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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)
While other German cities have networks of cycle routes, cycle highways, and traffic calmed streets, Stuttgart has a couple of lanes here and there and a catastrophe of a website that gives the option a four lane highway or a magical mystery tour through a forest to a set of traffic lights that change every Tuesday.
So when the now Green Party dominated city government announced last week that they are considering a plan to improve the infrastructure in Stuttgart, with the goal that by 2020, 20% of all journeys will be by bike, people say things like “about time too” or “We’ll believe it when we see it” or most likely “Get out of the way of my Mercedes”.
As the local planners don’t seem to know what a bicycle looks like, the city commissioned a Herr. Dankmar Alrutz, from Hannover to do a report. He did something remarkable: he got on a bicycle with his team and tried out the infrastructure for himself.
And he’s not even Dutch.
He came back last week and told the city “beim Radverkehrsnetz besteht dringend Handlungsbedarf” which is German diplomatic for “It’s cr*p. Do something quickly.” He then gave a list of recommendations which some of his car-centric audience must still be recovering from:
- A network of 141km ‘main’ cycle routes that connect the centre with the surrounding area
- Another 100km of secondary cycle routes connecting the different areas in the city
- Signs showing cycle routes to be updated to modern standards. (Pointing them the right way would be a start.)
- Cycle lanes on the roads, but also some streets to be converted to cycle streets: cycles have right of way and cars are guests. This already happens a bit.
- Bikes to be carried on trams at all times -often people cycle into the city and use the tram home.
- Increase the stations for the successful Call-A-Bike bike share scheme and hurry up with the new scheme with bikes that have electric-assistance, because if you hadn’t noticed, Stuttgart is hilly.
Herr. Alrutz said that if Stuttgart invests about 1,8 million a year until 2020, ( Which is, let’s see, about the same as it would cost to build 1.5 kilometres of highway), they can create an environment where one in five people will ride a bike for transport. 20% of journeys by bike. Not for sport, but for everyday transport.
So far signs are encouraging: the worst that even the more right-wing CDU party could manage was to suggest a ‘pilot scheme’ for bike transport on buses. Perhaps someone should point out that there was already a very successful one in 2004.
The morning after. Tent still upright.
The weather has improved. This is good news. Even better is that my camera battery survived the storm in the night, wrapped up in a ziplock bag. My shoes didn’t do so well though: despite being wrapped thoroughly in a large rubbish bag, my shoes feel suspiciously heavy and before putting them on I pour enough water out to make a small puddle on the floor. Squelch to the unheated shower hoping that’s not the way the day will continue.
Dyke racing.
We leave a bit earlier than the previous day, in sunshine, and with a strong tail wind. Everything looks great although we all know we’ll probably get at least one soaking by lunchtime. We’re following dykes again. I’m fascinated by these as they are almost unheard of in the south, certainly on this scale. They provide a dual purpose of protection against the river and a flat means of communication between villages, and all we have to do is stay on the top and they bring us where we need to go. Or that’s what we think until the road stops abruptly in a farm. We see a group of walkers appear from behind a woodland, and the path they are using appears to be bikable . More to the point no-one wants to ride against the wind so we manhandle the bikes straight down the bank -I’ll say this for the Bakfiets, it has good brakes- squeeze through a wood, and find ourselves under a signpost for the Rhine bike way. Unfortunately we annoy the walkers who don’t hear the bike bells, and shout at us that we should whistle. That’s a new one.
Soaked again.
We cross flat countryside and roll through small villages with brick built houses which still remind me of the UK. We’ve learned that the showers are short lived, and we’ve been soaked and dried off so many times in three days that no-one even mentions it when a particulairly violent squall hits when we are about a kilometre away from the nearest cover. True to form, the sun emerges straight after the rain and we’re dry in minutes. I suggest to Alex I could have saved myself a shower if I’d known. He grins.
„I’m sharing a tent with you, so I’m glad you didn’t know“
Fair comment.
Blast furnace as village ornament
Duisburg creeps up on us. We’re riding through a picturesque village when we turn a corner and there is a blast furnace at the end of the street. A few kilometres later we reach the river once more and suddenly we’re in one of the centres of German heavy industry. Duisburg exists by an accident of geography. It’s where the Ruhr meets the Rhine.The Ruhr isn’t the biggest tributary of the Rhine, in fact it’s the 6th largest, but when the only option was hordes over some pretty steep hills, it made a handy route across the north of the country. The fact this link also led directly to the longest river in Western Europe, giving access to the sea and the cities to the south was an even greater bon us, so so there has been a harbour in Duisburg since records began, and probably long before. In the 19th century someone a few kilometres along the Rhur noticed that if they dug down a bit, there was lots of coal for the asking. Coal is heavy stuff, so this would have been of limited use, but with a but with a nice big river to take it away on, there was money to be made: the Rhine/Ruhr area became the centre of German heavy industry, and Duisburg, at the junction of the rivers, thrived.
Why Duisburg exists. Rhur meets Rhine.
More recently the city has become known for its enlightened approach to cycling infrastructure, as we cross the Rhine into the city we find ourselves on the sort of infrastructure that you dream about when following narrow painted ‘bike lanes’ through the door zone: segregated from traffic, bright red, wide and clean. Even better, we get a great view of the point where the Rhine and Rhur meet, so we stop for a few minutes to look at the meeting point of these two rivers which have affected the history of Germany so much.
A real bike lane being ignored by Alex.
A few minutes later I lose a foot. Not personally you understand, but from the Bakfiets. I stop to take a photo, and when I lift the stand the foot falls off onto the road. On closer examination it looks like the bolt holding the foot was overtightened and split the rubber. The bike wobbles a bit on its stand without the foot but that’s the only difference, well, that and the fact that for the rest of the journey my progress will be shown by small scratch marks wherever I stop. I’m literally making a mark wherever I go.
Edge of the Rhineland
We get a lot of time to appreciate the infrastructure in Duisburg, mainly because we get lost. I don’t know what it is with cities on this trip, we don’t seem to be able to leave without making a grand tour. After following the road we think is correct for several kilometres, we stop to ask for directions. The pedestrian we meet is helpful and gives detailed advice, but clearly can’t understand the map we’re using, which leaves us none the wiser. Finally after some more asking around we meet a restraunt owner who not only tells us where we are (on the Rhine cycleway) but also how to get out of this maze of streets and south. It doesn’t look promising. We end up on a road bordered by some pretty shabby apartments on one side and a massive steelworks on the other, but then we cross the railway, go through some woodland, and suddenly we’re in fields again. Duisburg has stopped as suddenly as it started.
And out in the fields again... Long way to Düsseldorf though.
However, all this getting lost and then finding the way means it’s now mid-afternoon and we’re a long way north of Düsseldorf, which itself is north of our campsite on the banks of the Rhine. Either we have to ride through one of the biggest cities in Germany in a few hours, or we have to try some wild camping.
First decent pic of the Bakfiets
Today everything is different: the rain has been replaced by sunshine, the sky is blue, and even the yesterdays side winds are behind us, literally: we’re riding due east so they should be pushing us along today. There is one thing missing: Travis. To lose what is effectively 33% of the group by day 2 may seem careless, so let me explain…
Where we camped. The source of much hilarity for the farmer next morning.
Alex and I set off from the campsite at about 1000 for a relaxed detour around Wijk. I wanted to think deep thoughts about our journey where the Rhine-Amsterdam canal meets with the Rhine, and I’d promised Eldest Son I’d take a photograph of the ferry. Travis, on the other hand, wanted to think deep thoughts with his coffee and journal. We didn’t have mobile phone coverage in the Netherlands, but I was on the Bakfiets, and Alex was on my Xtracycle, and we were going around three sides of the village whereas he would be going directly east, so we were pretty sure Travis would get there before us.
Wijk ferry
I didn’t get any deep thoughts at the river. We loafed about at the junction taking pictures of the ships, I went down to the river for the promised ferry pictures, and, then we found ourselves on the old side of Wijk, and stopped and wandered into the town to take some photos of the streets and the windmill, and some of the house boats in the harbour, one of which I’d buy tomorrow if I had the money, and could swim.
Space saving ideas at Wijk.
If only I could swim...
Dyke road. no sign of Travis, but is that Darth Vader in the distance?
So that’s how you find us on the dyke road towards Arnhem missing one of our group. Not that we were concerned about this. I’ve long known people have different riding styles. Mine is to hit about 18km/h and keep churning out the kilometres. Travis rides in a series of sprints, stoppng every few kilometres to enjoy the view, and racing on. We typically pass each other several times during the day, so we figure he will pass us, or we’ll find him on a bench. He knew where we were going and the route was well signposted. We keep going at a sedate 15-18km/h through pretty villages, remarkably like villages in the UK, without the traffic, and along the dyke of the Rhine towards Arnhem, stopping periodically to take pictures, get lunch, check for mobile phone coverage and on one occasion to send a postcard.
Like a British village without the shunting 4x4's.
The bridge at Arnhem. The bikes are where some of the fiercest fighting took place.
Arnhem is the destination for the morning. It’s the site of one of the hardest fought battles of the Second World War. On the 17th of September 1944, British, Polish, Canadian and American airborne troops landed around to capture of the bridges and hold them long enough for land-based troops to come and relieve them. Operation Market Garden was supposed to allow the Allies a route over the Rhine, directly into Germany and end the war within a year. Apparently some soldiers, believing they would be part of an occupation force in Germany, packed leisure things in their kitbags. The Allied troops met far stronger resistance than expected, including several divisions of German and Dutch SS troops, and German reenforcements poured into the area throughout the nine-day battle. The allies lost somewhere between 15000-17 200 troops, and the German forces 10000. There’s a memorial just below Arnhem bridge to troops from both sides, and this morning someone set up a table decked in a British flag, with photos, books and some of the things the troops were carrying, like a shaving brush. I never liked war memorials in the UK -they always seem a bit triumphalist- but this one is quite moving and personal.
Still no sign of Travis, but a few kilometres beyond Arnhem, we find a Mammoth looking as if it was waiting for us to pass before crossing the road to find a bit of tundra. Unfortunately he (or she) is only a sculpture, placed next to the bike path, and as the information is all in Dutch, we don’t know why.
Where the ferry wasn't
Suddenly we ride through some trees and over a narrow bridge, and there in front of us was the Rhine proper, much wider than the northern ‘old’ Rhine we’ve followed until now. It’s here that according to the map, we should cross to the south bank and enter Germany, but we are planning to save a few Euro by staying on the northern bank and cross using a bridge at Emmerich in Germany. Hopefully said bridge will have a bike lane.
Now the other side of the river is a different country, and we follow the dyke expecting the usual European Untion ‘Welcome to Germany’ sign when the border turns north. Unfortunately when we reach the border, there’s nothing of the sort: the only sign says „Diversion“ in German, and behind this there is a hole where the bike lane should be.
Welcome to Germany
We end up following a very unusual street: houses on the left are in the Netherlands, and those on the right are in Germany. Road markings are a mix of the two countries and Dutch and German street signs vie for attention. I wonder what it is like to live here- how do you talk with the neighbours? Do the two sides have seperate rubbish collections?
Which country am I in?
Just after a Dutch post box we turn right, into Germany. A few kilometres further we find our first major obstacle, a sort of wicket gate for bicycles which is too short for an Xtracycle or a Bakfiets. We consider the situation. To go back would mean a long detour and a busy road, but we can’t lift the bikes over the wicket. After looking around it dawns on us that the fence alongside is made of plastic and wire, designed as a portable electric fence for cattle. It isn’t electrified…
Five minutes later we are riding along the dyke.
After another quick fencing operation and a wiggle over some traffic lights, we arrive at the bridge in Emmerich, which fortunately has a bike lane. Even better, we have a signal, and can call Travis. It turns out that he’s behind us, still in the Netherlands.
Longest bridge in Germany, yes, it has bike lanes...
While Alex directs Travis to us I make a futile attempt to find a place for the night. When I return I find Travis tired and annoyed. I understand this: I’d be annoyed in his position. Unfortunately there’s nothing for it but to push on for the last few kilometres to the campsite. On the positive side the tailwind is still with us. Just as we are approaching the campsite we pass the massive bulk of the former Kalkar SNR-300 fast-breeder nuclear reactor. It was built from 1972, cost billions of Euros to build and run, and never produced a single watt of electricity. The project was cancelled in 1991 and the place was turned into a theme park called „Wunderland Kalkar“ Obvious when you think about it. I was hopeful it might have slogans like „You’ll glow after staying here!“ but unfortunately there isn’t (there was never nuclear material on site anyway) Just an open gate and a bicycle sign advertising the cafe.
What do do with a useless fast-breeder reactor? Make it a theme park, of course.
Finally we arrive in the village our campsite is in. Then we have to find the campsite. This is not helped by the owner assuming we came by car and giving directions from the Autobahn. Then the rain hits again. We find a campsite, not the one we booked, but by then we don’t care. We throw the tent up as fast as we can, tying the guy lines to the bikes because pegs won’t hold in the soggy ground, and insert our soggy selves into it.
Uses for a bike #2675: holding a tent up.
We add up the miles and I’m astounded to find we’ve managed a cool 110,99km, my first metric century. Suddenly it all feels worthwhile, to me anyway.
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?
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.
It’s been a bit of a fight with the internet provider but it seems they have now agreed with me that as I’m paying them a monthly fee, they probably should get on with making a connection and providing me internet access, so they sent someone to find the plug or to whatever it is that they need to do when customers move house. Goodness knows why big corporations find it so hard to handle this sort of thing. It also seems my cunning plan to keep entries appearing on a regular basis didn’t work as it was suposed to: unfortunately after getting the pictures up and ready, I didn’t have time to make the rest publishable before the connection went down, hence the silence, Sorry about that: I’ll rewrite those over the next few days. On the other hand I’ve come back to several kind comments and emails wishing us well with the move: many thanks for those.
The Xtracycle was used a lot in the move and at some point during the shuttling back and forth we managed to clock up 1000km since I accidentally reset the computer in February. This and the weight it’s been carrying help explain why the brake blocks were worn down to almost nothing, and were even showing bare metal at the back: the poor thing wasn’t made for this sort of punishment.
Anyway, we’re here: we have a garage that we can use, and which I’m making into a bike workshop, (more of that anon) in a network of relatively quiet streets we can cycle on without too much trouble from Mercedes Man: We can see green trees, the boys can get to the meadow to play within three minutes, and every couple of days a buzzard or two flies past, so on balance I’m happy…
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…
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.
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.