Building the Cycling City

by Melissa Bruntlett

  In the meantime, Braakman has his hands full advising Jannie Visscher, Eindhoven’s deputy mayor for mobility, and hosting a rapidly growing number of international delegations through the Dutch Cycling Embassy. While these visitors always make a point of stopping in Amsterdam for a heavy dose of two-wheeled inspiration, they often depart Eindhoven—where cycling has since risen to a respectable 28 percent of all trips and 43 percent of all short trips—with much more practical ideas and motivation. “I hear a lot from those experts and decision makers that they actually think Eindhoven is more interesting for them, because it’s more comparable,” he says. “We have all this big infrastructure for car traffic, and all the barriers associated with it, and despite that we have a decent cycling mode share, and infrastructure like the Hovenring. Then they start realizing, ‘Okay, so actually it is doable. It is feasible.’”

  Bringing Beauty to “Oil Country”

  Many North American cities have tried to reinvent themselves in recent years, with few as poignant as Detroit, which attempted to shed its “Motor City” reputation (despite being home to a number of bicycle manufacturers) after a 2013 bankruptcy and become a city known for innovation and creativity. North of the border, in Calgary, Alberta, a similar revolution is taking place. Most Canadians know Alberta as “Oil Country” due to its economic dependence on the oil-rich tar sands, and Calgary, Canada’s third-largest city, is home to a number of oil and gas headquarters. Covering a 848-square-kilometer (327-square-mile) area—eight times the size of San Francisco—and sprawling endlessly into the prairies, it’s easy to see why driving has become the default mode of transportation for the vast majority of Calgarians.

  In the past few years, however, things have started to shift, as residents have begun demanding options. At the heart of that transition sits Councillor Druh Farrell, who has proudly held her seat since 2001. It was during her tenure that Calgary’s “Centre City Plan” was passed by a vote of the council under then-manager of city-center planning and design Brent Toderian, in which it was established that they would not consider any new river crossings for motor vehicles entering the downtown core. Situated where the Bow and Elbow Rivers meet, Calgary’s downtown is accessible from the north and east only by means of a river crossing, resulting in several car-dedicated bridges that are largely unwelcoming to cyclists and pedestrians.

  “The transportation system was fixed and we couldn’t expand it any further,” recalls Farrell of the May 2007 plan. “We needed to look at active modes and transit as bringing more people into our downtown core.” The Centre City Plan identified three locations where potential bridges could be built, dictating two simple criteria: they had to be dedicated pedestrian and bicycle crossings only, and they had to be beautiful. But as Farrell soon found out, building something of beauty in “Cowtown” would not be as easy as it seemed.

  “The Peace Bridge is red with my blood,” she muses. All kidding aside, the Peace Bridge was the first of the three crossings to be built, and—at the time of construction—was one of the most controversial projects in Calgary’s history. “For one thing, it was the first piece of significant infrastructure predominantly for active mobility,” Farrell explains. “If it had been for vehicles, we would not have had any debate, and it would not have been controversial.” Surprisingly, the issue wasn’t solely with the intended users of the bridge. This was also the first time Calgary would make aesthetics a priority, engaging celebrated—and foreign—Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava to design the City’s new bit of “bike bling.”

  Attractiveness aside, hiring Calatrava was about bringing in one of the most skilled bridge designers in the world in order to address some challenging site-specific concerns. The crossing, which would connect downtown Calgary to the northern river pathway and the community of Sunnyside, had to completely span the Bow River, while also being flat enough to avoid obstructing the flight cone of a nearby helicopter-landing area. The practicality of bringing in the best-of-the-best didn’t change people’s opinions, however, and for the opening of the bridge, Farrell recalls having to be escorted by four bodyguards. “It was an incredibly painful process. It became so intense. The level of hatred directed towards that piece of infrastructure was out of proportion with the cost.” The total budget for the bridge was $24.5 million (CDN), half the cost of a planned highway interchange in nearby Cochrane—18 kilometers (11 miles) west of Calgary—that would serve one-fiftieth of Calgary’s population.

  Farrell recounts that even her brother had to endure the ire directed at the Peace Bridge when a dinner guest discovered their relation and said to him, “You tell your sister that if we wanted beauty, we’d travel to Paris. In Calgary we just need it to work.” Despite that prevailing attitude—that Calgarians come to the city solely to make their fortune, and then travel elsewhere to experience vitality and beauty—she stood firm, defending the city council’s decision. “Now I think most Calgarians would recognize it was worth it,” she asserts emphatically. “I certainly believe it was worth it because the bridge is so well used.”

  Since its ribbon-cutting on March 24, 2012, the Peace Bridge has become one of the most-traveled walking and cycling routes in the city, boasting over 5.5 million crossings, an average of 28,000 per week—not bad for a region that enjoys a meagre 1.75 percent modal share for cycling. Farrell notes that in spite of the initial negativity directed towards the undertaking, it stands out as a memorable pivot point for Calgary. “The Peace Bridge really was a first for a lot of reasons,” she says. “It got people talking about architecture, and it identified a bottled-up need and desire for more walking and cycling connections to our downtown core.” In the years to follow, the City constructed the George C. King and Elbow River Traverse bridges—a pair of pedestrian and cycling connections to the east of downtown, with a fourth crossing planned to the west when demand grows to sufficient levels.

  The iconic structure has become more than just a gateway to the city. “What we ended up doing unintentionally with the Peace Bridge is building a public space over the river,” recalls Farrell. “It’s far more than a transportation hub or connection—it’s a meeting place, a sense of place, on top of our beautiful river. It’s the most photographed structure in the city. It’s used for the promotion of Calgary in everything from real estate to hotels, and included in international bridge-design showcase books. It reinforces that we did the right thing.”

  Figure 9-3: As Calgary’s first piece of infrastructure for active mobility, the Peace Bridge was also the first time the City prioritized beauty. (Credit: City of Calgary)

  “The Peace Bridge was a turning point for Calgary,” she adds. “It symbolized that we are building a great city, that we want people to fall in love with their city, and that we deserve better. It presented competing visions of what Calgary was all about.” In fact, the Peace Bridge laid the groundwork for Calgary’s next big cycling-infrastructure project, and Farrell’s next political challenge: a downtown cycle-track network.

  Within a year of the Peace Bridge opening, latent demand presented itself. As more people were using the trails and bridges to enter the city, it became abundantly clear they needed a comfortable place to travel once bursting onto the downtown streets. Farrell stood at the forefront, providing the initial push for the 7th Street cycle track that would connect directly to the Peace Bridge. Perhaps unsurprisingly, talk of reallocating road space spurred the usual anger, and even Bike Calgary—the local bicycle-advocacy group—were cautious about how a two-way cycle track would work, rather than painted one-way bike lanes.

  “I insisted it had to be a separated cycle track,” emphasizes Farrell. “It’s going to be downtown, it has to be separated.” After the construction of the 7th Street cycle track in 2013—a 750-meter (2,500-foot) bidirectional, curb-protected lane that quadrupled cycling numbers along that corridor overnight—talk began of a “minimum grid” to service the entire city center. Initially the project was to be completed in increments, much like Va
ncouver’s AAA network, but the discussion suddenly shifted to the idea of building the whole scheme at once as an 18-month pilot project. It seemed to be smooth sailing ahead, with Bike Calgary coming around to show its support, when a change of council in 2013 made the politics more challenging.

  As with the Peace Bridge, hostility towards the project from businesses and politicians was disproportionate to the cost of the project—$5.75 million—but what stood out for Farrell was the opponents’ refusal to see it as an opportunity. Due to the pilot nature of the project, it meant that the system wasn’t permanent, and the proposal narrowly passed by an 8–7 vote in April 2014. Then, on June 18, 2015, Calgary’s downtown cycle-track network was delivered two months early and $2 million under budget, reallocating just 2 percent of the downtown street space to induce 1.2 million bicycle trips over 18 months, with little to no driver disruption.

  “Pilots are so important. For one thing, we were constantly adjusting,” explains Farrell, referring to the 100 tweaks that staff made in response to data collected at 80 different points. These changes were facilitated by the provisional nature of the scheme, including flexible delineators, planter boxes, temporary concrete curbs, and floating traffic signals. “The transportation department was extremely nimble in identifying problems and mitigating them. By the end of the pilot, the system worked. So they weren’t just waiting until the end of the project to make adjustments—they were doing it all along and measuring the data. We had such a compelling case. We had more people cycling: different people, young people, women, and families were all using the network. It was hard to say ‘no.’”

  In December 2016, council voted 10–4 in favor of making the network permanent, meaning that the pilot had accomplished exactly what was intended: demonstrating to a skeptical public that—with safe, separated space for cycling—even the sprawling, frigid cities of the Canadian Prairies will get on their bikes. Councillor Diane Colley-Urquhart, who had initially voted against the pilot, decided to change her vote, telling reporters: “I was a person that didn’t support this in the beginning. I thought this was madness. But, to see how it’s evolved, and how it’s working and to see how people are starting to get the fact that this is shared public space …” Best of all, Calgary created a template for others to copy, inspiring its peers in Victoria, Edmonton, and Winnipeg to plan their own cycle-track networks in the coming years.

  Calgary’s pilot is a persuasive example of how temporary installations can change hearts and minds, but most notably, it is now cited as a reason companies and talent are relocating to the city. After a downturn in the local economy due to the deflated price of oil, and a downtown vacancy rate hovering between 25 and 30 percent, continued investments in walking, cycling, public transit, and infrastructure such as the Peace Bridge will be integral in attracting new economies to this sprawling city. As Farrell points out, “If we want to attract new industries to Calgary, we need to first build a city that’s worth moving to.”

  While her illustrious career is by no means at an end—she was elected to a sixth term in 2017—when Farrell reflects on her time on council, she is proud of how far her city has come. The old guard who stood in the way of progress is making way for a younger generation of politicians and entrepreneurs investing in innovation, and time is on their side. As a subtle reminder of her struggles, she made a small but important gesture to future generations: “When we did a time capsule for the new Bow Tower, I put in a drawing of the Peace Bridge with a letter to the future council 100 years from now that said: ‘When investing in the city and in beauty, what will you remember—the controversy or the legacy?’”

  The Practicality of “Velotopia”

  Cities such as Calgary and Eindhoven have clearly seen value in branding themselves as imaginative and innovative places, and—even more so in the case of the latter—these investments have raised them from relative obscurity and put them in the spotlight for all the world to marvel over. The Hovenring and the Peace Bridge have served as catalysts, attracting people to visit, and even live in, regions that recognize the importance of not just making it easier to move about the city, but also making those trips visually stimulating. Equally important, however, are the practical solutions that extend beyond those iconic projects, helping cities to better handle the future transportation stresses that will inevitably arise as our planet’s population continues to migrate from rural to urban settings.

  Dr. Steven Fleming has held academic positions at the Universities of Tasmania and Newcastle in Australia, and Harvard and Columbia in the United States, and is also the director of Cycle-Space International, a consulting firm. A passionate voice in urban planning and cycling circles, he points out that while prestige projects can shine a spotlight on cities, they serve a much more meaningful purpose. In his 2017 book Velotopia, Fleming admits that flashy architecture and smart urban design are great, but there are many more practical reasons to build the cycling city.

  “We can talk about cycling being red paint, and being deliberately shocking and creating icons and branding, but that’s all take-it-or-leave-it stuff,” he argues. “You could build anything to achieve that.” Fleming identifies the danger with iconic design is that “starchitects” can’t keep repeating the same trick. Frank Gehry can’t build a Guggenheim Bilbao in every city and have the same effect. “So the purpose of Velotopia was to say, ‘Hang on, there’s actually a practical benefit here and that’s to increase connectivity in the city.’”

  Fleming looks for a tipping point in every region—the point when they can no longer build their way to better motorized connections. Once the population in any area reaches 5 million people—considered the economically important category where more wealth and opportunities are realized—they become “slow cities.” By investing in cycling, governments can set themselves up better for the future. It’s a common sentiment in every growing metropolis: they simply cannot accommodate any more vehicles in their centers and still enjoy a meaningful quality of life. So how do you maintain and improve connectivity for other modes that will put less strain on the existing system? By building bikes into the equation.

  Fleming does warn, however, that placing too much value on prestige projects, or “bike bling,” can distract from what is more important—the fact that a connection is a connection, and how it looks is irrelevant to how it functions. In June 2017, Fleming curated the world’s first Bicycle Architectural Biennale in Amsterdam during the Velo-city Conference, but he resisted focusing on bicycle-specific infrastructure. “Infrastructure is just like a plumbing project,” he claims. “It wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t a tap on one end and a dam at the other. I was more interested in the dams and the taps—what sort of building type acts like a tap—the starting point—and which types of buildings act as destinations for bike trips—where you want to head? Each of the buildings, in their own way, tells a kind of story for many cities.”

  Practicality aside, Fleming concedes that if good design creates pride in a place, then that can only be a good thing. In Bogotá, he is helping design a school and innovation center in an area that experiences a high rate of crime. They know that, culturally, good architecture inherently causes people to behave better, and a high value has been placed on ensuring beautiful design. He cites a view of architectural theorist Mark Wigley, a professor at Columbia University, that architecture is one’s outermost layer of clothing. A person dressed down in jeans and a sweater might get away with cursing, but the same person dressed in a suit would have to behave very differently. “Similarly,” Fleming contends, “the built environment dictates our behavior. People will love and care for beautiful architecture and will be proud of it and take care of it.”

  If anything can be taken from examples like the Hovenring in Eindhoven or even the Dafne Schippersbrug in Utrecht, it’s the value of good design—which is to say, not design for design’s sake, but functional design that serves a purpose beyond simply being attractive. The Dutch seem to have a special
genius for this. “Some people attribute it to building the polders,” Fleming explains, “but the Dutch talk to each other when they’re designing things. It was only by the city and the school talking to each other that they were able to come up with the bridge on the school.” Of course, a deep-rooted dedication to artistic literacy has helped train several generations of Dutch designers to think innovatively and a little bit differently. “There’s a kind of knowledge that they don’t have a lot of resources,” Fleming suggests, “so they know they have to be innovative. They don’t want to copy anybody; they want to do something no one has done before, so as soon as the design process starts, off they go breaking rules and venturing into new territory.”

  Cities around the world are in the midst of using the bicycle as that “red paint”: an edgy branding tool for attracting newcomers and giving residents pride of place. Such is the case for projects like the Peace Bridge, the “Pink Lightpath” in Auckland, or the Bicycle Skyway in Xiamen, China—projects that have put cities formerly unknown for cycling onto the global map. And while these developments definitely stand out, the real importance still needs to be placed on creating attractive cycling spaces, not just icons.

  Figure 9-4: Eindhoven’s now-famous overpass for cyclists, the Hovenring, has become a symbol for a city that embraces the future and the value of functional, innovative design. (Credit: Modacity)