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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 trac ows, urban-planning
professionals projected separate lanes to control rather than to facilitate working-
class, mass-scale bicycling. Signicantly, cycling organizations opposed the lanes,
while experts like trac 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. e 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
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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
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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
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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.
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
Car density (cars per 1000 inhabitants)
Netherlands
Denmark
Belgium
Germany
Great Britain
Switzerland
France
Italy
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
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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,
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990
Percentage (%)
Amsterda m
Eindhoven
Enschede
Southeast Limburg
Basel
Hannover
Antwerp
Copenhagen
Manchester
London
Stockholm
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.
Ruth Oldenziel and Adri Albert de la Bruhèze
34 • © Transfers • Volume 1 Issue 2 • Summer 2011
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
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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
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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, trac professionals and policymakers expected that
in the future, modern motorized trac would inevitably and rightfully
substitute what they projected as old-fashioned bicycle trac.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 trac ows, framed in neutralizing
terms of speed and safety.e 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 trac
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 o
many roads for cyclists and forced them to use cycle lanes in other parts.44
e 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
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© Transfers • Volume 1 Issue 2 • Summer 2011 • 37
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
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38 • © Transfers • Volume 1 Issue 2 • Summer 2011
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
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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.
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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
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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
trac 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 xes were re-inventions of the
old iron triangle of trac safety/trac 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
Ruth Oldenziel and Adri Albert de la Bruhèze
42 • © Transfers • Volume 1 Issue 2 • Summer 2011
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
e history of urban bicycle lanes in Western Europe reects the twists
and turns of cycling. At rst, the bicycle lanes were mobilized as regulatory
“artifacts” to separate ows, subordinate the bicycle to the car, discipline the
bicycle user, and reduce trac accidents. Local policymakers and planners
dened cyclists as old fashioned, irresponsible, and anarchistic, who
needed to be controlled. Transatlantic disciplines like Radverkehr Planung,
trac engineering, and city planning embraced bicycle lanes as rational
and scientic solutions to solve the problem of urban trac 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 dierent
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. e 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
Bicycle Infrastructures in Western European Cities
© Transfers • Volume 1 Issue 2 • Summer 2011 • 43
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-rst 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,”Trac
Engineering and Control (1999), 393–6; Scientic Expert Group on the Safety
of Vulnerable Road Users (RS7) OECD, Safety of Vulnerable Road Users (Paris:
OECD, 1998); Eero Passanen, e 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: e Bicycle
Transportation Controversy,”Transportation Quarterly 55 no. 2 (2001): 7–18.
5. Wiebe E. Bijker and Trevor J. Pinch, “e Social Construction of Facts and
Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology
Might Benet Each Other,” in e Social Construction of Technological Systems,
ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, omas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1989), 17–50; Wiebe E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a
eory 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: e 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 etsgebruik 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 etshistoriograe in internationaal
perspectief,”Bijdragen en Mededelingen Geschiedenis betreende 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, “e Bicycle, the Bourgeoisie and the Discovery of Rural France,”
British Journal of Sports History 2 (1985): 127–39; Christopher S. ompson,
“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.
Ruth Oldenziel and Adri Albert de la Bruhèze
44 • © Transfers • Volume 1 Issue 2 • Summer 2011
10. ompson, “Bicycling, Class, and the Politics of Leisure,” 132–6.
11. omas 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 Reections 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 ets 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, “e Crossroads of Technology and Tradition: Vernacular
Bicycles in Rural Finland, 1880–1910,”Technology and Culture (forthcoming).
15. After 1922, cheap and stripped German bicycles ooded the Dutch market.
Veraart, “Geschiedenis van de ets,” 83–4.
16 Stadt- und Landesplanung Bremen, 1926–1930 (Bremen: Hauschild, 1931), 347–8;
“Is is the End of the City of Bikes?”Northern Echo (5 October 1968); Nan van
Zutphen, “Sociale geschiedenis van het etsen te Leuven, 1880–1900,” in Fiets
en lm 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 rst vehicle of
individual mass transport toward the “ride to modernity.” See Manuel Stoers,
Harry Oosterhuis, and Peter Cox, “Bicycle History as Transport History: e
Cultural Turn,” in Mobility in History: emes 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: e History (New Haven and
London: Yale University, 2004), 328. In the 1930s, British parliamentary debates,
government ocials claimed at least 9,000,000 cyclists. We thank Peter Cox for the
reference.
19 Herlihy, Bicycle: e History, 328. Anne-Katrin Ebert, “Cycling towards the Nation: e
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, e Automobile Revolution: e Impact of an Industry (Chapell
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); eo Barker, ed., e Economic
and Social Eects 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, e American Automobile: A
Centenary 1893–1993 (London: Prion, 1992).
21. Trend lines are based on modal splits and trac counts data; where no sound
assessment could be made, the trend line is missing.
Bicycle Infrastructures in Western European Cities
© Transfers • Volume 1 Issue 2 • Summer 2011 • 45
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, “e Bicycle as a Political Symbol: Italy, 1885–1955,”
International Journal of the History of Sport 7 (1990): 172–87; Richard J.B. Bosworth,
“e 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: e 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, “e 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, e Motor Car and Politics in Britain 1896–1970 (London: e
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. esis, University of Michigan, 1957); D. Prick Mihoy,
“Rough Road Cyclists Display Political Power. e League of American Wheelmen in
the Good Roads Movement as Reported by e 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 e 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: etspaden, van
gerieijke paden tot etsbeleid,”Verkeerskunde 60 no. 5 (2009): 21–6, here: 22.
31. Bosworth, “Touring Club Italiano.”
32. Veraart, “Geschiedenis van de ets,” 88–90; Ebert, Radelnde Nationen, 378–90.
33. German cyclists nanced the rst 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).
Ruth Oldenziel and Adri Albert de la Bruhèze
46 • © Transfers • Volume 1 Issue 2 • Summer 2011
34 Peters, Time, Innovation and Mobilities, 130–1; Kreuzer, “Historische
Verkehrsutopien,” 260–6, 271, 280; Bonham and Cox, “e 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, “e 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, “e 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, “e 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 Homann, “Arbejderidraettens
Forhold til Socialdemokratiet ca. 1880–ca. 1925,” Arbejderhistorie 1 (2008):
96–115; Pivato, “e Bicycle.”
41. W. Baneld, Accidents (pedal cyclists), HC debates, 28 February 1935, vol. 298,
cc 1281–2; Sir W. Sugden, Road Trac 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, e Shock of the Old:
Technology and Global History since 1900 (London: Prole Books, 2006).
44. Letter, Mayor of Antwerp to the Director of the (National) Service of Road Trac,
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
Bicycle Infrastructures in Western European Cities
© Transfers • Volume 1 Issue 2 • Summer 2011 • 47
1937; William Oakley, Winged Wheel: e 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 Wirtschaiche 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, e CIAM Discourse
on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Kees Somer, e
Functional City: e CIAM and Cornelis van Eesteren, 1928–1960. (Rotterdam: NAi
Uitgevers, 2007), chapters 4 and 5; Eric Mumford, Dening 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, “eorizing 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 omas J. Misa
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 257–80.
55. Helge Berglund, “Vilka praktiska lärdomar kann vi i Sverige draga urstads- och
trakplaneringen 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 etsgebruik 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, e 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, e 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
Ruth Oldenziel and Adri Albert de la Bruhèze
48 • © Transfers • Volume 1 Issue 2 • Summer 2011
tot ringweg”; Jens Norgaard, Cyklism, Bilisme & Trakkens (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 trac specialist Herman Knoacher, 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, e Woonerf Revisited (Rotterdam: Nai
Publishers, 2010).
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Greening of Urban Transport: Planning for Walking and Cycling in Western Cities,
ed. Rodney Tolley (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1997): 397–402.
Bicycle Infrastructures in Western European Cities
© Transfers • Volume 1 Issue 2 • Summer 2011 • 49
77. Jos Lammers, Cities Make Room for Cyclists: Examples from Towns in the Netherlands,
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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
includebooks and articles in the areaof 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:ruth@oldenziel.com
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: a.a.albertdelabruheze@utwente.nl
