For many years now people have divided the roadgoing public into tribes: “white van man”, “lycra lout”, “Mondeo man” (the latter being a label for tailgating sales reps on the motorway network). This immediately creates an adversarial scenario which pitches tribe against tribe. The trouble with this type of labelling is that it’s inherently lazy and doesn’t allow for blurring at boundaries or cross-dressing (which tribe do I belong to when I set down my lycra and drive to work?). I recently blogged about how the “lycra lout” label didn’t reflect the reality for most cyclists and was unduly disparaging of the majority. It seems that it’s only for the retarded few (and I include both cyclists and car drivers) for whom attaching labels seems to influence the way they behave. They would be the guys that thought it was fine to shout at my wife cycling to work “too slowly” or for filtering in to the right hand lane to turn right when she should have been in the gutter being forced to cross two lanes of traffic at the last minute.
Critical Mass ride San Francisco, 2005
This view of the road as essentially a gladiatorial arena in which different tribes compete for their right to drive/ride on it is such a negative starting point and inevitably leads to tribes kicking back through pressure groups against safety cameras or the Critical Mass movement. Critical Mass was founded in 1992 as a means of drawing attention to how unfriendly the roads were to cyclists through mass participation cycle rides. The problem is that this sort of drawing attention to cyclists simply reinforces the fault lines between cyclists and other road users as it all too often gets interpreted not as a passive assertion of cyclists’ rights, but rather as an aggressive assault on another tribe’s territory (in this case, urban drivers) with predictable results (the “Seattle Incident”). I know that cycling activists would argue strongly against this viewpoint stating that the territory in question didn’t belong to the urban driver’s tribe in the first place and that cyclists have an equal right to use the road. And I agree completely. But at the same time, I can’t help but thinking that there must be a better way.
One aspect of this that I hadn’t considered before is the separateness of the term “lycra lout”. Our attire, in the eyes of other road users places us into a different species of animal. We are not, fathers, mothers, brothers, children, workers, we are lycra louts and as such can be treated differently. Nowhere is this contrast made more stark than by looking at the Copenhagencyclingchic blog. In vain will you search for the smog-masked, fixie riding urban guerilla treating a queue of traffic as his personal skate park; instead you will see ordinary people on bicycles going about their business on wide boulevards with little traffic. Maybe, if other road users saw us as human beings instead of aliens, things might change.
Blue Boots by Mikael Colville-Anderson
Why can’t cycling in Manchester be like in Copenhagen? Well, it could. The only trouble is that it has taken 30 years of consistently putting pedestrians and cyclists at the forefront of the planning process for Copenhagen to get where it is today. The key to success seems to be in developing a mindset whereby streets are no longer conduits for motorised vehicles but amenities for people to use and enjoy. For example, imagine how much more pleasant living, shopping and visiting a cafe would be in central Manchester if Deansgate was closed to traffic? Or, how much more successful the cafes and shops in Chorlton and Didsbury would be if the streets became traffic free? In short, it’s people that make cities, not cars.
Nobody is going to pretend that this is going to be easy. Manchester’s overwhelming rejection of the proposed congestion charge proves, if nothing else, that planners are going to have to be far more imaginative in their plans to persuade Mancs that cycling to work is a realistic alternative to the morning traffic jam on the A34 or A6. Maybe putting some of the anti-congestion charge campaigners on a trip to Copenhagen to see what city life could be like might be a starting point.
Dapper in the evening by Mikael Colville-Anderson
Links:
Mikael Colville Anderson, author of Copenhagencyclingchic on Flickr
Independent Newspaper article: What the world can learn about cycling from Copenhagen.
Image Credits:
Critical Mass, Wikimedia Commons
Blue Boots and Dapper used with permission of Mikael Colville-Anderson
Categories:
Powered by FireStats