Reposted from Bikocity: More or less, bicycle infrastructure policy and its relationship to riderships was the topic of my 2007 master’s thesis. It’s been obvious to some of us for a long time that bicycle infrastructure policy needs to change…
I meant to complete this “things I loved about living & bicycling in ________” series before National Bike Month ended, but it didn’t happen and, anyway, bike month should be every month! Here’s the second-to-last post of the series….
I lived in the city of Groningen in the Netherlands for 5 months in 2007. With a bike commute rate of about 50-60% and about 2/3 of inhabitants, in total, using the bike from time to time, Groningen is a top-notch bicycle city. It has been named Bicycle City of the World on more than one occasion and the following are probably the main reasons why.
I recently took a short little vacation to Berlin (just about 5-7 hours away by train from where I live). While I had noticed when I visited the first time (2 years ago) that it was a tremendous bike city and put it at #7 in my bike city photo tours series, I didn’t bike around the city on that visit. Additionally, it was rather cold and rainy, so biking wasn’t in full bloom there.
This time around, we (my partner Marika and friend Salah) were set on biking, a bit at least. The weather was nice and our friend got us some bikes. We ended up going on a bike ride that lasted 5 hours or so on our first full day there.
Groningen would be number one on this list if we were looking at percentage of residents who bicycle for transportation purposes. About 57% of travel in Groningen is by bicycle!