Euro-envy in Basel and Berlin

I was in Europe on business this past week, Sunday through Friday, and spent my time in Basel and Berlin, which are both serious cycling cities. There were crowds of cyclists out, as the weather was mild. Pictures are worth thousands of words, and I'm suffering from mild jet-lag, so I'll just post some pictures and make a few comments. I describe this kind of post as "Euro-envy".

I know I've got a worldwide readership, and those of you who live in "real" cycling cities in Europe and elsewhere may well find this to be just boring tourist shots (and not great photography at that,) and for this I apologize in advance (although there may be one or two pieces of hardware below that are interesting). But this is mainly for those of us in America for whom bicycle culture is still on the outside looking in.

Arrived in Zurich on Sunday AM and took the train to Basel, where I had a day of meetings on Monday. Basel is a beautiful city situated on a bend in the Rhine, nestled in that corner of Switzerland that is right at both the French and German borders. Basel is a quite hilly place, with its share of rough cobblestone paving, and although they have bike-rental right at the Bahnhof, the profusion of streetcar tracks and the difficult navigation of the city's medieval planning kept me at pedestrian status. There is some bike infrastructure in Basel, but really it's just the social contract—well-educated motorists who are aware of the cyclists—that makes things work.

My first image tells quite a story by itself. Family of five. Mom hauling a trailer with kid #3, kids #1 and #2 on their own bikes, with Dad sheperding them. Mind you, this is the heart of Old Basel, at one end of the Mittler Brücke ("Middle Bridge") that crosses the Rhine. Here about 5 streets come together, as well as a couple (at least) of tram lines. True enough, it's a Sunday and a beautiful one at that, but ask yourself: Where in the US could this happen? Nowhere. Pick cities 1, 2, and 3 from League of American Cyclists best cities (I think they're Portland, Davis, and Boulder.) Would you see kiddo #2 on his own bike out there? I'm thinking not.

There were many families out, but this was the largest group that I saw. Lots of couples, with Mom having the child-seat or trailer setup and Dad getting to ride solo. Kind of unfair to the moms, always having to be the ones who lug the kids, but such is life.

Monday was all in meetings inside (it was a business trip, after all) and early, early Tuesday AM I caught the EasyJet to Berlin. (I must admit that knowing what I know about the carbon footprint of flying, and having the availability of trains, I was very tempted to try and build my itinerary around nothing but trains as a mode of transportation while in Europe, but it would have added probably two days to my stay to do so, and so was hard to justify to our company accountants.) Anyway, since I didn't have my next day-long meeting until Wednesday, I had an entire day to hoof it around Berlin with my cell-phone camera at the ready.

Berlin, Brunnenstraße north of Rosenthalerplatz: saw this nifty cargo bike with outrigger "rolling kickstand". This is a Biria-make postman's bike. Just look at the beautiful sweep of that split top tube, coming up to support the rear rack! A picture of the bike in action (being piloted by a familiar figure) with the kickstand up is here. Biria also sells bikes in the US, but not, unfortunately, this lovely model.

Rosenthalerstraße: the sleek iconic quality of this bike struck me. This is a classic Euro single speed. Fixies, even in Berlin, which is a very flat, infrastructure-rich, cyclist-friendly city, have not caught on here. Of the thousands of bikes I saw in use, I saw only one fixie, and it was parked. So think of this bike as "your Fixie's grandmother". Unlike what we think of as "fixies" these standard bikes are everywhere.

Rosenthalerstraße, heading south towards Aleksanderplatz (the omnipresent "Full-screenFernsehturm" TV tower in the distance): typical group of cyclists. Two of the seven cyclists in this picture have helmets. I would say that is about a normal ratio for Berlin. The Basel ratio is slightly higher.

Hackescher Markt: Nifty all-weather pedicab. These were all over. Several different companies running them.

F

Unter den Linden ("Under the linden trees", the broad tree-lined boulevard heading west to the Brandenberg Gate): The two shots, above and below, are the same intersection a few seconds apart as the light turned from red to green. The knot of cyclists are taking up the entire lane and spread out according to their different speeds. This is just Not A Problem in European cities. Sigh.

Charité Medical School, north central Berlin: I thought these little hedged and gated bike-parking yards were very nice. Secure and sightly. They are on the east side of the Max-Planck-Institut für Infektionsbiologie and can be clearly seen on Google Maps' satellite view.

Hannoversche Straße, near the medical school: This is a fairly unusual classic German motorcycle, an AWD. I'm no motorcycle fanatic, and certainly no expert, but I was struck by the aesthetics of this one. Look at that sleek crankcase and shaft drive. What a beauty!

Hauptbahnhof on Invalidenstraße: Right outside the main train station is a group of Deutsch Bahn "CallBikes". It is the German Railway-sponsored approach to city bikes, and it's quite different from Vélib or the others, as it has no fixed stations.

For the CallBikes system, you need a cellphone and an available CallBike (they are scattered everywhere). If the lock on the bike flashes green, it is available for rent. You call the phone number printed on the CallBikes to be texted the four-digit code which enables you to open the bike lock. When you're at your destination, you lock the CallBike to a stationary object anywhere inside the core city area. When you close the lock, a four-digit receipt code appears on the bike's display. Call the number printed on the bike, text the receipt code and the location of the bike and you're done. It will be interesting to see how this system works over time. I did see some people riding them, but I saw a lot more just sitting about.

(Sorry about the blurry shot—my group was walking fast to get to a meeting, and this was taken on the run).

Elisabethenstrasse, back in Basel: The Swiss Flyer is an E-bike produced by the Swiss firm Biketec AG, who have been at the E-bike game for a while. This is a small-wheel (20") version -- they have a lot of 26" styles and even an E-tandem! Most E-bikes, I think, use hub-motors, but this one appears to have a motor integrated with the front chainwheel (and concealed by the chain-guard.) One of my hosts in Basel is shopping for an E-bike. I think sales of these things are just exploding. This shot is a night shot of a window display, so it's a little blurry.

Intersection of Stänziergasse and Birsig-Parkplatz in old central Basel: Another night shot. This is a broad intersection of streets with lots of sidewalk-cafe action going on on a Thursday night in a pretty popular section of town, and the twentysomethings are getting around on.. bikes, of course. Lots and lots of them. (These bike parking areas are also visible on Google satellite view.) The near corner and the far diagonal corner of this intersection are packed with bikes. Most of them are locked with a short, heavy cable lock, which appears to be the security system of choice, much more popular than the U-lock seen more here in the US.

To an American, the most remarkable thing about cycling in urban Europe is it's not remarkable at all.

Cyc-Vac-Recon

Cycling vacation reconnaissance is (I suppose you could say) what I was up to the first three days of this week. My wife, younger daughter and I spent a few days on the Rhode Island shore (at Narragansett) doing some hiking, including some hiking on what is probably the number one bicycle tourism spot in the lower 48 (or at least New England). That is Block Island, RI.

Block Island is strategically located between RI and Long Island, and is served by ferries from Point Judith RI, Newport RI and Montauk NY. While there are certainly cars on the island (it has plenty of miles of paved and semi-paved roads), traffic is nonetheless very light, and the locals seem to be very cognizant of cyclists, so (I'm presuming here) automobile-bike accidents are rare.

The island is beautiful, filled with not only natural beauty (sea views and some outstanding cliff-protected beaches) but also much history, both maritime and architectural. The Southeast Lighthouse is pictured at right. It's on the National Register and the Historic American Buildings Survey. It was moved (taken down and rebuilt, I guess, brick by brick, as it's darn hard to move a brick building) back from the edge of the cliff it overlooks to prevent collapse.

Good seafood abounds, of course. The terrain can be intimidating to those once-in-a-blue-moon cyclists; climbing out of the village on Spring Street was an uninterrupted 1-1/4 mile climb. Not terrifically steep, mind you, but still a sizable challenge for a cyclist uncertain of their gears.

While there are on-island 5 bicycle rentals (one rental agency notes "Bikes with 6-27 speeds available"), it seems most on-season tourists brought their own. The ferries were packed with bikes, and they charged $6 to carry a bike, which for an hour ferry ride seemed a little steep to me. Bikes are accommodated elsewhere -- most on-island taxis, for example, have hitch-style bike racks for getting the less conditioned cyclists up those hills.

I won't go into a diatribe of the bicycling errors and risks I saw, suffice it to say that I'm sure many people go expecting a carefree day of cycling (away from those pesky cars) and find other pesky aspects of reality crawling their way into the picnic. I'd be willing to bet that flats, other minor mechanical failures, hills, and sunburn top the list. There is another non-bicycling hazard that exists on Block Island, and that is Lyme disease. BI has historically been endemic with it; however, I was told that BI has eliminated their deer population, and evidently that has had some effect. So, insect repellent is on the list of Block Island musts.

But the island looked great, even if a very touristy destination. It's for a reason. I've got vacation hours to burn at work, so I'm going back in the off-season, you can be sure.

Practical Cycling Defined

I define practical cycling most succinctly as "cycling miles that displace motor vehicle miles."

A group of six (only six?) high-school counselors has done a significant bit of practical cycling by touring college campuses (in my stomping ground, in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware) to check them out for their student counselees. Twelve days, more than a dozen colleges. 400 miles. (Now that I think about it, although that's only 33 miles a day, it still would take some selling to convince most people not doing serious cycling already that they could handle that.) This is significant. Yes, it's billed as "combining a serious tour with their love of bicycling," but this is ordinary people doing a sustained tour at 1/4 to 1/3 the rate of the Tour de France.

The story in the New York Times is here.

I'm impressed, and I hope their numbers grow next year.

Times Square

I asked my younger daughter (who lives in New York City) what she thought about the new Times Square makeover (where Broadway has been blocked from automobile traffic in a couple of places) and she seemed dismissive. (She might have called it a "gimmick".) I think that she, as an adoptive New Yorker, wants to keep away from touristy areas, and Times Square certainly qualifies.

It's weird to think about cheap folding lawn chairs in the left-over spaces where Broadway used to cross 7th Avenue (which remains open, by the way.) Supposedly, the city takes up the chairs every night and redistributes them every morning. Is this any way to run a national urban landmark?

But there's something important about the New Times Square makeover by the Planning Department of New York City. If nothing else, it's the first U.S. project (ad hoc though it be) in my memory whose momentum is decidedly anti-car. Nicholai Ouroussoff reviews the "design" in this article. Nick O (as I will dare to call him) is right on the money about the unplanned nature of the action (as he says, "this is not the Piazza San Marco in Venice or even Trafalgar Square", but I think it is so important to expose people (even if they are unwitting tourists!) to the idea that the U.S. can have a "public realm" that isn't driven (sorry!) by traffic engineering.

Over at the very interesting blog, World Streets (newly on my blogroll), there is a very interesting article (which promises to be a series) by Paul Barter, a professor in public policy at the National University of Singapore, about "The Battle for Street Space" that is really worth a read (as is much of the other stuff over there.) I see many people from all over the world on that blog talking about 30 kph (yes, kph) speed limits everywhere except on highways. My first reaction is to lecture these people about how this will never fly in the U.S.; the auto is forever king here. But maybe not -- Times Square is a very interesting precedent. It will be fascinating to see where it goes.

AIA-SFO: Integrating Bikes and Business

Next week I'll be attending the American Institute of Architects (AIA) convention in San Francisco. Architects are (at long last) becoming environmental leaders in the professional communities, and "cycling" and "environmental" fit together nicely for me, so I'll be taking a folding bike to push the envelope of "green consciousness" for architects. I don't want to be unfair here—I've noticed that there exists a large intersection among architects, cyclists, and (even) bike builders, it's just that, when it comes to cycling, and particularly practical, everyday cycling, there's a lot more lip service than action. So I hope to turn that around in a small way.

My company, Nemetschek NA, produces a computer-aided design software called Vectorworks. It's used primarily by architects (as I am), but it has great 3D and solids capabilities, and I want to design bikes with it. (This would be just another integration of life, work, and avocation for me.) I've designed buildings and shoes with it, but not yet bikes. If you've used CAD to design bikes, I want to talk to you, so leave me a comment and a way to get in touch!

San Francisco is a city where I've spent time before. And it has hills that are serious challenges to walk up, much less bike up. I don't think I have a bike set up with the gears needed for all of San Francisco.

That's the bad news. The good news is, I'm going to be spending almost all my time in the "SoMa" (South of Market) area, which is quite flat, by SFO standards. Following one of the guiding principles of Practical Cycling, "Research your Route", I've done some homework on SFO. Here's a nifty topographical map of the city overlaid with bike routes. Below is a Google map of what I'm going to be up to. The aqua-colored destination in the middle of the Castro district is where my friend Scott and his wife Polly reside, and that is at the top of a pretty awesome hill, one I don't think I'd try and tackle unless I had about 22" gears. So Scott and I will have to meet elsewhere (maybe at the "Zeitgeist" bar, which is I'm told a favorite of the local bike couriers), or I'll take the bus to his house.

View SFO AIA Convention 2009 in a larger map

So, I've decided to take my folder for the flat areas. I bought (off my brother, who wasn't using it) a Dahon "Speed D7" folder, (mine being about 8 years old, not quite as nice as the one in the link), and a Samsonite "Oyster" standard-airline-case (SAC) that it fits in for transport. I spent a weekend overhauling it, getting it properly equipped for minimal practical cycling (tool kit, pump, lock, patches, lights,) and learning how to pack it. (I made some breakthroughs in this area. There are websites that state that you can't pack a Dahon folder in an Oyster without removing the stem and handlebars, a major pain since I added a cyclocomputer mount. I found that I need only remove the wheels, and everything else fits neatly. (I'll leave the details of that for another post.)

I was in Seattle at the beginning of April and used the trip out there as a first shake-down trip for the travelling cyclist use-case. Excepting a tangled chain on initial unpacking of the bike, everything went surprisingly well. I found the little Dahon, while a bit short in the leg for my tall frame, to still be an acceptable ride for up to, say, 20 miles. I put about 75-80 miles on the Dahon in 5 days, in Seattle, a city not devoid of hills itself. The gear range is rather limited, at both the top and (somewhat surprisingly, given the 20" wheels) the bottom.

So, if you're in San Francisco next week and see the very tall guy on the clown bicycle wearing the Vectorworks shirt, that will be me. Flag me down and tell me you're a reader of A Practical Cyclist, and I'll be glad to invite you to the Vectorworks "City to Green" party on Thursday night! And if by chance you're attending the AIA convention, please drop by the Vectorworks booth, #1651, and let's talk bicycles, design, and computer-aided design.

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Happy New Year to All!

For me, it's that most mixed-emotion of times -- time to reset the odometer. There may be those who say that one should just go on running up the miles, but not me. I think goals are good things to have, and you have to know where you're starting. My goal last year was 3000 miles, which I almost made, even considering that I didn't ride much in January or February.

This year is starting out with ugly Maryland weather, rainy and cold, but I'll be out in the first two months of the year this time around. I'm wanting to make 3300 miles of "practical" (displaced automobile) miles, and that means I need an early start.

I'm feeling pretty positive about the blog. Something just happened that has never happened before. My last post (the cargo bike review) got two comments on the first day -- whoo hoo! There are many good topics for the Practical Cyclist this year. I expect I'll be writing on my winter clothing in some more detail before the winter goes much further, and I have some overseas adventures planned with a folding bike that I've, uh, "re-cycled" from my brother.

Here's hoping the year has good cycling in store for you, too.

Final word on Stockholm

Before I leave it, a few last words on Stockholm:

Stockholm Bike Fashion: The "fixie" craze has yet to hit Stockholm the way it has in the US. If you have a single-speed, it's an standard* steel-frame, coaster-brake style. Other "standards" are three-speeds. (I would call an "standard" an "old person's bike" except that young people who are not bike enthusiasts ride them too. So they are just "standard".) Enthusiast bikes are derailleur-equipped late-model mountain bikes or road bikes with bright paint jobs. (I did see one Rohloff-equipped bike. Nice.) I saw aluminum, not carbon, frames in the display windows of the one bike shop I stopped at. As for couture, I saw only a few people wearing Spandex, and they were all club riders. For that matter, I was remarkable (even in my street clothes) for wearing gloves.

Infrastructure / Pedestrians: Bikeways, where they are uninterrupted, are great, e.g. along a waterfront, especially where there is some separation (other than a line of paint) from pedestrians. But they are always problematic where they end, or have to deal with intersections, or cross roads. There is a lot of "engineering" (signalization, signage, and control) involved. And the cyclist always has the option of using the roadway anyway. Just as in the US, delivery trucks and cars park in the bikeways, forcing the cyclist into the motorway. The adjacency of bikeways to pedestrian areas is problematic, I think bikes (moving at 10-20 mph) belong more with cars than with pedestrians. I found myself using my bell a lot.

*I've been, justly enough, taken to task for my earlier use of the term "ordinary", which historically refers to a "penny-farthing" type bicycle.

Stockholm Cyclist Holiday...

..well, it was really a business trip, but I was able to tack on a day to do an extensive tour of the city by bike. As I said in an earlier post, I'd never been in Sweden before. I found it very English-friendly. (This is good thing, as my Nordic is pretty non-existent. One of the weird things about visiting Sweden is that "Hello" in Nordic is "He!" pronounced "hey". It's tempting to just say "hey" right back, kind of comfortable and informal, until you realize that you're sending the wrong signal about which language you prefer.)

Stockholm has a lot of practical cyclists. It would not be hard to believe that (at least in the warm months) 20 to 25 8 to 10 percent of city-dwellers commute to work, or do at least some practical transportation on bikes. The city has an extensive network of bike lanes, and the sensible Swedes wear helmets in far greater proportion than I've seen elsewhere in Europe. I'd guess 50% of the urban riders I saw wore helmets, which may not sound like a lot, until you see Paris where the percentage is in the low (and I mean low) single digits.

Stockholm has a public bike-sharing system called "Stockholm City Bikes". It has been put together by Clear Channel advertising, who I think also did the Washington DC "SmartBike" system. The systems look pretty much identical: the bikes (3 speed w/ coaster brakes on the rear) are the same (see my post on SmartBike here), and the rental system is very similar, with a 3-hour usage limit. SCB is more tourist oriented, though, with a 3-day pass available (for between $15 and $20) at the central railway station.

I got a better deal than SCB, though. I got a free bike for two days from my hotel (a very nice central hotel called the Scandic Anglais). Evidently this is not unusual. The larger hotels keep a collection of bikes available for patron use, and you just check them out and a deposit is put on your hotel tab until you return them. Simple and convenient. The bikes are nothing special: one-speed "ordinaries" with rear coaster brake (coaster brakes suck, by the way) and drum brake on front, rack, mudguards, and lights. Pretty basic stuff, and not very different from what a lot of locals use on their own. Just guessing, I would say that about 50% of the locals were on "ordinaries" while the other half were on more high-tech modern bikes. I saw very few people on the SCBs. It was late September, and past the tourist "high season", so maybe that was it -- the SCBs were mainly for tourists.

The SCB website is here, but it's in the off-season now. Bikes are available only for seven months of the year, 3/31 to 10/31. I guess winters are pretty tough in Stockholm. One of my acquaintances there said he had a co-worker who put on studded tires and rode year-round, but he was considered extremely hard-core by his colleagues.

So, to document the holiday and encourage other tourist-cyclists in Stockholm, I've mapped my city tour on Google Maps below. My first day tour (8.5 miles, Friday afternoon) is in red, and my longer Saturday tour (19.5 miles) is in purple:

View Larger Map

..and, even more fun, have an annotated collection of "travelogue" photos on flickr here. You can click on the map link on each photo page to see where it was taken in Stockholm. I hope you enjoy seeing Sweden's capital by bike!

Brief Interlude

Well, I seem to be having trouble finding time to get to my blog again. (There's probably a word for it - "blogpostaphobia" or something.) Anyway, to while away the time until I can get it together to finish the story of Stockholm, here's a link to the New York Times Biking Travel Guide section. (Did you know the Gray Lady had a section on bicycle tourism? I didn't).

Enjoy! I'll be back soon. Really.

Stockholm Business / Cycling Trip — 1

I just got back from my first time in Stockholm. Business trip. Lovely city in late September, and lovely people, too. I'll put several posts up about the trip, which culminated in a wonderful 5-hour cyclist's tour of Stockholm. I'll be putting a map up on Google and some linked pictures up on Flickr. about that, also.

Preparation: I'd never been to Stockholm before, so I got out the NYT's "36 hours" feature on it, which wasn't too old. I find the "36 hours" series try to find the very new, very hip, or offbeat places that you might not find in a conventional guidebook. (As I was meeting up with locals for business, I figured I would get plenty of the "standard tourist fare" from them.) Other than that, I looked up my hotel, my meeting places, and a couple of the places in NYT on Google Maps, and figured out how far apart things were. (My hotel was a couple of blocks from one of my meetings, and less than 4km from the other.) As for equipment, I took a helmet, U-lock, gloves, and a bandanna. As I was carrying on all my luggage, I wondered how the U-lock would look to the security screeners. (Outbound, no one asked anything. Coming home, the screeners asked to see it. I said, "It's a bicycle lock." The screener smiled and said, "I know, but she (pointing to the x-ray screener) wants to see it." All very good natured.) Also, a tourist tip: If you visit Stockholm, use the Arlanda Express high-speed train to get into town. Not much more expensive than a bus and much faster. And, you can pre-book on the Web and just use your credit card for ID in and out of town. Painless.

Geography / Geology: Stockholm is an archipelago. I rode on 7 bridge-connected islands when I was there. One of the first things you notice when you catch the Arlanda Express train into town is that the walls of the station itself are cave-like. No structure or walls, just hewn from rock, dark granite like stuff. At first I thought it might be decor, but I learned otherwise. It turns out Stockholm is underlain by a huge granite dome. (Question: what better place for a chemist to develop high-explosive to remove rock?)

Here's a picture of a "working bike". Notice the details. I was particularly impressed by the fact that the framemaker included diacritical marks in the lettering. Nice.

(Soon: A deal that's even better than Stockholm City Bikes..)