Funny personal mobility solutions collected by TED Blog.

Cycling in the Hungarian winter-time

It’s too cold! It’s raining! It’s slippery out there! These are the main excuses for a citizen why not to ride their bicycles from late November until March.

Now let me show you another reason that can easily be a demotivating factor when it comes to winter cycling. Though, the modal split of cycling has been increased by 50% annually in Budapest (even in winter months), but cleaning the snow from the cycle tracks (and other types on bike facilities) is just not that important for the city administration and/or the folks who are effectively cleaning the streets.

In 2012 the daily average of cycling traffic was over a thousand on working days. Not too much – you could say – compared to public transport (main tram routes run among the cycle lane) or individual car traffic. But still, much more than 5 years ago when the early bird cyclists of Budapest have arisen, mainly from different sub-cultures of the youth.

I personally have a strange déjá vu these wet and cold days that cycling is perceived as the extremely minority of the everyday traffic. Today around 500 cyclists are counted on the Inner Ring road and it used to be like this in all seasons until a sensable change in the mindset of city and traffic planners, who had put bike lanes, bike-boxes (ASLs) on the plans and let contra-flow cycling in downtown streets. Anyway, the average traffic in the same section was over 2.200 cyclist/day/direction in  September…

Why it’s only 25% who sit on the saddle when the temperature gets below 5°C?

I don’t know the perfect answer, for sure. But I show you some photos I’ve taken on my trips in Budapest and some other towns.

 

separated (bidirectional) bike-pedestrian path at a signalized crossing.

no comment…

not that attractive

Yet the biggest snow in downtown this year. The yellow line refers to the bike lane covered by grey snow :-/

Some cyclists prefer ski-glasses but an extra dimension can radically improve your senses!

It’s not clear who needs to clean the cycle paths. But for sure: residents are responsible for the clearance of the footpath in front of their property.

Unbelievable that the track was “perfectly” cleaned while the bottle-neck was totally forgotten…

Unbelievable that the track was “perfectly” cleaned while the bottle-neck was totally forgotten…

Cyclists are banned from the road (2×2 lanes) but shared bike-pedestrian path was fully covered by ice.

This was the first day when snowing this season.

This was the first day when snowing this season.

 

Do you have some other good/bad examples? Please, let me know in a comment.

Educating people to increase road traffic safety

Rule no.1

We want to make traffic safer, more comfortable and more affordable for everybody! This means huge investments on the infrastructural side (thousands of work hours of planning and design) but how could you enforce the changing rules if not spending on the additional education and communication projects. This could sound obvious but it must be underlined that human behaviour is the real root cause of most of road traffic conflicts.

Educating children

With Bike to School campaigns and Traffic parks.

Teaching high-school students and adults

I think we can agree that a creative and good quality video can bring through the message easily and can be continuously active on Utube or Vimeo. Here comes two great videos from the USA what tries to explain the new kinds of cycling facilities.

Involving police!

The Asheville Police Department is training officers on bicycle maneuvering techniques the week of June 2 as it rejuvenates its bicycle patrols in the city.

A brief history and introduction to the International Police Mountain Bike Association (IPMBA), providing world-class training and resources to public safety cyclists since 1991. Visit http://www.ipmba.org to learn more.

Changing travel behaviours

Once we got socialized in our cultural (historical) context, we are driven by habits and our perception of our alternative solutions. It sounds easy to change… but in order to convince my neighbours there really must be a diverse and intermodal transportation system. At this point things are more about psychology.

There are several case studies and campaign schemes available on the internet. Here are some European projects in what I got involved:

• Cycling Awareness Raising and MArketing – CARMA
• Active Access – Encouraging Active Travel for Short Trips to Improve Health and the Local Economy
• LifeCycle – How to run a cycling action?

This video shows Budapest in 2010 when over 30.000 people came together for a bike parade. The event is held twice a year since 2005, on the Earth Day in April and the Car Free Day in September.

City Of Joy from daniel fiantok on Vimeo.

Finally, another Streetfilms production from the movement ‘Guadalajara 2020’, Mexico. Good so see these local movements how they can transform the city into spaces full of people chatting, walking, playing on a music instrument, and activities that are enrichening our lives in general. Restrict motorized traffic!

Guadalajara’s Via RecreActiva – The World’s Most Transformative Ciclovia from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

One day in Budapest drawn by cyclists’ GPS track records.

UrbanCyclr (urbancyclr.com) app allows bikers to track their biking routes in the city. The individual routes are added to an aggregated map of the bikers’ community. 100.000 kilometers of biking routes have been collected from individual bikers since the launch of the app in 2011.

SubMap (submap.kibu.hu) is a unique tool to visualize geographic and time-based data on distorted maps. It has a huge potential in coping with data from a physically distributed network of independent sensors.

Be aware of crocodiles!

Photo taken next to Rotterdam in 2010. Could anyone explain to me what this sign exactly means?

SkyCycle: a transport icon for London

I found this video on the world-wide-web some weeks ago and I still do not exactly understand the reasons why not designing the cycling highways in a safer way but on the surface.
May be it would boost cycling for longer trips and passing next to the London Eye would give a magnificent position for cycling in general. But high-rising ideas can result in unsustainable implementations, though the concept is interesting but additional projects need to extend the main network’s attraction area by increasing the citizens’ perceived level of safety. Restrict motorized traffic step-by-step to fight against its side effects.

Low budget bike lanes

Who have told you that developing cycling facilities cannot be done by volunteers?!? Today I’d like to present you great solutions from the overseas.

The first one comes from Toronto!

http://cca-actions.org/actions/illicit-stencil-saves-cyclists

The second one comes from Mexico city

This is the link to the source of the photo.

And here is my personal favourite from Guadalajara

Click here for a detailed article: LINK

The Dutch Cycling Embassy in Budapest #3

Today you can meet Marc von Woudenberg, also known as Mr. Amsterdamized. The man who has once seen the burning man :) Marc runs the consultancy Amsterdamize.

Here comes our conversation when we met in Budapest, September 2012.

“I am here in Budapest because I was invited by the Embassy [the Dutch] and the Hungarian Cyclists’ Club to have a talk about the history of cycling the Netherlands and how it relates to Budapest and Hungary and how we can actually help. And it has been really interesting being here. I’ve been here before but now really in this capacity it’s very interesting.”

 You mentioned marketing and communication yesterday. What do you think? Which departments at a municipality or local government need to cooperate or necessarily be involved…?

“Be involved? Well. Coming from the Netherlands and knowing history and knowing how it works now… You cannot do any marketing communication or promotion if it is not really there (all the stuff that’s needed). There are different things that are needed to make a city bicycle friendly, so in the Netherlands now after 30 years of developing most of it, it’s a combination of traffic and city planning. That’s what it is in the Netherlands. When it comes to physical changes it’s about redesigning streets. Rethinking how people move about in a city. Who could go into a city? Like big trucks or heavy traffic in general, there you need to divert traffic or redesign certain areas in the city. So where I come from there is the professional concerning traffic planning and urban planning joined together basically. It’s interactive! And based on that when actually it’s implemented it’s being promoted. Because we cannot promote cycling saying it’s a lovely thing to do when there’s no way that people can actually do it. Because that would be lying. So it’s basically a very practical cooperation between planning and promotion. So It’s all about everyday life. I told you that. We were speaking about that at the forum [on the day before] that promotion needs to be based on reality. Based on everyday life based on convenience and then we use a little humor we use, you know behavioral things like what people expect but what you actually tell them, there are different ways but there is never one thing! You can never have a silver bullet trying to change the city into a bike friendly city. There are different measures are needed. Co operations are needed. Partners are really needed. And everybody needs to be involved.”

Additionally, I need to mention Marc’s video what he did for the Dutch Cycling Embassy.

Cycling For Everyone from Dutch Cycling Embassy on Vimeo.

The Dutch Cycling Embassy in Budapest #2

As promised before, more videos about urban cycling will be published, starring with some Dutch experts. Today I’d like to share our conversation with Marjolein de Lange, who works  for the Cyclists’ Union Amsterdam. She also gave lectures for the city planners in Budapest and the day after we all went out for cycling in the city…

Marjolein de Lange (Dutch Cycling) from Zsolt Kilián on Vimeo.

Stay tuned!

The Dutch Cycling Embassy in Budapest #1

We had the pleasure to meet four reputable members of the Dutch Cycling Embassy in Budapest. They gave lectures about the history of the Dutch cycling evolution from the 1970s till today. (I hope the presentation will be accessible on the web later.)

On the next day we went for a bike tour around downtown to see the sights and to have a look on the cycling infrastructure and bicycle culture. We had a great time and I’ve shot some short interviews with our guests. Let me share them with you.

Let’s see what Herbert Tiemens, traffic planner from Utrecht thinks about Budapest.

Herbert Tiemens in Budapest, 2012 September from Zsolt Kilián on Vimeo.

Other videos are coming soon… Stay tuned!