The obvious alternative to in-town car traffic

[Skybird]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8224141.stm

It is so obvious a thing: use a bike if your living place allows it.

However, as a resident of Münster, I must object in protest !! to some wrong claims in the article. because neither Copenhagen nor Amsterdam is Europe's leading city when it comes to bike-friendliness - Münster is.

The article claims that Copenhagen has "around 350 km" of cyle routes lanes in and around the city.

Now, Copenhagen has a population of roughly 520,000, Münster has around 270,000. Nevertheless Münster has slighlty over 300 km of dedicated cycling lanes just inside the town alone, with the town being just half as big, generally said. Add to this several hundred of kilometers of dedicated cycle routes in the surrounding country of the city. Like in Denmark (I assume), the country around Münster also is very flat and thus: biking-friendly.

the article says that Copenhagen wants to have half of it'S commuters using bikes in 2015.

In Münster, 97% of residents have bikes, and bike traffic already leaves car traffic behind on days without rain. 38% of town traffic is being done by bike, just 36% is from car, 16% are pedestrians, and 10% is public transportation (we only have busses here). The goal is to have bike traffic surpassing car traffic by a facor of two in 2020-2025. There are dedicated bicycle parking lots, some with guards ans some being sub-terranean, and even a bike wash facility like you know it for cars. On sunny days, in some places you can't move forward as a pedestrian because everything is blocked by parked bikes.

The downside is that on days with rain, many cyclists turn towards busses, making public transportation a misery then: overcrowded and close to collapse.

There is a runnig program to systematically improve quality of the cycle route network, and to identifiy accident hotspots and eliminating them.

In the past, I was repeatedly approached by Dutch tourists (of which we have many over here) asking in surprise how it comes that we have so many bikes in Münster, and that it is much more than what they used to know from Holland, and Amsterdam.

The surrounding land of Mümnster is optimal for biking, too. It is flat, and plenty of nature. In the north-east it turns into the hilly Teutoburger Wald, which is more difficult to ride, but very romantic. It begins 35 km away from Münster's northern town border. In that area, like practically all around Münster, very many paths and ways offside public roads are optimised for use by bicycles.

the city itself has a radial layout, with all main traffic lines in and out of the city being optimal for bikes even if traffic jams turn them into nightmares for car drivers, and several, sometime very green and bike/pedestrian-only routes making it easy to reach every point of the city in short ammounts of time.

There is much bad you can say about Münster and it's claimed pseudo-cultural status (that arrogant claim definitely is unjustified), it's oversized (in size the 3rd biggest in Germany) but underperforming university, and especially the highnosed and arrogant attitudes of it's old town inhbaitants. on the other hand, plenty of students have softened the climate up considerably in the past 20 years or so. But one thing cannot be doubted by anyone knowing the place: there is only one bike capital in Europe - and that is us...!

Written by a passionate cyclist and inline-skater, obviously. Of course I have a driving license, but I am out of practice since I never owned a car and luckily never needed one. Saves me a lot of money, too.