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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.
