Dr Harry Oosterhuis (H.)

 

Bicycling and bicycle policies from the angle of international comparison and cultural history

　

From the First World War until the 1960s, the bicycle was a popular means of individual transport all over Europe. After the volume of bicycle traffic peaked in the 1950s, it was rapidly outstripped by motoring. In many countries the share of the car in the total number of traffic movements (modal share or modal split) would surpass that of the bicycle by around 1960 – a development that came about slightly earlier in the United States. Growing prosperity fostered car-ownership and driving, while post-World War II traffic policies cleared the way for the dominance of the car on the roads. Urban sprawl and the up-scaling of town and country planning entailed that the number and distances of daily trips increased. Technocratic policymakers, urban planners and traffic engineers viewed motoring as inevitable progress and economic growth. The bicycle was discredited as an old-fashioned, slow and unsafe means of transport that hampered freer circulation of traffic. Insofar cycle paths had been put in already, they were increasingly neglected if not dismantled in order to make room for moving and parked cars. Cycling also suffered from a loss of social status: those without a driver’s license or who could not afford a car (lower income groups, youngsters, students and women) cycled out of sheer necessity.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, bicycle use seemed headed for an all-time low. Since the 1970s, however, it has managed to regain support from the general public as well as from governments. The energy crisis, worries about environmental pollution and traffic congestion as well as criticisms of large-scale and ‘inhuman’ technological systems, triggered bicycle activism and new bicycle policies. In ‘alternative’ ideologies and countercultures, bicycles acquired the status of perfect means of transportation, an unmatched example of ‘suitable technology’ and of energy- and environmentally-conscious application of ‘human power’. The modal share of the bicycle increased again, in some countries and cities more sharply than in others, but nowhere did it reach the pre-1960s level. Over the last two or three decades, national governments and cities throughout the Western world, from Finland to Australia and the Unites States to Austria, as well as the European Union, have launched ambitious policy statements and programs aimed at promoting cycling.

In this context, policy documents increasingly began to picture the bicycle as a clean, silent, sustainable, healthy, flexible, inexpensive and democratic means of transport that may contribute to solving an array of problems, such as traffic congestion and unsafety, environmental and noise pollution, the spilling of energy sources, ill health and welfare diseases, social exclusion and feelings of insecurity in public urban spaces. Policymakers seemed quite optimistic about the possibilities to increase the bike’s modal share in daily transport by means of infrastructural and social engineering, and programs for bicycle promotion. It is striking perhaps that new bicycle policies were introduced not only in countries with relatively high levels of bicycle use (Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Belgium (Flanders) and Finland, and, to a lesser extent, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Austria and Switzerland), but also in countries with low levels of bicycle use (Great Britain, the United States and Australia). By contrast, in countries in the Southern and Eastern part of Europe, bicycle policies, if in place at all, have hardly showed any further development in recent decades.

The policy rhetoric and the arguments reinforcing cycling policies tend to be similar in most countries, but the implementation of policy plans and the actual modal share of the bicycle in passenger transport reveal significant and often persistent differences between countries. Around 2000 the bicycle’s modal split amounted to 27 percent in the Netherlands and 20 percent in Denmark. It varied between 7 and 12 percent in Germany, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden and Finland; between 4 and 5 percent in Italy, France and Norway; and between 2 and 3 percent in Great Britain, Canada, Ireland and the Czech Republic. And it stagnated at around 1 percent in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Portugal and Greece. The annual distance traveled by bike per capita in kilometers fluctuated between 850 and 1020 in the Netherlands and Denmark; between 250 and 330 in Belgium, Germany, Sweden and Finland; between 140 and 230 in Ireland, Italy and Austria, between 70 and 100 in France, Great Britain and Greece; while it did not reach 50 in Portugal and Spain. Whereas all residents of the Netherlands and Denmark, on average, have a bicycle, the same goes for 3 out of 4 Germans; 2 out of 3 Swedes and Fins; about 1 out of 2 Belgians, Italians and Austrians; 1 out of 3 Frenchmen and British; 1 out of 4 Portuguese; and 1 out of 5 Spaniards.

These considerable differences in levels of bicycle use and ownership between nations raise several questions. For one thing, why do significantly more people bicycle in some countries? Is it possible to explain differences in the frequency of bicycle-use on the basis of geographical and climatological conditions, environmental planning and traffic infrastructure, composition of the population, habits with respect to passenger transport, and/or the image and appreciation of the bike? Are policies useful tools for promoting cycling and what is the impact of particular policy measures in various countries?

In this project I consider these various questions and concerns on the basis of social-scientific and historical bicycle studies as well as policy documents. I argue that these studies and also the bicycle policy documents leave several of the questions unanswered, which justifies a critical consideration of some of their basic assumptions. The cultural-historical and national dimension of cycling has largely been ignored in policy-oriented bicycle studies as well as in policy-making. My claim is that cultural-historical and national contexts are highly relevant for explaining international differences in both levels of bicycling and the effectiveness of bicycle policies. Specifically, this will be demonstrated by comparing national bicycle cultures in English-speaking countries and Germany versus those in the Netherlands and Denmark. In this way, this project seeks to bridge the gap between bicycle policies and the interrelated social scientific research on the one hand and cultural and historical research of bicycling on the other.