Can the Dutch model of a cycling city be exported?

Human powered transport, walking and cycling, will be a critical ingredient in helping the world address climate change. A story from the ABC’s “Blueprint for Living” discuses what’s happening in Holland and how we can learn from that.

The Netherlands has much to teach us about creating cycling cities.

Wooden clogs and windmills are stereotypical icons of The Netherlands, but a longer lasting and helpful export may be the idea of a purpose-built city with bicycles as part of the design.

This ‘Dutch model’ is the envy of many city councils who want to make their urban areas more cycle-friendly. But how realistic is it to adapt a city to this eco-friendly way of life?

Is it a question of infrastructure, citizen engagement, or both?

Listen to the Blueprint for Living from ABC Radio National - “Can the Dutch model of a cycling city be exported?”

Elevated cycling feeway for Melbourne’s speedy commuters

Cycling is one of the keys to combating and mitigating the effects of climate change.

An artist's impression of the express veloway
 planned for above Footscray Road.

Melbourne is making specific efforts to make cycling more attractive to commuters and for that should be applauded.

Read the story in today’s Melbourne Age by Aisha Dow about the city’s latest idea to encourage further us of bicycles -  “Elevated cycling feeway for Melbourne’s speedy commuters.”

Climate change mitigation must involve bicycles

Cycling: Helping the environment
and building better brains.

Cycling must be an integral part of processes we adopt to avoid the impending difficulties of climate change.

Obviously, they consume resources in their construction, which can be energy intensive, but once “on the road” they need pretty much only human power to access the wonderful mobility they allow.

And so although bicycles are not emissions free, they would, if used in place of the energy consuming and carbon spewing motor car on a relatively large scale, make a huge contribution to mitigating climate change.

But there is more, cycling is not only good for the environment and climate change mitigation, it is good for us in that it helps keep us physically fit, wards off diseases and, as explained here, help build better brains.

Read the CleanTechnica story - “Scientists Say Biking Builds Better Brains.”

Laura Lakers wonders if Edinburgh is better for bikes?

I

’m chasing Kim Harding down a hill. We’re heading from the Royal Mile to Princes Street on the kind of descent one rarely encounters, living as I do in a very flat part of the country. “I love that hill,” he says as we regroup at the traffic lights.

Like Athens and Rome, Edinburgh is built on seven hills, but perhaps more akin to a “lumpy” city like Bristol, those hills don’t deter people from cycling in relatively high numbers by UK standards - 6% of journeys to work and school are by bike, or 2% of all journeys.

Where Edinburgh stands alone is that its city council is committing a percentage of its transport budget to cycling - starting from 5% in 2012 and rising 1% each year to 10%. It’s currently at 8%, or just over £2m, with funding from the Scottish government on top. I’m curious to see what they’re spending the money on, and whether it’s making a difference.

Harding, co-founder of Pedal on Parliament, and the Edinburgh Festival of Cycling, has kindly agreed to show me around during my week-long visit to the city.

Read Laura Laker’s story in the Guardian - “Is Edinburgh's cycling budget making the city better for bikes?”

'Work' fewer hours, and so work on improving our lives

Contemporary understandings of work and the consumerist society that result from it both contribute to the worsening of climate change. Should we re-think how and why we work, consume less and subsequently reduce demands on energy use, then changes to our climate would not be so dramatic.

by Robert McLean.

Ideas for easing climate change are as varied as they are many.

Working towards a
 smaller ecological
footprint.



The equation seems, however, on the face of it pretty simple and easily understood.

Modern lifestyles of the developed world, in particular, have exceeded or exhausted the natural world’s ability to cope – we have created a global dystopia, a situation in which earth’s inherent ecological balance has been disrupted.

A few of us, in relative world population terms, live as if humans are detached from the rhythms of nature, ignoring the reality that we are in fact integral to it.

Just a couple of centuries ago we discovered how to access the magical power of fossil fuels (ancient sunlight) and now after such a short time we have nearly exhausted a resource that took nature billions of years to create.

We have been wasteful in the extreme and now the bill for that frivolity is coming due and should we choose to ignore the debt collector, civilization will be decimated.

Complete restitution is beyond us, but we can make inroads on the interest with a systemic behavioural change and within that a seismic-like revolution to the economic foundations of our communities.

Each of us should be limited, by law, to working four hours a day, no overtime and no double shifts with the outcome being five days at four hours being just 20 hours a week.

Consequently people would be inherently financially poorer and so vastly less able to consume and use products that are only available because of an economically driven society whose richness hinges on the prolific use of fossil fuels that are unquestionably the root of the complications that are changing the world’s climate.

Conversely, and importantly, people would suddenly be, by comparison to today, “time-rich” and so able to use those free hours to grow food, make things, enrich their neighbourhoods through simply being there more frequently, set up and implement sharing schemes reducing the need for every household have one of everything and begin the long societal haul to the creation of the “five-minute life”.

Such a life would mean that most everything important on a day-to-day basis was within five minutes easy walking or cycling distance.

Should a business want to operate longer hours, then it would need to hire another team of people for a further four hours changing completely the employment/unemployment nexus.

Most contemporary economic gurus will declare such a change as unworkable, alluding to consequences that would bring society to its knees.

However, what is truly unworkable is the business as usual paradigm and its 40-hour week producing a rich middle class that, in 200 years, has nearly exhausted the world’s fossil fuels, depleted obvious energy resources and left a benign environment and atmosphere in tatters.