Last month almost 100,000 people registered to ‘Slip and Slide’ down Park Street in Bristol, UK. The 90-metre water slide – the brain child of living arts artist Luke Jerram – was part of Bristol’s ‘Making Sundays Special’ program. 65,000 people headed to Park Street to watch thrill-seeking ticket holders literally slide head-first downhill, as part of Jerram’s plan to ask people to take a “fresh look at the potential of their city and the possibilities for transformation”.

Then, last week, the bicycle ‘rock stars’ Janette Sadik-Khan and Mikael Colville-Anderson and more than 500 international cycling professionals and advocates descended on Australia for the Velo-City conference. The key messages from the four-day conference were:

• more cycling = less obesity/congestion/emissions
• poor infrastructure = biggest hurdle to more cycling

Robert Kretschmer @URBLR tweeted “Something I’ve taken from #vcg14: there are no ‘cyclists’, just people who cycle”.

So I’m asking….

Can playful initiatives like ‘Slip & Slide’ make cycling fun?

Yes, I think they can.

Cycling’s image in countries like Australia, New Zealand, the USA and UK doesn’t do it any favours. The majority of the population in these ‘want to get more people cycling’ countries think there are only two types of cyclist:

1. Extreme athletes – The people who get up before dawn, dress in Lycra, buy expensive bikes, cycle 200km before breakfast and shout abuse at car drivers
2. Long-distance environmentalists – we all have one of these in our office. They cycle at least 30 kilometres to and from work every day, wear khaki cargo pants and preach the health and environmental virtues to anyone who will listen.

I like a lot of people in both of these groups. I admire their dedication and determination. The problem is that the vast majority – the 70 percent of our population who drive to work alone every single day – just don’t get it and that’s where fun things like ‘slip and slide’ come in, because they attract so many participants and spectators.

Let’s consider creating a new image for cycling in 3 very different ways:

1. Let’s make cycling stylish

A couple of years ago my mate Jon Giles created ‘Style Over Speed’. Two or three times a year on a Friday night, 100 or so people get dressed up – think fine dresses and dinner suits – and cycle around Brisbane. You don’t have to wear gym gear to ride a bicycle.

2. Let’s make cycling fun

‘Chocolate Ride’ in Sydney is an almost calorie-neutral bike tour of chocolatiers, gelato manufacturers and patisseries. The half-day tour encourages people to ride bicycles, shop locally and have fun. Riding a bicycle doesn’t have to be serious.

3. Let’s invite everyone

More than 2 million people participate in Bogota’s Ciclovia each Sunday. 120km of Bogota’s roads are closed for the exclusive use of cyclists and pedestrians. Young people, old people, families and friends take to the streets and everyone is invited. Riding a bicycle should be fun for everyone.

For years, we’ve entrusted our cycling culture to a small group of policy experts and advocacy groups. The sight of unused cycling lanes and row after row of empty bike parking racks suggests they’ve failed. It’s high time we called on some fresh thinking, and maybe playful events like Slip and Slide, Style Over Speed, Chocolate Rides and Cyclovia are just the thing we need.

Where do these ideas fit in with what you are doing?

What inspires you?

What excellent cycling events have you seen?

Rachel Smith (rachel.smith@archtam.com) is an internationally-recognized urban planner and commentator, and principal transport planner with ArchTam’s Brisbane office. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter, or follow her blog here.

The post “Slip & Slide”…and cycle? appeared first on Blog.

Last week Jamie Oliver launched his latest campaign: better, healthier and affordable fresh food for everyday Australians in a bid to tackle Australia’s obesity epidemic. “We’ve got more opportunities to affect change than any Government,” said Jamie, and he’s right.

This guy reaches 300 million people on social media – that’s about 1 in every 20 people on earth. We love Jamie. He’s a bit like us. He went to a state school, grew up in a pub and his mum and dad are down-to–earth, working-class folk.

As I write this hundreds of people from across the globe have gathered in Adelaide – Australia’s ‘city of churches’ – for the Velo City Global Conference. Velo City, the world’s premier cycling conference with high-profile speakers from every continent, celebrates what’s great about bike riding and focuses on three key themes:

–          how to design our cities to make it easy for people to choose cycling;

–          how to motivate people to ride a bicycle;

–          how to create cultural change.

So to add to the debate, I’m asking, “should private companies and celebrities like, for example, Jamie Oliver, create change in cycling?”

Yes, I think they should.

I say let’s consider creating change in 3 very different ways.

1. Let’s focus on action

“Most cities in the world were bicycle friendly in the beginning” tweets @bicyclesa.

The problem is, now they are not.

“We need to stop taking baby steps to getting people on bikes” tweets @wheelwomenride “and get on with it!”

The problem is, in the western world, we fear failure.

Imagine we understand one real problem affecting everyday people in one real city. Imagine we take the real problem – perhaps a lack of safe off-road bike paths to school – in one self-contained city in Australia that’s somewhere like Rockhampton or Toowoomba. Then we put the best people with the best resources onto solving that problem. We could make one city really bicycle-friendly again.

2. Let’s identify new investment vehicles

The problem is “Less than 1/2 of 1 percent of the South Australian transport budget goes to cycling…” tweets @MarkParnellMLC.

The solution is that we need to put great-quality technical expertise into identifying new investment vehicles to leverage more money. Imagine we find partners who can provide capital or investors who provide seed capital. In London, Boris Johnson secured private investment to secure a cable car across the River Thames.

3. Let’s try a new design and delivery model

“Everything we need to make cycle-friendly cities was invented 100 years ago” tweets @FunOnTheUpfield.

We have the solution; the problem is, we don’t always have the best mechanism to deliver the solution.

Imagine if a private-sector entity were to deliver a fully integrated solution. They would design, build, finance, operate and maintain the bikeways, the education, promotion and enforcement – yes they’d operate the cycle proficiency training and they could even go out and book the car parked illegally on the bike path. If they succeeded and met their targets, they’d get paid. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t. Many Councils in the UK privatised traffic enforcement many years ago.

If we really want riding a bicycle to be a viable and normal way to travel then let’s focus on action, identifying new money and using a new delivery model. Because like Jamie Oliver says, its people like him who really do have more opportunities to affect the change that we all want to see.

Who are you looking to for guidance, hope and inspiration?

What are people doing that’s excellent?

Where do these ideas fit in with what you are doing?

Rachel Smith (rachel.smith@archtam.com) is an internationally-recognized urban planner and commentator, and principal transport planner with ArchTam’s Brisbane office. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter, or follow her blog here.

The post Who should lead cycling change? appeared first on Blog.

I gave my best friend, Sarah, the book The Power for Christmas. Yesterday she emailed me saying that “if it only does one thing – to make me grateful with my lot – then that’s enough for me.”

If you’ve read The Power, you know it says that “like attracts like” and that “what you give out you receive back.” Some would say it’s about being grateful, and I agree. It’s why I write in my gratitude diary every night.

Last week was a terrible week for cycling in Australia. Last Sunday, a car collided with a bunch of cyclists in Sydney, and an Adelaide woman died from injuries sustained after a collision with a car.

The next day, video footage was released in which a cyclist in Brisbane was hit from behind by a car. On Tuesday, a Melbourne taxi passenger opened a door in the path of a cyclist.

The list goes on, but I’ll stop the negative stories right here and simply ask, is Australia cycling against the Law of Attraction?

I think both cyclist and car drivers are.

I’ve had it with this car driver vs. cyclist war. The more I see, the less I like. It leaves my head spinning and my heart screaming and it’s undoing all the good work that many of us are doing to encourage riding a bicycle as just one step to help cut the Aussie obesity epidemic. As Jamie Oliver says, Australia is now fourth in the list of the unhealthiest places on planet earth.

Right now Australia has two problems.

Firstly, too much negativity. As The Power says, negativity creates negativity, which creates a vicious cycle of anger and resentment. Take my Facebook friend John. He likes to tell Council exactly what he thinks. But what it really means is that Council is diverted into solving John’s endless dissatisfaction and grievances.

As a nation we’re so angry that we never stop and think about how to solve the actual problems. If we really want things to change – for cyclists and for car drivers – we have to do the slow and difficult work to identify the real problems. Wouldn’t it be great if people like John were part of the solution rather than just shouting about the problems?

Secondly, like it or not, Australia will never be like Copenhagen or Amsterdam. Our land use planning is completely wrong for cycling. The Australian Dream was – and maybe still is – space: a big house, a big backyard, and space for lots of cars. Everyone copied everyone else and so now Australia is full of big houses. Normal is driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for to get to the job you need to pay for the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it. As Brisbane Lord Mayor Graham Quirk said at my Australian Citizenship ceremony last week, “We need to respect each other and we need to leave the hatred behind.”

Now, he wasn’t talking directly about cycling, but he’s right. Cyclists need to respect car drivers and car drivers need to accept that cycling is a valid mode of transport.

So let’s start cycling towards the Law of Attraction.

• Let’s celebrate the positive achievements, however big or small. As Bicycle Network tweeted last Friday, “Despite this week’s media storm, let’s not forget that Kirsty, a year 12 student, rode to school for the first time.”
• Let’s work on the things that we can influence and control, and ignore the ones we can’t. How about cyclists stop jumping red lights and swearing at car drivers and car drivers stop driving whilst talking on their mobile phones, driving too close, and beeping their horns?
• Let’s be grateful for what we have. Australia has some world-class cycling infrastructure; Brisbane’s Bicentennial Bikeway, and Bourke Street Bikeway in Sydney to name but two. Rottnest Island has the largest cycle hire in the southern hemisphere while my mate Jonathan Giles attracts more than 100 people to his “Cycle Chic” bike rides with just a couple of Facebook posts.

We create our reality with our thoughts. Australia may never be a cycling utopia, but different road users can respect each other, and we can leave the hatred behind. And if we all only do one thing, let’s cycle towards the Law of Attraction, not against it. Like my friend Sarah says, “we can start with being grateful with our lot.”

Rachel Smith (rachel.smith@archtam.com) is an internationally-recognized urban planner and commentator, and principal transport planner with ArchTam’s Brisbane office. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter, or follow her blog here.

The post Cycle toward the Law of Attraction appeared first on Blog.

Last weekend I met Australian Olympic gold-medal-winning swimmer Liesel Jones.

I didn’t know who she was.

We chatted about day spas, massages and fake tans! Liesel has a dream: to open the best urban day spa in Australia, and I for one know she’ll make her dream come true.

A recent article in The Urban Developer took a look at the rise in cycling and the growing demand for end-of-trip facilities – things like showers, lockers and cycle parking racks. The opinion piece noted that whilst the car is still the dominant mode of travel in Australia – and many cities around the world – the rise in travel by bicycle and scooter – and up-surge in joggers and runners – is creating both demand for new or retrofitted office premises that provide facilities, and instances where  some city landlords are charging a monthly fee in excess of $50 for bike storage and locker use.

At around the same time, my yoga buddy, Julie, a primary school teacher who knows nothing about urban planning, asked the bleeding obvious question: “why don’t gyms and hotel spas let city cyclists use their showers?”

As you can imagine, all of this got me thinking: will day spas increase cycling in our cities?

Yes, I think they will.

Take my Facebook friend Mitch Bright. He runs the Brisbane Airport Bicycle User Group. They’re campaigning for showers and lockers at the domestic terminal. He says it’s fine for overall-wearing ground staff to be sans shower but we apparently expect  pilots to be highly poised and very polished! I don’t know much about airports but I do know – from long stop-overs and a few accidentally missed flights – that most airports have lots of showers. They’re in the business lounges, in the new pay-as-you-go shower facilities, the in-terminal hotels, the food courts, the dangerous goods areas (not that I loiter there!) and next to the swimming pool, if you’re in Singapore.

Today on my 11-minute walk to work I loosely counted the number of possible showers. Two day spas; two hairdressers; a bike shop; one medical centre; two yoga studios; a backpackers hostel; and a servo (fuel station) with a shower in the disabled facilities. In total, I counted at least ten showers that have the potential – with a little imaginative entrepreneurial thinking – to be utilised by cyclists once or twice a week.

I know we can’t just let anyone use any shower anywhere, but we can identify opportunities to adjust how we use our existing assets. Showers and lockers cost money, and their merits are often called into question. If we really want cycling to be a central part of our cities we need to work together so that we all “sweat our assets.” The story of this success lies in our ability to identify the obvious opportunities, to understand which assets are underused, and to create partnerships which provide advantages for all.

I reckon that outliers like Liesel, with big ambitions and heaps of determination, have the sense to realise that if we work together we can make everyone’s dreams come true.

Rachel Smith (rachel.smith@archtam.com) is an internationally-recognized urban planner and commentator, and principal transport planner with ArchTam’s Brisbane office. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter, or follow her blog here.

The post Shower power appeared first on Blog.

ABC news Australia recently reported that 10 million people in the U.S. are unemployed.  Forty percent of these people have been unemployed for more than six months. Ten million is a huge number to grasp, until you think of it like this: Australia has a population of 23 million people. Imagine every other person being out of work. (In the U.S. it’s every 30th person.)

The story featured Janice, a former government worker, supporting two young children as well as her niece and nephew. Her kids wanted new toys and books, but the little money that was provided from welfare benefits and family support was spent on essentials like rent and food.

Which got me thinking: are shops that are not shops the future in our cities?

My favourite city is Berlin, and in my former neighbourhood, Prenzlauer Berg, there was Leila – a shop that was not a shop – divided into two parts: things that are free and things that you can borrow.

Project  initiator and not-shop-keeper Nikolai Wolfert once gave me a tour of the store. According to Nikolai the average western home has more than 10,000 items of stuff! Nikolai is passionate about sharing, trust, and creating good relationships in our communities. Ultimately he wants to help change our consumer behaviour. He is also a huge fan of Sydney’s Rachel Botsman, the leading advocate in collaborative consumption, whose book I recently borrowed from my friend Bronwyn’s friend Sam.

The free section of the shop is filled with things or stuff that people in the neighbourhood no longer need or don’t really have space for. Books, CDs, DVDs, china, cutlery, trinkets, clothes, shoes, bags, garden seeds and even welly boots adorn homemade shelves. You name it and it’s there! You basically go in and take it, but only if you really need it.

The second section is dedicated to borrowing. Two whole rooms of amazing stuff that you can use free of charge and then give back. People in the community have donated their things for other people to use. It’s the ultimate in creating a resilient community and being good neighbours. You can borrow almost anything: musical instruments, dining room chairs, camping equipment, gardening tools, outdoor furniture, yoga mats, skateboards, children’s toys, kid’s books, cookery books, suitcases, hairdryers, irons and ironing boards, cots, baby change tables, rice cookers, blenders, saucepans, blankets, children’s car seats, bikes, cycle helmets, BBQs, picnic baskets, car tools and DIY books. You can even borrow gardening overalls!

I’ll confess the day I first visited I felt a fraud. After several days trawling around the second hand stores and the flea market without success, I had had to go and buy a clothes airer from a department store. Whilst at first I felt a bit embarrassed and ashamed of my shiny, plastic-wrapped, new purchase, I left the not-shop feeling happy…because I’d agreed to donate my airer to Leila when I left Berlin.

Normalising borrowing is going to be a long journey. When Prince Charles talked of his environmentally friendly lifestyle – recycling old curtains into cushion covers – it was scoffed at by the media as penny pinching.

Most of us have spare rooms, garages, cupboards, and wardrobes full of stuff and junk we neither use nor want. We are addicted to stuff. I’ll be the first to admit that only yesterday another handbag, that I don’t need and I can’t afford, caught my eye! (Note: I didn’t buy it because I’m buying nothing new in 2014!)

But things really are changing. British chain Marks & Spencer offers customers discounts in exchange for unwanted clothes, which are then donated to Oxfam. Last year in Sydney, meanwhile, more than 7,500 sellers took part in the Garage Sale Trail, an event to promote community recycling of unwanted stuff…and yes, most people took part because they wanted to de-clutter their homes.

These stories, and what I’ve seen at Leila, show that sharing, borrowing, lending, making, and mending might just be the future of shopping in our cities in these times of global austerity. I reckon Janice and Mrs. Merkel would agree. What do you think?

Check out the Leila shop at www.leila-berlin.de.

Rachel Smith is an internationally-recognized urban planner and commentator, and principal transport planner with ArchTam’s Brisbane office. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter, or follow her blog here.

The post The not-shop appeared first on Blog.

Last week my colleague sold her bike. She said if there was infrastructure where she lives — like the floating suspension bridge in Eindhoven, Netherlands, or the proposed SkyCycle above London’s rail lines — she’d cycle. Until then she said, “our roads are too dangerous for women.”

It’s not just here in my hometown of Brisbane, Australia, that women are scared. The problem is the same in London too. Forty cyclists were killed there in 2012, the majority by heavy goods vehicles.

I interviewed women in Australia to find out why the bicycle was the ‘elephant in the room.’ I wasn’t surprised with the answers I heard at coffee shops, yoga classes, and at workplaces: women didn’t ride because of the lack of separated cycle infrastructure. What women wanted was complete separation from all parked and moving cars.

In Copenhagen, a city of 560,000 bicycles, 521,000 people, and 35,000 cycle parking spaces, 85 percent of residents own a bike; 70 percent cycle all year round; and 60 percent use their bikes every day. A quarter of all families with two children own a cargo bike. In Denmark, cycling is chic, stylish, and sophisticated, but Copenhagenites don’t only cycle because it’s good for their health or their environment. They cycle because it’s the fastest, safest, easiest, and most convenient mode of transport — because their city has a network of separated bikeways.

I’ve visited 21 ‘cycling cities’ — the famous ones in Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany, as well as the lesser-known icons, such as Bogota, Colombia — to discover firsthand what infrastructure had transformed a city into a ‘cycling city.’ What I found was that each city had its own unique network of bikeways, but there were common themes: four to five metres of usable cycling space, complete separation from motorised traffic, a consistent level of service, as well as high-quality streetscaping and signage. All of the cycle routes in all of the cities were designed with cycling in mind — they were direct, quick, and traffic free. They were lined with cosy cafes, enticing boutiques, and townhouses with window boxes. Above all, they were beautiful.

Here in Australia, like in the U.S. and U.K., we have a problem with width and protection. We have some cycle lanes, but they are skinny, unprotected, on-road cycle lanes on busy highways full of big trucks, and often less than one metre wide. ‘Normal’ people — women, children, seniors, families, tourists (not the self-labelled ‘lycra clad roadies’)  — don’t ever consider riding a bicycle because it’s just too dangerous. In an attempt to ‘get more people cycling more of the time,’ councils build more skinny, unprotected, on-road cycle lanes, and not surprisingly, the vicious cycle of people not riding bicycles continues.

In 2010 I launched my Cycling Super Highways concept: a vision for seven-metre-wide, six-lane cycleways (fast, medium, and slow lanes) – the highway of bicycling – that are completely separated from cars, and most importantly, designed for everyone, including people new or returning to cycling, sports cyclists in training, time-constrained commuters, kids with bikes with stabilisers, seniors on power-assisted bicycles, and mothers on cargo bikes cycling with their weekly shopping.

I know we can’t just go out digging up roads and knocking down houses to build Cycling Super Highways, but we can identify opportunities to reshape our towns and cities to make them safer for cycling.

The Los Angeles Department of Transport was right when it said, “for the bike to catch on we need a revolution in our bicycle infrastructure.” If we really want cycling to be a central part of our lifestyle, our transport system and our cities, we need a ‘separate infrastructure revolution’ because that’s what women want.

Rachel Smith is an internationally-recognised urban planner and commentator, and principal transport planner with ArchTam’s Brisbane office. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter, or follow her blog here.

The post What women want appeared first on Blog.

On his blog ‘Cycling in a broad church,’ @GregVann recently wrote, “Danes don’t consider themselves cyclists – just as they use vacuum cleaners, but don’t consider themselves ‘vacuum cleanerers’!’

This got me thinking. Are we overthinking cycling in Australian cities?

I think we are.  There are four trends allowing overthinking:

1.  Choices

We have so many choices available to us today. We can choose where to live, where to work, where to send our kids to school, and even where to spend Christmas.

When I was growing up there was one state school and everyone went to it. Almost all the Dads worked at the chipboard factory and the mums got whatever job was available close to home. As for Christmas, no one dreamed of a beach vacation. You went to Granny’s; that’s just what happened.

We now overthink everything while popular media tells us to value being ever richer and more successful.

It’s the same with cycling. Aussie cities want to be like Copenhagen and Amsterdam. We want leaders like Boris Johnson and Janette-Sadik-Khan. We want our public bike shares to be as successful as those in Paris and Dublin. We desperately seek advice from ‘successful’ cities in Europe, but then we get confused with all the conflicting ideas and we end up ignoring our ‘cultural literacy’.

Choice has made us overthink everything and as a result we’ve ended up doing very little.

2.  Entitlements

We have developed an extraordinary sense of entitlement.

Most Aussies feel entitled to have lots of money, to drive to work, and to have their opinions listened to.

When these expectations are not fulfilled, as they often are not, we refuse to accept it and begin overthinking why we are not getting what we deserve.

In the world of cycling it’s the same:

• Motorists think cyclists should pay registration;
• Sport cyclists think slow riders should move out of the way when they yell “bike back”;
• Cyclists think pedestrians should walk in single file on shared paths.

Admittedly these are slight exaggerations, but you get the gist!

The entitlement obsession has led to too much overthinking. Too much time is focused on arguing, being angry and trying to get what we think we deserve while too little time is spent on dealing effectively with the real problems in our cities.

3.  Instant fixes

We have developed a compulsive need for ‘instant fixes’.

Sometimes the ‘quick fixes’ are the right choices, but if they are done out of dissatisfaction, they tend to accumulate into a string of failures.

My friend John likes to tell Council exactly what he thinks, but his well-intentioned actions mean people who are trying to make change are instead diverted into solving his endless dissatisfactions.

It’s as though his overthinking of current issues makes them bigger than they actually are.

If we really want our cities to be cycling cities, we have to do the slow and difficult work to identify the real problems and then design long-term solutions to alleviate them.

4.  Navel gazing

We have developed a ‘belly button’ culture, chronically analysing every twist and turn in life.

We hyper-analyse everything: the two extra people who cycled last week and the predicted mode shares for 2050.

In cycling we seldom consider simpler explanations:

• Perhaps people don’t cycle because they prefer the bus;
• Possibly it’s just the fact that the majority of everyday Australians have never been to Copenhagen and so have no idea what all the fuss about bicycles is all about!

If we really want cycling to be mainstream and normal, we need to stop being hyper-vigilant and start finding out what people really want their cities to be like.

Maybe then Aussies might just use their bicycles like they use their vacuum cleaners, at least once a week!

What do you think?  Are we overthinking cycling?  

Should we just stop thinking, stop looking for change, and accept what we have?

Please do create a debate. Can’t wait to hear from you!

I acknowledge the amazing work of Dr. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, whose work on thinking at universities across the U.S. has inspired the content of this blog. Thank you, Susan.

Rachel Smith is an internationally-recognised urban planner and commentator, and principal transport planner with ArchTam’s Brisbane office. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter, or follow her blog here.

The post Are we overthinking cycling? appeared first on Blog.

In 2011 I conducted a bicycle route options analysis in Australia for a public sector client who thought the number of options would be limited. I agreed, but our team – fearless, enthusiastic, and novice bicycle riders – set out and cycled every street in the study area nonetheless. We colour-coded each street based on our cycling experience and, using five assessment criteria, discovered there were many more options than everyone had first anticipated. Our client was thrilled with our tactical experimentation, but unfortunately our paper map had limited usage.

So when I was approached to produce an “Out In The City” project in Berlin for the urban design think-tank BMW Guggenheim Lab last year, I leapt at the opportunity to take my initial experiment with bicycle maps to the next level.

The result was the Dynamic Connections Map, a world-first experiment to crowd-source and crowd-solve cycling, using an interactive map based in the city of Berlin.

While traditional mapping efforts show current conditions and what type of bicycle infrastructure is located on given roads, the Dynamic Connections Map allows confident, regular and potential bicycle riders to assess the current Berlin biking network, rate streets on how cycle friendly they are and, as a result of data processing, unlock a potential future cycle network.

Participants are asked to select a road or street by clicking on the Google-based map provided. The following two questions ask the respondent if they think the traffic volumes, vehicle speeds, number of parked cars, visibility at intersections, and topography on the selected road/street are ‘bicycle friendly’ and if the road/street selected provides good access to a large number of destinations.

The final two questions ask participants if they feel safe, neutral or stressed when cycling through intersections and when riding a bike on the selected street. The information collected is processed using an algorithm that designates each street to be either bicycle-friendly (green) or unfriendly (red). Participants, planners, policy-makers, and people interested in cycling can filter the data to meet their own personal needs.

This project excites me because many people – not just engineers – are auditing existing bike networks. They are assessing existing streets that don’t have facilities, and effectively creating a map as a community of streets that are safest for cycling. And, as Christine McLaren, the BMW Guggenheim Lab blogger wrote, “perhaps their most glaring shortcoming of all bike maps is that they also fail to recognise that even if the ‘official’ routes are the best option (which they often aren’t), every now and then we need to leave the official network of cycling infrastructure in order to get to the places we need to go. We don’t just need information about bike routes. We need information about every route.”

What do you think? Do you have a favourite cycle route, or want to check out the Dynamic Connections Map? Start with your local street today. Access instructions on how to use the map here.

Rachel Smith is an internationally-recognised urban planner and commentator, and principal transport planner with ArchTam’s Brisbane office. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter, or follow her blog here.

The post Putting the best bike routes ‘on the map’ appeared first on Blog.

In 2011 I conducted a bicycle route options analysis in Australia for a public sector client who thought the number of options would be limited. I agreed, but our team – fearless, enthusiastic, and novice bicycle riders – set out and cycled every street in the study area nonetheless. We colour-coded each street based on our cycling experience and, using five assessment criteria, discovered there were many more options than everyone had first anticipated. Our client was thrilled with our tactical experimentation, but unfortunately our paper map had limited usage.

So when I was approached to produce an “Out In The City” project in Berlin for the urban design think-tank BMW Guggenheim Lab last year, I leapt at the opportunity to take my initial experiment with bicycle maps to the next level.

The result was the Dynamic Connections Map, a world-first experiment to crowd-source and crowd-solve cycling, using an interactive map based in the city of Berlin.

While traditional mapping efforts show current conditions and what type of bicycle infrastructure is located on given roads, the Dynamic Connections Map allows confident, regular and potential bicycle riders to assess the current Berlin biking network, rate streets on how cycle friendly they are and, as a result of data processing, unlock a potential future cycle network.

Participants are asked to select a road or street by clicking on the Google-based map provided. The following two questions ask the respondent if they think the traffic volumes, vehicle speeds, number of parked cars, visibility at intersections, and topography on the selected road/street are ‘bicycle friendly’ and if the road/street selected provides good access to a large number of destinations.

The final two questions ask participants if they feel safe, neutral or stressed when cycling through intersections and when riding a bike on the selected street. The information collected is processed using an algorithm that designates each street to be either bicycle-friendly (green) or unfriendly (red). Participants, planners, policy-makers, and people interested in cycling can filter the data to meet their own personal needs.

This project excites me because many people – not just engineers – are auditing existing bike networks. They are assessing existing streets that don’t have facilities, and effectively creating a map as a community of streets that are safest for cycling. And, as Christine McLaren, the BMW Guggenheim Lab blogger wrote, “perhaps their most glaring shortcoming of all bike maps is that they also fail to recognise that even if the ‘official’ routes are the best option (which they often aren’t), every now and then we need to leave the official network of cycling infrastructure in order to get to the places we need to go. We don’t just need information about bike routes. We need information about every route.”

What do you think? Do you have a favourite cycle route, or want to check out the Dynamic Connections Map? Start with your local street today. Access instructions on how to use the map here.

Rachel Smith is an internationally-recognised urban planner and commentator, and principal transport planner with ArchTam’s Brisbane office. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter, or follow her blog here.

The post Putting the best bike routes ‘on the map’ appeared first on Blog.