Carbon Trace

Here’s an interesting video I found at Bicycling is Better. There’s discussion of bicycles at the start of the video and again around 6:30. One word of warning: This film was made in a less-than-enlightened age re: race.

As Mighk notes, here’s a good example of bicycles mixing well with traffic without the help of bicycle lanes and other accommodation. Whether or not this is possible today in an American city is not entirely clear to me.

What I find especially fascinating about traffic as shown in this video is how uncontrolled it appears to be. As Mighk also notes: “But watch how the motorists and cyclists interact.  To us it looks like chaos.  Traffic control appears minimal at best, yet the cyclists all seem blithely unconcerned.”

When we are all thrown together by circumstances we are “encouraged” to get along. I like this as a controlling idea for traffic design.

Confession time: This doesn’t look like much fun. So crowded.

What I mean by that: I think I’m spoiled.

Explanation: Right now I live in a very good city to be a utility bicyclist. Flat. Streets on a grid. Low downtown speed limits. An active advocacy community. Interested city officials and business people. And (for the most part) polite drivers. And we have what appears to me to be a growing bicycle culture and “a lot” of bicyclists on the roads. (“A lot” has no real meaning except to indicate that the number of bicyclists appears to be growing steadily to the point at which a street scene downtown at any given time includes one or two bicyclists along a given sight line.) Riding is comfortable and easy here. Why would I want to ride in the chaos of Copenhagen circa 1937? Yikes!

But you see, it’s not about my tender convenience or my American terministic screen, i.e. “a set of symbols that becomes a kind of screen or grid of intelligibility through which the world makes sense to us.” It’s about choice. It’s about alternatives. It’s about going along and getting along. It’s about a world in which oil is too expensive to burn. It’s about making quality decisions for yourself. It’s about reaching that place where the riding in this video is fun and normal because it is better.

We can have Copenhagen 1937 right here, right now.

Get out on Springfield’s streets and ride like you mean it. See you out there!

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