restricted but a place for buses and taxis right by the station. There’s fair bit of free bike parking here, and shared use cycle/pedestrian ways cutting through the buildings. The air is clean, the roads are safe, and as I realised when I took some of this picture, it was so quiet that even with thousands of people passing by, I could hear the birds singing in the trees: It was like one of those utopian “Cities of the future” pictures from the 60’s, only with kebab stands. I don’t like cities, so I probably won’t move house and live there, but the next time someone starts saying how difficult it is to make a city people friendly, I’ll take them to Möhringen.
Social climbing Xtracycle
I had a cold coming on, I’d been working all weekend and would be working all evening. It seemed a far better idea to go out and get some fresh air than to keep going all afternoon as well. So I got on my bike and randomly set off for Hohenheim, the next town.
I went out, down another Scary Hill of Doom, across the valley and back up to Hohenheim, about two kilometres and 200 vertical metres (down and up) away from our village. Hohenheim is centred around the former ‘hunting lodge’ of the Royals of Württemberg. It is now the state university for agriculture, so the house and gardens are kept in immaculate condition and have whole sections showing how the earth looked say, 100 000 years ago.
- A tiny fraction of the bikes in Hohenheim…
The idea was to go through Hohenheim, up to a town called Degerloch, round the end of the valley I’d just crossed and back through the forest and home. I had just over an hour before I had to pick Middle Son up from kindergarten. No worries.
Hohenheim is a student town. And where you get students, you get bicycles. I hadn’t thought of that, but there they were: I saw more bikes in three minutes in Hohenheim than I would in a week at home. It was like I’d accidentally arrived in Copenhagen. I rolled down the main avenue, availed myself of the sort of bike path we can only dream of in Ostfildern and then realised I’d been so busy admiring the facilities I’d missed my turning. By the time I’d regained my route (Naturally it was uphill) I was getting tired and a bit concerned about the time, so I resisted the temptation to take pictures and pushed a bit harder in the direction of Degerloch.
- Another Scary Hill of Doom
Of course the thing about riding alongside a valley is that it’s not as flat as you think: rivers have tributaries and here, they are steep sided, like the one I had to cross now. Going downhill was fun, but the endless 15% climb the other side wasn’t, and worse still, I was losing time- only 30 minutes to go and I was less than half way around. Probably not the best moment to stop and take a picture on reflection. Ah, well…
The road to Degerloch dates from the time when the royal family needed a direct route from the palace in the city to the lodge at Hohenheim and it’s as straight as an arrow so I made better progress. I turned to cross the head of the valley with 20 minutes and mostly downhill to go, ran back through the forest and along a (mostly) excellent bike path to reach a Feldweg to our village, crossed yet another valley with the clock showing five minutes to pick-up time, and rolled into the village at a speed which would probably get me thrown out of the slow bicycle movement and narrowly missed a kerb while racing a couple of residential roads to the Kindergarten, only to discover I was the first person there. My watch was several minutes fast. Still, I was breathing easily, if a little rapidly, and thinking more clearly than I had all day.
I was thinking I need to allow longer next time.
Sunset on the way home. A cropped version of this may become the 'Winter Banner'
I had an appointment with a client about three kilometres away by cycle ways in the next village. My record so far for this run is eight minutes and you could never drive to the same place that quickly, because cars have to drive further and through four sets of traffic lights. The weather report said it would be dry and cloudy, so naturally it snowed all morning. I allowed a lot of extra time, thinking I’d have to walk through deep snow a lot of the way, and set off for the Scary Hill of Doom.
Lines in the snow
The Scary Hill Of Doom (SHoD) will one day get a blog entry of its own. There are valleys on three sides of the village, and the main road has is an 11% gradient for a bit less than a kilometre long. I’m not going to say how fast I went. At the bottom of the hill, where the road winds up the other side, I took the Feldweg along the valley. This is the way to a set of riding stables, so I knew the steady procession of SUV’s would clear the snow off the road, and so it was: as long as I kept in the tyre lanes I was snow free. The valley was monochrome: black tyre tracks and trees, white snow, and the loudest noise was the river running alongside, swollen from the thaw that morning. Anyone driving between the villages would right now be going stop-start through a jumble of shops, industrial buildings, and fitness centres, but I had a whole valley to myself.
Cleared cycle path
In the next village a shared use cycle path had been ploughed and gritted. In Ostfildern. I followed it feeling rather guilty for my earlier mutterings on this blog. Let the record show: a cycle path in Ostfildern that has been cleared of snow.
My client lives on the other side of the village, on top of the valley. Of course. I needed all my concentration to get back up the hill so there are no pictures of that. I finished the appointment a bit early, which I thought was a bonus as it meant I could get back sooner, but then I got sandbagged by the sheer beauty of it all and kept stopping to take more pictures.
Xtra and snow. Another possible banner image
Having climbed out of the valley once I don’t really like doing it again, so I avoid the SHoD by riding back along a slightly longer but less strenuous route. The first part of the journey is through a planned town, and lo and behold, the cycleways were cleared again, (and, like Assen, clearing cycleways was given priority over side roads) I could have raced through with very little trouble, but the sun came out and it was just too beautiful to race through, so more photos.
Leaving town. Xtra seems happy on the snow
Back on the Feldwege, and onto packed snow. I thought this would be a get-off-and-push moment, but the Xtra just dug in and kept going. Except that the views kept seducing me. More pictures. By now the sun had come out, and this being Germany I was sharing the road with half of the population of Ostfildern, a lot of dogs and small children with sledges. I barely had a place to stop for a pee before a nordic walker came around the corner.
The Xtra seems to like packed snow when loaded: I thought it’d be a bit skittery with the weeks bread supply in the back, but it just powered on along the ridge road home. By now I was severely late, but if I’d rushed home then I’d have missed the suset at the top of this post, which added an extra layer to an already beautiful view of the village.
Come to think of it, I’d have missed that in a car as well…
[Thanks to David Hembrow for the title idea...]
Neckar Bridge
Pedestrian and bike bridge over the Neckar river near Tübingen: you can find it here on Google maps. It’s the sort of infrastructure that is fairly common in a lot of places in Germany, and this one was pretty crowded with cyclists when I crossed it last summer. On a route like this it makes very sound business sense: tourists carry money and tend to eat in restraunts, which is why in Germany restraunts place signs by bike paths.
Unfortunately Ostfildern doesn’t invest in such things: you can’t fit a Mercedes over it, you see.
Bike Culture
There is a small bike culture in our area, and I’m going to try and document it as I can. Here, families will often own a car and use a bike to shuttle the kids about. Here’s an example of a well-used transport bike, waiting for mum and the kids to come out of the swimming pool and go home. The leisure centre is a pretty old, gloomy place, but at least it offers covered bike parking right by the door. Notice the pretty low security as well- a cheap cable lock on the bike, no lock on the trailer.
I’m thinking of doing my own version of this nifty little video to show people locally. I’m glad to see that Freiburg im Breisgau got a mention. This is not so far away from us in the south of the Black Forest, and is known as a very bike-friendly city. They were making bike facilities in the 50’s and 60’s when everyone else (like Stuttgart) was building bigger roads, which is yet another example of how cities tend to go in vastly different directions with transport policy in Germany. It also shows that narrow streets and old towns needn’t be a problem when making bike facilities- you just have move motor vehicles out of the way.
