Andy Polaine said...
I live in a small town in Germany that has a very good bike infrastructure, which makes all the difference. I've lived in Sydney and London, which both have very cycle unfriendly attitudes. Having lived in those different countries, you see very clear differences between social value systems and their relationship to congestion. One of the main culprits is the growth of enormous supermarkets in both the UK and Australia, which means there is an awful lot of simply daily shopping car traffic.
By contrast, Offenburg (where I now live) has a bakery on every corner and a proper active market in the town centre twice a week (not a faux fancy "farmer's market" selling overpriced delicatessen goods). The distributed nature of these smaller shops means both better produce (fresh bread/rolls from the bakery every morning, for example), less transportation from both the producers and the consumers and a thriving community.
From some recent service design insights research I did up in Hamburg, it is clear that trying to tackle transport in terms of transport itself makes little sense. You have to look at the reasons why people travel, why they use a car or train or bus instead of a bike and when. It's not fixed and often subtle things make a big difference (lighting in a parking space, secure bike storage, the fact that a Smart FourTwo can't take a beer crate in the boot).
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I just dropped in, read this post and can't resist an urge to comment. Living in supermarket wonderland Sweden, I always feel like I want to move to another country after visiting places like Denmark, Germany and Italy, where the important things in life is just around the corner. There are big infrastructure projects planned in my town (Stockholm) just to keep the cars moving. There are also big supermarkets planned in many cities across our country. Everything feels so wrong when I compare our life to the life with our neighbours in Denmark. I think that at least here the problems emerge from the capital that sees opportunities to invest in supermarkets and earn a lot of revenue from that. They of course wants the planners to care for the infrastructure for this. And the planners happily helps them as taxes rise with more shops in there community. Perpetum mobile so to say... So, are there any good examples out there of planners who have done something different?... Anyone?
ReplyDeleteGermany seems to be resisting it somewhat at the moment. The UK is totally out of control - Tescos owns everything.
ReplyDeleteThat is one of the nicer things about Germany, and it does seem to be largely intact although we have a few big box supermarkets as well.
ReplyDelete@andy P: Thanks for the heads up on Offenburg- I may swing over there to see what sort of infrastructure is in place.
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