How does a Copenhagen cycle track make bicycling safer? By putting bicyclists behind a low curb, a curb which a motor vehicle with its big tires can mount, but a bicycle can’t. The curb increases safety for bicyclists the way a streetcar track does.
A cyclist rides on a Copenhagen cycle track. Google Street View photo.
Oh, but wait — a streetcar track is a hazard to bicyclists, isn’t it?
So, let’s try to figure out the logic behind the Copenhagen curb. I think that it goes something like this:
“Bicyclists are sort of halfway between pedestrians and motorists, so we’ll put them behind a little curb about half as high as the sidewalk.”
This is reasoning by analogy. Reasoning by analogy is perilous if the analogy doesn’t hold. This one certainly doesn’t, so let’s look a little bit deeper. Continue reading →
The rails for the E line branch of the Green Line subway/streetcar in Boston, Massachusetts, USA occupied the middle of two-lane Centre Street for over 20 years after service was discontinued. There had been a proposal to redo the street and restore streetcar service, but ADA requirements for wheelchair compatibility would have required new tracks to snake over to raised platforms at the curbs for stops. Bicyclists, who already were crashing on the existing rails, would have had to cross the new rails repeatedly. Bus service with the transfer to the Green Line on Huntington Avenue, which runs in the median, is about 2 minutes slower than streetcar service. Reconstructing the street with the new rails also would have been very expensive. Eventually, the proponents for bus service won out and the old tracks were paved over.
The three remaining streetcar lines in Boston all run in the median. A busway also can run in the median. All conflicts can be addressed with signalization. But this solution requires a wide street. If it isn’t wide enough then you lose the bike lane/wide outside lane: here is an example.
Not so good: Running the bikeway behind the trolley stop. A Copenhagen study found that running a cycle track behind a bus shelter led to 19 times the crash rate and 17 times the injury rate of other installations. Problem with a streetcar line, though, is that the tracks pose the risk of bicyclists’ crashing even when there is no streetcar nearby. That leaves no good solution other than to put the streetcar and bike route on different streets. Here’s an example of a bikeway behind a bus shelter from Portland. Unfortunately, the street here leads to an important river crossing, so a different bike route wasn’t an option.
I have heard that Phoenix’s new light rail system has to skew between stops either side of a one-way street because there is an important trip generator on the left side. A bike lane plays hopscotch with the light rail line and bicyclists must cross the street twice to continue. At least it is possible to transport bicycles in the light rail cars — probably the best way to get through that area with a bicycle!
I thank Ralph Fertig of the Santa Barbara, California Bicycle Coalition for drawing the attention of the bicycling community to the following fascinating travelogue from Copenhagen, shot in Technicolor in 1937. Not all of the film is about bicycling, but the bicycling scenes are worth the wait.
In 1937, bicycling had been the dominant mode of road transportation in Copenhagen for decades. No transition to motoring had occurred, as in the USA. Bicycling declined after WWII with the increasing popularity and affordability of motor vehicles, but has since recovered considerably with the construction of bicycle facilities and other measures to encourage bicycling, and extremely high taxes on new cars.
The film from 1937 shows some very interesting scenes of bicyclists interacting with the relatively few motorists, especially near the end. Interaction is mostly vehicular, and bicyclists establish the prevailing speed of traffic. Look at how they navigate a traffic circle, moving to the center to go straight through. Bicyclists conduct themselves much like motor scooter users I saw in Taiwan in 2002.
I also notice that the youngest bicyclists shown are in the early- to mid-teen years. That also comports with what I saw in Taiwan, and differs from the “eight to eighty” paradigm that must be accommodated only with separate facilities, or on streets where motorists operate very gingerly — eight-year-olds can’t reliably follow the rules of the road.
Clearly, pre-WWII Danes were experienced bicyclists, but on the other hand, there is some rather sloppy bicycling shown.
Gotta love the narration:
“…a people who have contributed to the stability and progress of the white race, for the Danes are the descendants of the courageous Vikings…”
I had mistyped Bikings 🙂
Those Vikings were rather ruthless expansionist warriors, actually (just ask the Scots) , and in 1937, the Danes were within a very few years of being invaded themselves by history’s most brutal exponents of the concept of the “white race.”
New York City bicycling advocate Steve Faust adds the following observations:
I think I recognize the bridge…just west of the center city,
if so, the roadway has been changed from 4 mixed roadway lanes with trolley tracks in the center,
to two motor lanes without any streetcars, and two cycle track lanes – one on each side for one way bicycle flow.
The pedestrian sidewalk space remains about the same width as in the film.
The streets leading to and from the bridge have been given a cycle track treatment in place of the two motor lanes [sic], and probably are part of the bicycle speed paced green wave of traffic signals.
There is almost as much bike traffic on these streets today, plus more motor traffic volume, all on the same street width.
The major change besides the dedicated cycle tracks, is the use of the right hand left turn in a holding bike box on the far side of the intersection. This eliminates bikes having to merge across the car lane and possibly more critical, bikes don’t wait in the motor lane for a clear left turn, which waiting would block the relatively narrow motor lane – there are no left turn pockets.
Cyclist waiting time is minimized by having a total 60 second traffic signal cycle time. A cyclist arriving on the green through light has less than 30 seconds to wait at the far corner for the cross street green light – a delay that might well be shorter than waiting for a clear left turn from the roadway. I’ve certainly stood for over 30 seconds in the middle of the road waiting for a safe clear left turn.
The bike box Steve is discussing is a two-stage turn queuing box, which serves only left-turning traffic.
The graph below is from a presentation by Dutch bicycle program official Hans Voerknecht given in Boston, Massachusetts, USA in November, 2008.
The mode share for Copenhagen is indicated by the green line that starts at around 40 percent in 1920, rises to around 55 percent either side of World War II, then falls and rises again to around 37 percent in 1995.
This widely quoted number, though, is for commute trips only. According to more comprehensive sources from 1995 and also from more recent years — see this posting — bicycle trips are around 22% of all trips in Copenhagen. Data from earlier years and especially from before World War II may have been collected differently.
Copenhagen still has a large bicycle mode share for a city in an industrialized nation. Despite the draconian measures to reduce motor vehicle use, and the many bicycle facilities installed since the 1960s, Copenhagen streets carry many more motor vehicles now than in 1937, and on many main streets, bicyclists are restricted to cycle tracks or lanes which become congested at peak travel times.
You may click on the image to see a larger version.
Bicycle mode share in several European cities, 1920-1995
The workbook gives exact (fractional) gear ratios as well as decimal approximations, and corrects a number of minor errors in manufacturers’ literature and online gear calculators. For most hubs, the information is calculated directly from gear-tooth counts and an examination of the hubs’ internals. The workbook page about each hub therefore indicates how the hub generates its ratios.
Thanks to the excellent Sturmey-Archer Heritage Web site and to documentation on the site of Tony Hadland, author of the book The Sturmey-Archer Story, I have information on Sturmey-Archer hubs all the way back to the first model sold, in 1902. I also cover most geared hubs from SRAM (and the companies it absorbed) and Shimano, and the Rohloff hub. Please see the acknowledgments page of the workbook for a list of people who have been helpful. Coverage of additional hubs will be added as the information comes to light. If you have information to contribute, please don’t be shy!
Why am I doing this? I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a math nerd. It’s been bothering me for years to see only inexact, and sometimes incorrect, decimal numbers given for the drive ratios. But also, I am writing an article for the technical journal Human Power about trends in the design of internal hub gears. My research toward the article has generated the information on drive ratios.
I hold in my hand a piece of history. Some fortunate cyclist rode the hub shown below nearly a century ago. It turned up in the basement bike parts stash of my good friend, the late Sheldon Brown.
These hubs were made to last. Despite the rusted shell and the heavy wear to the inch-pitch sprocket, the gears and brake still engage. Clean oil seeps out — probably Sheldon’s work, and maybe he cleaned and reassembled the internals too, who knows. But even if so, the hub isn’t quite ready to lace up into a wheel and ride away — an indicator spindle and chain would need to be found or fabricated. Without them to shift the gears, the hub is a one-speed.
However, the hub is labeled as a Type S rather than Type F, and it has 36 spoke holes rather than the 40 usual in British production. The lettering stamped onto the shell reads, in its entirety,
S
STURMEY-ARCHER
TRICOASTER
(patented)
I inquired of Tony Hadland, author of the book The Sturmey-Archer Story, and he replied:
A 36-hole rear hub in the UK would be odd in those days – 40 was the norm. However, consulting my ‘The Sturmey-Archer Story’, I read that on 7 May 1914 Sturmey-Archer did a deal with Sears Roebuck & Co. Sears were to pay ÂŁ500 for use of Sturmey-Archer’s US patents, plus a royalty on each hub. So I’m guessing the ‘S’ stands for Sears.”
If you are interested in this kind of history, I can recommend Hadland’s book highly. I found it selling at a highly-inflated price on amazon.com, but Hadland pointed me to a much more reasonable source:
My Sturmey book … is still listed by the Veteran-Cycle Club at ÂŁ13.75, same price its been since 1987! I suggest you email their book sales lady, Bibi Bugg, at bibibugg*at*uk2.net.
Probably only a few people saw the earlier version of this post, but in any case I take it back. I thank Alex Wetmore for correcting my error. The 17-tooth planet gear of the SRAM S7 hub, not the 12-tooth, engages the ring gear. The ratios are as SRAM describes.
Also see the corrected chart for the earlier SRAM Torpedo hub, at the bottom of the page.
I will happily install a SRAM S7 hub on my Raleigh Twenty. Here is a table giving the actual ratios:
Drive ratios of SRAM Spectro S7 hubs
Number of gear teeth
Ratios
1 to 7
Sun gear
Planet meshing with sun
Planet meshing with ring
Ring gear
Power path
Turns, Out/In
YES! SRAM says:
1
33
12
17
63
R>P
252/439
0.574
2
30
17
63
R>P
21/31
0.677
3
21
24
17
63
R>P
72/89
0.809
4
Gears idling
1/1
1/1
1.000
5
21
24
17
63
P>R
89/72
1.236
6
30
17
63
P>R
31/21
1.476
7
33
12
17
63
P>R
439/252
1.742
Below is what I originally wrote, so you can see how even a purported bicycle expert can make a fool of himself!
Being a stickler for accuracy, I decided yesterday to count the gear teeth inside a SRAM Spectro S7 7-speed internally-geared hub to get exact (fractional) gear ratios. SRAM only provides decimal approximations. The results were much more interesting than I expected. I checked two different hubs, one with a drum brake and another with a coaster brake; plugged the tooth counts into my handy-dandy planetary gear ratio spreadsheet — which gives spot-on results — and with increasing incredulity checked against several versions of SRAM’s online technical manuals. The ratios and overall range are considerably narrower than what the company says. Continue reading →
New York’s former Traffic Commissioner and Chief Traffic Engineer, Sam Schwartz, “Gridlock Sam,” who describes himself as a “traffic guru”, has posted a Web page [updated and expanded since my original posting, apparently deleted sometime after October, 2014 but available on the Internet Archive] instructing bicyclists and truckers in how to interact. Truckers are supposed to double-park outside a bike lane, and bicyclists are supposed to ride in the channel between the curb or curb parking and the double-parked trucks.
[Update to post, November 2011: Sam misinterprets the New York ordinance prohibiting double parking in bike lanes as also requiring bicyclists to stay in the bike lane. As this is unsafe, and in some cases impossible, it is not required even under New York City’s restrictive mandatory bike lane ordinance. City ordinances, at least as Sam interprets them, do permit truckers making deliveries to park outside the bike lane, reflecting the assumption that cyclists will run the gauntlet between the parked truck and curb or parked cars. The same apparently applies to taxis discharging passengers.]
The following is an image from Sam’s page. I do not endorse what is shown! Please read on!
Look at that drawing again, carefully. You may click on it to see an enlarged version, if you like.
The bicyclists are giants, and the cars are tiny! The car in the middle, where it poses the worst problem for the bicyclists, is by far the smallest. Continue reading →
I’ve just read Frank Berto’s book The Birth of Dirt (second edition), about the origins of the mountain bike.
It’s a quick, fun read, and offers quite a thorough review of that history, illustrated with numerous photos and drawings. Berto was for a decade the technical editor of Bicycling magazine, and he has a fine command of the technical issues of bicycle design. But this is a history about people and what they did, not only a technical history. Berto has the advantage of living in Marin County, California, where the mountain bike originated, and of knowing and having interviewed most of the pioneers in its development. The book offers a thoughtful and probing exploration of the question of who invented the mountain bike. Berto’s conclusion is clearly justified by the evidence: many people were involved, and no one person could claim to be the inventor.
I did find some minor errors of fact: for example, what is described as an Atom drum brake is a Maxicar brake; Berto also locates the home of the late John Finley Scott in Davis, California rather than in nearby Dixon. The exact truth always lies somewhere in the past, and in the future…
In the summer of 2002, I had the privilege of visiting Taiwan, by then a dynamic, modern industrialized country. Cars and trucks were in wide use, and there was frequent bus service in urban areas, but motor scooters were the most common motor vehicle.
Taiwan had banned the sale of new two-stroke motor scooters several years earlier. Only occasionally did I see one, identifiable by a plume of blue smoke and the distinctive buzz of the two-stroke engine. Still, air pollution was very serious in Taiwan — worse than I have experienced in any US city — thanks to the subtropical summer heat, to the populated areas’ being sheltered from the prevailing wind by high mountains, to the strong manufacturing/industrial economy, and to later and weaker pollution control measures than in the USA.
What measures are needed to accommodate light two-wheelers — motor scooters or bicycles — with a mode share well above 50 percent? Well, Taiwan was a real eye-opener in that regard. Measures focused on accommodating light two-wheeled vehicles with a 10% mode share would mostly just get in the way.
Riding a bicycle among the motor scooters in Taiwan was air-pollution Purgatory and vehicular-cycling Heaven, a sort of anti-Amsterdam. (If I go to Taiwan again, I’m taking my filter mask.) I fit in just fine on my bicycle, as did the few other bicyclists I saw — and I’m not a fast cyclist and neither were they.
All kinds of people were riding motor scooters, from the mid-teen years on up. It wasn’t the “eight to eighty” paradigm we hear in the USA — more like fourteen to eighty.
Traffic moved efficiently except where the wider motor vehicles created traffic jams. There, the motor scooters generally filtered past. Everyone was riding according to the standard rules of the road, except for the filtering forward. In the several days I was there, I did not see a single crash.
Helmet use was mandatory for motor scooter riders.
I think there are a few lessons in what I experienced:
In hot climates, (think the U.S. sunbelt –), and especially with hills to climb, light motorized two-wheelers are going to very popular, bicycles less so if private passenger cars are too expensive to operate and/or road space is scarce. Though bicycles are certainly more convenient in many ways, and much less expensive, even in mild climates, many people will prefer light motorized two-wheelers due to issues of physical ability, steep terrain and time/distance.
In the USA, two-stroke motor scooters are still on sale and probably predominate in the market. (Why? The two-stroke motor has a somewhat higher power-to-weight ratio and is simpler and cheaper.) The issue of air pollution from motor scooters needs to be addressed proactively, and early. If we don’t go one better than Taiwan and require effective pollution control on motor scooters as we do on passenger vehicles and light trucks, the problem is going to catch up with us and reverse the gains in air quality of the past 35 years. [Update 2019 — e-bikes may render this observation irrelevant.]
I did see bike/motor scooter lanes on one main arterial in Taichung, Taiwan, but a society with a very large mode share for light two-wheelers needs to adopt a mostly vehicular paradigm, as Taiwan does. Any widespread attempt at segregation is too clumsy and inefficient. We do have a few examples in the USA where the same conclusion was reached — for example, see this video shot at the University of California at Davis, where bicyclists, service vehicles and shuttle buses share the campus roadways from which private motor vehicles are prohibited.
The “eight-to-eighty” [updated to “all ages and abilities] mantra so often heard recently has a nice sound to it if you’re just promoting bicycle use or bicycle sales, but isn’t going to work under Taiwan-like conditions, because eight-year-olds are not capable yet of operating safely in heavy traffic. 14 to eighty is more sensible for travel on a motor scooter anywhere in an urban area. Younger folks can ride on local streets (and bicycle boulevards and paths may increase the scope of where they ride ) — but not everywhere.
In a mature culture which makes widespread use of light two-wheelers, traffic law and helmet use are taken seriously in the interest of public safety and orderly operation, not dismissed as irrelevant due to “safety in numbers” or the goal of encouragement.
I just got the August 5, 2009 San Francisco Bicycle Coalition newsletter online. It contains the news that the Paris, France bike share program has been “a huge success.” [Page deleted and notarchived, SF Bicycle coalition has erased this history, and reading on, you might get an idea why. But the newsletter also was sent as an e-mail, and I have uploaded it as a page on this blog. ]
The credit-card swipe necessary to release a bicycle from its parking station in Paris would seem to solve the problems inherent in earlier “yellow-bike” programs that simply left bicycles lying around for people to use. Such programs have repeatedly been tried by people whose idealism knows no bounds, and have failed when the bicycles disappeared.
I was initially very hopeful for the Paris bike-share program, with its more sensible business model. The program has seen wide use, to its credit, with claims of 80,000 users per day. But there have been reports of very serious problems with theft and vandalism; I’ve read that some 8,000 of the original 15,000 bicycles have had to be replaced. See for example these news items from treehugger.com and the BBC. Unfortunately, claims of “huge success” do need a reality check.
I don’t have good information about the reasons for the problems, but I can speculate:
Perhaps the bicycles don’t have locks that secure them — or secure them well — to fixed objects other than the special racks.
People who use these bicycles are likely not to be knowledgeable about securing a bicycle.
Another problem could be that the bicycles all look the same, and so are hard to trace.
And they are rather nice bicycles, with built-in lighting, fenders and geared hubs.
There also could be a problem with credit-card theft and fraud.
Also, as the photo with the treehugger.com story shows, bicycles are an easy target for vandalism while parked in their racks, day and night, in unsecured areas on the streets. That problem doesn’t admit of an easy solution, because widespread dispersal of the bicycles is essential to the program’s usefulness.
Much would seem to depend on the general crime rate; the prototype program in the smaller university city of Lyon is reportedly doing better.
A claim which seems credible is that JCDecaux, the advertising company which financed the program, is suffering from the current economic downturn — see the report on triplepundit.com. The economic downturn might be less of a problem except that JCDecaux didn’t set the program up to pay for itself, but rather, subsidized it in return for rights to post billboards. Shades of the yellow-bikes phenomenon, from a large, established business…though a story on Streetsblog reports that JCDecaux is overemphasizing the problem to score negotiating points, and does not release financial information which would clarify the issues.
The program is expanding, but now the City of Paris also has had to subsidize it too, according to Bike Europe. Yes, all modes of transportation are subsidized, some more than others (apologies to George Orwell), but asking for a new and different subsidy may not be popular, and especially not in today’s economic climate.
I regard the problems with the Paris bike-share program as unfortunate, but also I ask the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and other bicycling advocacy organizations not to stick their heads, or ours, in the sand. Your credibility is at stake.
