Oldenziel and bruheze__eu_bike_lanes

• 29 Transfers 1(2), Summer 2011: 29–49 © Transfers 2011

doi: 10.3167/trans.2011.010203

Contested Spaces Bicycle Lanes in Urban Europe, 1900–1995

Ruth Oldenziel and Adri Albert de la Bruhèze Eindhoven University of Technology and University of Twente

Abstract

Today most cities emphasize the construction of separate bicycle lanes as a sure path toward sustainable urban mobility. Historical evidence shows a singular focus on building bicycle lanes without embedding them into a broader bicycle culture and politics is far too narrow. Bicycle lanes were never neutral, but contested from the start. Based on comparative research of cycling history covering nine European cities in four countries, the article shows the crucial role representations of bicycles play in policymakers’ and experts’ planning for the future. In debating the regulation of urban traic lows, urban-planning professionals projected separate lanes to control rather than to facilitate working-class, mass-scale bicycling. Signiicantly, cycling organizations opposed the lanes, while experts like traic engineers and urban planners framed automobility as the inevitable modern future. Only by the 1970s did bicycle lanes enter the debate as safe and sustainable solutions when grass-roots cyclists’ activists campaigned for them. he up and downs of bicycle lanes show the importance of encouraging everyday utility cycling by involving diverse social groups.

Keywords

bicycle lanes, European history, mobility, modernity, urban planning, users, utilitarian bicycling, traffic planning

Introduction

From Shanghai to Bogotá, policymakers, green activists, and cycling enthusiasts are investing their political capital in building bicycle lanes to achieve sustainable urban mobility for our congested cities.1

In Bogotá, Mayor Enrique Peñalosa Londoñohas installed the world’s most comprehensive network of segregated bike lanes. In 2009, New York City completed a 200-mile bicycle lane network to turn the city safer and greener; recently, the city of London invested £111 million to increase bicycling; and Copenhagen has developed measures to reach a 50

Ruth Oldenziel and Adri Albert de la Bruhèze

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percent bicycle share in commuter traffic by 2015. Indeed, most policies in European, South-American, and U.S. cities favor the construction of bicycle lanes, assuming that separate and safe lanes will help to increase utility cycling.2

Cycling activists point out that constructing bicycle lanes should never be the sole focus, but always be combined with policies to install special road junctions, limit vehicles’ speed, calm residential neighborhood traffic, offer bike parking facilities, and demand traffic training for both cyclists and motorists.3 Some scholars even question the claimed relationship between bicycle lanes, safety, and sustainability, arguing that bicycle lanes serve to maintain rather than challenge existing motorized travel and traffic planning norms.4 Such different understandings—of what cycling represents, who the (ideal) bicycle user is, and what the policy purpose should be—also produce different solutions (high tech versus utility design) and infrastructures (protected bike high ways versus unmixed and calming of traffic flow).

In this article, we offer historical support to show that investing in bicycle lanes to increase urban bicycle use is a laudable policy choice, but a singular focus on building bicycle lanes without embedding them in broad-based cycling cultures is likely to lead to technological rather than user-driven designs and solutions. In their ground-breaking article, historian of technology Wiebe Bijker and sociologist of science Trevor Pinch argued that social actors are important in the shaping of new technology. Indeed, social diversity based on class, gender, and geography was—and still is—crucial for both the shaping and social embedding of bicycling.5

While Bijker and Pinch focused on the period up to the 1890s, we examine the period after 1900 when in many European cities utility cycling became a wide-scale, but little understood, phenomenon. Based on De la Bruhèze and Veraart’s comparative research of cycling history in nine cities in Britain, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, and the Netherlands, we show the crucial role of active bicycle users’ organizations, policymakers, and politicians.6 Even more fundamental, however, are the representations that policymakers, citizens, and cyclists project in their vision for the future. The history of the bicycle lane—either part of or separate from the road—lets us view these dynamics in more detail.7

From Macho Machine through Touring Bike to Work Cycle

When pedal-driven bikes first arrived on the scene in the 1860s, they symbolized the nineteenth-century modern mobility in industrializing countries from the U.K., the U.S., France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands to Russia, Japan, and China. Everywhere, the domestication

Bicycle Infrastructures in Western European Cities

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of the bicycle went through similar phases, although there were local colorings. In what follows we offer a rough trajectory of the international developments. In the first phase from the 1860s to the early 1880s, the high-wheel models were designed and used for the thrill of danger, speed, and adventure. Young single men of the emerging bourgeois classes established bicycle clubs and engaged in cycling as a daring sport. They turned what they called “machines” into symbols of male modernity and leisure.8

In the second phase between 1880 and 1900, well described in the literature, urban middle-class women and older men began to tour on so-called “safety bicycles.” Unlike the high-wheeled model, the safety bicycle sported equal-sized wheels for better balance, a dropped frame for easier mount, a chain drive for speed, and air-filled tires for comfort.9 Such designs made cycling accessible to ever larger-growing groups of users like feminists, who celebrated the bicycle’s sense of freedom.10 The urban cyclist of the 1890s visited parks, escaped the city, and toured the countryside. Exceedingly well organized in hundreds of bicycle clubs, these bourgeois cyclists lobbied to open footpaths, towpaths, and main arteries to all road users.11 Cycling in this period was not an everyday practice, but a leisure activity of adventure, exploration, and pleasure.12

The design and meaning of cycling changed once again in the third and fourth—and least understood—phases. Between 1900 and 1918, the touring bike became also a work cycle. Professionals (ministers, doctors, and midwives), shopkeepers (bakers and butchers), and civil servants (postmen and soldiers) began to mount bikes for daily use to do business, commute, and transport goods.13 Later, skilled workers bought bicycles to commute to work. So too, young rural folk, followed by farmers and their wives, began to cycle to reach the field, the next town, the church, and the cinema.14 Bikes became more heavily accessorized for intensive daily use with brakes, front and back racks, as well as sturdy stands for short stops and quick deliveries. This bicycle was a workhorse rather than a fancy touring machine. In the fourth phase of the interwar period, cycling in most countries boomed, becoming a truly mass-scale urban phenomenon. Saving costs by getting rid of extras like the chain guard, coaster brakes, and back racks, the bicycle industry brought down the prices and tapped into the market of unskilled workers.15

The 1900 Paris exhibition is often taken to symbolize the moment automobiles entered the twentieth century as the trailblazers of individual mobility. Yet it was cycling rather than automobility that came to dominate interwar streets in such European cities like York, Basle, Bremen, Rotterdam, and Leuven, to name a few among many.16 Percentage-wise car sales compared to bicycle sales increased dramatically, but in absolute terms remained exceedingly small.17 By the mid-1930s, the number of



bicycles had soared to fifteen million in Germany, nine million in Britain, seven million in France, four million in Italy, and two million in Belgium. In the Netherlands, with three million bicycles, every second citizen owned one. An American journalist asserted in 1934 that in The Netherlands the bicycle had become “almost a part of the body” and joked that if evolution theory had any say in it, within a century one would see Dutch babies, “coming into this world on tiny bicycles.”18 Another contemporary roughly calculated that whereas in the U.S. there were seventeen cars to one bicycle in the 1930s, in Europe there were seven bicycles to one car.19 As Figures 1 and 2 show, compared to cars and public transport, bicycles were the most popular means of transport well into the 1960s.

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Figure 1. Car ownership in eight European countries per 1000 inhabitants, 1920–2005.

Source: Extended graph of Bruheze and Veraart, in Fietsverkeer, 184. The extended graph includes Italy and France, and covers a longer period (1990–2005). The additional data were provided by Ruth Oldenziel, Frank Veraart and Hanna M. Wolf, Following America? Dutch Geographical Car Diffusion 1900 to 1980 (Eindhoven: Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Ph.D. Thesis 2010), 3, 4, 9 and 11.

How then do we explain the general conceived notion that cars rather than bicycles were the most important innovations on the road in the twentieth century? The distorted view of history comes from the U.S., where bicycle production figures plummeted from sky-high levels while car sales increased dramatically.20 In the public imagination, policy



projections, and later studies on automobiles, America’s present seemed to signal Europe’s inevitable future. Even in bicycle-friendly Amsterdam, the City Department of Public Works in the 1930s compared the number of cars in the Netherlands and the U.S. in terms of lagging behind.22

In retrospect, we can see how the shifting meaning of the bicycle from a middle-class to a working-class means of transportation proved politically precarious. During the interwar period, when bicycles boomed as everyday devices in the cities, the upper-middle class culturally shifted gears from cycling to promote automobile touring, while many European governments began to treat bicycle traffic as a problem to be solved rather than a solution to be embraced.23 At the same time, socialist, liberal, and bourgeois reformers pushed the bicycle as an instrument to uplift, discipline, and educate the working classes, except in the Netherlands, where cycling remained thoroughly genteel.24 Policy discussions centered on whether roads should remain a space for mixed traffic or become a mono-functional space privileging motorized transit. In this context,

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Figure 2. Bicycles’ share in total number of car, public transport, bicycle, and moped trips in eleven European cities, 1920–1995.21

Source: Extended graph of Bruhèze and Veraart, Fietsverkeer, 14. The extended graph includes London and Stockholm. The London and Stockholm data were provided by Peter Cox and Martin Emanuel.



the bicycle became associated with the working class and with unsafe situations. In the minds of policymakers in many cities, intensification of urban traffic, the increased numbers of accidents, and speed became linked to and blamed on the bicycle. Governments began to regulate cyclists, while new professionals like civil engineers and urban planners converged on bicycle lanes as their preferred solution to regulate and facilitate traffic flow, turning the politically charged discourse of speed into a neutralizing category of analysis.25 As we will see, the bicycle lane—as part of or separate from the road—perfectly matched the emerging functionalist notions of segregating urban social activities, traffic streams, and water, energy, and sanitation systems.

Contesting Bicycle Lanes as Tools of Discipline, 1920–1950

Today we associate bicycle lanes with paths of safety, but in the interwar period many European cycling organizations opposed the construction and use of urban bicycle lanes.26 Earlier, cycling organizations had neither promoted separating the traffic streams of horses, carts, pedestrians, and cars nor campaigned for the construction of separate bicycle lanes, nor had they opposed cars. The clubs simply advocated to improve road surfaces for everyone. Consumer organizations like the British Cyclist Touring Club (CTC), Touring Club de France, the Dutch ANWB, the Touring Club Italiano, and the Dansk Cyklist Forbund pioneered in initiating road improvements and pushing government agendas. The CTC and their Road Improvement Association campaigned to improve the dense network of existing roads and tracks.27 In the U.S., cyclists started the Good Roads Organization in 1880, pressuring local governments to improve the roads.28 In Germany, local bicycle organizations like Hanover’s Radfahr-Renn-Verein and the Magdeburger Verein für Radfahrwege did the same.29 In the Netherlands, the Algemene Nederlandse Wielrijdersbond (ANWB) and its Road Commission was crucial.30 In Italy, the Touring Club Italiano, the strongest middle-class organization in the country, was equally active.31 None of the European bicycle organizations took anti-motorized transportation positions, best illustrated by the inclusive names of organizations like the Rad- und Kraftfahrerbund Solidarität and the Deutscher Rad- und Motorfahrer Verband Concordia. Some clubs did advocate separate bicycle roads for touristic pleasure. The Dutch national organization financed separate bicycle paths for recreational purposes along roads through rural areas.32 In the 1910s, powerful local bicycle organizations in Germany promoted special road sections to foster bicycle tourism in the countryside, while some cities installed special bicycle segments on roads.33 In all these



initiatives, however, when proposing to separate cyclists from motorists or pedestrians, advocates promoted cyclists’ riding comfort rather than their safety. Most importantly, for our argument, in the golden age of cycling between 1880 and 1920, the clubs succeeded exceedingly well in shaping existing and emerging infrastructures for all. As civil-society organizations, they developed user-based political expertise in municipal and state governance in part because neither the state nor experts systematically intervened on behalf of cyclists.

That changed in the late 1920s, when bicycle and motorized traffic began to compete in cities. Starting in the mid nineteenth century, local policymakers introduced new concepts to reorganize streets, manage the explosion of the number of vehicles and persons, and improve urban efficiency. City councils and traffic departments began widening streets, filling up canals, pulling down houses, building sub-surface roads, and regulating traffic speed as their primary tools to control what they considered the chaotic development of the city.34 In this urban context, separate lanes were introduced as a measure to literally push bicycles aside. As the Swedish engineer Einar Nordendahl for the Regional Plan for Greater Stockholm bluntly remarked in 1936, “The construction of special lanes for bicyclists and pedestrians is to a large degree motivated by the urge to free the main lane from such traffic elements.”35 By the interwar period, the construction of urban bicycle lanes and the funding of roads had become a contested terrain of class politics. In the 1920s, the Dutch socialist MP Florentinus Wibaut questioned the unfair bicycle taxes, which were “mostly generated by proletarians,” for whom “the bicycle is the same as for others the soles of their shoes.”36 The same criticism came from a Vienna businessman with no sympathy for socialists in the 1930s.37

After the First World War, nation-states increased their role in transportation, urban development, and social planning. Particularly in the (war) economies of Communist Russia, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, the state appropriated urban planning and traffic policies, strongly favoring motorized mobility.38 Professionals, who developed new areas of expertise dealing with the modern city, also entered the debate. Enabled by government agencies, professional groups like civil engineers and traffic engineers began to challenge the expertise of the civil-society organizations. As new professionals began to speak on behalf of cyclists and successfully claimed a new expertise in urban trafficking, bicycle clubs lost their monopoly over user-based expertise. The new professionals framed cyclists’ dominance over the road increasingly as a problem. Almost everywhere, municipal traffic engineers portrayed bicycles as dangerous and as obstacles to more modern modes of mobility. They blamed cyclists for traffic congestion, dangerous situations, and increased traffic accidents.39



At the same time, working-class organizations like the German Solidarität, the Danish Arbejdernes Bicycle Club (ABC), the Italian Ciclisti Rossi, and the British Clarion Cycling Club demanded more room for cyclist infrastructure.40 Politically speaking, bicycles and cars were on a collision course during the interwar period. In 1935, the British labor MP John Banfield put the conflict sharply, asking “the Minister of Transport whether he is aware of the resentment felt by the large body of pedal cyclists, numbering some 10 million, against the restrictions imposed upon their use of the roads by recent regulations?” No doubt because of facing the threat of losing his seat to the Labor party, even the conservative British member of the House of Commons, Sir Wilfred Sugden, pled for cyclists’ interests, saying, “the 9,500,000 cyclists ought to receive as much consideration in these democratic days as the 2,250,000 motorists.”41 The experts took a different political path.

At first glance, experts sought to tame cyclists in countries where the number of cars grew most rapidly (Figs. 1 and 2). The causal relationship between the rates of automobility and urban visions was not always close, however. In the Netherlands, where automobility came late and the national tourist organization reinforced a classless image of cycling, policymakers considered bicycles facts of life; in Denmark where automobility grew quickly, policymakers nevertheless assigned equal traffic rights to cyclists and motorists.42 Like in the Netherlands, in Germany cars came rather late, yet policies sought to tame cyclists early on. Levels in automobility then cannot solely account for the differences. Visions about the future better explain the treatment of cyclists.

All over Europe, traic professionals and policymakers expected that in the future, modern motorized traic would inevitably and rightfully substitute what they projected as old-fashioned bicycle traic.43 Such visions of the future, in turn, set in motion policy trajectories to guide the projected substitution of bicycles by cars. Bicycle lanes became the instrument governments used to deal with increasing traic lows, framed in neutralizing terms of speed and safety.he policy discourse on how to decrease accidents between bicycles and cars focused on cyclists. Policymakers sought to re-educate and discipline cyclists and even discourage cycling altogether. German and Belgian cities regulated cyclists by separating bicycle traic streams and subordinating bicycles to public transport and cars. In 1937, the mayor of the Belgian working-class city of Antwerp proposed prohibiting cyclists from riding side by side. In addition, Antwerp authorities closed of many roads for cyclists and forced them to use cycle lanes in other parts.44 he same happened in Hannover, Germany.45 And in the manufacturing port town of Manchester, the labor-dominated city council gave priority to the construction of an extensive public-transport system over investing in bicycle lanes for its working-class constituency.46



The clubs, however, continued to lobby for general access and improving road surfaces as they had done so successfully in previous decades. In Britain, the National Committee on Cycling (NCC)—an alliance of the Cyclists’ Touring Club (CTC), the National Cycling Union (NTC), and bicycle manufacturers—resented the new car-governed traffic policies that restricted cyclists’ freedom of movement. Since the 1890s, British cyclists had successfully gained the right to use the “King’s Highways.” The clubs were not about to give up that right so easily. In the 1930s, the CTC opposed separate bicycle lanes, fearing their construction would take away cyclists’ fundamental rights as traffic participants and actually threaten cyclists’ safety. They argued that separate lanes encouraged car drivers to ignore cyclists. “It is wrong in principle that a cyclist should be required to put himself to considerable trouble and expense to keep from being run into by a driver who is not obeying the common law of England.” For the same reason, the NCC opposed other road safety proposals like mandatory rear lights.47 Associated with workers, cyclists and bicycles became tightly connected to stubbornness and disorderly conduct in the ensuing political contest. In turn, the association led to new anti-cyclists policies.48

In Germany, the spectacular increase in bicycles in the interwar period prompted traffic engineers and urban planners to end local bicycle initiatives and to systematize bicycle lane design and construction, which they now considered to lay within their professional domain. Traffic engineers designed separate bike paths not to create riding comfort for cyclists, but to take them off the road through segregation. In 1926, the government agency Zentralstelle für Radwege became responsible for the design and construction of bicycle lanes in cities. Under the Nazi regime, the 1934 Reichs-Strassen-Verkehrs-Ordnung regulated the separation of traffic and the Radwegebenutzungspflicht coerced cyclists to use bicycle lanes.49 Bicycle lanes were defined as the safe solution to prevent traffic chaos and congestion. Thus, traffic safety, traffic separation, and bicycle lanes became locked into an iron triangle. The focus on separate traffic flows as a means of control was not an exclusive obsession of the Nazis. European traffic engineers and urban planners shared the modernist notion of uninterrupted traffic flows.

In short, what is most remarkable about the interwar period is that policymakers, traffic engineers, and urban planners were all convinced, that even though bicycle use was booming in most cities, cars would inevitably be the dominant mode of transport in the future. Blueprints were sketched accordingly, well illustrated by the discussions of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) about the functional city. In 1935, modernist architects took Amsterdam urban planning as their model for 34 other cities. The municipal engineer Cornelis van Eesteren, a leading thinker with his CIAM colleagues Walter Gropius and Charles Le



Corbusier, incorporated the bicycle in the 1935 urban plan for Amsterdam. His team measured the distances from downtown to the newly designed working-class neighborhoods in terms of how long it would take to cycle from home to work and determined city expansion should not go beyond a reasonable distance of bike commuting.50 While the Amsterdam blueprint echoed throughout Europe and the U.S. among modernist urban planners, the inclusion of the bicycle in the urban vision was lost in subsequent decades. In the hyper-modernist vision of Le Corbusier, European planning was recalibrated in a car-dominated blueprint for modern cities after the Second World War.51 In many cities, those class-inflected visions became reinscribed in American-oriented terms of progress, classlessness, and abundance in the political context of the Cold War. Still, it is important to remember that during the interwar period the outcome of the new mobility was still debated, contested, and open-ended.

Erasing Bicycles as Paths toward Modernity, 1950–1975

The rebuilding of many severely damaged European cities offered policymakers and urban planners the opportunity to realize their pre-war blueprints of modern mobility. The postwar rebuilding plans turned out to be the tipping point in what had thus far been a contested terrain with trends but no clear winners. In postwar reconstruction, the nation-states in Europe all reinforced the shift toward anti-cycling sentiments and pro-car attitudes. Moreover, new legal and political frameworks routinely cast European consumers as incompetent, immature, and dependent. Consumers like cyclists needed protection, guidance, and (re)education.52 Influenced by American models, urban planners cast cars as modern and progressive; bicycles were anachronistic and unsafe.53 Such visions of the future reigned in the newly established (U.S.) academic disciplines of urban planning and traffic engineering, which sought to revive and modernize postwar European, especially German, traffic planning. Academics, professionals, and consultants in these new disciplines, in alliance with politicians, turned into powerful players in European postwar transportation regimes.54 In their resolute opinion, the future belonged to the car. Therefore, policy initiative should prepare cities for such an inevitable future. In the words of the Stockholm social democratic commissioner for municipal building, Helge Berglund, after a study tour in the United States with the Swedish delegation of traffic politicians, engineers, and urban planners, automobility represented “an irresistible development, to which urban planning has to adjust.”55

It was a remarkable turn of events. During and after the Second World War, cycling grew even more dramatically than before as governments



encouraged the bicycle as the cheapest means of transport in response to gas rationing, war damages, scarcity, and poverty. The war-related experiences further reinforced the image of the bicycle as a poor man’s mode of transport.56 The associations turned the bicycle into the antithesis of motorized transport, and especially the car, symbolizing U.S.-inspired visions of middle-class mobility, peace, and abundance.

In the radically changed climate of postwar reconstruction, bicycle organizations resigned themselves to the emerging discourse. The British bicycle organizations now accepted sectioned-off cycle lanes on existing roads, but continued to resist traffic separation, even while the British government projected cycle lanes as the only appropriate way to segregate bicycles from cars, as illustrated in the postwar planning for Manchester’s urban development.57 More fundamentally, in local debates about car-governed cities bicycles either suffered benign neglect or active hostility.58 British cyclists—like their German, Belgian, and Swiss counterparts—often found themselves pushed from the road entirely. The Antwerp cycling leadership articulated the feeling of many cyclists, saying they felt treated as the “pariahs of the road.”59

While the Dutch Tourist Association ANWB and the Dansk Cyklist Forbund remained powerful lobbyists for building and maintaining bicycle infrastructure, even Dutch and Danish local policymakers shifted their views, representing cyclists as careless, unpredictable, undisciplined, and unskilled traffic participants, who hindered motorized and public transport.60 Over the years, policymakers and urban planning professionals positioned themselves as the true spokesmen for cyclists and delegitimized the voice of bicycle organizations. In their technocratic approach, they cast cycling as dangerous and irresponsible, unbefitting modernity and progress.61 City councils were no help either as they prioritized public transport as a commuting alternative for urban residents without cars, ignoring cyclists altogether.62 Public transportation, the Stockholm traffic commissioner believed, had to serve “the car-less proletariat.”63

In Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland, authorities took more drastic measures. Policymakers suspended the construction of new lanes and dismantled existing bicycle lanes to create space for cars. In Hannover, cyclists had to share car-governed roads and were prohibited to ride on many inner city streets. In Basle, cars were allowed to park on sidewalks. In fact, Swiss policymakers eyed bicycle lanes as an opportunity for expanding car parking once bicycling had gone.64 The attitude spread throughout Europe: cycle lanes no longer served as tools to discipline and separate bicycles from other forms of urban traffic, but offered planning opportunities to increase urban car space once cyclists had disappeared from the urban landscape.65 In short, the bicycle and its infrastructure had been erased from policy agendas.



Bike Lanes as Symbols of Sustainability, 1975–1995

In the late 1960s, from Copenhagen to New York and Toronto, new grass-roots organizations challenged traffic planners’ technocratic views. “Amsterdammers!” the anarchist cycling activist Provo announced in 1967, “The asphalt terror of the motorized bourgeoisie has lasted long enough.”66 Fed up with dangerous, car congested, and polluting car-governed cities, activists promoted a better quality of life, explicitly linking cycling to slowing down urban speed and improving city life, health, and environment. Grass-roots organizations demanded a regime shift from car-governed cities to public transport, bicycle-, and pedestrian-governed cities, reviving and (re)empowering bicycle organizations. The movement participated in a broader cultural resistance against the technocratic and consumerist welfare state in the 1960s, successfully inserting bicycles into integrated traffic plans that acknowledge bicycles as normal modes of urban mobility. It broke a powerful anti-bicycle constellation that had become the norm in the previous two decades.67 Now cycle lanes transformed into symbols of bicycle power, health, and sustainability.

In several cities, policymakers either matched or adopted the 1970s grass-roots initiatives. Environmental awareness, a new understanding that car-governed cities caused more problems than they solved, the 1974 and 1976 energy crises, and the 1980s economic recession forced policymakers to develop bicycle-friendly attitudes. Integrated bicycle lanes and bicycle networks became their new policy instruments. In Swiss, Belgian, British, and German cities the revival of the bicycle overwhelmed local civil servants. The Antwerp Police Commissioner characterized the sentiment, saying, “Suddenly, public administrators and the police were shocked into action because of skyrocketing energy prices and pressure from activists.”68 In Basle, new bicycle organizations like Aktion Pro Velo and Velo-Aktion encountered fierce resistance from the car lobby and policymakers, who had expected the bicycle revival to be short-lived. Policymakers claimed that anti-bicycle decisions, once taken, could not be undone. Their wait-and-see attitude prompted cyclists to protest on the street and forced the city council to reconsider its long-term anti-bicycle policy. Yet the new bicycle organizations faced an uphill battle as they had to start almost from scratch: streets needed to be made accessible, bicycle traffic lights installed, traffic and parking rights granted, and infrastructure built. During the 1990s, Swiss policymakers adopted grass-roots initiatives often in an ad-hoc fashion and focused on designing bicycle lanes, but everyday cycling remained just a fraction of the old levels.69

The same happened in Belgium and Britain. Lacking a dense urban bicycle infrastructure and a vibrant bicycle culture, most citizens of Antwerp opted for car and public transport. In Manchester, new bicycle



organizations like the Manchester Cycling Campaign and Sprocket campaigned for bicycle infrastructures. British policymakers developed bicycle-lane plans, yet focused on recreational rather than everyday cycling until the 1980s when policy attention gradually shifted to utilitarian cycling in urban areas. By then, polls indicated potential British cyclists were now scared to share the streets with cars.70 British experiences of a once vibrant bicycle culture had receded completely from collective memory.

In postwar Germany, bicycle lanes were rarely integrated in urban traic planning and city development. Most cities chose to invest in public transport instead. Here too, initiatives depended entirely on local bicycle organizations, which had to rebuild and often re-invent the everyday bicycle culture that once belonged to the working classes. By default, local experts and policymakers quickly mobilized their old professional knowledge of designing and building bicycle lanes in response to pressure from bicycle groups. In these political contexts, new bicycle experts and local policymakers came to see bicycle paths as the safe and only appropriate way to encourage bicycle use. Such quick ixes were re-inventions of the old iron triangle of traic safety/traic separation/bicycle lanes developed in the 1920s and 1930s, but did little to recreate urban cycling traditions.71

In Danish and Dutch cities, cycling declined rapidly too, yet remained substantial nevertheless. Here, activists’ critique fell on more receptive policy ears. In Denmark and The Netherlands, cycling had not disappeared entirely from political agendas, in part because of funding shortages and wavering policies in realizing grand visions. Lack of funding and political impasses seriously postponed traffic modernization. The stalemate offered cyclists room for negotiation in what turned out to be crucial years for political change as the Danes just kept on cycling in even larger numbers.72

High car taxes and the Danish Heart Foundation’s promotion of cycling as healthy in the late 1960s reinforced cycling in Copenhagen.73 When the counter movement came, Danish policymakers quickly integrated the grass-roots activism in their traffic plans. Since the 1990s, they have been at the forefront in promoting the bicycle as part of its environmental and energy policies since the 1990s.

As in Denmark, cycling in the Netherlands, despite the steep decline since the early 1950s was still relatively high at the start of the 1970s. Even though the policy change was relatively easy, local contexts mattered. In response to the economic decline , the textile-town Enschede opted for a contracting yet compactly built environment of a lively pedestrian- and bicycle-governed city. Amsterdam began to build bicycle lanes, alongside its traditional “laissez faire” and mixed traffic policies. The high-tech car-governed town of Eindhoven connected regional bicycle networks during the 1980s and 1990s, but in the working-class mining town Heerlen, lacking a policy vision and local pressure groups, bicycle commuting



never recovered.74 More generally, the positive re-evaluation of “slow traffic” like walking and cycling did lead to architectural and city planning of small-scale suburban “home zones” (woonerf)—residential areas with traffic calming, where pedestrians and cyclists enjoy greater traffic rights than cars.75 In the early 1990s, the government included the bicycle in its national Transport Structure Plan, while it issued a separate masterplan for cyclists to guide urban and regional traffic policies in facilitating comprehensive safe bicycle infrastructures.76 The initiatives marked a gradual but steady policy shift from motorized traffic to the bicycle.77 By 2005 bicycles were used daily more often in the Netherlands (28 percent) than in Denmark (18 percent), Germany (14 percent), Switzerland (10 percent), and Great Britain (2 percent).78 The success had less to do with Dutch DNA or the country’s flatness than with a combination of factors, including bicycle-friendly representations, strong bourgeois cultures, urban-planning choices, late automobility, and governmental policies.

Conclusion

he history of urban bicycle lanes in Western Europe relects the twists and turns of cycling. At irst, the bicycle lanes were mobilized as regulatory “artifacts” to separate lows, subordinate the bicycle to the car, discipline the bicycle user, and reduce traic accidents. Local policymakers and planners deined cyclists as old fashioned, irresponsible, and anarchistic, who needed to be controlled. Transatlantic disciplines like Radverkehr Planung, traic engineering, and city planning embraced bicycle lanes as rational and scientiic solutions to solve the problem of urban traic chaos before erasing them altogether on their path to car-governed modern mobility. Since the 1970s, safe and segregated bicycle lanes have been resurrected from the ashes of negative bicycle images, but recast in a very diferent mold. To reach a critical mass, policymakers from Shanghai to Bogotá will need to encourage everyday cycling by involving diverse social groups. Without understanding the history of the vibrant, diverse, and daily practice of cycling and without a comprehensive view of mobility, an exclusive focus on building segregated bike lanes will result in lightly travelled bicycle lanes.

Notes

1. he authors gratefully acknowledge the suggestions and comments on earlier drafts by three anonymous reviewers and editor Gijs Mom. In addition, they especially would like to thank Frank Veraart, Peter Cox and Martin Emanuel who where always ready to share knowledge and bicycle data, which were



converted into graphs by student assistants Jorrit Bakker and Valerian Meijering at Eindhoven University of Technology.

2. NYC Department of Transportation, “Bicycle Network Development,” http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/bikenetwork.shtml (accessed 5 January 2011). John Pucher and Ralph Buehler, “At the Frontiers of Cycling: Policy Innovations in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany,”World Transport Policy & Practice 13 no. 3 (2007): 9–56; Johan Whitelegg, Critical Mass: Environment and Society in the Twenty-irst Century (Chicago: Pluto Press, 1997), 190–2; John Pucher and Ralph Buehler, “Making Cycling Irresistible: Lessons from the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany,”Transport Reviews 28 no. 4 (2008): 495–528.

3. J. Franklin, “Two Decades of Roadway Cycle Paths in Milton Keynes,”Traic Engineering and Control (1999), 393–6; Scientiic Expert Group on the Safety of Vulnerable Road Users (RS7) OECD, Safety of Vulnerable Road Users (Paris: OECD, 1998); Eero Passanen, he Risks of Cycling (Helsinki: Helsinki City Planning Department, 1999); Pucher and Buehler, “Frontiers of Cycling.”

4 Peter F. Peters, Time, Innovation and Mobilities: Travel in Technological Cultures (London: Routledge, 2006), 150–4; Jennifer Bonham and Peter Cox, “The Disruptive Traveller? A Foucauldian Analysis of Cycleways,”Road & Transport Research 19 no. 2 (2010): 42–53; John Forrester, “Ideas in Motion: he Bicycle Transportation Controversy,”Transportation Quarterly 55 no. 2 (2001): 7–18.

5. Wiebe E. Bijker and Trevor J. Pinch, “he Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Beneit Each Other,” in he Social Construction of Technological Systems, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, homas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 17–50; Wiebe E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a heory of Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 33–53; Dave Horton, Paul Rosen, and Peter Cox, eds., Cycling and Society (Burlington, VT: Ashgate,2007), 1–25. For users’ active role in innovations, see Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor J. Pinch, eds., How Users Matter: he Co-construction of Users and Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

6. Adri A. de la Bruhèze and Frank C.A. Veraart, Fietsverkeer in praktijk en beleid in de twintigste eeuw. Overeenkomsten en verschillen in ietsgebruik in Amsterdam, Eindhoven, Enschede, Zuidoost Limburg, Antwerpen, Manchester, Kopenhagen, Hannover en Basel (Eindhoven: Stichting Historie der Techniek, 1999). Available only in Dutch, the research is still considered unmatched in its multinational detailed approach. See Manuel Stoffers and Harry Oosterhuis, “Review. ‘Ons populairste vervoermiddel.’ De Nederlandse ietshistoriograie in internationaal perspectief,”Bijdragen en Mededelingen Geschiedenis betrefende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 124 no. 3 (2009): 390–418, here: 401. A translation is currently considered.

7. Comparing sizes and shapes of lanes, and their relation with number of cyclists is beyond the scope of this article.

8. Richard Holt, “he Bicycle, the Bourgeoisie and the Discovery of Rural France,” British Journal of Sports History 2 (1985): 127–39; Christopher S. hompson, “Bicycling, Class, and the Politics of Leisure in Belle Epoque France,” in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar (London: Berg, 2002): 131–46; David Rubenstein, “Cycling in the 1890s,”Victorian Studies 21 no. 1 (1977): 47–71; Richard Harmond, “Progress and Flight: An Interpretation of the American Bicycle Craze of the 1890’s,” Journal of Social History 5 no. 2 (1971): 235–57.

9. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs, 88–93.



10. hompson, “Bicycling, Class, and the Politics of Leisure,” 132–6.11. homas Burr, “National Cycle Organizations in Britain, France, and the United

States, 1875–1905,”Cycle History 18 (2007): 34–42; Zach Furness, “Biketivism and Technology: Historical Relections and Appropriations,” Social Epistemology 19 no. 4 (2005): 406–11; Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs, 94–5.

12. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs, 40.13. Frank C.A. Veraart, “Geschiedenis van de iets in Nederland, 1870–1940” (MA

Thesis, TU Eindhoven, 1995); Michael Taylor, “Rapid Transit to Salvation: American Protestants and the Bicycle in the Era of the Cycling Craze,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 9 no. 3 (2010): 337–63.

14. Tiina Männistö-Funk, “he Crossroads of Technology and Tradition: Vernacular Bicycles in Rural Finland, 1880–1910,”Technology and Culture (forthcoming).

15. After 1922, cheap and stripped German bicycles looded the Dutch market. Veraart, “Geschiedenis van de iets,” 83–4.

16 Stadt- und Landesplanung Bremen, 1926–1930 (Bremen: Hauschild, 1931), 347–8; “Is his the End of the City of Bikes?”Northern Echo (5 October 1968); Nan van Zutphen, “Sociale geschiedenis van het ietsen te Leuven, 1880–1900,” in Fiets en ilm rond 1900: moderne uitvindingen in Leuven, eds. Nan van Zutphen, et al., Jaarboek 1979 Vrienden Stedelijke Musea – Leuven (Leuven: Crab, 1979), 107–11, 114–5; Bruhèze and Veraart, Fietsverkeer, 14. See also Figure 2 in this article. Increasing number of studies present the bicycle as the irst vehicle of individual mass transport toward the “ride to modernity.” See Manuel Stofers, Harry Oosterhuis, and Peter Cox, “Bicycle History as Transport History: he Cultural Turn,” in Mobility in History: hemes in Transport, eds. Gijs Mom, et al. (Neuchatel: Editions Alphil-Presses Universitaires Suisses, 2010), 265–74; Matthew Patterson, Automobile Politics: Ecology and Cultural Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) shows how the automobile became the dominant mode of transportation entrenched in a political-industrial-technical-cultural complex.

17 Karl Hodges, “Did the Emergence of the Automobile End the Bicycle Boom?”Proceedings Fourth International Cycle History Conference 4 (1993): 39–42.

18 Travel (June 1934) cited in David V. Herlihy, Bicycle: he History (New Haven and London: Yale University, 2004), 328. In the 1930s, British parliamentary debates, government oicials claimed at least 9,000,000 cyclists. We thank Peter Cox for the reference.

19 Herlihy, Bicycle: he History, 328. Anne-Katrin Ebert, “Cycling towards the Nation: he Use of the Bicycle in Germany and the Netherlands, 1880–1940,” European Review of History – Revue européenne d’Histoire 11 no. 3 (2004): 347–64; Tiina Männistö-Funk, “Gendered Practices in Finnish Cycling, 1890–1939,”Icon (forthcoming).

20 Jean-Pierre Bardou, he Automobile Revolution: he Impact of an Industry (Chapell Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); heo Barker, ed., he Economic and Social Efects of the Spread of Motor Vehicles: An International Centenary Tribute (Basingstoke: Macmillan,1987); James Fink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Nick Georgano, he American Automobile: A Centenary 1893–1993 (London: Prion, 1992).

21. Trend lines are based on modal splits and traic counts data; where no sound assessment could be made, the trend line is missing.



22. Gemeente Amsterdam, Het Verkeer te Amsterdam volgens de uitkomsten van de openbare verkeerstelling 1930 (Amsterdam: Dienst Publieke Werken, 1934), Bijlage A, 10.

23. Bruhèze and Veraart, Fietsverkeer, 186–9. 24. Anne-Katrin Ebert, Radelnde Nationen. Die Geschichte des Fahrrads in Deutschland

und den Niederlanden bis 1940 (Frankfurt a.Main: Campus Verlag, 2010), 321–58, 409–12; Stefano Pivato, “he Bicycle as a Political Symbol: Italy, 1885–1955,” International Journal of the History of Sport 7 (1990): 172–87; Richard J.B. Bosworth, “he Touring Club Italiano and the Nationalization of the Italian Bourgeoisie,” European History Quarterly 27 no. 3 (1997): 371–410. For class dimensions in U.S., see: Furness, “Biketivism,” 404–5; Ruediger Rabenstein, Radsport und Gesellschaft: Ihre Sozial-Geschichtlichen Zusammenhaenge in der Zeit van 1867 bis 1914 (Hildesheim: Weidmann, 1955), 178–98; Denis Pye, Fellowship is Life: he National Clarion Cycling Club 1895–1995 (Bolton: Clarion Publishing, 1995).

25. Gijs Mom, “Roads without Rails: European Tansnational Feeway Network Building and the Desire for Long-range Motorized Mobility,” Technology and Culture 46 no. 4 (2005): 745–72, here: 755, 760–9; Peters, Time, Innovation and Mobilities, 8; Bonham and Cox, “he Disruptive Traveller?” 45.

26. Peters, Time, Innovation and Mobilities, 131. Bernd Kreuzer, “Historische Verkehrsutopien für die Stadt der Zukunft. Von der Utopie zur Realität,” in Stadt. Strom-Strasse-Schiene. Die Bedeutung des Verkehrs für die Genese der mitteleuropäischen Städtelandschaft, ed. Alois Niederstätter (Linz: Österreichischen Arbeitskreis für Stadtgeschichtsforschung, 2001): 257–305, here: 261, 264, and 280.

27. William Plowden, he Motor Car and Politics in Britain 1896–1970 (London: he Bodley Head, 1971), 7; Anthony Bird, Roads and Vehicles (London: Arrow Books, 1969), 53 and 64.

28. Philip P. Mason, “The League of American Wheelmen and the Good-roads Movement, 1880–1905” (Ph.D. hesis, University of Michigan, 1957); D. Prick Mihoy, “Rough Road Cyclists Display Political Power. he League of American Wheelmen in the Good Roads Movement as Reported by he New York Times, 1880–1900,”North American Society for Sport History. Proceedings and Newsletter (1989).

29. Burkhard Horn, “Vom Niedergang eines Massenverkehrsmittels. Zur Geschichte der Städlichen Radverkehrsplanung” (Diplomarbeit Gesamthochschule Kassel, 1990), 16–29; Volker Briese, “From Cycling Lanes to Compulsatory Bike Path: Bicycle Path Construction in Germany, 1897–1940,” in Proceedings of the 5th International Cycle History Conference (San Francisco: Bicycle Books, 1994), 123–8, here: 124–6.

30. Gijs Mom, “Road Building in he Netherlands, 1810–1980,” in Road History: Planning, Building and Use, eds. Gijs Mom and Laurent Tissot (Neuchatel: Editions Alphil, 2007), 33–62; Frank C.A. Veraart, “Reis in de tijd: ietspaden, van gerielijke paden tot ietsbeleid,”Verkeerskunde 60 no. 5 (2009): 21–6, here: 22.

31. Bosworth, “Touring Club Italiano.”32. Veraart, “Geschiedenis van de iets,” 88–90; Ebert, Radelnde Nationen, 378–90.33. German cyclists inanced the irst lanes in Bremen, Hamburg, Hannover, Lübeck,

and Magdeburg. In Bremen, the two-way middle-of-the road sections were paved with coal cinders or copper dross, but transferred to road sides in the 1910s. (Briese, “Cycling Lanes,” 124).



34 Peters, Time, Innovation and Mobilities, 130–1; Kreuzer, “Historische Verkehrsutopien,” 260–6, 271, 280; Bonham and Cox, “he Disruptive Traveller?” 44–5. In Stedebouw en burgerlijke vrijheid. De contrasterende carrières van zes Europese hoofdsteden (Bussum: Uitgeverij THOTH, 2001), Michiel Wagenaar describes Paris, Brussels, Rome, Budapest, London, and Amsterdam between 1850 and 1914.

35 Regionplan för Stockholm med omnejd, huvud sakligen anseende förortsomrädet (Stockholm: Stockholmsförorternas regionplaneförbund, 1936), 149, cited in Martin Emanuel, “Planning the Urban Bicyclist in Stockholm, 1930–1970,” forthcoming in Journal of Transport History.

36 “Staten-Generaal. Tweede Kamer. Vergadering van Donderdag 16 October. Tariefwet,”Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (17 October 1924); “Staten Generaal. Eerste Kamer. Vergadering 23 dec. Belastingonderwerpen,” Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, 23 December 1926.

37 Charles A. Gulick Jr, “Vienna Taxes since 1918,” Political Science Quarterly 53 no. 4 (1938): 533–56, here: 552.

38 Volker Briese, “Radwegebau vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: Zurück in die Zukunft,” RadMarkt 5 (1993): 50–62; Horn, “Niedergang,” 79, 100; Kurt Möser, “Motorization of German Societies in East and West” and Maria R. Zezina, “he Introduction of Motor Vehicles on a Mass Scale in the USSR: From Idea to Implementation,” both in Towards Mobility: Varieties of Automobilism in East and West, eds. Corinna Kuhr-Korolev and Dirk Schlinkert (Wolfsburg: Volkswagen AG, 2009), respectively 55–72 and 43–54, here: 43–8.

39. Bruhèze and Veraart, Fietsverkeer, 186–9.40 Pye, Fellowship; David Prynn, “he Clarion Clubs, Rambling and the Holiday

Associations in Britain since the 1890s,” Journal of Contemporary History 11 no. 2/3 (1976): 65–77; Ruediger Rabenstein, “he History of German Workers’ Cycling Association, Solidarity,” Cycle History 11: Proceedings of the 11th International Cycle History Conference (San Francisco: Van der Plas Publications, 2001), 160–8; Briese, “Radwegebau” and “Bicycle Lane,” 125; Aage Hofmann, “Arbejderidraettens Forhold til Socialdemokratiet ca. 1880–ca. 1925,” Arbejderhistorie 1 (2008): 96–115; Pivato, “he Bicycle.”

41. W. Banield, Accidents (pedal cyclists), HC debates, 28 February 1935, vol. 298, cc 1281–2; Sir W. Sugden, Road Traic Acts, HC debates 24 May 1935, vol. 302 cc 703–39. We thank Peter Cox for these references.

42 Ary Blonk and Jan Pieter Kruyt, De besteding van de vrije tijd door Nederlandsche arbeiders (Amsterdam: Nutsuitgeverij, 1936), 59–63, 94–106; Johan Adolf Leerink, De verkeersveiligheid op den weg. Een juridische, sociologische en verkeerstechnische studie (Alphen aan de Rijn: Samson, 1938), 138–43, 234–40, 632–37, 660–2; Samuel Josua Embden, Amsterdam’s toekomstige gedaante (Amsterdam: Van Munster, 1931); David Kouwenaar, “125 jaar verkeerspolitie,” Ons Amsterdam, 38 no. 2 (1951).

43. Mom, “Roads without Rails.” See also: David Edgerton, he Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (London: Proile Books, 2006).

44. Letter, Mayor of Antwerp to the Director of the (National) Service of Road Traic, Wielrijders 1929–1942, Stadsarchief Antwerpen, no. 19477.

45 Briese, “Cycling Lanes,” 124.46 Bruhèze and Veraart, Fietsverkeer, 133–5.47. National Cycling Archive, CTC Minutes, National Committee on Cycling, 28 August

1938; Memorandum Stating the National Committee’s View on the T.A.C. Report; National Cycling Archive, “An Amazing Memorandum,” Bicycling News, 15 April



1937; William Oakley, Winged Wheel: he History of the First Hundred Years of the Cyclists’ Touring Club (Goldaming: CTC, 1977); Bruhèze and Veraart, Fietsverkeer, 131–3.

48. Bruhèze and Veraart, Fietsverkeer, 133–5.49. Carl Henneking, Der Radfahrverkehr: Seine Wirtschaliche Bedeutung und die Anlage

von Radfahrwegen (Magdeburg, 1927); Hans Joachim Schacht, Der Radwegebau in Deutschland (Halle: Schriften des Seminars fuer Verkehrswesen and der Martin-Luther-Unversität Halle-Wittenberg, 1937); Horn, “Niedergang,” 57–63, 87–109; Volker Briese, “Opium für Radfahrer,” Radfahren 1 (1994), 36-4, idem, “Cycling Lanes,” 126, and “Radwegebau.”

50. “Algemeen Uitbreidingsplan van Amsterdam. Nota van toelichting,” (Amsterdam, 1985 [1935]), 153; Kouwenaar, “125 jaar verkeerspolitie”; Wim Nelissen and Hendrik Schmal, “Van railverbinding tot ringweg. Honderd jaar verkeer in Amsterdam,” in Wonen, Werken en Verkeer in Amsterdam, 1880–1980, ed. Gerrit Adriaan de Bruyne (Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit, 1980); Bruhèze and Veraart, Fietsverkeer, 66.

51. Cornelis van Eesteren, De functionele stad (Amsterdam: De 8 en opbouw, 1935); Vincent van Rossem, Het Algemene Uitbreidingsplan van Amsterdam: Geschiedenis en ontwerp (Rotterdam: NAi Uitgevers, 1994); Eric Mumford, he CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Kees Somer, he Functional City: he CIAM and Cornelis van Eesteren, 1928–1960. (Rotterdam: NAi Uitgevers, 2007), chapters 4 and 5; Eric Mumford, Deining Urban Design: CIAM Architects and the Formation of a Discipline, 1937–1969 (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2009), chapter 3.

52. Ruth Oldenziel and Adri A. de la Bruhèze, “heorizing the Mediation Junction for Technology and Consumption,” in Manufacturing Technology, Manufacturing Consumers, ed. Adri A. de la Bruhèze and Ruth Oldenziel (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2009), 9–40, here: 21–2, 31–2.

53. Hans Bernard Reichow, die autogerechte stadt (Ravensburg: Otto Maier Verlag, 1959), 34.

54. Horn, “Niedergang,” 121–6, 134–70; Per Lundin, “Mediators of Modernity: Planning Experts and the Making of the ‘Car-friendly’ City in Europe,” in Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities, eds. Mikael Hård and homas J. Misa (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 257–80.

55. Helge Berglund, “Vilka praktiska lärdomar kann vi i Sverige draga urstads- och traikplaneringen i U.S.A.?” in: Bilstaden, ed. Uno Åhrén (Stockholm: Royal Institute of Technology 1961), 9–16 as cited in Emanuel, “Planning.”

56 Horn, “Niedergang,” 120–1; Adri A. de la Bruhèze and Frank C.A. Veraart, “Fietsen en verkeersbeleid. Het ietsgebruik in negen West-Europese steden in de twintigste eeuw,” NEHA-jaarboek 62 (1999): 138–70, here: 157–70.

57 Oakley, Winged Wheel; Rowland Nicolas, City of Manchester Plan (Norwich: Jarrod & Sons, 1945).

58. Mike Hudson, he Bicycle Planning Book (London: Open Books, 1978), 2; Frank Hendriks, Beleid, Cultuur en Instituties. Het verhaal van 2 steden (Leiden:DSWO Press, 1996), 136, 138.

59. “De Paria’s van de weg,” Editorial comment in Beige-en-Bruin. Maandelijks orgaan van de Antwerpse Wielerunie (February 1955).

60. Ton Welleman, he Dutch Bicycle Master Plan: Description and Evaluation in a Historical Context (Den Haag: Ministerie van Verkeer en Waterstaat, 1999); Kouwenaar, “125 jaar verkeerspolitie”; Nelissen and Schmal, “Van railverbinding



tot ringweg”; Jens Norgaard, Cyklism, Bilisme & Traikkens (Kopenhagen: Politik- en sociologisk magisterafhandlung, 1981). Bruhèze and Veraart, “Fietsgebruik,” 157–9.

61. Bruhèze and Veraart, Fietsverkeer; Norgaard, Cyklism; Stadingeniorens Direktorat Koebenhavn, Skitse til en Generalplan (Koebenhavn: Stadingeniorens Direktorat, 1954); Heinz Lauenroth and Georg Barke, Hannover. Schritt in die Zukunft (Hannover: Städtischen Presseamt Hannover, 1956).

62. Steen Eileen Rasmussen, Greater Copenhagen Planning Status (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Regional Planning Committee, 1952); Johann Karl Rippel, Ein Integriertes Nahverkehrsnetz für wachsende Großstädte am Beispiel der Stadt Hannover (Hannover: Stadarchiv, 1971); Klaus Scheelhaase, “20 Jahre Stadtbahnbau und die Folgen in Hannover,” Der Nahverkehr. Zeitschrift für Verkehr in Stadt und Region no. 3 (1986); 8-12 Nicolas, City of Manchester Plan; Gemeente Amsterdam, Analyse van het verkeer in Amsterdam. Verslag van het verkeersonderzoek gedurende de period 1960–1968 (Amsterdam: Gemeente Amsterdam, 1968).

63. Berglund, Vilka praktiska lärdomar, 9–16 as cited in Emanuel, “Planning.”64. Letter from Baudepartement-Stadtplanung to Tiefbauamt, 3 March 1958 (Staatsarchiv

des Kantons Basel-Stadt, BD-Reg 1 A 601-2-1, Radfahrwege 1936–1962).65 In some (Southern) Dutch cities, existing bicycle lanes were abolished to create

car parking space (Bruhèze and Veraart, Fietsverkeer, 109–10).66. Zachary Mooradian Furness, One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of

Automobility (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 56.67. According to Austrian traic specialist Herman Knolacher, the expected car

mobility growth and preoccupation with managing speed were key to urban traffic planning until the 1990s: “Die Bedeuting der Verkehrsplanung für die Stadtentwicklung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” in Stadt. Strom-Strasse-Schiene. Die Bedeutung des Verkehrs für die Genese der mitteleuropäischen Städtelandschaft, ed. A. Niederstätter (Linz: Österreichischen Arbeidskreis für Stadtgeschichtsforschung, 2001), 307–23, here: 312.

68. Verkeerspolitie Stad Antwerpen, Jaarrapport 1981 (Antwerpen, 1982).69. C. Oberer-Kundert, “Die Massenmotorisierung im Kanton Basel-Landschaft,”

(Liestal: Forschungsstelle Baselbieter Geschichte, 1991); Bruhèze and Veraart, Fietsverkeer, 175–80.

70. M. Hillman, Children Transport and the Quality of Life (London: PSI Publishers, 1993), 9, 13; Dave Horton, “Fear of Cycling,” in Cycling and Society, eds. Dave Horton, Paul Rosen, and Peter Cox (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007): 133–52.

71. Pucher and Buehler, “Frontiers of Cycling” and idem, “Lessons from the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany.”

72. Bruhèze and Veraart, Fietsverkeer, 67–75.73. Knut Boge, “Votes Count but the Number of Seats Decide: A Comparative Historical

Case Study of 20th Century Danish, Swedish and Norwegian Road Policy” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oslo, 2006), 80; Kai Lemberg, Alli’vel så elsker vi byen: København og regionen gennem 100 år. [But Still We Love the City: Copenhagen and the Region during 100 Years] (Copenhagen: Arkitektens forlag, 1985), 122–4.

74. Bruhèze and Veraart, Fietsverkeer, 74–5; 111–4.75. Delft Architectural Studies on Housing, he Woonerf Revisited (Rotterdam: Nai

Publishers, 2010).76. Jan Ploeger, “Designing for Cycling: he New Dutch Design Manual,” in he

Greening of Urban Transport: Planning for Walking and Cycling in Western Cities, ed. Rodney Tolley (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1997): 397–402.



77. Jos Lammers, Cities Make Room for Cyclists: Examples from Towns in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland (Den Haag: Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management, 1995); Jan Hartman, “he Delft Bicycle Network Revisited,” in he Greening of Urban Transport: Planning for Walking and Cycling in Western Cities, ed. Rodney Tolley (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 193–200.

78. European Conference of Ministers of Transport (ECMT), National Policies to Promote Cycling (Paris: OECD, 2005), 16–19.

Author Biographies

Ruth Oldenziel is professor of American and European history of technology at the Eindhoven University of Technology. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in American History. Her publications include books and articles in the area of American, gender and technology studies: Cold War Kitchen (2009) with Karin Zachmann; Manufacturing

Technology, Manufacturing Consumers: The Making of Dutch Consumer

Society (2009) with Adri de la Bruhèze; Gender and Technology: A Reader

(2003) with Nina Lerman and Arwen Mohun; Crossing Boundaries,

Building Bridges (2000) with Annie Canel and Karin Zachmann; Making

Technology Masculine: Men, Women and Modern Machines in America,

1870–1945 (1999). Currently, she is working with Mikael Hård (TU Darmstadt) on a monograph on European Users of Technology in the American Century (Palgrave 2013). E-mail: [email protected]

Adri Albert de la Bruhèze is assistant professor of History of Technology at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He has published on the history of radioactive waste management in the U.S., the history of bicycle use in Europe, food and nutrition history in the Netherlands, Dutch consumer society, the history of technology in twentieth-century Netherlands, and transnational European tourism regimes. His most recent publications include Techniek in Nederland

in de Twintigste Eeuw [Technology in the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century], 7 Vols. (1998–2003) with Johan Schot, Harry Lintsen and Arie Rip, and Manufacturing Technology, Manufacturing Consumers:

The Making of Dutch Consumer Society (2009) with Ruth Oldenziel.

E-mail: [email protected]

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