I found a very interesting article on website of BBC. Is there anyone who can help me to read this?
It all started with dead horses, during 1816 – the “year without a summer”. Temperatures had plummeted around the world, because of the eruption a year earlier of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora. It was among the most violent eruptions on Earth in recorded history, and the fallout of dust and sulphur caused crop failures across Europe. As horses died of starvation, the German inventor Karl von Drais came up with an idea to replace horses: a contraption with two wheels but without pedals. It was the predecessor of today’s bicycle.
Back then, it had a different name: draisine – or velocipede in French. Pedals came in due course, and soon the two-wheeled mode of getting around became popular.
Today, it’s known as the most efficient method of self-powered transportation by far.
Despite being clean and green, however, cycling is really popular in only a few countries. Potential accidents, the lack of a cycle-friendly infrastructure, and worries about rain and cold keep many from hopping on a two-wheeled horse. In the UK, US and Australia, for example, only about 1% of all journeys are made on a bike. But there are exceptions, of course: in the Netherlands, the number is 27%; and in the Danish capital Copenhagen, more than half the population cycles regularly.
Fewer people on cycles, however, doesn’t mean fewer accidents – quite the opposite. The number of cyclist deaths per 100 million kilometres cycled is 5.8 in the United States and 3.6 in the UK. In contrast, a cycling-happy country like Germany has a rate of just 1.7 deaths; and in Denmark it’s 1.5 – four times safer than in the US and twice as safe as in the UK. And cycling is even safer in the Netherlands, with just 1.1 deaths per 100 million kilometres on the road. It appears that the more cycling is encouraged and taken up, the safer it becomes.
Traffic traumas
But can this Dutch or Danish bicycle utopia work everywhere? And how would our cities’ roads have to change to persuade people to give up gas guzzling cars and switch to two wheels instead – especially when it’s cold and wet?
And can technology help us to make cycling smarter?
“The main factor that keeps cycling rates low in many cities is that most people are not comfortable sharing space in streets with fast-moving cars and trucks,” says Mark Vallianatos, policy director at the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute, Occidental College, in Los Angeles, California.
Most modern cities are designed for the car, says Ralph Buehler, associate professor in urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech university in Alexandria. Whether it’s the driveways of our homes, or parking spots lining the roads of city centres, everything is designed to make travelling by car as easy as possible, with little thought of cyclists. In most cities, for instance, roads have no separate cycle lanes, let alone a specially designed bike network of the kind you will see if you visit Groningen in the Netherlands, where hundreds of bike paths criss-cross the city
While cyclists have to swerve to avoid parked vehicles, cars zoom past them at high speeds. Where bike lanes exist, they are often narrow. “People in cars, in mass transit, or on sidewalks get to be side-by-side and talk. The narrow width of the cycle tracks in London would suggest that bicyclists don’t have any friends,” says Anne Lusk, an urban planning researcher at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts.
Green barriers
The starting point, though, would have to be travel distance. On average, around half of all car journeys in European cities are shorter than five kilometres. “An intelligent city planner building from scratch would rather be assuming that cycling, walking and public transport would be the main forms of transport while trying to figure out how to accommodate inefficient, polluting, dangerous modes like private car use,” says Ceri Woolsgrove, a road safety policy officer at the European Cycling Federation.
With this in mind, planners would create so-called separated cycle facilities, says Vallianatos, “a combination of cycle tracks at the sidewalk level and/or protected bike lanes in the roadways”. In 1998, the Colombian city of Bogota built more than 300 kilometres of such ‘greenways’ – protected bike routes separated from roads by trees. Enrique Penalosa was Bogota’s mayor at the time, and in a recent TEDx talk he stressed that these greenways were not “a cute architectural feature”, but showed “that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally important to one in a $30,000 car”.
