A queens -based bicycle letter which joins the mononymous of Quentin echoes the feeling of Berlanga, noting how the streets of New York suddenly feel more spacious than ever.
“It is only many more elbow rooms now,” says Quentin, admitting that part of him is missing traffic, because the dead end has often made his job more exciting. “The avenues, especially through the city center, seem very open, and you can say that there are so many cars on the road.”
But it is not only letters enjoy the less trafficking streets of the city. Although the city bike sharing platform, Citibike, has not yet shared information on traffic from January, there seems to be more people on bikes than at comparable times in the past years.
“Even in this unusually cold winter, we have seen more people cycling since congestion prices have come into force,” said Ken Podziba, director of the New York non -profit bike. “But the real excitement will come with a warmer weather, while we are witnessing a spectacular quarter of work – more beautiful cars and more bikes filling the streets of the city.”
To the point of Podziba, what could happen when the temperature increases? Will Manhattan suddenly resemble Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris or Oslo, whose last two have recently joined the trend of bicycle transport in their urban design? And if the traffic soars, will the city take the lead of its legion of cyclists and will put safer means for people crossing the city by bike?
Amsterdam is Amsterdam. Renowned for its hundreds of kilometers of cycle paths, its protected bicycle infrastructure and its cycling residents, many of whom move in the city almost exclusively by bicycle, the Dutch capital is an international lighthouse for urban planning centered on bicycles.
However, what you may not know is that the accent put by the Dutch city on bicycle infrastructure is a relatively recent phenomenon.
In 1971, after a few decades of post-war boom, 3,300 Amsterdammers were killed in traffic accidents. Four hundred of them were children. In the aftermath of this bloody year, a variety of defense groups began to organize demonstrations at the city level, fiercely opposing the city’s increasing dependence on cars and urging legislators to better consider cyclists and pedestrians. On the original level, a few years later, during the 1973 oil crisis which saw the price of the quadruple oil, the Dutch government closed several streets of the city on Sunday, urging citizens to enjoy traffic without traffic.
In the 1980s, the cities and cities of the Netherlands began to slowly introduce special routes on bikes, which led to networks of cycle paths across the city. Today, the Netherlands represent some 30,000 miles of cycle paths spread across the country’s 12,900 square miles, while more than a quarter of all the country’s trips are bicycle.
Cyclists in Copenhagen, Denmark.Photography: Jörg Carstensen / Getty Images
