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Aarg.. sometimes someone tells a story so well, I’m just envious.
This is in German but with English subtitles. Wait until the end, it’s worth it.
(Via the European Christian Environment Network)
Yesterday Beautiful Wife and myself celebrated our 9th wedding anniversary. Eleven years after we met in the UK, and many people reacted to our engagement with disbelief that two young people from the UK and Japan could ever see each other again, let alone organise a life together, we’ve three fantastic boys and a lot of dreams for the future. And she’s more beautiful than ever…
I love you M, thanks for a great nine years…
[If you're wondering what the picture is, it's a Celtic two-chord design, each chord forming one half of the heart, intertwined at the top and the point.]
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.
Contraflow bike lane. Better than nothing-or is it?
I have a train to catch in Stuttgart, and being one for a bit of adventure I decide to go to the city by bike. Stuttgart isn’t known for being bike friendly, but there are at last two online route planning services, so I log onto both and see what happens. The results aren’t promising. The German cycle club planner apparently can’t tell difference between an bike lane and a heavily used urban road. Stuttgart city is slightly better, and suggests a pleasantly bucolic way through the forest and suburbs but warns the surface is gravel in some places: at least someone looked at it. I’m told to allow 45 minutes for this run, at 15km/h average speed.
Stuttgart is surrounded by steep wooded hills. The way to the city, therefore, is on forest roads: a mix of gravel and surfaced car-free streets. A complete lack of signposts though, so much consulting of map required. The route leads to a main road and here the problems begin. Further progress means crossing an unlovely 4-lane road and cars snarl past while pedestrians and cyclists wait for signals that change grudgingly after several minutes and then change back within seconds.
Between crossings and map reading stops -still no signs- I’m getting late, and the next bit doesn’t help either. It’s an indifferently surfaced forest trail, for 500m after which I need to re-cross the highway on it’s sinuous route down the hillside. This crossing has the centre reservation shaved to a fine point for the convenience of cars turning right, leaving a gap too short for a bike let alone the Xtracycle. Of course, the pedestrian lights trap me in the middle. A rush to the safety of the other side brings a short respite in the form of a contraflow on a one-way street, then yet another crossing -yup, same highway- with all the same features as before and some seriously impatient drivers. Then, like a mirage, a high-quality bike lane appears with its own lights and a red surface. Unfortunately it’s going in the wrong direction, and I’m left following a road with tram lines and parked cars and another minuscule bike lane that sends me off into some impenetrable suburbs, delaying me further.
This pattern continues all the way into the city: steep hills, busy junctions, no signs, and and a map that takes a perverse pleasure in sending me on left-hand turns across oncoming traffic. Eventually, after cycling through a dingy underpass and the city park, I climb up a delivery road and wind up at a sign saying „Welcome to Stuttgart railway station.“ It’s at the bottom of a row of steps, and by the time I get upstairs the train has gone.
Not the greatest introduction to cycling in Stuttgart, but the good news is that the Green Party have taken a lot of seats in the local elections: in other German cities where this took place, there has been a rapid change of transport policy afterwards, so hopefully they will begin to address these problems sharpish.
At the very least they may get some cyclists to test out the website and make reccomendations.
I could do it, for example, for a reasonable fee…
Long frustrating Monday morning trying to organise our route from Amsterdam and all the stuff included, and incidentally get ready for Japan. Finished with a short bike ride on the Xtracycle with our neighbours little boy on the back, giggling for he was worth.
My one English lesson at the moment is on Monday afternoon. Martin, my ’student ‘, is a tad older than me. He’s a thoughtful man, editor of a national newspaper for the Forestry industry which is at the meeting point of industry and conservation and has a lot of knowledge and understanding of ecology and the ecological movement in a German context. His English is better than he thinks, and we usually spend 45 minutes talking about ecology and related matters and I get paid for correcting the occasional error. I’m not complaining, especially as he comes up with some pretty deep ideas.
For example, I’ve always seen environmental concerns as looking after the land, but as Martin points out, there isn’t any truly ‘natural’ land left in Germany, (or as he puts it: ‘There isn’t a square metre of the country that hasn’t been dug up at some time or other’.) He thinks that when many people talk of conserving the natural landscape, they mean preserving a culture they remember from their childhood. He’s not criticising this, in fact he sees it as important because if we lose this part of our culture as our lives become focused on cities, people lose touch with the land, and ultimately with their roots. It reminds me of Japan, where mass rural-urban migration has left dozens of forgotten farms in the jungles, and whole mountains are removed to make way for cities to expand because people don’t value the land except in economic terms.
On the other hand, I can’t help feeling that as soon as we start trying to preserve a culture we could be killing it, not letting it develop or change. We need to keep the rural areas alive and we’re looking at how we can do this as a family of artists. We’re looking at how we can live off-grid (Independent of mains and water) and learning about Permaculture farming, which could be a further development of our personal connection with the land.
We’re engrossed in the conversation when he suddenly realises he has to go and get his daughter from school. Leaving the house I become aware that my link with nature is calling urgently so I make a minor detour into the fields before riding home.
Once home I help wrestle the boys into bed, but it’s still daylight and warm, and youngest son keeps coming out to play. The day ends with me alternately shooing him back to bed and reading to the accompaniment of our neighbour playing Lloyd-Webber songs on their piano.
I can imagine the meeting where this was discussed:
“We need to add a few kilometres of bike lane to keep the greenies happy. Put a white line along this road here.”
“It’ll be tight with two-way traffic, can we make it one way?”
“No, that would slow down traffic.”
“Well, we’ll have to take out the parking”
“Don’t even think about it”
Pity the poor transport planner. There is no way you can fit traffic in both directions, and a cycle lane, and space for residents parking on a road this narrow without someone getting the short end of the arrangement, and naturally you can’t expect Mercedes Man to drive a detour of almost a hundred metres to make the street more liveable. There are similar cycle lanes in this part of Stuttgart, including about a kilometre of lanes, broken by roundabouts every two hundred metres, where the cycle lane stops abruptly, spitting you into traffic, and then starts again the other side.
On the other hand, the drivers I encountered seemed quite used to a bike riding outside of the bike lane, so I guess it’s normal for them. Stuttgart also does seem to have worked out that a red cycle lane – which is equivalent to a blue lane in Denmark, and gives bikes travelling along it priority at junctions- is a good thing to remind motorists that cyclists have right of way, which puts them a few decades ahead of Ostfildern.
I wrote this before we moved and planned to post automatically, typically, not only did that not happen, but Karl at Do The Right Thing beat me to it with with a more entertaining version in Edinburgh.
I’ve mentioned before that there is a harebrained scheme in the offing to lay yet more tarmac on the fields by our village, and last week there was an information evening where a local traffic planner was giving us details of what they were going to do. I naturally felt I had to go: I’m a local resident with children, I had a duty to both of my readers to blog about it and besides, there may be food
Some background may be needed here. We live in a fairly small village just outside of Stuttgart which happens to be between an Autobahn to the south and a port and industrial centre to the North. There is a bypass to the east and west, but we still have a lot of traffic through the village (about 13500 cars and 1500 trucks every 24 hours). Almost everyone wants a bypass because they believe it will ‘finally’ solve the problem. Like the last one was supposed to. And the one before that. It never does because traffic expands and contracts to fill the available space. Naturally the Strassenbauamt (Road building ministry) are aware of this but keep quiet about it.
While almost everyone wants the bypass, no-one wants it going past their house, and I don’t blame them. So now there is a new scheme being proposed by Stuttgart. They are offering to build a nice new road under the village to connect to one of the existing bypasses. This will take the traffic well away from the village and the noise, and no-one will have their view spoiled.
This is marsh gas. Absolute, 100% unadulterated cobblers. Anyone capable of walking erect should smell a king-sized rat when Stuttgart offers to build something for Ostfildern. Why would a city offer to spend taxpayers money on an infrastructure project in another administrative district? The answer is geography. There’s a major intersection of north-south and east-west autobahns, to the South West of Stuttgart used by a lot of traffic, but also a lot of traffic from the North-west going to the South East. This traffic has to curve around three sides of Stuttgart and climb a major hill. For about 20 years the Strassenbauamt has been quietly working on a plan for a bypass to the east of Stuttgart avoiding the hill, and it’s a section of this road that will go under our village. In other words, the road isn’t a bypass for us, but for Stuttgart, under this village.
Unfortunately, they’ve done their spin well: the notion is fixed in people’s minds that we need a bypass.
The economy is now going fast down the toilet, and the transport industry is going with it. As the majority of the traffic is cars, and about half of that is internal traffic, we could reduce traffic in the village simply by making less parking spaces and more bike infrastructure, because traffic expands and contracts to fit the space available… but I’m being rational, and using science which isn’t going to get me anywhere in this debate.
Not that any of this matters, because despite the huff and puff, no-one has yet committed to the €20-30 billion that this white elephant will cost, so I suspect it’ll be a while before any diggers turn up, but rest assured the Strassenbauamt is out there somewhere, building pointless roads to link up their fantasy network…
Cycleway in the Black Forest: It's tougher than you think...
Hills are on my mind at the moment, specifically the one where this sign is planted between Neuenbürg and Waldrennach in the northern end of the Black Forest.
Cycling has a pretty meagre travel share in this region. It isn’t helped by variable quality of cycle paths, but a major obstacle is Geography, (To be more accurate, Geology, but if I’d said that you’d have switched off straight away) The Black Forest is a series of hills with deep gorges slicing through them. For various reasons of interest to geographers and virtually no-one else, this makes most villages are either long and thin in the valleys or small and round on the hilltops, with big with big gaps (and hills) between.
If you just look at this sign you’d think a cycle commute from Waldrennach to the larger town of Neuenbürg was a doddle at 3,8km, a nice easy distance for cyclists, on a road closed to vehicles. What it doesn’t tell you is this is 20m above Neuenbürg, and cyclists to Waldrennach have another 200m to climb. If you want to be the next Lance Armstrong (And much respect if you do) this is your ideal training route, but most of us aren’t really up for this.
To add insult to injury, the valleys can create winds: Geographers call these anabatic and katabatic winds and insist that anabatic winds are created when warm light air rises along the valley floor and up the sides, and on a really good day, make thunderstorms as well, while katabatic winds are cooler, heavier air blowing down at night. Cyclists call them all sorts of things and insist they are created by the presence of a cyclist by a malicious fate, so we’re riding into a permanent headwind. A similar meterological process causes coastal winds in the Netherlands, and as David Hembrow says, they are a major problem as well.
This shows the trouble with a ‘one size fits all’ approach to cycling: Faced with a 200m climb to visit grandma, very few people will use bikes even if there is perfect infrastructure all the way. (that said, a safe route along the valleys would be nice) The villages are so compact everyone walks except for xtracycle nutters like me who should know better. Bike lanes on narrow steep mountain roads probably aren’t practical, so how do you provide an alternative to cars here, especially as this is one place where some people will need cars for work? I reckon a combination is required: trains and buses that carry bikes (lots of bikes) at no extra charge, preferably with good connections from the valley to the hills, so the train along valley comes into station as bus comes into the forecourt, so passengers can change without waiting, rather than seeing their connection pull away as they arrive.
This is the same problem as we face. Ostfildern (Suggested motto: “Four wheels good, two wheels bad”) is about 170m above Stuttgart or Esslingen and there is almost no way around it. Stuttgart now allows limited bike transport on the Metro but you can only carry bikes on a bus off peak, which rules out commuting. Even if Ostfildern wakes up to reality and makes a decent cycle network, we’d still need to help people get up the hills before we have any chance of a cycling culture.
So what ways are there? I’ve already mentioned the rack railway in Stuttgart, but there must be other ways. Does anyone else know of low cost ways to get lots of bikes up monster gradients?
Yep, I’m afraid that the post I put up yesterday was an April Fools joke. Sadly, Ostfildern isn’t planning to invest in cycling in the future, even though most of the measures described are already being used within about 10 kilometres of here. Obviously my piece was a bit subtle- the local paper was less so, having a front page headline about the Mayor resigning over daylight savings time.
But if I’d posted the real news you wouldn’t have believed it either: Stuttgart and Ostfildern plan to build a new €200m bypass underground with junctions serving various villages and smashing their way through several nature reserves. The paper reporting this said that the Green Party were against this because it “May generate more traffic”. I think they “May” be right there.
But that’s Ostfildern: never mind that our dependency on oil is killing people and sending us headlong into serious economic trouble when the stuff runs out, and never mind that the rest of Germany is waking up to the idea that we can’t keep building more rat runs:, or that the Neckar valley has the worst air quality in Germany (Way over the EU pollution limit) mostly because of motor vehicles. Here in Ostfildern we’re going to need more roads, roads, roads, for our fast cars and trucks.
What a depressing thought. The next post will be a bit lighter, I promise.
The Greenwash
July 17, 2009 in Environment, General musings while dodging traffic, Germany, Trenchant comments about cars | 5 comments
Yeah, Right.
“Because new is cleaner. The Environment Premium Plus”
There’s an old saying amongst writers that when you write satire, you’ll never beat real life.
This advert shows how: the problem is where to start amongst the rich pickings of nonsense? The idea that scrapping a perfectly good car and buying a new one is good for the environment? That’s an interesting suggestion, as the old, and by implication, dirty vehicles were made by the same people that now want you to buy new ones, so are car companies now saying the very vehicles they claimed were clean and effecient are actually dirty polluters? Have they just found this out?
The really lovely bits are in that green panel entitled, “The Environment Premium Plus.” As presented here, the ‘Environment Premium Plus’ package has the following points: on top of the government handout of €2500 for scrapping your old car, you’ll get an extra reduction, 0,9% Financing, Insurance, and a lengthened gaurantee.
The new Greenwash, coming to a town near you. And if you don’t drive the car companies will take your money anyway.
Back to more positive stuff soon, I promise.