Lately, we’ve been into biking at OK Do. One day we looked at our recent posts and realised we had bikes all over the place. Although it might seem so, we’re not putting up a bicycle club – not yet. Instead, having talked with Marek Salermo, a former cyclist in a Belgian racing team as well as a bicycle traffic planner working for the City of Helsinki, I’ll introduce yet another view on the subject. These are the three issues Marek and I talked about.
Let your hair down and bike.
1. Sensation of safety
During the times of mass automobilisation in Finland in the 60s, the bike was pictured as a vehicle for children and elderly people and this idea still exists. Partly for this, the communication related to biking often focuses on its dangers – and on helmets and reflectors. In addition to increasing safety itself, however, it is desirable to increase the sensation of safety, too. Bikers should feel safe enough in a city to take their share of the driveway confidently so that motorists will learn to see and respect them. It’s all about traffic psychology.
2. The vehicle for a real city
When biking is increased in a city in the right way, the city automatically becomes a better place to live and move around. When there are less cars, there is more space for bikers, pedestrians, the users of public transport – as well as for the few who drive. All in all, a true city should be so dense that there is only space for efficient modes of transportation like biking.
3. Out of time
It has been said that the bicycle was invented either too late or too early. Too late as it didn’t have enough time to establish its status in the traffic culture before cars were created, and too early because now it’s often considered an old-fashioned and unconvincing way to move. If a bike was only designed today, it would win a Nobel prize as a solution for a myriad of issues in the city.
The interview was part of our project with We Are Helsinki magazine.