Groupe Chronos

A biking man, using his iPhone with both hands, this is how the New York Times pictures the bicycle renaissance. The American Newpaper published no less than ten key cycling-related articles within the last 12 months (Individualism, Identity and Bicycles, see also Hudson River Walkway, an Improbable Treat). For the Wall Street Journal, papers dealing with bicycle issues are still scarce, with only two articles released in 2009. Its vision? A young cyclist girl gets her bike back via Facebook, and makes the thieve arrested by the police.

Beyond the image of a popular, trendy bicycle use, the digital world's references of cycling-related articles is a new thing. It shows the connections between transport modes, lifestyles and new urban practices. "Augmented cycling" is further improved by the two big names of the digital world: the Apple iPhone with more than 100.000 applications, and Facebook with its 450 million members. Google is not to forget (stock price +102% in 2009, Apple, +141%!) with its brand new bicycle directions function.

As bikes become part of a pool of services, cycling becomes "augmented"

Cycling is getting trendier and trendier but contemporary bicycle differ from the old-fashioned ones: they are somehow improved by new technologies. Sometimes it is right on the bike, not for the bicycle but for the rider (equiped with a mobile phone or an MP3 player). Other times, the network lay hands on the bike (through Facebook, Twitter...). These are the technologies the MIT is exploring (For Bicyclists Needing a Boost, This Wheel May Help) in order to make normal bikes more efficient and to win over new bike adepts. The wheel captures the kinetic energy released when a rider brakes and saves it for when the rider needs a boost, helping him with hills. Cycling gets "augmented", from every side. And, the icing on the cake is that the meterings of the wheel-embedded air quality sensors can be sent via Bluetooth to a data center that will publish this aggregated public information. Moreover, the wheel's magic hub receives the bike's position by GPS and allows direction recommandations and data sharing (the dashboard informs about the city and its social flows). A meter also logs the miles you traveled out of the asphalt.

In the same vein, San Francisco (Tracking Bicycle Trips) has developed a cyclists-dedicated smartphone application that tracks routes (origin-destination + object of the ride) and puts them into a common database in order to apprehend bicycles movements and better answer the riders' needs. Remotely located bikes also exist, simply spotted by microchips. NTT DoCoMo (In Japan, you can rent a bike with your mobile phone) is going to offer its subscribers a bike sharing service totally available from smart phones, from the vacant bike search to the payment, through navigation while cruising around.

Extension of the everyday field

There are three main ways of proceeding in order to further develop cycling practices and therefore improve urban development. The first is conventionally taken from the car world: bike highways, without crossings and hence without obstacles make bike riders increase travel distances. Libération tells us about how the Dutch cyclists ride at full blast on the bike highways. There are now five bicycle highways without crossroads or red lights in the bike Country, sometimes up to 20 kilometers! (see also Urban Integration. Design).

Another solution is borrowed from the walking buses and uses digital tools in order to group cyclists together with RFID chips. Cycling buses thus see the roads open and the lights green along their way. It is in Copenhagen (Banning the Cul-de-Sac and Building Bike Highways) that this concept has been developped, combining new technologies, social networks and bike performances.

A third way comes from the New York's "Bicycle Boulevards" concept which is under investigation in Denmark and also exists in the Netherlands and Germany. Beyond a regular bicycle lane, this kind of boulevard combines bicycle-friendly signs and devices to promote a fairly-shared road use between different transport modes, in order to keep any obstacles out of the cyclists' routes. These bikeway designs are interesting in the way they deal with urban integration, leading to a livable city. It is not about making the car-city a bike-city, it is all about making a peaceful city of coexistence and respect (see the Streetsblog video, The Case for Bicycle Boulevards in NYC).

Image from the book Rien n'est simple ("Nothing is simple") by Sempé, published in 1962, see the five cartoons of the series

The bike's royal way

You cannot help but think about bicycles' sustainable perspectives. Mikael Colville-Andersen, Chronos' Danish correspondent, reminds us, on his famous blog (Copenhagenize.com), that cycling is part of the solution in cutting off the 40% of CO2 emissions motorized traffic is responsible for. "There is no Planet B", the crowd was yelling during the Copenhagen conference in order to challenge authorities.

This is also why the Greater Lyon wants to double the modal share of the bike within the city. Yet, even in doing so, the city would still be far from Lund, Sweden, champion of the bicycling consultation (40% of bike modal share, as in Copenhagen) which "multiplies bicycle storage facilities, especially around the station and bus stops in order to facilitate the transition from one mode to another". Multimodality is therefore improved by cycling, but also by a better parking policy. This unavoidable issue is yet poorly understood by cities.

Biking, a thriving city culture

Even in Copenhagen, 57% of the cyclists (figure from 2006) are unsatisfied with the city centre parking conditions. In Paris, the Vélib's thefts even made the headlines of the New York Times (French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality), which, like Les Echos (Vélib's high bill) and other newspapers, shed the light on the incivility of Parisian inhabitants. It is not to forget that the rise of bicycle theft goes with the growth of the city's bike stock and the increasing attractiveness of bicycles.

Yet, if one compares the couple of thousands of vandalized bikes to more than 50 millions Vélib's trips, the ratio is probably lower than the one of private bikes' thefts. It is still too much anyway. You can judge incvilities, explain them and bring answers to them. But this is not the problem of Vélib', nor bicycles, this is a problem of common goods in general. Mikael Colville-Andersen thus states, following the gradual dismantling of a bike from his flat's window, that "a bicycle culture is thriving" (Disposable Recylable Bicycles). For all those reasons, cycling has good chances to become a major citizens claim, to keep receiving a good media coverage and to seduce politicians. It cannot be a bad thing for our cities.