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.

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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.

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