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For Bicyclists, a Widening Patchwork World
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In Berlin, biking now accounts for 12 percent of all transportation. The city has 3.4 million residents, and the city estimates that they use their bicycles a million times a day.
One of those cyclists is Michael Abraham, 35, an engineer at Berlin's Technical University. He has been riding a bicycle to stay in shape most of his life, but in the past year, goaded by high gasoline prices, he started cycling to work. "It's simply cheaper with your bike," he said.
Abraham estimates that he now saves about $35 a week on gasoline. That's not the only benefit. Thanks to Berlin's finely tuned cycling network, he also knows exactly how long his 7 1/2 mile commute will take -- 35 minutes. If he drives, the trip takes between 20 minutes and 1 1/2 hours, depending on traffic.
"With a car you can't reliably predict how long your commute will be, but you can with a bike," he said. "You are not affected by traffic jams -- you can just ride through them. It's a real advantage."
Build It and They'll Come
While the northern European model for promoting cycling certainly works, it is costly and requires lots of government intervention. There are other ways to get people on bikes. Japan does not pamper cyclists, but it does provide easy access to mass transit.
In greater Tokyo, where 35 million people live in the world's most populous metro area, there are almost no bike lanes. Guided by vague laws about what cyclists can and cannot do, police tend to ignore them -- except for confiscating illegally parked bikes.
Traffic chases most Tokyo cyclists onto sidewalks, where they periodically bump into pedestrians. Mothers are forbidden by law to carry more than one child on a bicycle, but tens of thousands of them do it every day.
"The manners of Tokyo cyclists are very poor and sometime suicidal," said Nobuyuki Tsuchiya, director general of public works in Edogawa, a Tokyo ward with 640,000 people, most of whom ride bikes. As for government transportation officials in Japan, Tsuchiya said it is difficult to find one who doesn't show some "negative thinking about bicycles. We are far behind our counterparts in Europe."
Still, a bicycle is an essential component of life in Tokyo. Impossibly thin women in four-inch heels ride them, as do important-looking men in black suits. Cycling's chaotic ubiquity is a result of several factors: population density, the high cost of driving and arguably the world's best train and subway system.
Commuters ride bikes often but not for very long -- usually less than 15 minutes. Train stations are no more than 1 1/2 miles apart in most of the city. Compared with walking or taking a bus, riding a bike shaves precious minutes off the daily trip to and from a station.
The one bone that some municipal governments have thrown cyclists is bike parking near stations. This year in Edogawa, that bone went high-tech. The ward government spent $67 million to build a cluster of computerized bicycle parking towers that use robotic arms to snatch bikes away from subway-bound commuters.
Pickup is just as easy as drop-off. At the swipe of a magnetic card, the arm finds the bike and returns it to its home-bound owner. The wait is about 10 seconds.
