Monday 8 October 2012

Velo-city 2013: The Sound of Cycling – Urban Cycling Cultures

You know when you have bad cycle infrastructure when you start talking about culture.

Cycling should be really boring like Vacuum cleaning culture.  However in Vienna it is not quite main stream yet.  Vienna will host the Velo-city conference and it's marketing draws the link between cycling and Vienna's  great music culture.  It is true that Vienna has a great culture for music and theater.  This culture did not evolve by accident it was engineered by patrons, talented individuals and governmental investment. Big expensive high quality infrastructure was financed, like this, this, this etc.....

I think Velo-city should be about the boring technical infrastructure that makes cycling a mundane practical choice (explained here) rather than some culture phenomenon that happened by accident.  Culture grows out of the environmental conditions that are engineered.

Having said that if you like quirky cycling sub culture Vienna is a really great place to enjoy.

1 comment:

  1. Specially if you love Beer... but that should not be the point. As an activist I always have said that the best way to promote cycling (apart from the very important issues of road design) is to have a non-nocive attitude... but, man, I think every Austrian loves alcohol even though is not safe to bike or promote biking while drinking.

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