Building the Cycling City

by Melissa Bruntlett

  Despite the decades-long task ahead of them, everyone involved in Atlanta’s “Bike to Ride” project is safe in the knowledge that, at the very least, they are all pushing in the same direction, a fact all the more astounding when you consider that they’re working in an environment designed for and dominated by motor vehicles for over half a century. “The City of Atlanta’s chief bicycle officer has told us, ‘We’re not adding capacity to any more roads. We’re actually looking to take vehicle capacity away to increase person capacity on our streets,’” Maines reveals. “So they’re not looking to accommodate any more cars in this city, but they are very focused on getting more people walking, biking, and using transit.”

  09 PUT YOUR CITY ON THE MAP

  The Hovenring is a joy for thousands of commuters who now pedal into and out of Eindhoven every day—and an emphatic statement by a city that knows where it’s going.

  — WIRED MAGAZINE

  “8 Cities That Show You What the Future Will Look Like”

  As the home of Royal Philips Electronics for over 125 years, the southern city of Eindhoven—now the fifth largest in the Netherlands, with over a quarter-million residents—once epitomized the industrial heart of the country. During that period, its design, development, and economic vitality were inextricably linked to the electronics giant—long the city’s largest employer, ever since the lightbulb factory opened its doors during the First World War.

  Right after the war ended, recognizing the unprecedented growth a booming Philips would bring, Eindhoven hired nationally renowned architects Pierre Cuypers and Louis Kooken to develop a master plan for the region. Their inspiration—the “Garden City” imagined by British planner Ebenezer Howard—would prove to be a precursor for modernist thought. The five villages surrounding Eindhoven would be annexed and connected by a “ring road” intended solely for automobiles, while residential living would be pushed to suburbs outside of that perimeter. The interior would be for industry and shopping—a geographic separation of the three main functions of daily life: dwelling, business, and commerce.

  “From the very beginning, the city was planned and designed for the car,” suggests Bas Braakman, bicycle policy advisor for the City of Eindhoven. “That means the mindset of the inhabitants is still very much car-based. We face a bit more struggle than other cities, like Amsterdam and Utrecht, in making the transition to more sustainable modes of transport.” But, as with many other locations across the country, it wasn’t until after the Second World War that traffic engineers were handed the keys to shape the city in their ideal image.

  “Eindhoven itself was bombed several times during the war—both by the Allies and the Germans—because it had industries close to the center, and was close to the Arnhem bridge depicted in the film A Bridge Too Far,” recounts Frank Veraart, assistant professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology, and co-author of Cycling Cities: The European Experience. Unlike Rotterdam, most of its structures were left standing, but the attacks provided officials with the perfect cover to start making room for the automobile. “Every single building that was only slightly damaged was demolished to make more space for cars,” claims Veraart. “All with the bigger view of getting more cars into the town.”

  The motor vehicle, as Veraart points out, was seen as a status symbol, an expression of luxury, and a way to stimulate economic activity in the central area: “They viewed the car as a vehicle of wealth. So if you welcomed cars into your town, drivers would stop and spend their money.” For Eindhoven, this meant building a number of roads through the city center and setting aside vast spaces for customers to park while shopping and dining.

  Meanwhile, in 1947, even as that status symbol grew in popularity across the region, people on bikes still constituted 71 percent of road users in Eindhoven (with motorists a mere 6 percent). But even in the face of that reality, American- and German-inspired professionals such as Dutch architect Jaap Bakema pursued their own form of social engineering, and any benefits to cyclists were either incidental or intended to get them out of the way of cars.

  Vertical separation became one of the popular ways to get cyclists out of sight (and out of mind), as was the case of the Woenselse railroad crossing, a major bottleneck for the huge number of Philips employees biking between the factory and Woensel, a blue-collar neighborhood to the north. Often these gates would remain closed for five hours a day, causing massive delays for commuters. A solution wasn’t implemented until 1953, when a tunnel was built to allow passage for cars, which proved equally beneficial to cyclists.

  A brand-new train station was built three years later, but even still, decisions surrounding that were made with an eye on making it easier for motor vehicles to move freely throughout the city. “They elevated the railway tracks,” explains Veraart. “That relieved traffic, so it could flow without hindrance. At that time, the whole idea was building the city for cars, rather than bicycles.” This was in spite of the fact that, as late as the 1960s, 80 percent of all Philips employees (from factory workers to corporate executives) cycled to work daily.

  Then, in 1961, the City hired German civil engineer Karl Schaechterle—a colleague and successor of M. E. Feuchtinger, the man who had proposed the calamitous demolition of Utrecht’s medieval center five years earlier—to draw up a traffic plan to solve their ever-worsening congestion and road-safety problems. His idea, in its most basic form, was to prevent the “slow” traffic from obstructing the “fast” traffic, realized through dedicated bike paths and tunnels built adjacent to and underneath new car-only thoroughfares—wide, seamless boulevards that greatly expanded the capacity of the existing ring road as they radiated from the suburbs into the city center. One of the more interesting experiments in this vertical separation was the Berenkuil (“Bear Pit”)—a sunken bicycle roundabout built in the early 1970s below the intersection of the perimeter ring road and one of those radial roads.

  Eindhoven continued implementing both horizontal and vertical separation into the next decade, completing a 155-kilometer- (100-mile-) network of cycle paths and eight tunnels and bridges by 1976. Separating these transportation networks, however, was more about appeasing frustrated motorists than encouraging and enabling cyclists. “We were one of the cities in the Netherlands that were the quickest and most serious in doing that,” claims Braakman. “But it was not meant to facilitate cycling at all. It was meant to facilitate car drivers.” That meant the bicycle routes were often indirect and inconvenient, forcing cyclists to take uncomfortable and unnecessary detours, as was the case of the Berenkuil.

  These efforts to prioritize driving had the intended effect, and Eindhoven’s cycling modal share bottomed out in the late 1970s, accounting for just one in five trips. There it remained, until the city reached an unexpected and unwelcome watershed in the early 1990s, with Philips’ decision to relocate its manufacturing offshore and its headquarters to Amsterdam. When their second-largest manufacturer, automotive company DAF, suddenly went bankrupt a year later, Eindhoven abruptly found itself in a grave economic and existential crisis.

  Rebranding a Car Town into a Cycling City

  “At that point, Eindhoven was statistically one of the poorest cities in the Netherlands,” discloses Veraart. “And it even qualified for EU funding, like other southern European cities going through tough times.” But rather than accept their fate, leaders opted to pivot away from industry and towards technology, attempting to attract new start-ups and revive their region as a “Silicon Valley of Europe.” “With this flow of new energy,” continues Veraart, “Eindhoven started to rebrand itself as a city of technology, design, and knowledge. As part of this rebranding process, it also wanted to rid itself of old views, like being a car town.”

  Veraart believes that the city’s desire to put itself on the map was also driven by a form of local status anxiety. “Eindhoven is the fifth largest city in the Netherlands, but the four above it—Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht—are all in the northwest,” he
explains. “Eindhoven is the biggest outsider, so it needs an image of its own in the Dutch context.” The city realized that reinventing itself would not be easy, but mobility could play a central role in that process. “They cannot undo the layout of the city, because that’s engraved in stone, but they can at least try to picture themselves as being something different, and using the bicycle in this image building,” offers Veraart. Central to that rebranding process has been the implementation of prestigious, headline-worthy bike infrastructure projects, useful for drawing international interest, such as the click-generating Hovenring, Eindhoven’s now world-famous suspended bike roundabout, which opened in 2012 at a cost of €6.3 million ($7.8 million USD).

  According to Braakman, the site selected for the Hovenring was definitely not arbitrary: “It was a major three-lane roundabout with no grade separation, a lot of congestion problems, and a lot of road-safety issues.” That particular intersection was also located on a planned east–west cycling corridor linking the city center, the airport, and Veldhoven, home to the ASML campus: a Philips spinoff and the largest supplier of photolithography systems in the world. “In order to give right-of-way, and get more traffic through that intersection, we had to separate the networks of driving and cycling,” says Braakman.

  After considering numerous design options, including a series of Berenkuil-like sunken tunnels, the Dutch engineering firm ipv Delft presented the stunning circular suspension bridge concept, which took vertical separation to the next level. “It was more expensive,” recalls Braakman, “but we saw it as an icon for Eindhoven.” Fortunately, the politicians and decision makers involved saw tremendous value in investing in a symbol that sent a strong visual message home and abroad: “‘This is how Eindhoven, like all the other Dutch cities, is paying attention to cycling,’” as Veraart puts it. “That’s much easier than showing a map with the grid of cycle tracks, for example. That doesn’t convey the message of ‘We’re working on it.’”

  The overwhelming response to the Hovenring—a genuine shock to the humble Dutch—meant that shortly afterwards, when artist Daan Roosegaarde approached the City about his idea for a luminous bicycle path inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s beloved “Starry Night” painting, Braakman and his colleagues didn’t hesitate for a second. “He was looking for a location near the village of Nuenen, where Van Gogh lived and worked for a number of years,” he recollects. “One of our goals in Eindhoven is to facilitate all kinds of innovators. So we said, ‘Okay, we have a bicycle path for you.’” Opened in 2014, the one-kilometer- (more than half-mile-) long trail combines solar-powered, glow-in-the-dark stones with LED lighting, creating a visual spectacle that recalls the region’s pioneering past and bright future.

  “That was a turning point for us,” recounts Braakman. “We saw that, as policy makers, if you do something beautiful, something that has an impact on the image we have as a car-based city, we can use those examples to move towards more-sustainable modes of transport.” He acknowledges that prestige projects are incredibly helpful in securing funding and attention from politicians, pointing to their warm reception by citizens and by people around the world. Cycling has become so normal in the Netherlands, and the electorate so blithely accustomed to it, that these endeavors serve to get members of the public, media, and business community enthusiastic about bike infrastructure again: “I think for decades, we’ve taken the bicycle for granted. It is one of our strengths, but also one of our weaknesses.”

  Figure 9-1: The stunning “Starry Night” path, which allows visitors to cycle above and below the stars, combines glow-in-the-dark stones and LED lights. (Credit: Modacity)

  With a newfound assurance that comes with executing such drastic and well-received projects, Eindhoven moved ahead in 2017 with its Groene Corridor (“Green Corridor”) plan, the transformation of Oirschotsedijk, a collector road that moved 12,000 cars per day. “For us, that was revolutionary,” says Braakman gleefully. “Everyone was shouting, ‘You can’t get rid of 12,000 cars!’ But we did it anyway.” What was once an arterial road that dissected Philips de Jonghpark, a private park owned by the Philips family, is now a delightful, family-friendly public green space, reconnected by a 5.5-meter- (18-foot-) wide bike path. “It is very successful,” asserts Braakman. “It doesn’t have the same impact as the iconic Hovenring. But in terms of the transition from car to bicycle, this may be even more radical.”

  Even before the Hovenring came along, Eindhoven was no stranger to making bold statements about its priorities and aspirations, as is evident with the 2009 transformation of 18 Septemberplein—the city’s central public square. There, Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas was hired to reclaim a place that had long been given over to cars—a former collector road and surface parking lot—into one for people: a vibrant gathering space and weekly market, with 1,500 underground bike-parking spaces accessed via two bicycle-friendly escalators covered by a pair of iconic, cone-shaped structures made of concrete and glass. When it was unveiled it received splashy illustrated coverage in both the Washington Post and New York Times, and now it serves exactly as intended, encouraging residents to visit the city center by bike (and spend money there).

  Despite these pricey precedents, it’s important to note that these kinds of high-profile ventures don’t have to be costly, nor do they have to be so serious. One of Eindhoven’s more recent projects takes advantage of its plentiful tunnels, as well as its status as an emerging design capital. As part of the City’s new “Smile Factor” program, an initiative aimed at giving creatives a chance to work in their own city, graffiti artists Studio Giftig were commissioned to liven up the drab Dommel pedestrian and bicycle tunnel connecting the train station and university. The result: the “Silly Walk Tunnel”—130 meters (425 feet) of John Cleese’s immortal Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch in which he depicted an official of the “Ministry of Silly Walks.” A packed crowd attended the April 2016 unveiling, at which Cleese made a surprise appearance, remarking, “Do you seriously have nothing better to do today?” Reveals Braakman: “This was such a success that we have now 30 or 40 tunnels and underpasses, and a substantial amount of money available for artists to come up with their ideas.”

  In addition to drawing high-tech companies and talent from around the world, Eindhoven’s new global, cycle-friendly image has another added benefit: attracting tourists. “We currently have five million, which, within a couple of years, will be ten million passengers flying into Eindhoven Airport, and taking the first train to Amsterdam,” explains Braakman. “One of our goals is to get them to stay in the city at least one night, and spend their money discovering Eindhoven. But that means you have to offer them something.” For an increasing number of visitors, particularly young people, that something is a guided bike tour of the city, featuring the spectacular cycling infrastructure it has built over the years. “Our city marketing organization is doing really well,” he says. “And it’s becoming a lot more popular among city bloggers and weekend breakers.”

  Figure 9-2: John Cleese’s beloved “Ministry of Silly Walks” sketch is immortalized in a formerly drab bicycle tunnel as part of Eindhoven’s “Smile Factor” program. (Credit: Modacity)

  With the completion of Strijp-S—an impressive, 27-hectare (67-acre) incubator lab and cultural hub housed within Philips’ former manufacturing plants, Eindhoven has most certainly earned its new reputation as the Netherlands’ “Brainport,” complementing the country’s two other points of entry. “Amsterdam is branded as a city of economics, partly because Schipol Airport is seen as the main economic driver of the region,” Veraart points out. “Rotterdam is seen as the gateway to Europe, with one of the biggest ports on the continent. And Eindhoven now positions itself as being an innovative town, as a bright town. So it’s now indeed attracting all types of industries, and presenting itself as a kind of ‘Silicon Valley.’”

  Carrying on this new spirit of invention are events such as the annual Dutch Design Week, which attracts ov
er a quarter-million visitors and 2,500 designers to 100 locations across the city over a nine-day period in October. Similarly, since 2006 the annual GLOW Eindhoven Festival has invited local and world-renowned light artists to create colorful installations on dozens of building façades, interior spaces, and public squares across the city, which are offered as a self-guided walking tour for just one week.

  Despite the positive gains, both Braakman and Veraart fear that this high-tech focus will bleed into the worlds of transport and planning, while overlooking the inherent spatial, social, and health benefits of the seemingly antiquated bicycle. “If you talk about Eindhoven, the university is very much pushing autonomous and electric vehicles as part of the sustainable-mobility solution. So it’s pushing for four wheels instead of two,” laments Veraart. Unlike Amsterdam and other fine-grained Dutch cities, the infrastructure and layout of Eindhoven are suited for both modes, offering few deterrents to the expansion of car use.

  “That’s the weakness of the bicycle: we see a lot of opportunities for smart mobility, but it’s focused on car traffic,” concurs Braakman, pointing to the Automotive Campus in nearby Helmond. There, entrepreneurs are doing all kinds of experimentation with the automobile, and are even using the motorway between the two cities as a testing ground for semi-autonomous driving. “So there’s millions and millions involved in smart mobility solutions in the region, but only a small piece is invested in new technologies for bicycles,” he states with frustration.

  There is one field, though, in which Braakman hopes his city’s car-friendly environment could provide a unique prospect for the right thinker. An excess of traffic lights makes for an exasperating amount of waiting time for cyclists, which could easily be reduced with a bit of high-tech tinkering. “There are a few new developments for cyclists using apps interacting with traffic lights, in order to get longer green times and shorter reds,” he explains. “But these are only small experiments and pilots. I think there’s a big opportunity to work with the CEOs of technology companies and make it not only about accidents and incidents, but to upscale it.”