Challenges to Making Cycling a Key Element of Budapest’s Transport System
By GREG SPENCER
Central European University Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy Master’s Thesis 2004-2005
Abstract
In cities around the world, people have embraced bicycling as an antidote to the environmental ills associated with cars: air and noise pollution, congestion, the take up of public space by parked vehicles, the drain on natural resouces. In northern Europe, where cycling tends to be quite popular, cyclists command significant modal shares in the urban transport structure. In Amsterdam, almost a third of commuters go by bike, while in Copenhagen, Salzburg and Munich the modal shares are all above 15 percent. But as in many cities around the world, cyclists in Budapest have only a marginal modal share, about 1-2 percent.
Public opinion polls show that Budapest residents are growing increasingly frustrated with traffic congestion, the use of sidewalks as car parks, and other problems associated with automobiles. A policy switch aimed at promoting cycling as a more civil and humane alternative to the car could address this disaffection. This thesis examines the particular challenges to achieving such a switch in Budapest. They include an unfortunate stigma dating from the Socialist era of bicycles being a proletarian or peasant vehicle; skyrocketing car use and the car as status symbol; a weak NGO movement; poor cycling infrastructure; and a lack of significant political support or policy.
The thesis looks at a recent European example of a city that has created a vibrant cycling culture from the ground up. Paris, confronted in the mid-90s with a population exasperated by congestion and pollution, embarked on a systematic campaign to promote cycling. It included infrastructure investments, public awareness raising and an attack on private car use. In the first six years of the campaign, cycling levels jumped by almost 60 percent.
The thesis concludes that Budapest could follow in Paris’s footsteps if city leaders chose to do so — and if NGOs provided the necessary pressure. The first priority is significant improvement to the bike path network. Presently, the system doesn’t cover enough of the city, and the existing paths are neither safe nor fast. Several signs point to rising interest in cycling — including the stunning attendance at a recent Critical Mass, the biannual demonstration intended to raise awareness of the road rights of cyclists. The fall 2005 Critical Mass drew 20,000 participants, about four times as many as in the previous year’s event. Evidence strongly suggests that the population would respond positively to a promotion campaign similar to Paris’s. The onus is on the city to follow through.
Keywords: Bicycle, bicyling, utilitarian cycling, commuter cycling, Budapest, Hungary, Central and Eastern Europe, Paris, France, Delanoë, Demszky, Tibéri, Critical Mass, modal share, urban transport, bike path
2 Dedication
This thesis is dedicated to my wife, Kristin Faurest, who helped me in many ways throughout the research and writing: not only with editing and advice on the work itself, but with cooking, baby-sitting, huge amounts of time on her computer (even while she was writing her own doctoral dissertation!), and the surrender of way too much of our free time. I am grateful to have had such tremendous, loving support.
3
Introduction...... 6 Literature review ...... 10 Overview...... 10 Car-traffic problem ...... 12 Bicycling infrastructure ...... 13 Cycling patterns and habits...... 15 Political support for cycling...... 20 Good international examples ...... 23 Candidate cities from Northern Europe ...... 23 The Paris model ...... 24 Other world cities...... 26 My own contribution to research topic...... 30 Methodology ...... 31 Aim ...... 31 Objectives ...... 31 Explanation of methods ...... 32 Literature review methods ...... 32 Infrastructure assessment...... 33 Interviews...... 34 The Paris example...... 37 Data analysis ...... 38 Findings...... 39 Overview...... 39 Image of cycling ...... 40 Historic background...... 40 Image of bikes in Budapest...... 42 From pleasure to purpose...... 44 Positive image promotion in Paris ...... 46 Car-centrism...... 49 Budapest’s car problems...... 49 Physical challenges ...... 49 Car lobby...... 50 Paris’s history with cars...... 52 A fortuitous calamity ...... 53 The bike as a foil...... 54 NGOs ...... 54 Bicycling NGOs in Budapest...... 55 Bicycling NGOs in Paris...... 57 Infrastructure...... 60
4 Financial support...... 72 Spending in Budapest ...... 72 Spending in Paris ...... 74 Cycling trends ...... 77 Discussion...... 79 Overview...... 79 Image of cycling ...... 79 Car-centrism...... 81 Weakness of NGOs...... 82 Infrastructure...... 84 Conclusions and recommendations...... 86 Recommendations for City Hall ...... 86 Recommendations for cycling NGOs...... 89 Reference list ...... 92 Personal Communications ...... 97
5 Introduction
Budapest — along with other booming, post-Socialist capitals of Central and
Eastern Europe — is suffocating on its good fortunes. A decade and a half after the political changes, it faces the same traffic jams, loss of urban space, noise and pollution that spurred London to introduce its congestion tax and California its zero emissions vehicle mandate.
During the early part of the economic transition of the 1990s, Budapest residents had good reason to welcome western cars onto the local market: it meant the replacement of highly polluting Trabants and Ladas with cleaner-running Fords, Suzukis and
Volkwagens. But it is a common misperception that this automotive upgrade has brought an accompanying decline in vehicle emissions. While the country saw a brief drop in traffic-generated pollution during the early economic restructuring, emissions of nitrogen dioxide, as well as of particulates and carbon dioxide, have risen steadily since 1991 (KTI
2004). This means Hungarians in general, but especially those in the much more intensely motorized capital, all face an increasingly greater risk of respiratory problems.
While Budapest is catching up to the West in terms of motor traffic problems, it probably is not ready to implement some of the more high-tech western solutions.
London’s congestion charge, for instance, cost that city about GBP 180 million (EUR
265 million) to implement (Litman 2005), almost a quarter of Budapest’s entire municipal budget. Another emerging technology, hybrid cars, have enthralled politicians in the United States for their fuel efficiency and lower emissions. But in Hungary, the hybrid Toyota Prius retails for almost HUF 700,000 (EUR 28,000). Considering this is more than double the average Hungarian’s annual income, hybrids don’t seem a feasible
6 solution to Budapest’s problems, either. It doesn’t have to be so difficult. In fact,
Hungarians have plenty of practice with one particular solution — the bicycle. During
Socialism, bicycling was a much more common mode of transport than today, and vestiges of this old cycling culture can be seen in the countryside. Even in larger provincial cities such as Debrecen, as many as 20 percent of urban trips are made by bicycle (Szálka 2005).
The objective of this thesis is not to probe the environmental advantages of cycling as a mode of transport. It takes it as self-evident that compared to cars, cycling is quieter, takes up less city space, is enormously more resource-efficient, stirs up less dust and produces none of the harmful emissions that come from cars. And for cyclists themselves, it provides considerable health benefits deriving from physical exercise. Yet, despite the myriad virtues of this mode of transport, cycling in Budapest still only accounts for just 1 to 2 percent of all urban trips, according to the most recent studies
(Mayor’s Office 2001).
The aim of the thesis is to identify barriers to greater cycling usage in Budapest, and propose ways around them. Cycling advocates often hold up examples from the
Netherlands as proof of how far cycling can go in displacing the car. In Amsterdam, roughly a third of commuters go by bicycle, almost on a par with the portion that drives
(Langenberg 2000). The mayor of Budapest has chided local cycling advocates by saying that the Hungarian capital “will never be Amsterdam” due to differences in “geographical characteristics.” (Magyar Hírlap. 2005) Yet Vienna, which is similar geographically, has built up a cycling modal share of 10 percent in its downtown area (Szálka 2005). San
Francisco has built up a bike route network more than twice the size of Budapest’s
7 despite much steeper terrain throughout the city (BAC 1997). Bogotá, which suffers all the problems of a developing world capital, has built up a 5 percent modal share for bicyclists through investments in bike lanes and park and ride facilities at bus stations
(Wright, L. and Montezuma, R. 2004).
The thesis examines in detail an even more relevant success story: Paris. Like
Budapest, the French capital had no post-war tradition of urban cycling, and was almost devoid of bicyclists as recently as the 1980s. And like in Budapest, people have a love- hate relationship with the car — people drive them and complain about them in equal measure. But in the government’s response to these complaints, Paris is at least a decade ahead of Budapest. Since 1995, the Paris Mayor’s Office has carried out an aggressive cycling promotion policy, one that has the explicit aim of reducing automobile use and making Paris a more pleasant place to live and visit. The promotion policy includes the construction of paths, lanes, and streetside parking racks; widespread use of traffic calming measures; motor traffic restrictions; public awareness raising and the sponsorship of public events encouraging human-propelled transport. The investments have succeeded in establishing bicycles as a common part of traffic.
This paper comes to the unavoidable conclusion that the main challenge to promoting utilitarian cycling in Budapest is neither hills, nor weather, nor financial challenges. The primary issue — as it was in Paris — is political will. At present, the development of Budapest’s cycling culture languishes due to a Catch-22: potential new bicycle commuters won’t start cycling until better bike paths are built, but City Hall won’t invest serious money in bicycle paths until it sees evidence of more riders. City
Hall should take the first step to get the wheels rolling. In both the literature review and
8 the findings, this thesis addresses specific problems that must be confronted along the way, and then in the discussion and conclusion proposes possible solutions and makes policy recommendations. The specific barriers to be analyzed are:
• Poor image of cycling: As part of Hungary’s Socialist heritage, bicycles carry a
lingering stigma as a proletarian vehicle for peasants and menial workers.
• Car-centrism: In the post-Socialist culture of consumerism, cars have become
powerful symbols of status.
• Weakness of NGOs: The Budapest cycling community, perhaps with City Hall’s
help, lacks a continuous, full-time lobbying effort.
• Insufficient infrastructure: Second-rate cycling amenities discourage bicycling. The
city must build — and maintain — a comprehensive network of paths; parking
facilities; and provisions that integrate cycling with public transport.
While Amsterdam may present too lofty a goal, Paris offers one that Budapest can reach. In Paris, the modal share for bicycles is quite low — no more than 2-3 percent, according to NGO estimates (LaLande 2005) — but the number of bicycle commuters is growing at a remarkable rate: 58 percent since the city launched its bike promotion programme. (DPRT 2003) What Paris demonstrates is that a city administration can effect greater bicycle usage by making it a policy priority. All that is needed is the will to try.
9 Literature review
Overview
The search for literature for this thesis focused first on those writings germane to utilitarian cycling in Budapest and secondly on best-practice studies from around the world that appear most instructive on the best way forward in the Hungarian capital. The latter task was the easier of the two considering the virtually unlimited sources from which to draw in the dozens of cities around the world where urban cycling has a long, well-documented history. The first task required considerably more resourcefulness. First of all, Budapest has had limited experience with treating cycling as a practical mode of transportation. City Hall began building bike paths in 1989 to foster recreational cycling on the city’s outskirts, and most of the cycling developments since then have maintained the focus on biking for pleasure rather than transport. It’s no surprise then that scholarship devoted to utilitarian cycling in Budapest has been limited.
Significant studies directly focused on cycling as practical transportation in
Budapest consist of a few planning documents from the city’s transportation department, a public-opinion survey commissioned by City Hall about attitudes toward cycling
(Transman 2000) and a survey on cycling habits published by Studio Metropolitana in the spring of 2005. A much smaller poll concerning bicyclists’ willingness to pay for secure parking was conducted by the NGO Clean Air Action Group (CAAG 2004a). Due to the paucity of formal research directly focused on the subject, the literature review takes in non-scholarly articles on the subject and several texts of general interest that have something to say on sub-themes of the topic. One sub-theme, for instance, is the city’s urban environment and its broader transportation system, so this literature review
10 incorporates a 2005 public opinion survey on attitudes toward pubic space (including sidewalks and bike paths) in Budapest and an older study that explored the reasons behind Budapest’s growing problem with traffic congestion (one of the main hindrances to urban cycling in Budapest and in every other city in the world). A strict reliance on scholarly literature would exclude much of what has been written on the thesis topic, therefore some articles of a more journalistic nature are considered. The Budapest-based
NGO Clean Air Action Group publishes a monthly magazine Lélegzet which has run occasional articles on urban cycling since 1991; they are journalistic rather than scholarly, but they help to form a more complete picture on cycling in Budapest and elsewhere in Hungary. Finally, the subject of city cycling crops up now and again in the
Hungarian popular press, and several recent articles proved informative on the state of utilitarian cycling in terms of its political status and recent history.
The following review has been organized according to the following themes:
• Car-traffic problem
• Bicycling infrastructure
• Cycling patterns and habits
• Political support for cycling
• Good international examples
• My own contribution to the research topic
11
Car-traffic problem
The international literature, as well as that in Hungary, identifies car traffic as a primary barrier to bicycle use in urban areas. As one Danish cycling expert has noted, cars hinder bicycle use in two ways: first by habituating people to a less strenuous way of travelling and second by creating a form of traffic that poses a physical danger to would- be bicyclists (Krag T. 2001). Two public opinion surveys (Transman 2001 and Studio
Metropolitana 2004) found that car traffic and congestion are the biggest problems facing the city from the point of view of residents; the latter survey points specifically to car traffic and motorists’ behavior as deterrents to urban cycling.
That Budapest suffers from growing car congestion is readily apparent to anyone who has been here during the past 15 years. The city has a problem common to the rapidly developing cities in transitional Central and Eastern Europe: a skyrocketing increase in private car usage and a municipal government unable to cope with it. The database of the Budapest-based Institute for Transport Sciences contains several statistics that bear this out, including a 30.4 percent rise of car ownership in Hungary between
1990 to 2001 (KTI 2004). A 1999 article about Hungarian transport policy following the political changes describes how car ownership has gone up in Hungary generally, and even more so in the capital (Hook 1999). The Hook article and other reports (Skinner et al 2002, REC 2004) note that the increase in car use has coincided with a dramatic decline in public transport ridership across Central and Eastern Europe. A 2003 article in the Clean Air Action Group’s magazine Lélegzet states that the modal share for public
12 transport in the capital had dropped from 80-85 percent to 60-63 percent during the previous 20 years. (CAAG 2003)
As detailed in the section below on cycling patterns and habits, bicycle use during this same period has made only modest gains despite the creation of several bike lanes and paths in the city. Modal split figures show car use climbing while the share for cycling remains stubbornly below 2 percent. (Transman 2000, Mayor’s Office 2001)
Bicycling infrastructure
Documents available from the Budapest Municipal Transportation Department provide the most thorough written description of cycling infrastructure in Budapest.
According to the most recent official overview, contained in the 2001 Development Plan of Budapest Transportation, the city had created 130 kilometres of cycling paths of a planned 300-kilometre network. That document declared that the main goal of the city’s cycling-path development plan was to bring about a 5 percent modal share for bicycles
(from a then estimated 0.9 percent share). This would be achieved by building up the path network to 320 kilometres by 2015, although the document states that in the medium term it would be achievable to build it up to only 160-200 kilometers. (Mayor’s Office
2001) The plan also mentions that the city had installed parking racks with a capacity for
14,000 bikes (11,700 at 460 schools and universities, and 2,300 at various other institutions). No estimate is given for the number of privately installed racks in the city.
Other documents include a brochure for the 1.6 kilometre bidirectional cycling lanes on
Andrássy Boulevard (Mayor’s Office 1995) — a controversial project among cyclists due to the lanes’ tight fit between the curb and parked vehicles and the danger posed by opening car doors (Kiss 2005, Szálka 2005). These city documents serve as valuable
13 snapshots of infrastructure development and planners’ hopes during the first decade of bike network development in Budapest. However, they are now quite out of date, and have the other shortcoming of describing only the quantity and not the quality of the bike paths.
More recent articles in Hungarian newspapers and other periodicals provide up- to-date figures on the number of built paths — 137 up to 2004 (Kőhalmi 2004) and 140 kilometers up to 2005 (Borsos 2005). The literature search turned up several references to the poor standard of Budapest bikes paths, which tend to be no more than painted lines on sidewalks demarking space for bikes (Borsos 2005, Tóth 2004), and bike riders’ dissatisfaction this type of solution (Metropolitana Studio 2004). The last study noted that cyclists have two unsatisfactory choices of where to ride: on sidewalks where they are limited to walkers’ speeds or on the sides of roads where they are blocked by parked cars.
Internationally, most transportation experts frown on shared pedestrian/cycling paths because they invite collisions and can condition cyclists to behave in a way inconsistent with traffic rules. Many such paths, for example, run on only one side of the road while accommodating both directions of traffic; therefore when the path ends, cyclists rejoin the road riding against the flow of traffic. The Guide for the Development of Bicycle
Facilities by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials
(1999), a touchstone text for U.S. transportation engineers, notes, “Sidewalks generally are not acceptable for bicycling” except as alternative facilities “in a few limited situations, such as on long and narrow bridges and where bicyclists are incidental or infrequent users ... .” As for the portion of Budapest’s bike path network that runs on sidewalks, the most credible estimate comes from István Kőhalmi, the founder and long-
14 time president of Hungary’s largest cycling NGO (until his death in April 2005), the
Friends of City Cycling (VBB). In the Clean Air Action Group’s monthly Lélegzet,
Kőhalmi wrote that painted lanes on sidewalks comprised “at minimum 70 percent” of
Budapest’s total network. (2004) A recent city development plan recognizes this failing in past bike path developments. Future improvements to the network, the plan states, should “aim to build real bicycle paths and not the spreading of solutions that mark off the edges of streets and sidewalks which later become useless to bicycle traffic.”
(Budapest City Hall 2005)
Cycling patterns and habits
City Hall has given official estimates of the modal share that bicyclists have in the city’s overall transport system. A study on Budapest cycling habits (Mayor’s Office
1996) indicated that the modal share for cyclists had risen from 0.6 percent in 1984 to 1.2 percent in 1994. (The shares of other transport modes in 1994 were 49.9 percent for public transport, 24.1 percent for automobiles and 24.8 percent for pedestrian and other traffic.) The 2001 Development Plan of Budapest Transportation indicates the modal split for bicycles was 0.9 percent by 1997-1998. Although this figure is slightly lower than the one given in the 1996 Mayor’s Office report, the small difference is doubtless within the respective studies’ margin of errors.
Unfortunately, no official modal split figures have been given since 1999. The aforementioned article by Hook (1999) optimistically assayed that bicycle usage at the end of the 1990s was likely on the rise considering increases in bicycle sales and the progress achieved on Budapest’s bike-path development — 80.5 kilometres from 1990 to
1999. However, from the author’s more recent interviews with local experts — including
15 Budapest’s bicycling affairs coordinator Balázs Tőkés, Hook’s primary source for cycling-related information — this inference is somewhat dubious. The experts interviewed during the thesis research were unanimous in their impression that the biggest rise in bike use in recent years has been in recreational riding over the weekends.
A survey on bicycle riding habits published in May 2005 by Studio Metropolitana Urban
Research Center confirmed that bike users in Budapest were far more likely to ride for pleasure than for everyday, utilitarian travel.
At any rate, the modest modal split for Budapest cyclists resembles those in two of Central and Eastern Europe’s other major capitals, Warsaw and Prague, the former being at less than 1 percent and the latter at about 2 percent. (Spencer 2004). Such low levels of cycling put the capitals in this region far behind Europe’s beacon cities for bicycle culture, such as Munich, where cyclists have commanded a 15 percent modal share, or Salzburg with 19 percent, Copenhagen with 20 percent, or Amsterdam with 28 percent. (UITP/ECF 1997).
Studio Metropolitana Urban Research Center published a 52-page report in May
2005 on cycling-related habits and attitudes in Budapest. This report, based on responses of a randomly chosen sample of 300 adults, provides a wealth of information on the thesis topic. The levels of cycling reported by respondents are surprisingly high given the marginal modal shares estimated in the mid to late 1990s. About half of the survey’s respondents had ridden a bicycle during the previous year, and of these 13 percent said they rode everyday. Still, the number who used bikes for practical purposes (going shopping or commuting to school or work, for example) was quite small. Just 6 percent of those who commuted to work did so by bicycle, and the numbers weren’t much greater
16 for students commuting to school: 6 percent did so regularly, and 8 percent on rare occasions.
A large portion of the respondents agreed that there were not enough bike paths in
Budapest, and that this hindered them in cycling. However just 10 percent of those who did not bicycle said they would definitely ride in the city if there were a modern, better connected bike path system.
Although the study found many complaints about bicyclists among walkers, and even more so, among drivers, generally people were more sympathetic toward bicyclists than toward motorists, the study found. According to a majority of the respondents, car drivers don’t take consideration of cyclists, they don’t obey rules protecting cyclists; and they park on bike paths. By contrast, just a third agreed that cyclists disobeyed traffic rules, and just a fourth thought cyclists rode too fast (Studio Metropolitana 2005).
People also recognised the lack of bicycle paths in Budapest as a community drawback on par with problems associated with parked cars (i.e., illegally parked cars as a nuisance as well as the frustration among motorists with the shortage of parking space), lack of public cleanliness and the poor condition of roads.
Although the new Studio Metropolitana study makes no reference of it, a similar survey was published once before in Budapest, in 1996 by City Hall. The earlier survey was narrower in scope, covering just cycling habits and not attitudes, however it is of some interest to compare numbers. Both surveys included a chart about how often people ride bikes. The categories are somewhat different and possibly not comparable (e.g. it’s not clear whether “occasionally” in the 1996 chart is equivalent to “rarely” in the 2005 chart), and the makeup of the respective samples may be different, i.e. the 1996 chart
17 included all people who rode “occasionally” while the 2005 one included a more specifically defined group of people who had ridden at least once during the previous 12 months. Nevertheless, the two charts share three categories that, when aggregated, produce a common metric between the two studies: 1) bicyclists who ride everyday or nearly everyday, 2) those who ride multiple times per week and, 3) those who ride once per week. If these three categories are combined into a single group, you get all those who ride a bicycle at least once per week. In 2005, 39 percent of cyclists rode at least once per week compared to just 29 percent in 1996. This may indicate growing bicycle use.
Source: Budapest City Hall, 1996
18
Source: Studio Metropolitana, 2005
Interestingly, the 1996 survey would seem to indicate a larger proportion of bicycling trips made to work and school (although, again, the 2005 survey didn’t include similar categorisation). Regarding the purposes of trips, 26 percent were between home and work places, 6 percent between home and school, 63 percent between home and another destination, and 5 percent between “other and other,” the 1996 survey found. The study showed that 90 percent of trips were shorter than 4 kilometers, which mirrors the situation elsewhere in the world. For instance, surveys have shown the average bike trip in the UK to be 3.4 kilometers, in Austria 2.3 kilometers, and in the Netherlands 2.4 kilometers. (UITP/ECF 1997).
In the spring and summer of 1999, City Hall performed the only formal traffic count ever done on Budapest cycling paths. The results, which document daily cyclist counts on both weekends and weekdays at 13 sites, can be found in the 2001
19 Development Plan of Budapest Transportation (City Hall 2001). The figures identify the most trafficked spots on the city’s cycling network: two lie along the Buda promenade of the Danube, which offers a spectacular view of Parliament on the opposite bank, and two others lie north of downtown on a route toward the touristic village of Szentendre, some
20 kilometres from the city; about half of this route is a purpose-built bike lane finished in the late 1980s. Interestingly, the least trafficked spot on the weekends, and second least trafficked spot during weekdays was the right in the middle of downtown Pest, where motor traffic is intense and cycling paths almost non-existent. The traffic counts may one day serve as a benchmark with which to gauge the development of bicycle use and its responsiveness to infrastructure improvements. But no follow-up cyclist counts have yet been made.
Political support for cycling
From a recent public opinion survey on attitudes toward public space (Studio
Metropolitana 2004), it would appear cycling has greater popular appeal than indicated by traffic counts. The study involved a questionnaire survey of 1,200 residents and detailed follow-up interviews with several focus groups. Several respondents expressed a desire for a more “environmentally friendly, easier and more fashionable alternative to the car” while noting that bicycling would be a suitable option if the city had “real paths.”
The prevailing sentiment, according to the report, was, “If they’d built up the whole bike infrastructure (storage places, parking places, bike rental facilities) then more people would use bikes for everyday transport.” (Studio Metropolitana 2004)
The 2001 Transman survey contained mixed findings regarding bicycles. Asked the best ways to address the city’s traffic problems, increased bicycle useage came in last
20 behind mass transit development, widening and construction of streets, traffic calming measures and technical improvements for cars. The poor ranking for cycling may be explained by respondents’ values in the area of transport. To them, the most important value was quickness, followed by safety, expense, comfort, hygiene and the mode’s environmental impact. From the results of studies, we know that many people believe bicycling is neither safe nor quick (Transman 2001) under present conditions. That study did not ask how respondents would view cycling if conditions were improved.
Several news articles published in the spring of 2005 give an idea of the current political status of cycling, starting with the increasing popularity of Critical Mass rides
(Index 2005, Borsos 2005). Critical Mass is a grassroots, international movement that began in 1992 in San Francisco. Although customs vary from city to city, the basic idea of Critical Mass is to gather a large group of cyclists, rollerskaters and other non- motorized travellers and then ride in a procession around a city. (Blickstein and Hanson
2001) Having spread to more than 100 cities around the world (or 325 according to the on-line information service Wikipedia), the rides normally take place on the last Friday of the month, with routes and starting times established by popular consensus over the
Internet (Blickstein and Hanson 2001). One of the rallying cries of the movement is,
“We’re not blocking traffic, we ARE the traffic.” (Wikipedia 2005)
Although rides in many cities take place without official sanction (Wikipedia
2005), recent large-scale Critical Mass rides in Budapest have been officially permitted by City Hall and given police escort. (Borsos 2005) During the last two years, Critical
Mass rides have been held twice a year in Budapest – on April 22 for Earth Day, and then on September 22 for European Car-Free Day. The Car Free Day ride in 2004 stirred
21 controversy when Budapest Mayor Gábor Demszky refused to issue a permit on grounds that it would coincide with a workday rush hour. (Földes and Rácz 2004) The mayor said he would permit the ride only if it were postponed to the following Sunday. Organizers complained that the rush-hour timing of the event was crucial to the effectiveness of its political message, and noted that other cities in Europe were holding their cycling parades on Car Free Day. (Földes and Rácz 2004) Hungarian Environmental Protection Minister
Miklós Persányi stood with bicyclists, pledging to ride on Car Free Day, with or without the city’s blessing. A small group went ahead and rode on Car Free Day, although the larger procession rode the following Sunday afternoon with City Hall’s permission. Some
4,500 riders took part, according to a police estimate. (Földes and Rácz 2004, Index
2005)
The following Critical Mass, on Earth Day 2005, drew more than double the
September event — 10,000 riders (Borsos 2005). The procession followed a 15-kilometre circuit, from Heroes’ Square on the Pest side, across the Érzsébet Bridge to Moszkva
Square on the Buda side, and then back via Margit bridge. (Index 2005b] Organizers seized the occasion to point out the larger potential for cycling in Budapest. “With this demonstration we wanted to show that cycling isn’t just a matter of a few hobbyists — cyclists are real transport, from the points of view of green politics as well as city planning,” said organizer Gábor Kürti, who also manages the city’s largest bicycle courier company, Hajtas Pajtas. “A lot more people would travel by bicycle if conditions were better in the city.”
However, in a news article recapping the event the following day, Mayor
Demszky was quoted as saying, “It’s not worth spending a more serious amount on bike
22 paths, because 140 km of paths have already been built and just a few people use them.
More important than bicycling is that the whole transport structure needs to be improved.” (Borsos 2005)
The next Critical Mass, Car Free Day 2005, was still bigger, drawing an estimated
20,000 participants. (Földes 2005)
Good international examples
Candidate cities from Northern Europe
In Europe, “two countries stand out with a much higher modal share of trips by bicycle, the Netherlands (27 percent) and Denmark (18 percent).” (DG Energy and
Transport 2000) According to European Commission data, the Dutch and Danes are followed by Swedes, Germans and Belgians in Europe (See Figure 1). Bicycle usage varies from city to city throughout Europe, with modal shares reaching 50 percent in some communities and being hardly existent in others. Behind the variations lie many factors relating to economy, culture, history, weather, topography, policies, and more
(ECMT 2004).
Figure 1: Cycling distance per day per person and modal share Cycling/person/day in 2000 Modal share (percentage of number of trips) Country in kilometers Netherlands 2.3 27 Denmark 2.6 18 Sweden 0.7 12.6 Germany 0.8 10 Belgium 0.9 10 Finland 0.7 7.4 Ireland 0.5 5-6 Austria 0.4 5 Italy 0.4 4 France 0.2 3 Japan n/a 14 USA n/a 0.7
23 Source: DG Energy and Transport 2000
In the quest for an urban model for good bicycle policy, two cities that naturally spring to mind are Copenhagen and Amsterdam, which appear repeatedly in the literature cycling utopias. Both cities have long traditions of using bicycles as everyday transport.
In Amsterdam, the bicycle was the dominant mode of transportation throughout the early
20th century, commanding a 75 percent modal share until 1955. (Langenberg 2000)
Increased car usage and suburbinazation took a toll on two-wheeled transport during following two decades, but even when bicycle usage bottomed out in the 1970s its modal share was still 25 percent. (Langenberg 2000) The city eventually took steps to revive city cycling and by 1990 the modal share had rebounded to 28 percent. (UITP/ECF 1997)
Copenhagen’s cycling history has followed a similar trajectory; usage peaked in the
1950s, declined for several years due to motorization, and then started to recover thanks to an aggressive campaign by the city government to promote bicycling while discouraging car use. (City of Copenhagen 2002) Today, the municipal government proudly advertises Copenhagen as the “city of bicycles,” and city policy aims to increase the two-wheelers’ modal share from an already robust 33 percent to 40 percent.
The Paris model
Although both Amsterdam and Copenhagen have much to offer Budapest policy makers in terms of best practices, a couple mentions in recent literature suggest that a better overall model for the Hungarian capital may be Paris. András Tóth, a Hungarian writer, noted in the Clean Air Action Group’s monthly magazine, Lélegzet, that:
24 “We shouldn’t look just at the ideal examples, but also the civil societies that are developing from a poor state, and with what tools they struggle against their regrettable state.” (2004)
Tóth notes a striking contradiction about the French and bicycles — France is the birthplace of the velocipede and the staging grounds for cycling’s greatest race, the Tour de France, but it is not known as a haven for everyday, commuter cycling. Osberg and
Stiles echo that observation (1998), while Papon (2001) points out how the bicycle’s modal share in Paris was “very low” in 1976, and continued to decline until a public transport strike in 1995 forced people to consider alternatives. Only since then have
Paris’s city leaders made serious efforts to promote bicycling in the city. All in all, the literature paints a picture of an urban transport situation with several similarities to
Budapest’s: well-developed, well-used public transport; a problem with car traffic and congestion; a public demanding changes; and an urban cycling culture that’s still in its infancy.
Somehow, Paris’s cycling in Paris is catching fire more quickly than in Budapest, even though the city started building its path network six years after Budapest started its programme. A few things that make Paris an interesting model for Budapest are the extent and pace of its infrastructure improvements, the aggressiveness with which the city government is using the bicycle as a foil to the car, and the brashness of its public communications on the topic. Tóth notes Paris’s recently inaugurated monthly Critical
Mass, in which the entire width of a downtown boulevard is closed down on a Saturday during the busiest shopping hours of the week (by contrast, Budapest’s less frequent
Critical Mass events close down only one direction of traffic.) Tóth also points to the wildly successful “Plage,” in which a motorway on the Right Bank of the Seine is shut to
25 motor traffic for the entire summer and converted into a beach. On the Left Bank, meanwhile, roads are closed weekly to cars for the pleasure of cyclists, runners, rollerskaters and other non-motorized traffic for an event called Paris Respire.
Tóth doesn’t put much stock in another pro-cyclist measure: the creation of restricted-access lanes where cyclists share road space with buses. He writes that “it’s an immediate question whether you can cycle safely with these long, stretch buses.” But a writer for Transportation Alternatives Magazine, the quarterly of a New York NGO, notes that it’s all part of City Hall’s attack on the automobile. The article says:
“Delanoë’s daring strategy has been to drastically reduce the amount of road space available to cars, in the process intentionally creating such gridlock that no one in their right mind would want to driver in the City of Light,” the article says. (TA 2002)
It goes on to quote Delanoë directly:
“Is it my fault that the automobile is the city's major source of pollution and that it takes up two-thirds of the road surface? Things have to be brought back into balance."
Other world cities
Beyond Paris, other cities around the world offer inspiration with various aspects of their cycling systems and the particular challenges that they have overcome. The city of San Francisco, for instance, offers a sound refutation to anyone who supposes that hilly topography poses a hindrance to cycling development (During a speech at the 2005
Toward Car-free Cities Conference in Budapest, the city’s deputy mayor, Tibor Bakonyi, said hills are partly to blame for Budapest’s tepid cycling culture). In contrast to
26 Budapest, where only the sparsely populated residential part of the city is hilly, virtually all of San Franciscans live, work and recreate on hills, and steep ones at that. The city’s
1997 bicycle plan (BAC 1997), not surprisingly, lists topography, along with heavy traffic and scarce space, among the chief challenges to bicycle transport. “There are a limited number of flat or even relatively flat through routes in the city,” the document states, but then proceeds to outline a 10-chapter strategy to make the most of these few corridors. According to the city’s Department of Parking and Traffic, the city increased the modal split for the bicycle from 0.95 percent in 1990 to 1.8 percent in 2000. The cycling plan states that if its proposals were fully implemented the modal split would rise to 3 percent by “conservative” estimates. According to 2000 figures, the city had a bicycling network more than twice the size of today’s network in Budapest; San
Francisco’s 333 km system included paths, lanes, signed routes on streets, and signed routes on widened curbs. (DPT 2005)
It would seem that topography would be the least of Bogotá’s challenges
(although the city’s lofty perch at 3,600 meters in the Northern Andes presents an oxygen challenge that cyclists face in few other cities). The more serious obstacles include that many of its 7 million residents live in illegally built shantytowns, that many of them are unemployed and that the country has been embroiled in civil war for four decades.
(Wright and Montezuma 2004) Despite acute problems of development and finance,
Bogotá has become a cause celebre in the international community for its progressive steps toward sustainable urban development. The city’s renaissance during the last decade, neatly summarized in a conference paper entitled, “Reclaiming public space: The economic, environmental, and social impacts of Bogotá’s transformation,” (Wright and
27 Montezuma 2004) was the result of steadfast adherence to pedestrian- and cyclist- friendly policies over three mayoral administrations starting in the early 1990s.
Along with the building of new schools, libraries and parks in wealthy as well as in poor neighborhoods, the city embarked on a systematic campaign to discourage car use while promoting public transit, walking and cycling. Similar to Paris, Bogotá has also established zones where cars are prohibited at certain hours every weekend. It’s even gone so far as to ban cars all across the city during the evening hours of Christmas Day.
During a short, three-year span, the city built a 300 km network of bicycle routes. It has promoted cycling further by integrating it with a revamped bus system; brand-new bus terminals have free-of-charge, secure, enclosed bicycle parks where passengers can leave their bikes and board buses that whisk them to downtown along walled-off lanes for buses only. (Wright and Montezuma 2004) According to the article, the modal split for bicycles climbed from less than 0.4 percent before the developments to more than 4 percent in 2004. The figure has since climbed to 5 percent, according to a Bogotá city official speaking at the aforementioned Toward Car-free Cities Conference in Budapest
(Diaz 2005).
It has been suggested that a particular barrier to everyday bicycling in Central and
Eastern Europe relates to the growing moneyed class in this region and its penchant for conspicuous consumption. In this region, bicycle use was a common mode of transport right through the 1980s, but it has since been sloughed off in more developed communities as a proletarian relic. The bicycle holds on mainly in small villages that have missed the fruits of the economic transition; therefore, many upwardly mobile city dwellers today consider it as “peasant-style” transport. (Spencer 2004)
28 A countervailing example comes from Gdansk, Poland, the famous shipbuilding center that spawned Lech Walesa’s Solidarity Movement in the 1980s. Typical of the transitional countries of the region, Poland has seen skyrocketing car use since the change of systems, from 135 per 1,000 inhabitants in 1989 to 240 per 1,000 in 2000 (UNDP/GEF
2001). Despite this, the bicycle has wide appeal in Poland, and is particularly popular in
Gdansk, a city of approximately 458,000. According to public opinion polls commissioned by the Gdansk-based Polish Ecological Club (Polski Klub Ekologiczny) in
1999 and 2000, 21.4 percent of respondents viewed cycling as an ideal form of urban transport (second to the car, at 43 percent). Approximately 60 percent of respondents in both polls accepted increased spending on bike path construction, even at the expense road expenditures (UNDP/GEF 2001).
Gdank’s leading pressure group for cycling, the Civil Environmental League
(Obywatelska Liga Ekologiczna), set about in the 1990s organizing mass bicycle rides as a way to impress local officials of the bicycle’s popular support. Duly impressed by one such ride, which drew 1,000 cyclists to the streets, the mayor in 1999 established a team to investigate international funding possibilities for new cycling infrastructure. (Cities for
Bicycles 2005) Serendipitously, this was when the United Nations Development Fund’s
Global Environment Facility announced a call for bids for medium-sized grants aimed at climate-change mitigation. The city — with the help of cycling advocates, a regional climate change expert and other consultants — drew up a proposal for reducing local car traffic (and thus CO2 emissions) by means of promoting cycling as a convenient, cleaner alternative for commuting. The project team submitted the proposal to UNDP/GEF in
September 2000 and the following May they got their answer: an affirmative reply and a
29 promised grant of EUR 1 million, provided the city commit co-funding. Gdansk’s burghers agreed to chip in EUR 1.5 million to help implement an ambitious cycling enhancement project that included:
• the building of 30.7 kilometers of bicycle paths (adding on to the then
existing 25 kilometer network) and the modification of 70 kilometers of
streets with bike-friendly, traffic-calming measures;
• a public-awareness campaign designed to reach 80 percent of Gdansk’s
population, partly through the publication and dissemination of printed
materials; and
• the sharing of the city’s experience with other communities with the aim
of replicating Gdansk’s success elsewhere in Poland. (UNDP/GEF)
The ultimate goal of the project was to increase the bicycle’s modal split in
Gdansk from the dismal baseline of less than 1 percent to 5-10 percent (UNDP/GEF
2001). To cap off their work, project leaders conducted 10 workshops for cycling advocates in other cities. These training sessions provided the spark for a cycling infrastructure project in Krakow (Cities for Bicycles 2005).
My own contribution to research topic
The thesis aims to enrich the existing research on utilitarian cycling in Budapest in the following ways:
• It will assemble sundry transport figures, opinion poll findings and
journalistic articles on the subject into a single piece of scholarly research.
The result will certainly be the largest formal work on the subject, and will
30 hopefully also paint the clearest and most comprehensive picture of the
topic that’s yet been presented.
• It aims to compare and contrast the cycling situation in Budapest with
relevant examples from other cities, with particular attention to recent
successes in Paris, a city that offers lessons of particular interest to
Budapest. Little international literature exists on the Parisian example, and
to the author’s knowledge just one short article has explored it in contrast
to Budapest. (Toth 2004). This thesis’s comparison between Paris and
Budapest will likely be the most thorough to date.
• Because most of the opinion polls and hard data (traffic counts, ownership
figures, etc.) on cycling in Budapest are quite old, the thesis will present a
much fresher view of the topic than readers will find elsewhere. Time
constraints made it impossible to collect new quantitative data on bike
traffic. However, the thesis will present current information gleaned from
interviews, articles and other field research in order to present the most
up-to-date, relevant study on the topic.
Methodology
Aim
This thesis aims to identify the main challenges and possible solutions to making bicycling a significant part of Budapest’s overall transport system.
Objectives
The research will achieve its aim by fulfilling the following objectives:
31 • to assess, through interviews and a review of literature and surveys, the current
political support for cycling as a mode of transport (This includes financial
backing from City Hall, the vitality of local cycling pressure groups, and the
attitudes of the public at large toward cycling.);
• To assess the physical infrastructure of lanes, paths and parking facilities in the
Budapest metro area;
• to review international literature for instructive examples on possible ways
forward for cycling development in Budapest;
• to conduct an in-depth study of one successful international example, i.e. Paris, to
learn how cycling advocates there confronted some of the challenges currently
facing Budapest; and
• to write a list of recommendations on how Budapest might become better geared
to cycling commuters.
Explanation of methods
Literature review methods
The research began with a review of literature on cycling. As explained in greater detail in the literature review itself, analytical writing directly relating to the topic amounted to a few journalistic articles in Lélegzet, the monthly magazine of the
Budapest-based NGO, the Clean Air Action Group (CAAG). Aside from these, written material about utilitarian cycling in Budapest is quite spare. Several experts in the field
— including the bicycle coordination officer at Budapest City Hall and leaders of the
32 local cycling pressure groups — were queried regarding available documents; they referred to the same few public opinion surveys and city planning documents, but no one could point to scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles of the type normally included in literature reviews. An attempt was made to cover what written material did exist, including the surveys, studies, plans, news articles, brochures, etc. Early in the research period, articles in Lélegzet were collected at the CEU Library, and information relating to international examples of cycling planning was gleaned from journals and on-line sources. As the research passed into the interviewing stage, further literature was collected from — or by the recommendation of — the interview subjects. Planning documents were obtained from municipal transportation officials and from a local transport planning consultancy. Studies were collected from pressure groups. Several news articles about cycling developments in Budapest were available from the on-line archives of local media outlets. In the literature review, an attempt was made to reach the saturation point beyond which further documents confirmed what had already been learned while providing little new information.
Infrastructure assessment
Written documents provided basic empirical data about Budapest’s cycling infrastructure: the kilometres of cycling lanes created and bike racks installed by the city, maps of the network, and trends in capital investment. But these alone only hint at the conditions for cycling in the city. The only way to appreciate how easy, or difficult, it is to get around a city by bike, is to bicycle in the city yourself. During five bicycle rides around the city, I took photographs and field notes on the type and quality of bikes lanes, the “cycling friendliness” of other infrastructure, general traffic conditions (including the
33 behaviour of other road users), signage and road markings, etc. While these qualitative assessments are subjective, it was thought they would add an important element to the picture of cycling in Budapest, and help to identify key distinctions with the cycling conditions in Paris.
Interviews
The other main research tool was semi-structured interviews. These filled in the large information gaps in the written record, and were therefore indispensable in gaining a coherent picture of the thesis topic.
Much of available data in written sources came from documents more than five years old. For example, the last proper bicycle traffic counts in Budapest were published in 1996. It was not feasible to do traffic counts on my own, however the interviews allowed me to at least obtain the opinions and impressions of experts on more recent trends in the level of utilitarian cycling in recent years. Likewise, the largest public opinion survey every conducted about cycling (TRANSMAN 2000) is now more than five years old, an eternity considering the rapid pace of development of the city’s economy and urban landscape. The operative development plan for Budapest’s bike-path network (Mayor’s Office 2001) is now more than four years old. Therefore, it was crucial to interview the city’s bicycling affairs officer as well as cyclists and pressure groups for an up-to-date report on the plan’s progress, and an explanation as to why developments are so far behind schedule. A separate interview with a cycling transport consultancy brought me up-to-date on the state of a follow-up plan currently being drafted.
Along with eliciting more current information, interviews provided an opportunity to get a more detailed and satisfying interpretation of basic facts. Most of the data from
34 the city transportation department, for instance, consists of raw, unexplained data (e.g., the number of bike lanes, the number of bicyclists counted at various points of the cycling network, the level of bicycle ownership in Budapest, etc.). To understand the background behind these numbers, and how various stakeholders perceive them, the written record provided little help. This was particularly true for the politically sensitive issue of funding cutbacks for cycling infrastructure during 2003 and 2004. Naturally, city leaders are reluctant to speak about such programme cuts and what little explanation that has been given has been in response to pointed questions by reporters and pressure groups. An article in the Hungarian daily newspaper Népszabadság (Borsos 2005) quoted the mayor as saying existing trails were underused. But such a statement called for follow-up questions that were not pursued in the article. I was interested to know if the mayor has considered whether the deficiency of infrastructure itself could be a hindrance to cycling’s popularity. An interesting political question is: “Should bike path funding be contingent solely on the desires of bike users, or does a robust cycling culture provide environmental benefits to the greater community?” I wasn’t able to interview the mayor, but I was able to explore these questions in face-to-face as well as through e-mail interviews with representatives of City Hall and various other stakeholders.
In total, 11 people were interviewed for the research, and they were chosen through expert sampling, which is the best way to elicit views of individuals with expertise in a specific subject (Trochim 2005). I sought out experts about urban cycling in Budapest from the primary stakeholder groups concerned with the issue. The selection of the first three groups — cyclists, political leaders, and transportation engineers — was based on an approach established by BYPAD (short for “Bicycle Policy Audit”), an EU-
35 funded, Brussels-based consortium formed in 1999 that has implemented professional cycling policy studies and follow-up improvement programmes in more than 40
European cities. Their method, which has been endorsed as a “best practice” in EU policy, focuses on achieving a consensus on development priorities among these three core stakeholder groups. (BYPAD 2003) My own interview subjects were:
• Cyclists — represented by the cycling pressure groups Friends for City Cycling;
the manager of a bicycle courier service, Hajtas Pajtas; and a rank-and-file
messenger working for Hajtas Pajtas.
• City leaders — represented by a member of the Budapest City Assembly and a
spokesman for the mayor’s office.
• Transport planners — represented by the cycling affairs coordinator at Budapest
City Hall and a transport engineering consultant working on the city’s bike lane
development plan;
• Environmentalists — represented by the Clean Air Action Group, a group
interested in urban environmental issues, with a specific focus on transport issues.
A possible shortcoming of this list may be its omission of a representative of the
“car lobby,” a group frequently mentioned by cycling advocates as their chief political nemesis. Efforts were made to identify a representative of this group, but I could not find a suitable organization. Hungary has an automobile association, Magygar Autóklub
(Hungarian Auto Club), but this group is not so much a political advocacy group as it is a provider of services. Where passenger cars are concerned, the club’s main activities are emergency repair services and car insurance provision. The fact is, when cycling activists
36 refer to the “car lobby,” they refer not to a dedicated, organized pressure group, but to car owners in general, who, because of their huge numbers (226 cars per 1,000 residents [DG
Energy and Transport 2000]), exert substantial de facto political influence. In any case, two of the public opinion surveys included in this thesis (Transman 2000, Studio
Metropolitana 2004) serve to convey the views of motorists about the question of urban cycling.
The Paris example
A separate part of the research concerned a comparative case study of a city where cycling has been successfully developed into a significant mode of transportation.
As explained in more detail in the literature review under “Good international examples,” it was initially thought that the study should focus on a world-renowned cycling city such as Amsterdam or Copenhagen. However, it can be argued that these cities belong to a different league than Budapest when it comes to urban cycling. They have cycling traditions that stretch back much earlier than Budapest’s, and they have levels of cycling that are many times higher (20-30 percent modal share compared to less than 2 percent).
Paris, on the other hand, has built up a significant, but modest, cycling culture from a base of almost nothing. And as in Budapest, it didn’t begin serious efforts to develop bicycling until recent years.
The basic outlines of the Paris story were researched during the literature review.
The remaining research consisted of a three-day study tour in which I conducted three interviews, took photographs and made notes of bicycle infrastructure, and took three bicycle rides around the city. More interviews were envisaged, however of the eight individuals I queried multiple times by e-mail, in French and in English, just two
37 responded. The third interview was arranged in Paris with the help of one of the other interviewees. The three interviewees were:
• the city transportation department’s bicycling affairs coordinator;
• a representative of Paris’s — and France’s — largest cycling pressure group, one
that supports and cooperates with the current mayoral administration;
• a representative of a smaller cycling pressure group that has been critical of the
current administration.
Data analysis
I attempted a systematic analysis, or at least an ordering, of my 22 pages of typewritten interview notes. As recommended in several texts on sociological research, I went through all of the notes and coded the information according to themes that appeared to be recurrent. The initial pass through the notes produced an unruly number of codes, so I began to aggregate them into larger, umbrella codes. Eventually I reduced the number of codes to four: “image of cycling,” “car-centrisim,” “NGOs,” and “financial support.” These categories became the main headings of the thesis findings section, although toward the end of the writing a fifth heading, “infrastructure,” was added to accommodate the substantial and important information collected during the physical surveys of the cycling accommodations in Budapest and Paris.
38 Findings
Overview
The following section presents the essential findings of this research. At its heart were in-depth personal interviews with 11 people — including nine face-to-face interviews and two e-mail exchanges. Eight of the 11 were from Budapest, the other three from Paris. The interview subjects were chosen for their special knowledge of various aspects of urban cycling. In Budapest, the interviewees ran the gamut from the bike messenger who rides 100 kilometers a day all over Budapest to the city leaders who set the policy and budgets critical to cycling infrastructure. During the three-day research trip of Paris, three subjects were interviewed, two NGO leaders and the city transport department’s manager of bicycling affairs. In addition to the 11 interviewees, the perspectives of two more people were obtained from public speeches at the Towards Car-
Free Cities Conference, held in Budapest in July 2005. Together with supporting data gleaned from documents, these communications give a coherent picture of utilitarian cycling in Budapest today, as well as a comparative picture of the system in Paris.
Regarding these trouble spots, a few general points of reference emerged as unifying themes. These were selected as the umbrella topics under which the following data is presented. The topics are:
Image of cycling
Car-centrism
NGOs
Infrastructure
39 Financial support
Image of cycling
Bicycling means different things to different people. To someone from the
Netherlands, it represents a time-honored, practical way to get around, one that promotes environmental goals and transcends social classes (the country’s much beloved Queen
Julianna was popularly known as the “bicycling monarch.”). To the Italian or Frenchman
— and lately the American, thanks to bike-racing champion Lance Armstrong — the bicycle is more strongly associated with the athletic heroics of riders in the Tour de
France and the Giro d'Italia. But in Hungary, as elsewhere in Central and Eastern
Europe, bicycling, particularly bicycling as a form of transport, has had a decidedly negative association with the economic privations of the Communist system. That mental link continues to be reinforced today by the fact that in many of the region’s poorest communities, bicycles remain a dominant mode of transport simply because they are more affordable than cars.
Historic background
The English website of one of Hungary’s bicycling NGOs, the Friends of City
Cycling, describes the contempt in which bicycles were held in the waning days of the planned economy.
“In the ’70s and ’80s even some transport experts regarded the bicycle merely as an obsolete ‘small capacity’ vehicle, and cyclists as travellers causing a lot of trouble.” (VBB 2001).
40 The site goes on to describe a nation-wide development programme in which some 1,350 km of separate bike-paths were built in the countryside from the late 1980s to the end of 2000. In an interview for this thesis, Miklós Szálka, a Budapest city councilman and transportation engineer, explained that the programme originated as a response to the problem of fatal collisions between cars and field workers, who frequently would ride to and from work in a state of intoxication. The program resulted in the construction an impressive length of bike paths, but its success in addressing the problem was debatable, according to Szálka. Although national funding was allocated for the program, each path was built as a stand-alone project under the supervision of a local municipality. This meant that, with the single exception of a recently completed 200 km circuit around Lake Balaton, the countryside paths do not connect to each other, and therefore, cyclists who try to go from one village to another inevitably must ride on the road in car traffic for at least part of their journey. A further problem has been that the government has left the maintenance of these paths the respective municipalities, who generally have not allocated funds for this work. (Szálka 2005)
Just as the national government has treated cycling as a traffic problem rather than opportunity, so too have the city fathers of Budapest, according to Szálka (2005).
“In the minds of people, riding a bike everyday doesn’t represent a high social quality. It’s very degrading. This is maybe the reason why the network builds up so slowly.”
The slow progress to which Szálka referred has been the virtual stagnation, since
2002, of any path construction in Budapest. Of the city’s planned network of 320
41 kilometres, 140 had been realised by that year, but no new funds were allocated during the next two annual funding cycles. (Tőkés 2005)
Image of bikes in Budapest
In Budapest, people view bicycling more as a leisure activity than as a form of transport. Traffic counts performed in the spring and summer of 1999 bear this out. At 11 spots around the city, bicyclists were counted during weekdays as well as weekends (at two other locations, they were counted on just weekends). At nine of the 11 stations, the number of cyclists counted during weekends was higher than during weekdays — in three cases, more than twice as high.
Figure 2: Bicyclist traffic counts — 1999
Location Season All day traffic count, both directions Weekday Weekend Szentendrei Street, north city limits Summer Not counted 2,344 Vitorla Street-Római Street intersection Summer Not counted 1,206 Váci Street, north connection to rail bridge Summer 1,030 2,354 Újpest city gate Spring 920 1,158 Buda upper quay at Margit Bridge Summer 950 2,760 Dózsa Győrgy Street-Vágány Street intersection Spring 77 394 Szilágyi Erzsébet Boulevaard-Retek Street-Krisztina Summer 824 1,130 Ring Road intersection Buda upper quay at the Chain Bridge on the quay Summer 1,170 2,024 bike path Veres Péter Street-Jókai Street intersection Summer 512 648 Hungária Ring Road-Stefánia Street Summer 1,006 980 Csömöri Street-Rákos Creek Summer 222 364 Kossuth Square-Alkotmány Street Spring 220 184 Szerémi Street-Hengermalom Street intersection Spring 770 1,018 Source: Development plan of the Budapest transport system, October, 2001. Budapest Mayor’s Office
42 As part of a recent survey on Budapest bicycling habits (Studio Metropolitana
2005), researchers asked respondents how often they rode a bicycle to perform various activities that they engaged in on a regular basis: commuting to work or school, shopping, going out for parties and other leisure activities, and taking excursions. The last activity was far and away the most likely to be done by bike, with 69 percent indicating that they bicycled at least sometimes for excursions. Among those who commuted to work, just 6 percent went by bike always, 1 percent frequently, 9 percent rarely and 84 percent never.
Perhaps surprisingly, student respondents were even less disposed than workers to perform their commutes by bicycle — 87 percent of students never went by bike. People who frequently shopped were somewhat more inclined to ride their bikes for that purpose
(36 percent did so at least some of the time). In summary, the survey showed that people were far more likely to use their bicycles for recreation than for transport.
According to City Hall’s Tőkés, recreation rather than transport considerations has driven Budapest bicycling policy from the beginning. When he took up the newly created position of cycling affairs coordinator in 1987, bicycling in Budapest was considered strictly as a leisure activity, he said. The city’s very first bicycle path construction project — a 10-km separate path built in 1989 from the north city limits to the touristic village of Szentendre — was geared toward getting cyclists out of the city and into the countryside, where they could take leisurely weekend rides. Tőkés believes that the recreational bias about cycling continues to inform the thinking of most transportation officials and policy makers.
“Among authorities, planning offices, district governments — all transport officials need to change the way their view cycling. They need to see it as
43 a mode of transport, but most haven’t yet. So cycling is still a problem for most planners.” (Tőkés 2005)
Szálka observed that the view of cycling as a mere liesure activity is unique to the capital city. Even in relatively large countryside cities such as Debrecen, with a population of more than 200,000, cycling is much more common as an everyday activity
— according to Szálka, cycling has a modal share in Debrecen of 20 percent.
“In Budapest, people ride bikes for a different reason than they do in the countryside. Here it’s a form of recreation. But in the countryside, people go to work by bike.” (Szálka 2005)
From pleasure to purpose
Budapest bicyclists today ride mainly for fun, but as they gain experience and as their numbers grow, the city will likely see a growth in utilitarian cycling, according to experts interviewed during the thesis research.
Indeed, this is how cycling evolved in Paris, according to Camille Lalande, a former general secretary of the French capital’s largest bicycling pressure group, Going by Bike is Better [Mieux se Déplacer à Bicyclette, or MDB]. Although the group today concentrates mainly on promoting the bicycle as a means of urban transport, MDB counts as its first big success a campaign in the 1980s to promote recreational cycling. That initiative involved winning space on suburban trains so that downtown residents could take their bikes to the countryside for weekend excursions. That success bolstered
MDB’s ranks with scores of weekend riders who, to this day, comprise about half of the group’s membership. Lalande said that that the recreational element of the group can sometimes detract from MDB’s transport-oriented objectives, however there’s no
44 denying that they contribute to making MDB the largest, most influential bicycle NGO in
Paris, and, indeed, in all of France. According to Lalande (2005), recreational cycling and utilitarian cycling “go hand in hand.”
Gábor Kürti, managing director of Budapest’s Hajtas Pajtas bicycle courier service, wrote in an e-mail interview (2005) that he believed the growing numbers of pleasure cyclists in Budapest bode well for transport bicycling.
“In the spring you see more and more cyclists on the streets, and it’s also becoming a more common sight in the winter. On the weekends, it approaches an ‘Amsterdam’ number on the cycle paths towards Margitsziget and Varosliget (the city’s two largest parks). The leap from hobby cycling to everyday cycling really has only one obstacle — the lack of a safe, connected 4-500 kilometer long system of paths.” (Kürti 2005)
Szálka, the city councilman and transport engineer, noted during an interview:
“In Hungary, 500,000 bikes are sold annually. Even if they’re only used on weekends, it brings people closer to using them during the work week. (At present) most people don’t ride them during the work week because of lack of experience.”
Although cycling groups criticized Budapest Mayor Gabor Demszky for saying, in the spring of 2005, that he didn’t believe it was worth directing serious money toward bicycling (Borsos 2005), his office has recognized that bicycling is growing in popularity in the city. For the present thesis, a letter was sent to Demszky asking for an explanation for his stance on bicycling. A written reply came from Zsolt Mérey, head of Office of
European Integration and Foreign Affairs, Municipality of Budapest. He wrote:
45 “It can be clearly seen that the popularity of bicycling is growing constantly in Budapest as a free time activity as well as a form of urban transport. (Mérey 2005)
Another of the experts, Péter Lenkei of the bicycling pressure groups Friends of
City Cycling, was also of the opinion that bicycle commuting is gaining adherents:
“It used to be that in winter, you hardly ever saw another cyclist. But now you see them all the time. Of course you have always seen bicyclists in good weather, but the bad-weather cyclists are who count.” (Lenkei 2005)
Positive image promotion in Paris
Bicycling faces prejudice of different sorts in many communities, whether it is a belief that they are a poor man’s vehicle or a toy that ought not to mix with car traffic.
This is one reason why communications are considered a key component of any urban cycling promotional strategy. (ECMT 2004) However, in Budapest, public awareness raising about bicycling has been limited to largely ad hoc efforts by the NGO community. Stickers and fliers for Critical Mass events adorn street posts along bike paths, cycling pressure groups host websites (though most are rather casually maintained), and at least one Budapest NGO has conducted a public outreach program
(the Friends of City Cycling ran an education project from 1999 to 2004, offering talks about bicycle safety to school groups on an invitational basis [Lenkai 2005]). In our interview, András Lukács, the president of the Board of Directors of CAAG, lamented a lack of public-awareness raising about urban bicyling, particularly by City Hall, which he said “does nothing” in this regard. During the thesis research, the only promotional
46 material I found from City Hall was a 10-year-old leaflet about the bicycle path on
Andrássy Boulevaard (City Hall 1995).
Concerning public awareness raising, Paris stands in sharp contrast. The Paris mayor’s office promotes bicycling through a multifaceted communications programme, one that seeks to boost the image of cycling as a healthy, environmentally sound mode of transport, while giving all due publicity to the bike paths and other bike-related services and amenities in which the city has invested. In fact, one of the critics of the current administration in Paris, Abel Guggenheim of Vélo 15, 7, complained that Mayor Bertrand
Delanoë’s publicity strategy is so good, it obscures the fact that the rate of bike path construction actually slowed down after he took office in 2001. “They do a lot of communications about cycling,” said Guggenheim (2005), a long-time Paris cycling activist who once headed the larger cycling group, MDB. “So when we say the city is doing nothing for cyclists, people can’t believe it.” To be clear, Guggenheim has no complaint with communications per se. He sees it as a vital element of any cycling promotional strategy, and he acknowledges that Delanoë’s record on bicycle PR is unimpeachable.
The mayor’s PR efforts start with print media. The city publishes a bicycle route map, a leaflet about the publicly operated bike rental company Roue Libre, and a flier about Paris respire [Paris breaths], a program that turns over city streets in eight different parts of Paris to cyclists, rollerskaters and pedestrians on weekends and bank holidays.
Paris respire is also liberally promoted on the mayor’s office’s website (www.paris.fr) with maps, time-tables and other details.
47
Near Paris’s Canal Saint Martin, a sign (left) along a city bike path informs passersby of an attractive cycling amenity under construction along the boulevard de Magenta. Such communications give citizens a positive vision of what they can anticipate with the conclusion of street work (shown at right).
Bicycling gets further mention on the website with information about paths, bicycle rentals, traffic count studies, and opportunities for tourists. Interestingly, the website’s French and English versions promote bicycles in different ways. Whereas the
English page has a clickable tab for bicycles directly on the homepage, one must delve deeper to find bicycles on the French-language page (by either going two clicks deep under the “sport” tab, or three clicks under “déplacements” [transport]). Moreover, in the transport section, bicycling is mentioned second to motorcycles under a subcategory of
“two-wheeled transport” and the figures given for bicycle traffic volume are three years out of date. So although the city has made serious efforts to promote cycling as transport,
48 its web communications promote the bicycle first as a sport and touristic diversion, and second as a utilitarian vehicle.
Car-centrism
Budapest’s car problems
As noted in the literature review, car traffic represents a major hindrance to bicycling, not only in Budapest but in any heavily congested urban area. Cars take up space on roads, and many people regard bicycles and cars as incompatible, which creates a difficult problem in densely built-up cities such as Budapest. The city’s bicycle affairs coordinator put the dilemma this way:
“If you want to develop cycling in this city there are very few areas where you won’t have conflicts: either with car traffic, parked cars, pedestrians, green spaces. So you have to decide. (Tőkés 2005)
Szálka agreed, and noted further that in Budapest, the most difficult way to build a bike path is to take space from car traffic.
“In Paris, they support the bike as a tool of reducing car traffic. So they’re prepared to take lanes away from cars. But in Budapest, they’re not ready to do that.” (Szálka 2005)
Physical challenges
Two of the interviewees remarked that Budapest, at least in some districts, is a difficult place to build bicycle lanes because of its high density. Klára Macsinka, a senior transport consultant for Pro Urbe Kft., a Budapest transport consultancy, said that
Budapest, with the exception of certain areas, is not a good city for cycling because of its
49 density and because its narrow streets leave too little room for traffic (2005). András
Lukács of the Clean Air Group was also of the opinion that high density creates a problem for cycling downtown, although he believed other neighborhoods, such as
District XI in south Buda, were well suited to bicycles.
While high densities do present a challenge to creating space, it is worth noting that the average densities of Amsterdam (4,432 people/sqkm) and Paris (20,248 people/sqkm) both exceed that of Budapest (3,381 people/sqkm). ([DG Regional Policy
2004] for the former two figures, [KSH 2001] for the latter)
Car lobby
All of the interview subjects mentioned the “car lobby” as a major antagonist to urban bicyclists. When queried further on exactly who they mean by the “car lobby,” the interviewees would mention journalists, editorialists and writers of letters to the editor who have sided with motorists in public debates about transport. Others mentioned individual citizens who have lobbied their district governments in defence of parking privileges on public streets. Understood in this way, the car lobby isn’t an organised political pressure group as such, but simply a large demographic that continually makes its point of view known to decision-makers.
András Lukács blamed the car lobby’s influence for obstructing an ongoing Clean
Air Action Group campaign to increase on-street parking fees. CAAG had made a recent proposal with the following elements:
• increased neighborhood parking rates for non-residents;
50 • introduction of a parking fee for residents, who had until then been charged a
nominal fee that was generally not collected; and
• standardization of parking policies across all of Budapest’s districts.
Lukács said the proposal garnered support for the Budapest’s deputy mayor in charge of city operations, Pál Vajda, however it went nowhere.
“The deputy mayor favors it, but practically all the newspapers are against it. As soon as the newspapers wrote against it, and it looked like pushing for it would damage his reputation, Vajda dropped it. With elections getting nearer, it was impossible to do anything.” (Lukács 2005)
Szálka offered two examples of political pressure by car owners, both involving small neighborhood matters in the Buda hills. The first concerned a plan to mark off a bicycle lane on Hajnoczy Street, a quiet residential lane in District XII. The project would have rearranged street parking from diagonal spaces to strictly parallel spots, resulting in a net loss of parking space. Immediately, a Hajnoczy resident presented the district mayor with a petition signed by several hundred unhappy car owners. The protest blocked the plan for a period, although it was eventually implemented.
The second project involved creating a car restriction zone on Rözse utca, further up in the hills. Again, the reaction was immediate and negative. However, in time it went through, and Szálka said that it ultimately won over the most vociferous opponents. After the project was realized, flat owners discovered that the car-restricted status of their neighborhood had added value to their property. Thereafter, any neighborhood flat that went on the market was invariably advertised as being in a pedestrian- and bicyclist- friendly zone. According to Szálka, the story illustrates a truism in city politics:
51 “People can’t accept change quickly. At first they’re very negative. But after they get used to it, they adjust their view.” (Szálka 2005)
On a city-wide scale, some see motorists as simply an unbeatable force in city politics. Kürti, of the Hajtas Pajtas courier service, recalled that Demszky had been more forceful about cycling promotion in his early years as mayor, but had been beaten back by the car lobby.
“Those who tried (to promote cycling), and Demszky was one of them, have been set back on points where it would have cost money, went against motorists’ interests, or stymied development. Up until now we’ve had no chance in the competition against the car lobby … .” (Kürti 2005)
Paris’s history with cars
As was the case in many other cities in Europe, bicyclists plied the streets of Paris with relative freedom until the rise of the car culture following the Second World War.
Parisians gave up their bicycles — as well as a highly developed streetcar network — in favor of personal, swift, motorized transport. For several decades, the car reigned in the
City of Light with little opposition, least of all from bicyclists. In the 1970s, a nascent urban cycling lobby persuaded City Hall to mark out Paris’s first cycling lanes, in green paint, on downtown roadways. However these lanes were merely advisory — drivers were asked to yield to cyclists if one should appear, but cars were otherwise free to drive where they pleased. The green lanes were ignored from the start, and soon forgotten. For several more years, bicyclists remained a rare sight in downtown Paris.
The modern turnaround began with the administration of Mayor Jean Tibéri, elected in May of 1995 as the successor to Paris’s first mayor, Jacques Chirac. Tibéri was
52 a conservative in the Chirac mold; in fact, he had been Chirac’s right-hand man under the latter’s administration, and one of Tibéri’s top priorities upon inheriting the office was to distinguish himself from his renowned former boss. Tibéri needed a tool to make his mark, and the one he chose came as somewhat of a surprise: the bicycle. According to cycling advocate Abel Guggenheim, the choice was partly based on the fact that Tibéri happened to have a cabinet member who knew a lot about cycling development. “Cyclists were lucky with the conservative mayor,” Guggenheim said. “He needed something to give his administration a personality. So he chose the bike. It could have been anything else.”
A fortuitous calamity
The choice was cemented in the winter of 1995, when public transport workers went on strike, and Paris — which was already choked with traffic congestion — seized up like never before. Many commuters realized that cars were not a realistic option to getting into the city; journeys of a few kilometres could stretch out for hours because of the unprecedented number of cars filling the streets. As the strike dragged out day after day, and ultimately for an entire month, people discovered that bicycles, along with rollerblades and rollerskates, were a much easier and quicker way to get downtown. Not only did it awaken Parisians to the efficacy of two-wheeled, self-propelled transport, it gave Tibéri vindication for his bicycle scheme. “He realized he’d struck gold,” said
Lalande of the cycling group MDB.
Following the strike, the Tibéri administration began implementing his plan vélo, which resulted in the construction of 150 kilometers of bicycle lanes (including about 30 kilometers of special access lanes for bicycles, buses and taxis) over a five-year period.
53 The bike as a foil
In 2001, Tibéri lost his office to Socialist Bertrand Delanoë, but the drive to promote cycling continued on. Delanoë, assisted by transport deputy Denis Baupin from his coalition partners in the Green Party, has used the bicycle as one arrow in a quiver of anti-car measures. Along with the development of bicycle lanes that take away space from cars, Delanoë is reintroducing the tram, beginning with a 30 km line on the city’s southern border, and creating so-called “green zones” with reduced speed limits and restrictions on through traffic. Due also to Delanoë’s fiery public rhetoric — he once pledged that he would “fight, with all the means at my disposal, against the harmful, ever-increasing and unacceptable hegemony of the automobile” (Transportation
Alternatives 2002) — the new administration gets compared to that of Ken Livingstone in London. Both mayors are left-wing, environmentally conscious leaders grappling with enormous traffic congestion in huge cities, the two largest cities in the European Union.
Both have launched bold initiatives that challenge the private will of individual motorists in the defence of the public’s right to a more pleasant, healthful urban environment.
Didier Couval, the Paris transport officer in charge of bicycle and rollerskating affairs, sees Paris’s mixture of anti-car measures and London’s new congestion charge as parallel experiments that could determine the future path of urban transport management in
Europe. “Time will tell which one is more effective,” he said in an interview.
NGOs
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play a key role in promoting bicycle- friendly policies, at both the local and national level. They collect information and
54 expertise, promote best practices, organize tours and conduct campaigns to raise the status and awareness of cycling (ECMT 2004).
Bicycling NGOs in Budapest
Budapest’s bicycle community has executed very successful Critical Mass events during the last year (Index 2005), but these have been one-off events rather than part of a continuous, sustained lobbying effort. No single group organizes the ride — in fact, there is surprisingly little organizing that needs to be done, considering the thousands of people that get involved. According to bicycle messenger Gábor Kiss (2005), the April 22, 2005
Critical Mass was organized by an ad hoc assemblage of some 20 people including messengers from Hajtas Pajtas and competing messenger services, an NGO called Zöld
Fiatalok (Young Greens) and Friends of City Cycling. Promotions were by word-of- mouth, email and over an official website set up by Hajtas Pajtas. The ubiquitous posters and stickers for the event, (many slapped on bike racks and lamp posts along cycling paths) were the work of casual volunteers who could download an image of the official flier off the official website, and print out and distribute the fliers at their own expense.
Escorts in orange t-shirts emblazoned with the Critical Mass logo helped police the event, but they were also volunteers recruited over the website who made their own t-shirts with a downloadable JPEG logo.
András Lukács of CAAG said during a thesis interview (2005):
“(Critical Mass) has become a really popular event. But no one was really organizing it full-time. And no one is organizing cycling lobbying on a continuous basis.”
55 As mentioned in the literature review, an estimated 10,000 bicyclists participated in the April 22 ride, and the following day, cycling advocates were aghast at comments that Mayor Gabor Demszky had made in the media. “It’s not worth spending a more serious amount on bike paths …,” Demszky had said in the newspaper Népszabadság
(Borsos 2005).
To Balázs Tőkés, the city’s bicycling affairs coordinator, the mayor’s comments were extraordinary in that Demszky almost never hands an unequivocated “no” to a political constituency. “He usually says ’yes’ to everything,” Tőkés said. “And if there has to be a ’no’, that comes from a department head.” Tőkés continued:
“The fact that he said ’no’ to the cyclists shows that he really feels the bicycle lobby is not very strong. It cannot influence an election. Although it’s good to see so many bikes together, I’m afraid the ride was not really a ’critical mass’.”
Regular lobbying, such as it is, has been carried out in recent years by the NGO
Friends of City Cycling, Budapest’s most prominent cycling NGO and one of the sponsors of Critical Mass. During an interview for the thesis, Péter Lenkei, one of the group’s spokesmen, was obviously eager to put the best face on the group’s activities. He stated the group had 380 “active members” and that he was in touch with the Tőkés twice a month lobbying for the cause. However, Lenkei did acknowledge that the group “hasn’t been very active in the last year,” and that VBB’s top priority of the moment did not concern Budapest cycling at all, but access privileges on intercity trains. (Lenkei 2005)
VBB suffered an unexpected, and obviously damaging, setback on April 23 — the day after the successful Critical Mass ride — with the death of the founder and president
56 of Friends of City Cycling, István Kőhalmi. Kőhalmi was widely known in the cycling
community as a committed and active leader; he had been frequently quoted in the press
on cycling matters and had penned several articles himself on the topic for the magazine
Lélegzet. He helped steer VBB campaigns to win bicycle access on the HÉV suburban trains and on the cogwheel railway to the Buda Hills. Lenkei said it was doubtful that any single individual would step up to replace Kőhalmi as head of VBB. Instead, the group would appoint a “figurehead” as the public face of the group, while the rest of the president’s duties would be divided up between Lenkei and four other VBB officers.
(Lenkei 2005) It’s a credit to Kőhalmi that the group was having difficulty finding a suitable replacement, but it may also show a lack of depth in the group’s active membership.
Bicycling NGOs in Paris
Several cycling NGOs operate in France with at least part of their activities focused on Paris. These include the Fédération des Usagers de la Bicyclette (FUBicy)
[Federation of Bicycle Users], la Fédération Nationale des Associations des Usagers des
Transports (FNAUT) [the National Federation of Associations of Transport Users], l'Association Française de développement des Véloroutes et Voies Vertes (AF3V) [the
French Association of Bike Route and Greenway Development], and Club des Villes
Cyclables [the Club of City Cyclists].
The main NGO in Paris focused on transport cycling is the aforementioned Mieux se Déplacer à Bicyclette (Going by Bike is Better) or MDB. MDB has a one-room office in a building near Montparnasse which they share with two other transport NGOs. The group has a desk, a computer and a phone and some long benches and tables for
57 meetings. It isn’t extravagant, but it is an office, something that Budapest’s VBB does
without. The other thing MDB has that VBB lacks is a full-time administrator to answer
phone calls and e-mails and take care of other day-to-day business. It is a basic function
of any organization, but one that many non-profits can’t support, said Camille Lalande, a
member of MDB’s Administrative Council. That was the case with MDB for almost 30
years.
When MDB formed in 1974, it fought for the rights of a very small number of
people who bicycled in Paris, plus an imagined few others who might bicycle if
conditions were made better. As previously mentioned, the group won bicycle access on
suburban trains in the 1980s, but their early campaigns for cycling lanes in the downtown
area went nowhere. With the 1995 election of Mayor Tibéri and the month-long public
transit strike a short while later, that changed. Suddenly, the mayor’s deputies were
knocking on MDB’s doors, anxious to enlist the group’s help in Tibéri’s populist bid to
promote the bicycle. Lalande, who had been with the group in the 1970s when bicyclists
were personae non gratae on Paris streets, said the change in City Hall’s attitude was
“extraordinary” and described how cycling activists were invited to the mayor’s offices
several times for consultations on Tibéri’s plan vélo.
When the Delanoë regime came to power, cycling remained a priority at the mayor’s office. Denis Baupin, Delanoë’s transport deputy, appointed a cycling-affairs officer, Jean-Luc Marchal, who reached out to MDB for support. Lalande said Marchal contacted MDB, and encouraged the group to hire a full-time administrator to mind phones and e-mail:
58 “Marchal called us and said, I need an ally, but you’re good to me only if someone is always there.” (Lalande 2005)
The cycling officer needed a more professional, reliable resource in the bicycling community. In 2003, MDB took a municipal grant in order to hire a full-time administrator. The acceptance of financial support from the city administration created controversy. According to one view, it was a necessary step to make MDB a better advocate for the cycling community. Lalande noted that it would have been impossible for MDB to hire a full-time staffer from membership revenues (MDB has about 500 members, each of whom pay EUR 30 in annual dues). The full-time administrator has established MDB as a serious civil advocate that can be relied on, not only by city administrators, but by MDB members, the media, advocacy partners, potential new members and supporters, and the general public. Whereas other cycling organizations can be difficult to reach due to a lack of staff, MDB has a paid staff member to look through emails each morning and to field phone calls. Despite these advantages, some MDB members had reservations about taking city funds out of concern that it would compromise its political independence. Abel Guggenheim, a past president of MDB and a critic of its current leadership, said that since MDB accepted its first city grant it has withheld necessary criticism of the mayor’s bicycle policy.
“An association like ours should represent only cyclists, not a political regime. If the adminstration does good things for cyclists, support them, but when they aren’t doing right by cyclists, you have to criticize.” (Guggenheim 2005)
But the debates about the group’s direction have not stopped MDB from forging ahead with several activities. Along with advising the city’s transportation department on
59 cycling infrastructure, MDB publishes a 16-page bimonthly magazine Roue Libre [Free
Way], hosts a website (www.mdb-idf.org), serves as an information source for journalists and the public, and organizes monthly, open-invitation bike rides in the countryside around Paris.
Although MDB is the biggest cycling group in Paris, it is not the only one making a difference. Guggenheim heads up another group, Vélo 15, 7, which is specifically dedicated to cycling infrastructure questions in the 15th and 7th arrondisements.
Guggenheim says the 30-odd members of his group serve mainly as technical advisors, helping city traffic engineers and road crews with the fine points of bike path and lane design in those neighborhoods. (Guggenheim 2005)
Infrastructure
To say Paris has built up 300 kilometres of bicycle lanes over the last decade only begins to explain the improvement to infrastructure. The quality of the developments has mattered as much as the quantity. From 1995 to 2004, the city had built 290.7 cycling lanes. Approximately, 140 of these were lanes for bikes only, separated from traffic by speed dots, or in many cases, by a 20 cm high concrete barrier. The barricaded lanes are built to keep out parked cars. Quite often, parking space is designated between the barrier and traffic so as to remove even the temptation to park on the lane.
60 In separated bike lanes, of which Paris had 101 kilometers in 2004, cyclists ride between sidewalks and a concrete median that prevents cars from encroaching on the lane. Car parking spots are designated on the other side of the median, which is wide enough to protect cyclists from the swinging passenger-side doors.
Combination bus/bike lanes, of which Paris had 120 kilometers in 2004, are often, but not always, separated from other traffic by a raised concreted median (as in the lane pictured). The lanes are wide enough to accommodate a bus and cyclist riding astride. The city permits taxis in these lanes as well as emergency vehicles.
In Budapest, as stated in the literature review, bicycle lanes are almost universally placed on sidewalks, forcing bicyclists to mix with pedestrians. In the best cases, the cycling lane is paved with red-brick flagstones, which makes it visually distinct from the concrete walkway. Much more common, however, is a simple yellow dividing line complemented by stencilled markers indicating which side is for bicycles and which for pedestrians. Kőhalmi (2004) continually campaigned against shared bicycle/walking
61 paths of any sort, for the reason that it puts the two most environmentally friendly modes of transport in competition with one another. Bicycle messengers in Budapest tend not to use these paths. As Gábor Kiss noted in an interview for the thesis (2005), speed counts for everything in the courier business, and messengers typically ride at speeds upwards of
20 km/hour; it is neither safe nor efficient to ride amongst the slower users of the path, who frequently include parents with baby strollers and people walking dogs. As mentioned in the literature review, the “Guide for the development of bicycle facilities” states that sidewalks are generally not acceptable for bicycling. (AASHTO 1999) The guide echoes the criticism that shared-use sidewalks create conflicts between cyclists and slower moving pedestrians, skateboarders and rollerskaters, who can, and frequently do, suddenly and unpredictably stop and change directions. It notes other hazards, as well, including stationary obstructions such as signposts, fire hydrants, bus benches, telephone poles, etc. and moving ones such as people exiting buildings and parked cars. Another problem is that motorists may not notice bicyclists on sidewalks, and will be taken off- guard when they cross intersections at unexpectedly high speeds. The cyclists themselves have less sight distance on a sidewalk due to obstructions such as signs, posts, fences, shrubbery, etc. Finally, pedestrians traveling in pairs or small groups tend to line up astride of one another taking up the whole width of the sidewalk. The AASHTO guide notes further that wider paths do not necessarily mitigate these problems, as the extra space encourages cyclists to ride faster, which increases the necessary reaction time to avoid collisions. On the point of shared paths, the cycling lobby in Paris stands in agreement. MDB opposes such solutions as a matter of policy, as taking space from
62 pedestrians and giving it to bicyclists represents a zero gain for environmentally friendly transport (Lalande 2005).
The lane along the Pest quay south of Margit Bridge is a typical Budapest design: bicycles are shunted off the street onto a shared-use path with a yellow line separating pedestrians from bike traffic. The light traffic on this segment of the path, however, makes conflict between cyclists and other users rare.
Further south, the same path winds around Parliament, one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions. Here pedestrians and cyclists struggle to avoid each other while both groups generally ignore the yellow lane divider.
In Paris careful thought has been given to the design of intersections. Although not unheard of in Budapest, traffic signal posts in Paris usually include a small, shoulder high signal for cyclists. It faces inward into the lane so that cyclists can pull up in front of cars stopped at the signal — and avoid breathing their exhaust. In some cases, the cycling signal turns green a few seconds before the car signal changes, enabling cyclists to get a head start through the intersection. At many intersections, special herringbone-patterned strips are painted right through the crossing to mark the way for bicyclists.
63 At this intersection, a special, shoulder-high bicycle signal supplements the main light above. The light is canted toward the lane for the sake of cyclists who pull right up to the post where they can’t see the main light. A herringbone patterned strip crosses the intersection as a warning to motorists turning to the right, across the path of bicyclists.
In Budapest, some street crossings include yellow markers for bicyclists. But reflecting the generally poor state of city roads, the bicycle lane markings are often in a badly worn state.
These pictures show local roads in districts XIII (far left) and II (near left) where a lack of maintenance has all but obliterated bicycle crossings.
64
At bottom, the resurfacing, in the summer of 2005, of Árpád fejedelem on the Buda riverbank included nicely implemented crossings for bicycles.
A frequent complaint of the Budapest bicycle lobby is the lack of a comprehensive integrated network of cycling lanes and paths. The city’s 2001 transport development plan stated that the goal of the bike path network should be to enable bicyclists to get from anywhere to anywhere else in the city. According to the plan, this would require the building of at least 500 km of bike paths, of which 200-300 km would be realistic in the medium term. This goal was in line with international best practice in accommodating utilitarian cyclists. According to a guide published by the US Federal
Highway Administration, cities trying to promote utilitarian cycling should start by mapping out a network on streets that:
• access main residential areas;
65 • serve the community’s most popular destinations (schools, parks, work centers,
shops, etc.); and
• provide continuous corridors with good access to surrounding neighbourhoods.
(FHWA 1998).
Among these streets, planners should prioritise those that already carry heavy bicycle traffic or show potential for high bicycle use in the form of significant bicycle traffic on nearby neighbourhoods. (FHWA 1998)
To date, the city has built just 140 km of bike paths and lanes (Borsos 2005), and most of the key downtown corridors remain uncovered. No bike lanes exist on the small or large ring roads, and Andrássy Boulevard is the only major radial arterial with bicycle access. The others, including the Pest thoroughfares of Rákóczí, Váci, and Üllői and major Buda streets such as Hegyalja, Bartók Béla and Alkotás have no designated bicycle lanes. These streets — with their heavy, fast-moving traffic — make several important destinations difficult and unsafe to access by bike. The city’s train stations, for example, can be easily reached on foot or by metro, but road access is not bike-friendly. Likewise,
Westend CityCenter, Budapest’s largest shopping mall, is difficult to access by bicycle due to being surrounded by busy thoroughfares with no bike lanes. In fact, very few of the streets in downtown Pest, including the street in front of City Hall, have bicycle lanes.
Another critical deficiency with Budapest’s infrastructure is the lack of any designated bicycle lanes on the main downtown bridges: Érzsébet, the Chain Bridge and Margit.
Currently, cyclists who want to cross these spans must either ride in car traffic or amongst pedestrians on the sidewalk. Neither is particularly comfortable. The former option means riding on a poorly maintained road surface, and the constant worry of
66 swerving into the path cars in order to avoid cracks and potholes. The sidewalk option presents an obstacle course of posts, girders, and pedestrians. The approach roads to the bridges lack bike lanes, and there are no ramps to get up onto the raised sidewalks.
Speaking at the Towards Car-Free Cities Conference July 17-23, 2005 in Budapest, the city’s deputy mayor, Tibor Bakonyi, said that Budapest “needed to build a bike and pedestrian bridge” over the Danube. But a Danube crossing built exclusively for cyclists and pedestrians would entail enormous capital cost. Considering the city’s recent paltry spending on bike infrastructure, such an outlay would seem unlikely in the near term.
Typical of Budapest’s downtown bridges, Margit Bridge has no special accommodation for bicycles. Cyclists must either ride amongst pedestrians on the sidewalk (upper left), or ride on the rather deteriorated edge of the roadway amongst fast-moving car traffic. Following the eastbound sidewalk past the Pest bridgehead, cyclists must hop the curb into traffic, whether they are continuing straight ahead (as in the photo upper right) or turning to the right (left), where a large lamp post blocks the sidewalk.
67
A designated bicycle crossing over the Danube exists north of downtown on the Újpest Rail Bridge. Although officially prohibited, motorcycles and motor scooters (upper left) are a common sight on the span.
Budapest’s lack of a comprehensive cycling network is one of the main complaints of the cycling lobby. Southbound cyclists on the riverside path in Pest find that the route comes to an abrupt end at a tram track on the south side of Parliament.
Although Paris is similarly divided by a river, the Seine doesn’t break up the cycling network there for the simple reason that in Paris bicyclists share the roadway with car traffic. Cycling lanes run along the edge of bridges just as they do on other roads in the city.
68 Another way that Paris has made its streets safe for cyclists is by designating special “green” zones around the city. In these neighbourhoods, car traffic is kept in check by 30 km/hour speed limits, traffic bumps, and an onerous system of one-way streets limited access and egress to and from the zone. In theory, traffic moves slowly enough in these areas to obviate the need for cycling lanes; bikers can ride amongst cars at an unhurried pace. This scheme isn’t without its critics, however, as it tends to increase traffic on streets adjacent to the zones. In addition, the cycling lobby has been lobbying for exemptions from the one-way restrictions on green-zone streets. They argue that it makes no sense to inconvenience “green” forms of transportation along with motorists.
(Lalande 2005) The city has begun experimenting with counterflow lanes in a few spots, though Didier Couval of the city transport department said that generally, the streets aren’t wide enough to provide for them.
The entrance of a green zone in the 19th arrondisement in a neighborhood of Asian immigrants called Belleville. Bike lanes are not marked inside the zone; it is assumed that traffic is calm enough for them to ride safely among cars.
69 In the Belleville green zone, special elongated speed bumps discourage cars from speeding but allow cyclists to pass unhindered around the tapered sides.
A policy for promoting bicycle use must give sufficient priority to bicycle parking. Facilities must be of sufficient quantity and quality (Zuks 2001). In a public opinion survey conducted by the Clean Air Action Group, 20 percent of respondents said insufficient safe parking was the biggest obstacle to biking in the city (2004), while a survey by Studio Metropolitana (2004) showed that poor parking facilities amongst other infrastructure was a hindrance to cycling development in Budapest. In Budapest, the most recent figures on bicycle parking facilities come from the 2001 city transport development plan (Mayor’s Office 2001). Not counting bike racks as schools, the city had parking capacity for 2,300 bicycles at 160 assorted institutions (Mayor’s Office
2001). By comparison to Budapest, bike parking in Paris seems omnipresent. And it isn’t confined to racks in front of buildings; much of the parking consists of street side racks that don’t seem to belong to any particular address. Document from the Paris Mayor’s
Office show that the city installed most of this infrastructure in the last decade; street side parking for two-wheeled vehicles (the same racks can be used for motorbikes) grew from
3,300 places in 1996 to 21,228 in 2002. (Mayor of Paris: DPRT 2003) A city code
70 requires property owners to provide a certain number of bicycle/motorbike parking spots based on the size of the property and the type of use (residential, commercial, public office, etc.). The bike parks seem to come in two basic types, fence-like structures that double as barriers between sidewalks and motor traffic, and heavy steel tubular racks.
Neither type protects bicycles against vandalism, but the parking racks themselves appear indestructible.
Some of the various types of special “two-wheeler” parking facilities available on Paris streets
71 Financial support
Spending in Budapest
In recent years, Budapest City Hall’s attention to cycling matters has waned.
From 1990, when the city made its first cycling-network development plan, until 2001, progress was slow but sure, with as many as 10 km of bike paths built per year (Tőkés
2005). Over the years, the city has spent an average of HUF 100 million annually
(approximately EUR 400,000, in 2005 terms) on bike paths (Szálka 2005). To put this in perspective, Budapest’s total municipal budget is HUF 270 billion. Although it was less than a tenth of a percent of the budget, bicycle funding was cut completely after 2002. No new funds were committed in 2003 and 2004; the small cycling projects that were carried out drew from leftovers of the 2002 budget. Tőkés said HUF 180 million had been approved for 2005, although the actual spending of this money is to be provisional.
According to a new policy, no bike path project can go forward unless it is integrated with a larger, already-planned road improvement. Tőkés has lost the power to implement self-standing cycling projects — he must wait for opportunities to piggyback cycling projects onto car-oriented road projects. (Tőkés 2005)
In order to carry on under these circumstances, Tőkés initiated a new bike path development plan in 2004. The aim of the plan — which was still in progress during the thesis research — was to map out a comprehensive citywide bike path network that meets the approval of the mayors of all 23 of the city’s districts. In Budapest, City Hall has control and responsibility for main roads only. Side streets are the province of district governments, and therefore any cycling infrastructure on these routes must gain district
72 approval. As a practical matter, the city prefers to have district support even for routes along main arteries. (Macsinka 2005)
Neither Tőkés nor the consultancy in charge of the development plan sounded optimistic about the plan’s near-term implementation.
“Cycling will be in the hands of the professionals who look after various projects. There won’t be money specifically for cycling. It’ll have to be integrated into other projects. And we’re not very good at integration.” (Tőkés 2005)
Klara Macsinka, chief consulting engineer with Pro Urbe Kft, the consultancy in charge of the coming master plan, said that her task would be difficult because of the lack of support for bicycles in the districts. Almost none of the 23 district governments care about bicycling, Macsinka said. The single exception was District XXI (Csepel Island), which was interested in a comprehensive intra-district cycling network with connections to all its primary schools.
Despite these doubts, City Hall announced on August 18 a bicycle-development proposal package that included 23 kilometres of new bike paths, unspecified improvements for bike-path signage and bike parking, further bicycle access on public transport vehicles and a new bike path map (Bárkay 2005). The plan was detailed at an event attended by representatives from Hajtas Pajtas, Friends of City Cycling and the
Clean Air Action Group, who mainly praised it, although Peter Lenkei hinted at some reservations when he said that hoped it wasn’t a campaign trick in anticipation of the autumn local elections. According to a news article in Népszabadság, the new paths
73 would be created along some of the many roads slated for resurfacing before the year was out.
Spending in Paris
In Paris, the Mayor’s Office currently allocates approximately EUR 4 million per year on bicycling, including maintenance and building of infrastructure, as well as publications and other promotions. (Couval 2005) The figure does not include spending on shared infrastructure, such as the dual use bus/bike lanes which comprise more than one-third of the city’s total designated bicycle routes. Neither does the figure reflect spending on the green zone program, which benefits cyclists by calming motor traffic.
(Couval 2005) Both of these elements of transport policy add substantially to Paris’s cycling accommodations, although it would be difficult to estimate how much of their costs belong under “cycling spending.”
As for future improvements, the city has a few projects under works. A partly constructed path around the city’s perimeter needs to be completed, and this is envisioned in the city’s long-term planning. (Couval 2005) A more immediate project, one that was just getting underway in the summer of 2005, was a comprehensive improvement of signage on the city’s bicycle route network. As Couval explained, bike paths run along just some of Paris’s streets, not all, and 75 percent of the city’s roads are one-way. These factors make it difficult for bicyclists who are unfamiliar with the bike lane network to find their way around. It is hoped that the liberal placement of bicycle road signs will make the cycling network more navigable and, thus, more inviting.
Another new cycling initiative will involve a free-of-charge, bike loan system modelled on a pilot program in France’s second city, Lyon. (Couval 2005) The system
74 operates with the aid of a special swipe card available at public transport ticket booths.
Users take the cards to a city bike depot (Couval says four depots will be opened around
in Paris) and swipe the cards through a console, which then unlocks and frees a bicycle.
The user can ride the bike without charge up to a certain time limit, and can then return
the bike to a the depot of greatest convenience. As a security measure, if the bicycle is
kept out beyond the time limit, a fee is charged against the user’s card, which is attached
to some kind of collateral. According to Couval, the Paris system may involve more than
4,000 bicycles.
The city bike program in Lyon, France works like a luggage trolley system in an airport. You put up refundable collateral, in this case by inserting a personalized swipe card into the console (pictured left), then take a bicycle, which is free of charge as long as you return it within a certain time limit. Source: Courtesy Lewis Rainsberry
While MDB is generally supportive of the city’s current approach, they have a few unmet wishes. One is the lack of a safe bicyclist crossing of the city’s outer ring
75 road. (LaLande 2005) At present, this heavily trafficked road presents a prohibitive barrier to would-be bicycle commuters travelling from outside the city gates to downtown. A related problem concerns the insufficient bicycle access to Paris’s suburban trains — called the SNFC. At present cyclists aren’t permitted aboard during peak hours
— the precise times when commuters need access. In addition to getting rush hour access, the cycling lobby would like to see more secure, long-term parking at the city’s train stations. Some Parisian rail stations have large, sheltered bicycle racks out front, but they don’t offer adequate security for a functional park and ride system. MDB would like to see quality improvements following the Dutch example, in which indoor parking facilities are integrated with commercial spaces that include bike rental and repair shops.
In this way, train commuters can park their bicycles for a fee, and have the assurance that they will be watched over by a human attendant. A high level of security is needed when a bicycle is left for longer periods of time. (Zuks 2002, AASHTO 1999)
A parking facility next to the central railway station in Amsterdam provides the ideal implementation of park and ride. Paris has few examples of guarded, long-term storage facilities at rail stations. Source: Taken from the report “Stimulation of Bicycle Usage in European Cities” by Renee Zuks.
76 Cycling trends
The policies of the last 10 years have improved bicycle usage in Paris, by both empirical and qualitative measures. Neither the Mayor’s Office nor MDB could provide a modal split data for bicyclists in Paris. However, the city has been making annual bicycle traffic counts at six key points on the cycling network since 1997, two years after the
Mayor Tibéri first conceived his Plan Vélo. Data from this monitoring shows a growing trend in bicycle traffic. From the 1997 baseline level, the numbers grew in fits and starts until 2002, but then jumped significantly in 2003 to 51 percent above baseline and in
2004 to 58 percent above baseline. MDB’s Lalande said that bicycle traffic in Paris has historically been insignificant in the larger transport picture. “They used to say that the modal split was 1.0 to 1.5, which is another way of saying it wasn’t measurable.” She believes that in recent years, bicyclists have begun to command a significant modal share.
Whatever the numbers, the experts interviewed for this research all said the difference on the streets is obvious. Lalande, who has been advocating at MBD for 20 years, said that in the 1980s, “if I saw another bicyclist out on the streets, it was a red letter day. Now if I don’t see another cyclist, I think there must be something wrong.”
Abel Guggenheim, despite being a critic of the current administration’s record on cycling development, concedes that the situation “is much better than before.”
77 Figure 3: Growth of cyclist numbers in Paris
1.6 1.4 1.2 1 0.8
0.6 Cycling levels, 1997 base year = 1 0.4 0.2 0 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 Source: Paris Mayor’s Office
By personal observation, cycling levels and conditions seem markedly better compared to those in Budapest. In Paris, it is indeed unusual not to find cyclists riding down the road. They’re a reliable constituent of traffic on even the busiest roads, along with private cars, buses, taxis and the omnipresent scooters and motorbikes. Parked bicycles can be seen everywhere, as the city has installed sturdy, brown-painted bicycle stands all across the city. A noticeable qualitative difference between Parisian and
Budapestian cyclists is in their riding habits; whereas cyclists on main arteries in
Budapest tend to either race with car traffic or stick to sidewalks, Parisian cyclists ride at an unhurried pace in the thick of traffic. In Paris, most roads at least have lane markings for cyclists as well as special traffic signals, giving them clear recognition as belonging to traffic. It is also true that Parisian traffic is much heavier and tends to move more slowly than traffic in Budapest, which may make it seem less intimidating to some cyclists.
Another marked difference between the two cities concerns the types of people who bicycle. In Budapest, cyclists tend to be young and athletic. They tend to wear sporty
78 clothes, including Lycra cycling shorts and helmets, and they ride sporty bikes — mountain bikes, road racing bikes, or little stunt bikes. In, Paris, cyclists seem to come in a wider variety of ages and shapes. They dress as they are, rather than wearing cycling attire, they seldom wear helmets, and the bikes they ride are sturdy city bikes with baskets and racks — bikes that are built for shopping and commuting rather than speed or fashion.
Discussion
Overview
Although some analysis was made as the research was revealed in the findings section, the following discussion has been included to round out the dissection process.
The organisation of this section parallels that of the literature review and the findings:
• Image of cycling
• Car-centrism
• Weakness of NGOs
• Infrastructure
Image of cycling
While it is true that bicycles are still associated in some people’s minds with the economic privations of the Socialist era, they have acquired other, more positive associations in the last 15 years. As the various surveys and expert comments presented in the findings point out, cycling in contemporary Budapest is seen more as a sport and
79 leisure activity. While the ultimate goal is to popularize cycling as a means of transport, the fact that people have already embraced it for other purposes can be counted as a step in the right direction. As pointed out in the findings, the cycling lobby in Paris charted its first victory in the 1980s with a campaign to promote weekend rides in the countryside.
Success with that initiative eventually led to progress on transport-related activities. The two forms of cycling — recreational and utilitarian — have gone hand in hand.
It should also be pointed out that the bicycle industry has adapted to rising incomes. Specialized bike shops today carry bicycles costing several hundred — or even thousand — euros a piece, along with all the racing jerseys, helmets, shoes, gloves and other paraphernalia that a conspicuous consumer could desire. It is clear that several of
Budapest’s bike shops are targetting wealthy young professionals, not peasants. The popular image of cycling seems to be changing. As Gábor Kürti of Hajtas Pajtas has observed, bicycles frequently appear in contemporary advertising as tokens of health, youth, and modern sensibility.
The chore of promoting utilitarian bicycling, then, doesn’t have to start from square one — people already have positive associations with the bicycle. But this promotion does need to be done. Up until now, the city has all but ignored public awareness raising, leaving this task to NGOs that lack the wherewithal to do it on a continuous basis. Meanwhile, the international literature indicates that public awareness raising — along with bike path construction, parking provision, and other activities — is a crucial aspect of any effective cycling promotion strategy. Several of this study’s interview subjects noted that image comprised one barrier to utilitarian cycling in
Budapest. Therefore, public-awareness raising should seek to enhance the image of
80 transport cycling, while also dispensing basic “how to” information concerning bike paths, bike services, public transport accommodations, relevant traffic rules, etc.
Car-centrism
The public fixation on the car as a status symbol is another issue that could be addressed through public awareness raising. This campaign could highlight the bicycle as a tool to mitigate environmental problems associated with the car and the virtuousness and community-mindedness of choosing to bike rather than drive.
An even more important tool in combating car culture in Budapest, however, will be to create policies that encourage the use of more environmentally friendly modes of transport — with cycling and walking at the top of the list. The examples of Paris and
London show that urban Europeans have a limit to the amount of car traffic they will tolerate. The issue involves a balance between each citizen’s desire for free choice in transport versus their recognition of how that freedom affects actual conditions in the city. At some point they see that a laissez faire transport policy doesn’t result in greater personal freedom, but just the opposite: traffic jams, annexation of common space, air pollution and noise. In the end, a more communitarian, less liberal approach, is needed to promote not only a more pleasant and clean environment, but freedom of mobility itself.
Intensive motorization has a shorter history in Budapest than in either Paris or
London. However, now more than a decade and a half after the political changes, car traffic in Budapest has reached the point where the public sees it as a threat to quality of life, as evidenced by multiple public opinion cited in the findings. With motorization trending steadily upwards in Budapest, as it is in the other new member states of the EU,
81 these complaints can be expected to grow louder. It would appear it is only a matter of time before Hungary’s car-obsessed capital witnesses an automotive backlash.
Weakness of NGOs
The reason that cycling is developing so slowly in Budapest is a lack of political will. The mayor has openly stated that cycling is not worth serious expenditures because too few people use existing paths. In essence, he has sized up bicyclists as too small a constituency for serious attention — a political judgement. Balázs Tőkés, the city’s cycling-affairs coordinator, observed that the estimated 28,000 regular cyclists in the city comprised too small a group to compete with the hundreds of thousands of motorists.
“They can’t influence and election,” he observed.
But it is not just numbers that make or break a political movement. It is also the strenuousness of the movement’s activism. As the expression goes, the squeaky wheel gets the oil. It’s an apt political metaphor: like a squeaky wheel, the successful lobbying group is not only noisy, it is persistent. In recent years, the bicycle lobby has behaved more like a tropical storm — making a big noise a couple times a year, but quickly blowing itself out into a benign breeze, and remaining that way until the next monsoon.
This has been the story of the cycling lobby in recent years. Twice annually several thousand riders gather for Critical Mass rides that block city traffic, make headlines in the papers, and provoke a fleeting public debate. Unfortunately, the discussion rarely goes into detail beyond the gross number of kilometres of bike paths that exist, or should exist, in the city. This is not surprising, as Critical Mass is a loosely organised event that makes only a general political claim of “We are traffic.” It doesn’t have a board or leadership
82 structure to convey specific demands and priorities to city decision-makers. Although the event makes it clear that many bicyclists in the city are dissatisfied with cycling conditions, it gives no signal on how the situation should be righted.
The city does have some activist groups interested in the cause of cycling. But even the most prominent one, Friends of City Cycling (VBB), lacks operation staff, and that group’s main priorities of late haven’t even concerned cycling issues in Budapest.
The prima facie evidence suggests that whatever the cycling lobby’s activities have been, they are not working. During 2003 and 2004, despite growing attendance at Critical
Mass, the city gave no funding for cycling. And in 2005 the situation showed little improvement, as the mayor issued his sharpest public rebuff to cyclists yet, while declaring that new funding for bike lanes would be restricted to those projects that could be tied into larger road works.
Though Critical Mass, by itself, may not constitute an effective lobbying campaign, it does show potential for one. With the last ride having drawn 20,000 riders
(Földes 2005), Critical Mass seems to have hit a vein of discontent among the city’s two- wheelers. The frequent shouting matches that invariably erupt between riders and motorists would suggest that many participants are eager to fight for the cause. If a small percentage of them could be conscripted into a regular lobbying organisation, they might be able to effect change in the city’s transport policies. As the findings show, an effective cycling lobby does not have to be huge, it just needs to maintain continuous activity and provide a reliable presence for cyclists, the media and City Hall planners. The MDB in
Paris, for instance, has become an effective voice in city politics with just 500 dues- paying members.
83 Infrastructure
To the credit of Budapest’s city administration, bicycling conditions have substantially improved in the last 15 years. The bike-path network has grown from zero to approximately 140 km, bicycles are now allowed on some public transport vehicles
(the cogwheel railway and HÉV suburban trains), and a few streets around the city — notably Váci utca, Raday utca and Hajos utca — have been partially or completely restricted to car traffic. While all these measures have improved conditions for cyclists, even city officials acknowledge that they have fallen far short of original plans. The operative bicycle-development plan calls for the completion of at least 320 kilometres of bike lanes, while one official planning document states that at least 500 km would be needed for a truly integrated network that would enable commuters to get from any point in the city to any destination by bicycle. Budapest Deputy Mayor Tibor Bakonyi, speaking to an audience of alternative transport experts at the 2005 Toward Car-free
Cities Conference in Budapest, had little choice but admit the deficiencies of the city’s bike path network, adding that these comprised one barrier to popularizing urban cycling.
The problems with Budapest’s bike-path network are not just quantitative; an estimated 70 percent of designated bike paths consist of nothing more than painted lines on sidewalks, a half measure that has done little to elevate the status of bicyclists on city streets. Budapest’s latest city development plan states that marked lanes on sidewalks do not constitute good cycling infrastructure.
In sum, the city’s current approach does not treat cycling in a serious way. It treats cycling as primarily a leisure activity, placing paths generally outside the city center, along the river, through parks and out toward the surrounding countryside. In
84 instances where path are built in the city, the city takes pains to direct them away from heavy traffic and down sidestreets and sidewalks, presumably in the interest of ensuring their safety. This always comes at a cost of convenience, though. Utilitarian cyclist naturally seek the most direct, fastest routes possible, and therefore cannot be restricted to minor routes.
Transport planners could provide for bicyclists’ safety in a way that would splite these convenience costs more equitably between cyclists and motorists, while also creating other public benefits. Traffic calming measures, for instance, would serve to make roads bicycle friendly while also improving the neighbourhood environments be reducing noise and making sidewalks more inviting to pedestrians. Another example is the marking of bike lanes on roads. At first glance, it seems this would subtract space from motorists, but it actually has the opposite effect of allocating road space more efficiently. (FHWA 1998) Bike lane markings make the movements of both cars and bicycles more predictable to each other. In the absence of a bike lane, an overtaking motorists tends to give the cyclist an exaggerated berth, perhaps changing lanes entirely, to avoid the danger of a collision. But with a bike lane marker, the passing driver can remain in his or her lane, knowing precisely where the cyclist’s boundary is.
There are just a few examples of international best practices that could promote bike use in a cost-effective way while addressing broader traffic problems. Transport planning for bicycles, with which Budapest has had brief experience, could benefit from exchange of experiences and new approaches.
85 Conclusions and recommendations
A major hurdle to the further development of cycling culture in Budapest is the perception that the scarce use of existing infrastructure means there’s no demand for improvements. It’s a view voiced by transport planners working with a constant shortage of road space and a mayor who gauges support based on current users while overlooking potential ones. But the lack of a comprehensive, high-quality cycling network is itself one of the main obstacles to progress. The existing infrastructure suits the needs of two main groups of users:
• recreational, weekend cyclists who ride for the sake of riding and are not very
particular about where the bike paths go, and
• a hardcore of utilitarian cyclists who are willing to ride in the thick of urban traffic if
a proper bicycle lane doesn’t lead to their destination.
However, the evidence suggests that the network does not serve a significant population of potential transport cyclists who don’t like riding in car traffic, and who can’t reach their main daily destinations via a designated bicycle path. Cities such as
Paris and Bogotá have made the leap of faith that investments in bike paths bring such cyclists out of the woodwork, and the rising trends in bicycle use in both those capitals have vindicated their policies. Budapest City Hall should follow suit.
Recommendations for City Hall
The city should embark on a cycling promotion strategy that includes the following elements:
86 • Completion of the planned bicycle route network. According the city’s original
network plan, Budapest could complete a 320 kilometer network by 2015. That would
mean that the city should build an average of 15 kilometers per year over the next 10.
The city’s 2001 transport plan noted that 500 kilometers would be ideal — this should
be the city’s longer-term goal. Priority projects should include bike lanes on the large
ring road (Nagykörút), paths across the three downtown bridges (Érzsébet, the Chain,
and Margit) and down all the city’s major radial arterials, including Rákóczí, Váci,
Üllői, Hegyalja, Bartók Béla and Alkotás.
• A reassessment of the general approach to path construction. First off, the city must
stop marking bike paths on sidewalks. Traffic planners should take their cues from
good international examples, integrating bicyclists with car traffic by marking bike
lanes on streets. Cycling lanes can be marked with paint, with speed dots, or with a
raised curb that effectively segregates them from motor traffic. The approach should
be tailored to the physical characteristics and traffic conditions of the road, as well as
the types of riders the road may attract (i.e, while downtown streets are likely to
attract more experienced adult riders, roads by schools will draw more children). On
some streets, traffic calming measures alone can encourage cycling by slowing down
cars more compatible speeds. Planners shouldn’t shy away from taking space from
motorists, as they presently do in Budapest. They should consider closing lanes to
cars to create high-speed priority lanes for buses and bicycles, as in Paris. These lanes
give incentives to take environmentally-preferable modes of transport, while making
life more difficult for car drivers.
87 • A promotional strategy. As the city invests in its cycling infrastructure, it ought to
promote it with a public relations campaign. The promotion strategy should be
mindful of the proletarian associations that some people may attach to the bicycle, as
well as Hungarians’ affection for the car as a status symbol. Cycling could be
promoted for its relative advantages to the car: faster and more manueverable in
heavy urban traffic, easier to park, less stressful, good for your heart and muscle tone.
It needs to be promoted as the smart choice for Budapesters at a wide range of income
levels. On a more practical level, the city needs to inform the public about the
particulars of the bike path network. The city can’t expect the poorly funded NGO
community to do all of this. The promotions plan could follow the examples of the
Mayor’s Office of Paris by creating maps, brochures and websites, and organizing
events that help popularize cycling.
• Installation of parking. As one of the major hindrances to urban cycling is the fear of
theft when a bicycle is left unattended, the city should vastly increase the number of
public bicycle racks. The racks should be built around major traffic generators —
shopping malls, public transport stations, schools and universities, office building,
etc. — and should be located in busy areas (as near entrances), where theft and
vandalism are less likely to occur. The city should consider subsidizing bicycle park
stations, manned facilities near train and other public transport stops, where bicycles
can be parked securely for long periods.
• Required parking for bicycles. Apartment blocks, stores, workplaces and other
buildings that generate street traffic should be required to provide a certain number of
parking spots for bicycles, based on floor space. Such a requirement could be based
88 on the Paris model. Train and long-distance bus stations could be compelled to
provide long-term parking, such as guarded facilities or lockers.
• Monitoring of cycling levels, charting of trends. Due to a lack of systematic bicycle
traffic monitoring, no one knows the trends of bicycle use in Budapest over the last
15 years. For the city to create an effective bicycle path network, it needs to conduct
systematic traffic counts at key points around the city at regular intervals. Such a
monitoring programme will help gauge the effects of bike lane improvements, and
help city planners develop the network in ways that best suit demand.
• Forming a partnership with cycling NGOs. The best authorities on Budapest’s bicycle
infrastructure can be found in the local NGO community. With their dedicated,
volunteer advocates, cycling NGOs can provide free-of-charge guidance to the city
about how to best develop the cycling system. They can also help promote the system
and supply necessary political support. However, the funding status of Budapest’s
cycling NGOs — as with many NGOs — doesn’t even reach the threshold of
supporting rudimentary office functions. The city should consider giving grants that
could enable a cycling NGO to establish continuous operations, and thereby become a
reliable, functional partner in cycling promotion.
Recommendations for cycling NGOs
The cycling community in Budapest has no continuous operations, and it suffered a significant setback with the death this past spring of István Kőhalmi, the longtime president of the Friends of City Cycling (VBB). Bicycling advocates need to get better organized and establish a continuous lobbying effort that gives City Hall a clear picture
89 of their priorities. With this in mind, the following recommendations are offered to cycling NGOs and cycling advocates:
• Organise a fund-raising and membership drive to coincide with Critical Mass.
Considering that the fall 2005 Critical Mass ride drew an estimated 20,000 riders,
future Critical Mass rides could be fertile grounds for new recruits to the cycling
movement. If someone had signed up just 5 percent of the fall 2005 rider, the city
would have had 1,000 new cycling advocates — double the size of Paris’s largest
biking NGO.
• Strive to establish permanent, full-time operations. The hiring of staff is contingent
on sufficient funding, something that has eluded Budapest’s struggling cycling
NGOs. However, the experience of the MDB organization in Paris shows that the
establishment of a full-time staff — even a staff of one — can push an organization
across an important threshold in terms of effectiveness.
• Engage the city in a bicycle policy audit. The Brussels-based Bicycle Policy Audit
(BYPAD) coalition has created a political methodology for improving bicycling
policy at the municipal level. Again, it requires funding — in this case for training
and for the hiring of a full-time auditor to see the process through. But the BYPAD
approach is a sensible way for cycling advocates to communicate their goals to city
leaders and transportation staff, to learn the precise nature of potential conflicts, and
to then work out compromises that will hasten progress.
These suggestions should not be taken as a prescription for solving all of
Budapest’s cycling challenges. Cycling accommodations in the Hungarian capital should suit the particular preferences of Budapest cyclists while also being acceptable to the
90 larger public. This will require some trial and error on the part of facility designers and builders, and it will evolve with time. The important thing is that cycling advocates continuously voice their opinions regarding transport matters, and that City Hall considers this input in relevant decision making. Eventually, worsening traffic conditions will force Budapest to pay greater heed to more efficient and cleaner transport options.
Hopefully, it will do so before conditions get as bad as they are in West European capitals.
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Litman, T. 2005. London Congestion Pricing: Implications for Other Cities. Also available on-line at URL: www.vtpi.org/london.pdf. Victoria, B.C.: Victoria Transport Policy Institute.
Magyar Hírlap. 2005. Páratlan nap: most a kritikus tömeg nem az autóban ült. [Unique day: Now the critical mass doesn’t sit in a car.] Budapest: Magyar Hírlap 22 September.
Osberg, J. S. Stiles, SC. 1998. Bicycle use and safety in Paris, Boston, and Amsterdam. Transportation Quarterly 52(4): 61-76.
Papon, F. 2001. Towards the end of the decline of walking and cycling in France? A communication at the World Conference on Transport Research in Seoul, July 25- 27, 2001. Available on-line at http://www.inrets.fr/nojs/ur/dest/publications/ pub_papon/paponV4.pdf.
Paris, Mayor of — Directorate of Public Roads and Transportation (DPRT). 2003. Schema directeur du reseau cyclable Parisien. [Schematic guide for the Paris bicycle network, 2002-2010.] Not published. Available from the Directorate of Public Roads and Transportation, 40 rue du Louvre 75001 Paris.
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The Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe (REC). 2004. Next stop: sustainable transport — a survey of public transport in six cities of Central and Eastern Europe. Szentendre, Hungary: REC.
San Francisco, City and County — Department of Parking and Traffic (DPT) 2005. DPT’s San Francisco Bicycle Program [on-line]. URL: http://www.bicycle. sfgov.org/site/dptbike_index.asp?id=3178#Info. Accessed 15 July, 2005.
Skinner, I., Fergusson, M., Dusik, J., Sulcova, S., and Bina, O. 2001. Background for the integration of environmental concerns into transport policy in the accession candidate countries, final report to DG Environment. Also available on-line at: http://europa.eu.int/comm/environment/trans/ceec/index.htm. London: Institute for European Environmental Policy.
Spencer, G. 2004. City cyclists fight to bike. Green Horizon 1 (1): 9-11.
Studio Metropolitana Urban Research Center (Studio Metropolitana). 2005. Biciklivel Budapesten: Kerékpározással kapcsolatos attitűdök és szokások a fővárosban [Attitudes and habits in connection with bicycling in the capital]. Budapest: Studio Metropolitana.
______. 2004. Közterületek használata és megítélése Budapesten [Usage and views of public space in Budapest]. Budapest: Studio Metropolitana
Tóth, A. 2004. Rozsdás szög és hallótölcsér [Rusty nail and bullhorn]. Lélegzet 14 (7-8): 9.
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Transportation Alternatives. (T.A.) 2002. A Tale of Two Cities: The Mayors of Paris and London Say “Enough” to Cars. Transporation Alternatives Magazine. Fall: 19.
Trochim, W.M. 2005. The Research Methods Knowledge Base, 2nd Edition. Available on the Internet at URL: http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/sampnon.htm. Accessed July 1, 2005.
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95 Wikipedia. 2005. Critical Mass. [on-line] URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Critical_Mass. Accessed 29 June, 2005.
Wright, L. and Montezuma, R. 2004. Reclaiming public space: The economic, environmental, and social impacts of Bogotá’s transformation. Paper presented at the Cities for People Conference, Walk21, 9-11 June, 2004, Copenhagen, Denmark. Available on-line at: URL: http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/archive/00000110.
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96 Personal Communications
Couval, Didier. Charge d’affairs velo-rollers [Bicycling- and rollerskating-affairs officer] of the Directorate of Sanitation and Transportation of the Paris Mayor’s Office. Formal interview with e-mail follow-up. Paris, 11 July 2005.
Guggenheim, Abel. President of Vélo 15, 7 [Bicycle 15, 7], and a former general secretary of Mieux se Déplacer à Bicyclette (MDB). Formal interview. 12 July 2005.
Kiss, Gábor. Messenger at the Hajtas Pajtas courier service in Budapest. Formal interview. Budapest, 5 May 2005.
Kürti Gábor. Managing director of the Hajtas Pajtas courier service of Budapest. E-mail interview. 20 May 2005.
Lenkei, Péter, Spokesman for the Városi Biciklizés Barátai Egyesület [Friends of City Cycling]. Formal interview. Budapest, 10 May 2005
Lalande, Camille. A 20-year member of Mieux se Déplacer à Bicyclette (MDB) and former general secretary of the group. Formal interview with e-mail follow-up. Paris. 11 July 2005.
Lukács, András. President of the Board of Directors of the Clean Air Action Group. Formal interview. Budapest, 4 May 2005.
Macsinka, Klára. Senior Transport Consultant for Pro Urbe Kft, a Budapest transportation consultancy. Formal interview. 21 April 2005
Mérey, Zsolt. Head of Office of European Integration of the Mayor’s Office of Budapest. E-mail interview. 4 July, 2005.
Szálka, Miklós. Lead planner at Pro Urbe Kft., a Budapest transportation consultancy, and deputy chairman of the Committee of City Management for the Budapest City Council. Formal interview. 21 April 2005.
Tőkés, Balázs. Bicycling affairs coordinator for Municipality of Budapest’s Transportation Department. Formal interview. Budapest, 25 May 2005
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