thoughts...

[beige_alert]

Today is a lovely day here in Milwaukee, sunny and very warm for this time of year, 29°C. I’m pretty much over the concrud, and rode my bicycle downtown to my favorite market and had some coffee and cinnamon bread. It’s nice to be back on the bicycle, and out on the familiar roads.

I’ve read much about cycling here and in Europe, and it was interesting to see a bit in person.

I didn’t do any cycling in Germany, and I think it would be as terrifying as driving a car there would be. Here I’m a confident cyclist, whether out in the country on the edge of a road with a 55 MPH (88km/h) speed limit or in the city with cars everywhere turning in all directions. I know the American bike safety experts’ advice and the traffic laws and I might look bold to the uninitiated but it’s actually careful adherence to recommended safe practice and to the law.

It was great to see all the people on bicycles in Germany, and to see all those utilitarian bikes with the cargo baskets, fenders, covered chains, and all. Here it’s either junk bikes or people like me with fancy expensive high-performance machines. On the other hand, essentially everything I saw a cyclist do in Germany was exactly something American bicycle safety experts warn to never, ever do if you want to live. I’m sure it’s legal over there and it sure seemed the motorists were looking out for the pedestrians and cyclists in a way they never do here, but I’d have no idea how to fit in on a bike.

Some of the difference surely has to do with different urban patterns. I was always just amazed to see, wherever I was staying, that just down the street, just a few hundred meters away, there was der Bäckerei, there was die Apotheke. We have parking lots bigger than the walk from home to the shop. We honestly, literally do. I suppose high-speed cycling isn’t required if you are only going a kilometer or two. No need for Lycra clothing and aerodynamic aids.

Here, the nearest shop is probably kilometers away, and any place you actually want to get to could easily be 10, 15, 20 km away. The market I went to this morning is 22 km away, right about an hour by bicycle for me. It’s not a trip you are going to make by bicycle at 9km/h mixed up with the pedestrians off to the side of the road. There’s a reason I’m out there in the road with the fast traffic, wearing my Lycra clothing and riding my fancy aerodynamic machine, just to go to the bakery. The reason is that you were expected to drive a car to get there, just as you are to get everywhere else, and it’s correspondingly distant. It has to be distant, what with the space all those parking lots take up. Different worlds.

[Edit: I am aware that urban design generalizations are shakier than electric power plugs. There are outer suburbs in Europe, Manhattan is technically part of the USA. I am interested in how ordinary or how special the places I stayed in Germany are, though. It seemed ordinary. If I lived two hundred meters from a bakery, or just down the road from the subway, you wouldn't be able to shut me up about how nice it is. No one seemed so excited about it over there.]

Comments

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Here, in the suburbs of Long Island...

I ride my bike a lot. It's not entirely as utilitarian as the German ones, but it's a city-use hybrid. Within a 3 Km radius, I have...ummm....4 major supermarkets, one independent one, a small greengrocer, several drugstores, a good bakery, restaurants, a barber shop, bars, restaurants, a multiscreen cinema, etc. Slightly further away but still within a 20 minute cycle are not one but TWO public libraries. The ocean's no more than 13 klicks ride.

I think it's dependent on where you choose to live in the US, not JUST a Germany vs. US thing

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

It is, yes, though the fraction of people here living in such places is probably a good deal lower. If I could afford some place in, say, the 3rd ward, it would be rather different. Given the limited supply of walkable/bikeable communities here the prices do tend to be high.

I actually do have grocery stores closer than 15 km, but they are not my favorites and are not in places even I really want to try to get to by bicycle, and as I say, I'm quite comfortable with busy roads and big intersections. The drugstore is just 2km or so. The big lake a bit over 20 depending on route. The nearest public library is fairly close, but the only one worth going to is downtown, 20km. Sometimes I do that by bus, or by some combination of bus and bicycle (leaving the bike at work and taking the bus into the city). I have a comical photoset (http://flickr.com/photos/beigephotos/sets/336426/) documenting the walk to the "nearby" restaurants.

[madfilkentist]

In Köln there are extensive bike paths on the sidewalks, and the cyclists are very clear on their right-of-way there. This produced a few interesting moments for someone like me who's not used to this. Some of the people I talked with in Köln said they consider bicyclists in general crazy.

[lisande.livejournal.com]

Some of the people I talked with in Köln said they consider bicyclists in general crazy.

I do not live in Köln, but I second that!

Re: Your increased journal popularity

[madfilkentist]

This spammer hasn't gotten to my journal yet, but I've put an anticipatory ban on it.

Re: Your increased journal popularity

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

Yeah. LJ is remarkably free of that sort of thing, but something always slips in.

[aunty_marion]

I'm not sure it's just Germany. I mean, I live in a fairly ordinary north London suburb, admittedly close to a tube station, which makes it a 'centre of population', but it is a suburb. And within ten minutes' walk I have not only the tube station but a public library, a post office, a choice of banks, two bakeries (one Turkish/Cypriot, one mundane), Woolworth's, a print shop, various small supermarkets, liquor stores, greengrocers (one of them organic), charity shops, newsagents, hairdressers, dentist, etc. My doctor's surgery is more like 15 minutes' walk away. There's a nice pizza restaurant, a fish-and-chip shop, at least two kebab houses, and a couple of smaller snack bars.

However, there's only one clothes shop, no shoe shops, and the nearest cinema is either a longish walk or a bus-ride away. And the nice butcher closed down a couple of years ago and is now a halal butcher/greengrocer.

This is fairly normal for a lot of places. I have lived in areas where you had to go more than five minutes to get to anything useful, mind you!

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

It's Germany I visited, but this is really more about Europe in general. To me, you live in an amazing place. My local drug store, close by, is at least 20+ minutes walk, though through the woods. There is a gas station with crappy convenience store probably five minutes walk or so away. (Walking in the gravel by the edge of the road, of course) A few nicer restaurants a long and not at all pleasant walk away, and some dreadful ones a long and unpleasant walk away. The bank (crappy branch staffed by idiots, by the way) would be a long, long walk, again in the gravel at the road edge. Post office? Bunch of kilometers. Dentists and doctors? Whole bunch of kilometers. I am actually within city limits, not out in the suburbs, though out toward the edge. The rent is low, though, and the route from here to work by bicycle is a very pleasant 14 km.

Joyce has some grocery stores, misc. shops, and restaurants in plausible walking distance, though of course we're talking 1-2km distance.

Part of walkability is not just pure distance but what the route is like. Paved is better than dirt. Interesting places to walk past better than parking lots. I've walked across parking lots because I refuse to drive from one end of the lot to the other just to get from the shop at one end to one at the other, and while the actual distance is not great, it feels huge. Who wants to walk through a parking lot?

As I say, there certainly are places like that in the US. The examples that come to mind locally are mostly Vastly Expensive Condo Land, though perhaps the edges of that are more affordable. Life on/near campus back in my university days was a bit more like that, though. Not that you'd want to live among the students if you aren't one.

The places I stayed to me felt like exotic urban living in really, really nice locations. Like right by a castle and a subway station, and a bunch of local shops. Bielefeld has rail connections to the rest of the country, a subway, and light rail running around, like I'd expect in a major urban center, yet it's much smaller than Milwaukee. I mean, you can't shut me up about how wonderful it is that, by special state cooperation, the minor city of Milwaukee, just the 25 biggest in the country, with a half-million people inside city limits and another million in the surrounding region, not only has a rail connection to Chicago, but not just one or two trains a day but *7*. Amazing!

[bardling.livejournal.com]

Well, think about it - a lot of the cities, towns, villages date from well before cars even existed. Even if some of the buildings now are newer (be it due to simple replacement or due to wars & subsequent (re-)building), the layout often is still old, or based on the pre-car layout. People tend not to like to have to move and see their house demolished just to make way for bigger roads, parking lots etc. So of course things are mostly on a scale that's suitable for walking/cycling and not cars. So cars had to be fitted in afterwards, and while it's had a big influence, the old influence and some of the preferences are still equally there.

From my own experience in the US, there seems to be an awful lot of it that was built around cars being the major mode of transport. Like, say, the huge parking lots, or many roads not even having any pedestrian sidewalks...

Sadly, I have no comparison from say Russia, so I don't know how much of it is influence of history and how much is influence of size/space. Most of western Europe is, of course, also vastly smaller than the US as a country.

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

Yes, pretty much everything built in the US in the last fifty years was layed out to provide space for cars first, with all other considerations coming after that :)

[bigbumble.livejournal.com]

It is interesting comparing your German vs Milwaukee experiences with my small town (population <4,000) life in Otsego, Michigan. I have a mongo recumbent tricycle that is relatively slow compared to the fast road bikes. The trip into town where there are the local library, grocery, hardware store, post office, banks, and bakery is a little over a mile (maybe 2 kM) away from my house. The travel is over wide, generally quit, city streets. In the opposite direction towards US-131 on M-89 is the "Strip" with box stores, auto dealers, multiplex theater, etc. all with enormous parking lots.

While the distance to the strip is only slightly greater than to the downtown, I only rarely go that way on my tricycle. The difference in the feel of riding to the two places is palpable, although certainly less than your Milwaukee/Germany contrast.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

I think that beige_alert's experience sound a lot like where we grew up in Portage, actually. Southland, then a strip mall, was what, 2-3 miles (3-4 km) away? Now that I live within city limits in Ann Arbor, I'm about 3/4 mile (1 km) from a strip mall of similar proportions, with a grocery store, drug store, office supply store, fabric store, and a couple of other odds and ends. No serious hills, either.

[lisande.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, essentially everything I saw a cyclist do in Germany was exactly something American bicycle safety experts warn to never, ever do if you want to live.

Now I'm curious. Can you explain what they did? I think you don't talk about crossing red traffic lights, for I told you that it's NOT allowed... ;)

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

See, here I'm essentially a slow-moving motorcycle. I'm out in the road with the cars, I change lanes to get to the left to make a left turn, I'll stay to the right to let people pass if there is room (as there often is on our wide roads) but if not I get out into the center of the lane to force people passing me to change to another lane (often lots of lanes on our big roads) to pass safely. Riding off the road, off on the side, will get you smashed by someone turning. No one turning would ever be looking for a bicyclist. Plus I'm averaging better than 20 km/h including the time stopped at intersections, so to be off the road at 25+ km/h, near the pedestrians (who pay no attention at all to anything), and zoom past driveways that someone might turn into, and to zoom into the right edges of intersections where people are turning, is pretty much certain collision. Slowing to walking pace at every driveway for a careful look would make that 14 km trip to work rather long.

To the extent that we do have any designated bicycle "sidepaths" off the sides of roads, they are terribly designed, and very unsafe, and no one in a car is paying any attention to them.

[lisande.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see. Here you are forced to stay on the right side of the lane as a bicyclist (by law and by the fact there there mostly is only one lane in one direction). And should a car collide with a bike you can bet that the driver of the car will be given most of the fault, even if logic says that it was all the fault of the bicyclist. So we're used to watching out for those little two-wheeled pests... ;)

And yes, I stick with it: a lot of bicyclists ARE a pest here and don't take care - which I can't understand, because they are the most vulnerable traffic participants...

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

Here the cyclist would probably get the blame even if the motorist was clearly at fault.

We have lots of multi-lane roads and big intersections with right-turn-only and left-turn-only and straight-through-only lanes, and the only way to get through one of those without getting hit is to be in the proper lane for where you are going. No way, no how is anyone going to be looking out for anyone coming from anywhere else.

There are *lots* of crazy cyclists here. The red-light and stop sign runners, who are highly annoying. The clueless and inattentive, meandering around. The people who haven't figured out that they are in the US, not the UK, and are on the wrong side of the road. The no lights in total darkness people. (The days are getting short, I'll be seeing lots of those soon...)

[lisande.livejournal.com]

Stupidity seems to be a world-wide problem...

And I guess that you as a careful and attentive bicyclist are extremely annoyed by those idiots because they ruin the reputation of every cyclist!

[bardling.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think the "on the road" vs. "on designated bike paths" argument gets influenced rather heavily by the number of lanes/ease of overtaking. In Germany, cyclists, being generally slower than average car speeds, therefor have to cycle such that overtaking is possible with the least amount of danger.

Some cycle lanes in Germany are designated lanes of road, also, rather than on sidewalks.

As for those on sidewalks & the driveways, mostly I found that on a bicycle visibilty is good enough to determine any risk from cars turning in or out without having to slow down. Pedestrians tend to be slightly more aware, plus that's why bikes have bells. One rings bells both to request a pedestrian obstruction leave one's path and can also do so to alert pedestrians to the fact that one is approaching/will be passing, if one deems the pedestrians riskily unawares.
Now, visibility from a recumbent bike is of course vasatly different...
Personally, I feel safer on the typical by-the-pedeistrian-sidewalk type of cycle path, because it reduces the biggest danger to me as a cyclist - cars. Yes, there is danger at intersections, but all traffic participants are more aware of that, and it does take the overtaking-without-leaving-enough-space issue out of the equation.

Also, bikes in Germany do tend to get the biggest use as a means of utilitarian transport (or at least that's certainly a big factor in planning), recreation being second on the list. People from all walks of life ride bikes, not just the young & fit, so of course you get all sorts of differetn speeds.

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

I once had a bell on my bike. I never saw the slightest response from any pedestrian, ever, to it, so I removed it. One can really only pass pedestrians safely here by slowing way, way down. Motorists are in big dangerous vehicles, but are far more predictable and attentive than pedestrians.

In the US, the crash statistics are clearly that intersection crashes are far more common than hit-from-behind crashes. Again, no on in a car looks in any direction that they don't expect to see another car in. You either need to be where the other car would be or else come to a stop and wait for everyone to clear out of the way---they will not be looking for you, and if they hit you, it will be blamed on you.

The shear number of cyclists has an effect. No one driving a car on a road with no other cars wishes there were lots of other motorists, but cyclists would love to see some more cyclists on the roads. People might look out for us if they ever say any of us. On my 14 km, 40 minute commute to work, mostly along a very nice route for cycling, one so nice it's officially designated as a fun cycling route, on a nice lovely summer morning, I might see as many as a dozen other cyclists. I might see a few dozen in the evening, when all the people out having fun are out. To actually be following along behind someone else is unusual.

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

Also, of course, in the US we have some striped 'bike lanes' in the streets, but usually if you were off to the side you'd be illegally on the pedestrian way. Which people do...

[valydiarosada.livejournal.com]

Like aunty_marion I live in London and have most necessities (butcher, baker, pharmacist, library, good Indian Restaurant, good fish and chip restaurant, doctor's surgery, various small supermarkets, etc, etc.) within walking distance. However if I want to do serious shopping, such as clothes, computer accessories, electrical goods or furniture, I go either to a dedicated commercial estate or one of the larger, more established High Street shopping centres. These are usually within a 1-2 mile radius of where I live. And yes, I would drive there.

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

See, I'm thinking 1 mile or 2 as the close stuff. The other stuff much farther than that. And thinking back to college where everything was "walking distance" that distance was still something like a half-mile to the very nearest anything.