Being 'sweet' to bikes benefits everybody

To those Winnipeggers who are up in arms over the recent wave of bikeway construction; who are infuriated over the loss of parking spaces and car lanes, or just annoyed at the scale of public dollars being spent on the needs of what you might think of as a vocal minority... I have someone you need to listen to.

His name is Jan Gehl, a renowned Copenhagen-based architect who has spent decades working to make cities in Europe, Australia and the U.S. more people-friendly. He has just come out with a book called Cities for People.

I recently heard him speak at the 2010 Canadian Institute of Planners conference in Montreal.

For Gehl, the fundamental problem with most of the modern cities in the West is that they were laid out by traffic planners, who, for decades, geared all their efforts to "making the cars happy," as Gehl put it.

By extension -- and through a lifetime of acculturation -- all of us have, to some degree, adopted the same car-oriented perspective.

The result for our cities, he says, is that they have become inhumanely scaled and bleak, filled with places in which nobody wants to linger. The buildings and complexes may look spectacular as architects' models or when seen from an airplane; yet, according to Gehl, the only scale that matters is the human scale, and at five kilometres per hour.

This orientation has led Gehl and his colleagues to roll back automobile dominance wherever they have worked. The results have been astonishing, and in some cases, rapid.

The squares and streets of Copenhagen, which in 1960 were deluged with cars, are now plazas bustling with street life, pedestrians and cyclists. Businesses are thriving, and the city is regularly cited as one of the most livable and sustainable in the world.

In Melbourne, what was as recently as 1994 a bleak urban core is now a thriving commercial centre, thanks to pedestrian and cycling schemes.

Even New York City, with its streams of Manhattan traffic, has closed off large sections of Broadway, with the result that rents for businesses along those sections are shooting up.

The math, according to Gehl, is simple: 10 bicycles can park in one car space. Removing the parking and closing off the lanes -- as he dubs it, being "sweet" to pedestrians and cyclists -- acts as an invitation to human-scaled street life.

I saw the results for myself in downtown Montreal, which is constantly humming with people walking and cycling -- many of them travelling on Montreal's recently installed "Bixi" rental bikes. The major thoroughfares now feature bike lanes segregated from traffic and continuous network of routes painted on the streets -- the very infrastructure that is now vexing so many people along Assiniboine Avenue.

I spoke with Gehl about the controversy in Winnipeg. He was quick to point out that every city that has taken on these improvements has faced just this sort of vocal opposition, largely from drivers and merchants, who insist that such measures can never work in their city. Critics, however, are invariably won over by the transformation their cities undergo: people of all ages and in their hundreds filling spaces where before such travel would have gotten them run over, enjoying the opportunity to mingle with their neighbours and patronize local businesses.

The several dozen projects underway in Winnipeg may look bad now while under construction, and they may require that some of us change our travel patterns.

But in the end, just as they have around the world, they will make life a little "sweeter" for pedestrians and cyclists -- who, after all, are not some special class of people, but are simply our friends, families, neighbours, tourists, parents and children.

And, yes, customers.

Michael Dudley is a research associate at the Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Winnipeg. m.dudley@uwinnipeg.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 9, 2010 H12