life’s better on a bike


of the New York City Department of Transportation (behind the ambitious strategy to make NYC greener and more accessible); Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner for Climate Action and keen cycle commuter, to name just three.


Borrowed bikes And how did the conference


participants get around town? On bikes borrowed from the fabulous Baisikeli boys. Baisikeli (which means bicycle in Swahili) was set up as a commercial company by Henrik Smedegaard and his cousin Niels Bonefeld to not only make money for the founders but also for local bicycle repairers in central Africa. Second hand and ‘given up’ stolen (but insured) bikes are packed into shipping containers along with spare parts to Sierra Leone and Tanzania. Baisikeli trains and employs local people to repair and sell the bicycles at a ‘decent profit’. The profits help fund a hospital and


create better living conditions for local communities; the bikes themselves provide low cost mobility and practical transport for goods. Some have even been converted to ambulances. Another venture involves the


construction of special blue corporate bikes with cargo box for Ikea employees and customers. After the conference Baisikeli were off to a major music festival to take part in a new five star ‘green ticket’ system and lend bikes to festival goers. No wonder the company won the Danish Best Socio-Economic Business award last year (presented by ‘our’ Princess Mary).


Cycling in Copenhagen Velo-city Global 2010 aimed to


“highlight the bicycle’s potential to enhance the quality of life around the world and to solve global challenges such as congestion, obesity and climate change”. It was a highly successful conference, and Copenhagen itself was an excellent showcase for sustainable transport. But cycling in Copenhagen isn’t


without its problems. There’s now major bicycle congestion. Accidents happen; right turning traffic in particular can be dangerous. Too many bikes means crammed and cluttered bike racks — bikes crowd around corners of buildings, onto additional makeshift racks and against heritage buildings despite notices such as: “Henstilling af cycler langs facade forbudt”. (But ‘too many bikes’ is a pretty good problem to have, and the city is working on


freeing up more space for cyclists, creating wider cycleways, putting car parking underground and encouraging employers to build bike storage facilities for staff, for example.) The city bike hire system in


Copenhagen was well-intentioned but not successfully designed or implemented. As the very patient tourism information officer explained to yet another hopeful visitor, ‘here is the map showing where the bikes for hire are meant to be – but you’ll be very lucky to find a bike”. For a 20 kroner coin, people could ‘withdraw’ a bike using a system similar to the shopping trolley coin-in-the-slot deposit system used here. But for that tiny deposit you could just take the bike forever – perhaps right across the border and sell it. Time and again I would find an empty bike hire rack, such as outside Central Station. In fact these racks were often just being used by regular bike riders as a parking bay due to lack of space. Copenhagen aims to increase the


cycling mode share from 36% to 50% by 2015. City planners are working on ways to improve the cycling infrastructure even further by increasing the number of green wave highways and redesigning intersections to reduce the accidents between cyclists and right-turning traffic, for example. There’s video detection of cyclists, ‘bicycle islands’ and traffic calming, new ways to integrate bicycle parking at stations and systems to


allocate space for bicycles inside the train carriages.


Start saving for Seville The Velo-city Global 2010


conference ended with the symbolic handover of the conference to Seville, Spain. Vice-Mayor of Seville, Antonio Rodrigo Torrijos, confirmed that in only three years, Seville has managed to increase the number of daily cyclists “from a mere few thousands to 60,000 a day”, and that the modal share for the bicycle has increased to 7.5% of daily transport. The Velo-city 2011 conference in Seville will be held 23 – 25 March 2011.


*The city of Frederiksberg together


with the city of Copenhagen hosted Velo-city Global 2010; in this article I have simply referred to the host as Copenhagen since most readers would recognise ‘Copenhagen’ as the capital of Denmark (rather that the name of a city council).


More info Velo-city http://www.velo-city2010.


  





com/ Baisikeli http://www.cph-bike-rental.


dk/ European Cyclists’ Federation (ran


Velo-city Global 2010) http://www.ecf. com/ Brenda’s Blog on BNSW site http://


www.bicyclensw.org.au/content/velo- city-global-brendas-blog


Ride for the rainforests International adventure cyclist Krista Bernard will lead ‘Ride for the Rainforest’, a cycling challenge, in Sri Lanka in February 2011. Working with Rainforest Rescue, a not-for-profit organization that has been protecting rainforests in Australia and internationally since 1998, Krista hopes the cycle challenge will raise urgently needed funds to protect the endangered Sri Lankan environment.


‘Ride for the Rainforest’, is a fundraising twelve day trip which includes five days of cycling at a moderate grade, accommodation at hotels and comfortable camping grounds.


Riders will visit the Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage, see Buddhist Temples and the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kandy, visit the UNESCO World Heritage listed Sinharaja rainforest, which the project is helping to protect, and relax at the beaches of Galle.


During the trip, participants will also spend an afternoon planting trees and finding out about the environmental work being done in Sri Lanka.


For more details and to book go to www.rainforestrescue.org.au.


Krista Bernard has an indomitable cycling history. In Australia, she traversed the Nullarbor and Central Deserts on dirt tracks, has ridden down the east coast, and cycled around Tasmania. Pedalling 15,000km solo across 19 countries – from Indonesia to Egypt – won her the prestigious ‘Young Adventurer of the Year Award’ in 2000 by the Australian Geographic Society.


9


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20