Building the Cycling City

by Melissa Bruntlett

  Mayne’s major challenge over the coming years will be to convince these industry players to get behind the ECF’s push for safer streets and better bicycle infrastructure in urban centers across the continent: “I’m communicating back to the industry: ‘This looks like a magic bullet at the moment, but you need to support us on getting infrastructure built and making roads safer, because the market will plateau.’” In order to fulfill those optimistic business plans, and realize the projected profits, these business owners must help ensure that their customers have great places to ride.

  And so, tempering the expectations of manufacturers, retailers, and advocates is perhaps Mayne’s most important role, as well as emphasizing the fact that those new users and new trips won’t appear without significant investments in active transportation. Getting the basics right has to come first when it comes to increasing cycling rates and sales of new bicycles—whether electric-assist or not. As Mayne points out: “The underlying belief that e-bikes will fix everything is a bit like expecting e-cars to fix everything. It’s just another form of the same mobility. So the underlying issues of infrastructure, parking, and safety are not resolved by the technology.”

  On that front, their daunting and difficult work is just getting started.

  03 FORTUNE FAVORS THE BRAVE

  Groningen is a true Cycling City. For young and old, the bicycle is the most commonly used mode of transport in the city. In Groningen, cycling is part of our DNA. We are proud of that and we want to keep it that way.

  — GRONINGEN CYCLING CITY STRATEGY

  Max van den Berg was just 24 years young in 1969 when he decided to throw his hat into the circus ring of municipal politics, mere months after obtaining his sociology degree from the University of Groningen. Despite landing a coveted and relatively comfortable teaching position lecturing on political science and urban-planning issues, dramatic plans to “modernize” his once-fortified hometown—similar to those being executed 250 kilometers (155 miles) south in Rotterdam—convinced Van den Berg to leave the world of academia and commit himself to a higher calling.

  After countless discussions with like-minded students, entrepreneurs, and homeowners, Van den Berg realized that someone needed to represent their interests at the political level. “They wanted to bring big roads through the city, and make totally new neighborhoods,” he recalls. “Because in the view of the technocrats, these smaller houses and buildings were old-fashioned.” As they had attempted elsewhere in the country, planners and policy makers were scrambling to create the ideal conditions for mass motoring, and were prepared to sacrifice Groningen’s centuries of history and character in pursuit of the monolithic, monocultural modernist ideals.

  According to Van den Berg, a willingness to get his hands dirty developed at an early age. “You could say I was raised—from both my father and grandfather—with the simple idea that democracy is something fairly essential,” he claims. “It means every person with conviction can participate in the democratic process, and has the power to change things.” Instead of the general feeling of helplessness dominating the public sphere, Max grew up with a hopeful “Yes, you can” attitude, understanding that politics is far too significant to remain simply a spectator sport. Any ordinary citizen can play a critical role and make the change they want to see in their city.

  Rather than acquiesce to the demolition of large swaths of his town, in September 1970 Van den Berg ran for, and won, a seat on the city council as a member of the Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA or “Labor Party”), based on a platform opposing these car-centric plans. But rather than latch onto the existing social movements arising in other Dutch cities and towns, he opted to shape his own Groningen-specific solution. “If we don’t like this, we don’t have to say ‘Yes,’” he remembers telling his constituents. “We can say, ‘Stop with all these plans and make something new.’”

  For his first two years as an alderman, Van den Berg and his allied council members were in the minority, and he behaved as such, raising his objections to these destructive proposals at every available opportunity. “I caused a lot of debate, and that debate created a lot of support. I had support from the traditional labor class, students, professors, and the middle class,” he recalls. In the face of that vigorous dissent, four members of the opposition resigned in protest, and Max and five other progressive aldermen were named to a city board tasked with developing the urban and traffic plans. This newly reconfigured board had the support of the majority of the city council, and Van den Berg—at just 26—found himself deputy mayor assigned with the Traffic and Urban Development portfolio.

  Max wasted no time taking advantage of his newly secured mandate, drawing stakeholders from the business community, residents’ associations, law enforcement, urban planners, students, and cycling advocates, and he gathered them in a room in the Martinitoren (“St. Martin’s Tower”), the 700-year-old church located in Groningen’s main market square. The goal was to create an alternate proposal for the city center. “We brought in enough coffee, and we said ‘no one leaves this room unless you have to do a specific task,’” Van den Berg recollects. “Step by step, we will create this plan. And the technical translation we did in more or less four weeks.”

  The resulting document, Groningen’s now-famous Verkeerscirculatieplan (“Traffic Circulation Plan”), proposed dividing the city center to four parts and forbidding cars to cross between those quarters. This made the inner city practically impenetrable with a car, leaving cycling and walking the best ways to get around. The plan didn’t completely remove motor vehicles from the equation—as public buses and delivery vans would retain limited access to parts of the core—but it came remarkably close.

  The predictable outrage attracted headlines across the country, and Groningen’s angry merchants painted slogans on their storefronts, circulated numerous petitions, and demonstrated in large numbers outside City Hall. The local paper ran an editorial referring to Van den Berg as Harry Houdini, suggesting that he was attempting a huge magic trick by making all of the cars disappear. Jacques Wallage, the unfortunate alderman who inherited the traffic portfolio from Van den Berg in 1976, even received several death threats.

  Nevertheless, after a 1974 election that saw the PvdA increase its seat count from 11 to 18, the Groningen Council officially adopted the Traffic Circulation Plan, empowered by the consent given to them from a comparatively quiet majority. “That was all done with an enormous amount of public discussion and debate,” says Van den Berg. “So people were quite aware of the direction we wanted to go.”

  It took another two years of preparation before, on September 19, 1977, the Circulation Plan was finally put into action, mainly because Van den Berg and his team understood the importance of getting it right first time around. “I was aware that if you want to change such a thing, you only have one chance,” he recalls. “You need political support, and then you can implement it in one day, and you suddenly change the entire system overnight.” In a move that predated Janette Sadik-Khan’s own lighter-quicker-cheaper approach by three decades, Groningen’s city center was radically transformed within just a few hours. City staff scrambled to erect hundreds of provisional barriers and signs forcing motor-vehicle traffic in specific directions, and—the very next morning—special hostesses were employed to stop and greet frustrated drivers with flowers and informational pamphlets.

  The residents of Groningen quickly adapted, and in the following years, city officials turned the temporary treatments into something more permanent, adding landscaping and other materials to make the traffic-calming measures more beautiful and better integrated into the urban fabric. Subsequent studies by the City showed that—despite the protestations of a small, noisy minority—the plan resulted in improved sound and air quality as well as increased retail sales, and it has remained popular with a majority of citizens, who visit the city center more frequently than before.

  As a result of this radical civic transformation, Van den Berg was sw
iftly thrown into the national spotlight and soon was consulting with cities and towns across the country, whose residents and politicians were desperately trying to find an alternative to the devastating modernist school of urban planning and transportation. “I was invited to Maastricht, Delft, Leiden, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam,” he remembers fondly. “For them, Groningen was four years ahead of the rest of the Netherlands. And so, we were an example of what is possible. It helped their imagination. And in politics, you need imagination.”

  Figure 3-1: Accessible only by foot or bicycle, downtown Groningen’s Folkingestraat was recently named the best shopping street in the Netherlands. (Credit: Modacity)

  Over a long and varied career in both national and international politics, Van den Berg has been a member of European Parliament, served as chair of the national Labor Party, and sat on the King’s Commission as head of the Province of Groningen. Upon his retirement in 2016, he was made an honorary citizen of Groningen, where he still lives and rides his opafiets, immensely proud of how he permanently shaped his city for the better.

  Today, the Traffic Circulation Plan remains central to Groningen’s success as a cycling city on the global stage, where two-thirds of all trips in the city center are made by bicycle—a staggering figure that would have simply been unattainable without Van den Berg’s political courage. “In a certain way, it was brave to go ahead,” he reflects. “But at the same time we had promised to do it. And we believed you have the right to proceed, if you have the vast majority that we had.”

  There’s no doubt that Groningen would be a very different place today had Van den Berg not made the idealistic—and somewhat naïve—decision to get involved in local politics at such a young age. But, according to him, it was the most effective way to make a genuine impact. “If you only stay a citizen’s group, then you usually just end up fighting against politicians,” he counsels. “You have to integrate yourselves with the politicians, convince them via knowledge, and sometimes yourselves run for office.” And as he demonstrated, age is no excuse: “If you see a wall, when you’re young and enthusiastic, you’re able to walk through it. And that’s exactly what I did.”

  A City Living on the Power of the Bicycle

  In the decades following the execution of Van den Berg’s Traffic Circulation Plan, Groningen policy makers went from strength to strength. But somehow—perhaps because of Groningen’s modest size and relatively remote location—they’ve flown under the radar during discussions about the world’s best cycling cities, despite boasting a modal share that eclipses those of the established powerhouses, Amsterdam and Copenhagen.

  Groningen’s profile was raised when filmmaker Clarence Eckerson Jr. of Streetfilms visited in the summer of 2013 and then released a short documentary declaring Groningen to be “The World’s Cycling City.” The 15-minute film has since been viewed almost half a million times, including once by Tel Aviv native Lior Steinberg, who, at the time, was completing his master’s degree in urban planning at Stockholm University. On the strength of Eckerson’s inspiring images, Steinberg chose to complete his four-month work term in Groningen, eventually settling there after graduation. He cofounded the Velotropolis and LVBLcity blogs—a pair of websites and social media accounts dedicated to sharing Groningen’s success story with the world—as well as his own urban-planning firm Street Makers, which, among other projects, was instrumental in designing the “Creative Crosswalk” on Rotterdam’s Westblaak.

  In addition to its historically Calvinist and socialist values—which inspire many wealthy and successful people to choose the humble bicycle over a Mercedes—Steinberg credits Groningen’s tremendous number of cyclists to their two-pronged approach to street design, depending on proximity to the inner city. “There are several characteristics that make it a cycling city,” he explains. “In terms of infrastructure, it’s definitely the complete separation between cars and cyclists outside the city center, and the filtering of cars from getting inside the city center.”

  Steinberg believes the genius of Van den Berg’s plan lies in the fact that you don’t notice its existence when you’re on foot, bike, or bus. “I’ve tried to drive in Groningen a few times, and that’s where you really feel it,” he observes. The end result is that traveling from A to B virtually anywhere in the city is faster by bicycle than by car. “This is something that is quite rare elsewhere. Even in bigger cities where they are investing in cycling and it is catching on as a mode of transportation, it’s still often faster to go by car,” Steinberg notes. “It might be more expensive, it might be less comfortable, but it’s still faster. The circulation plan made cycling faster.”

  As a result of making cycling the single fastest and easiest way to move around Groningen, local planners have been forced to address a significant problem that many cities would love to have: dealing with the vast number of cyclists during peak hours. “Bicycle congestion” clogs up a number of parts of the city, particularly corridors between the center and the University of Groningen’s northern campus.

  With one in four of its 200,000 residents attending the two local universities, Groningen’s student population has forced the City to find innovative solutions for its busier streets as a way to accommodate a growing number of cyclists. These various solutions include a series of “smart routes”: direct, convenient cycle paths designed to get students and staff to the university in less than 15 minutes, without having to put their foot down even once. “Had a late night? Spent too much time in front of the mirror? Use the smart routes,” suggests their cheeky marketing campaign via social media, which Steinberg thinks was a brilliant move. “The way they marketed the ‘smart routes,’ I found it amazing,” he says, recalling how students were targeted directly as a way of getting to class on time without having to brave the bus.

  Groningen is also one of the first cities to attempt to “solve traffic situations with eye contact,” first piloting and then expanding a counterintuitive but highly effective four-way green light for cyclists at 29 different intersections. What sounds like chaos actually creates a calm and orderly ballet between road users, as a dedicated light phase permits cyclists from all four directions to pass through the intersection at once. Steinberg says this was an experiment born out of necessity: “They were trying to find more efficient ways to pass more cyclists in the same amount of time, and this ended up being a bit safer.”

  However, with as many as 20,000 cyclists traveling certain corridors on a given day, planners are being forced to “think outside the lane” and experiment with the notion of handing entire streets—known as fietsstraten (“bike streets”)—over to the bicycle as the dominant mode of transportation. Here, street-design features like red-colored asphalt, prominent signage and branding, traffic-calming, and reductions of on-street parking combine to make it abundantly clear that bikes are the main users of the street, and that drivers—as guests—should adjust their behavior accordingly.

  Image 3-2: Groningen’s newest fietsstraat, located on Bessemoerstraat, uses several design features to prioritize bicycles while treating cars as guests. (Credit: Modacity)

  The huge number of students proves to be both a blessing and a curse, especially when it comes to behavior on the bikeways. Steinberg points to a study from the University of Groningen that stopped 7,510 cyclists between 1:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning, 89 percent of who had consumed alcohol, while 68 percent were over the legal limit of 0.05 percent blood alcohol. Nevertheless, although drunk cycling is technically illegal, Dutch officials regard it as a low priority. In a move typical of their sustainable road-safety strategy, they focus on engineering rather than enforcement, designing streets that remove user error from the equation. “By having all those intoxicated cyclists, you really need to make cycling safe, and separate cars from cyclists,” Steinberg insists. “Combining drunk cyclists and fast cars is a recipe for disaster. So I do think that having a large number of reckless young cyclists creates the need for better infrastructure.”<
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  While Groningen has garnered a reputation in urban-planning circles as a place for testing revolutionary ideas, its politicians haven’t always held firm to their convictions. Steinberg points to a 1994 referendum to close the large park just north of the city center to motorized traffic. Noorderplantsoen, up until then, had been home to a busy thoroughfare dissecting the park, and the measure passed by only a narrow margin but could have gone either way. “The results were 51 percent in favor of closing the park to cars,” Steinberg recalls. “If now you had a referendum on whether to open that park to cars, it would be 100 percent to keep it car-free.”

  Steinberg adamantly warns cities against making important planning decisions by referendum, as it allows elected officials to shirk their political responsibility and hand off decisions they deem too controversial to make on their own authority. Despite the slender success of the Noorderplantsoen vote, he thinks the referendum process is often designed to fail: “The people who asked for that referendum were anti-action,” he says. “They knew it was easy to mobilize car owners against change, and assumed the quiet majority will not vote.” While, to their credit, the supporters of the proposed change did turn up, it would be far better to move forward with a well-informed plan on behalf of the citizens who elected them to make these kinds of decisions.