Apartments with no place for bikes are a barrier to better cities
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The European Cyclists’ Federation
The European Cyclists’ Federation (ECF) is an international organization that acts as an umbrella over the European countries bicycle organizations. There are at least one bicycle organization by country. It interacts with the European Commission, the European Parliament or the Council of Europe as well as the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe or the World Health Organization.
The ECF puts into practice its influence to support laws which promote biking, avoid those which harm it and maintain cyclist in the politics agenda. Moreover, the ECF coordinates the Eurovelo and organizes the Velo-City every year.
According to its president, three factors have contributed to the boom of biking in the last years: Climate change, COVID-19 and the Ukraine war. This last point contributed to increase the price of raw materials. Furthermore, he indicates that most moves within a city are as long as 5 kilometers, a perfect distance to pedal, and the main contribution to climate change and pollution at city level is produced by combustion engine vehicles. Thus, bicycles are perfect to face it.
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A brief Amsterdam story
Back in the 70’s, the number of purchased cars increased in Amsterdam and car parking were created, although citizens were detrimental due to the lack of pedestrian areas. Even channels were dried to gain extra space for cars. Such cars increment provoked a chaos and an augmentation in crashes, thus deaths. At that time the Agenda Autoluw was created. It is the politics of reducing private cars and make it difficult the entrance of it to cities in essence.
At the beginning of the XXI century, the same city experienced a boom as it comes to new inhabitants (an increase of 16%) and bikes (a higher percentage). As a result and partly because of tourists, streets were clogged with bicycles in sidewalks. This time pedestrians were affected. In 2012, public authorities started facing such a problem. New bike parks were built, campaigns for consciousness-raising were launched and bad parked bikes were banned. Additionally, car parks were transformed into bike parks. Moreover, impressive bike parks for thousands of bicycles have been opening in the last years with special interest when close of train stations and high demanded buildings.
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Fyllings Dalstum Nelen
A traditional approach when pedaling from point A to point B and there is a mountain in the middle of the path is to create a road to save it, commonly by zigzagging. Some bicycles have gears to overcome high slopes, but some others do not. In Bergen, Norway, they have built a tunnel between two neighbors of the same city (Fyllingsdalen and Mindemyren). Originally, one should pedal for 35 minutes, whereas today a cyclist can spend 10 minutes to arrive to the same destiny. This almost 3 kilometers long, 6-meter width tunnel is opened for cyclists (3.5 meters of bike line) and pedestrians. (2.5 meters). It goes by in parallel to the train line and takes advantage of the auxiliary tunnel originally built as a complement to the railway.
Apart from the obvious improvement in the sustainable mobility, it also opt for security because of all the cameras which register images 24-7. However, the tunnel is only opened from 5:30 to 23:30. Additional improvements over common tunnels for bicycles are the emergency phones and speakers throughout it. In case of emergency, ambulances and firefighters can access without problem.
The main problem architects faced when building it was the high humidity since the mountain is plenty of water and needed a drainage system to overcome it.
As far as I know, this is the second larger tunnel for bikes. The most large is called Snoqualmie in Seattle with 3.6 kilometers.