Build it and they will park their bike on it.

They have a few put more bike racks at the Vienna Middle Station and normal behavior has changed! 

Originally they totally forgot or ignored bike parking and there were many problems with badly parked bikes.  This creative freestyle bike parking was normal behavior.

Now it is normal behavior to lock your bike to the excellent Vienna Bike racks.  Here is a very bad video to illustrate the current situation.


The capacity of bike parking is already nearly full so if the city want to encourage more people to cycle and to park their bike responsibly they will have to double the parking capacity again, otherwise they will end up with lots of behavior arguments etc...

Lenaugasse

There is plenty to get frustrated about in Vienna but the summer is here and there are many cyclists enjoying the sunshine. So here is a positive blog post for a change.

Lenaugasse is a road came across by accident and it is wonderfully well designed residential access road.  No through traffic and design that encourages a sense of place rather than a sense of get through here as quick as possible.  It is officially a Wohnstrasse but they did more than put up a sign to make this space work.


It shows that they can get residential access roads right in the middle of Vienna if they try.

The corner Czapkagasse and Gärtnergasse

The layout at the corner Czapkagasse and Gärtnergasse and in particular the slight lines are really really bad. Bikes can not see the cars coming down Czapkagasse and the cars can not see the bikes coming from Landstrasse to Marxegasse.  This gets particularly bad when parked high sided vans are on the corner.

 

In this video you see a cars swinging round the corner and then a second that stops to look properly but only looked right and so I had to emergency stop.  It was after they started to turn left that I got eye contact.

I cycle this route most working days and have so many conflicts here with cars.  I have also seen a cyclists sat on the curb with their beading head in their hands.  This clearly needs a proper solution.

The main problem is that cars have to give way but the only indication is a triangle sign off to the side above parked cars.One third of drivers seam totally un-aware of this give way sign. Some kind of simple who has right of way system would  help enormasly...http://crowize-vienna.blogspot.co.at/2012/07/sharks-teeth.html and this would indicate to the cars they have to give way.  The triangle sign is totally useless and so are sharks teeth unless the implementation is consistent...

The line the cars have to drive if they turn left is also a problem. The diagonal parked cars make the road very narrow and also force turning cars to queeze in close to the parked cars on the left. The diagonally parked cars need to be removed to make the turn left more open.  However the turn radius needs to remain tight to reduce speed.  Bringing out the curb in to the road would help pedestrians too.

These turning cars have really really bad slight lines.  They can not see bikes coming until they are already turning and then it is too late. Bike parking racks on the corner would stop vans parking there and improve the sight lines a lot.  A raised junction like the one at Marxegasse and Gärtnergasse would help to reduce speed of cars.

This route is again used as a rat run and it is a main route for cyclists.  This conflict of function multiples the design problem conflicts.

In my opinion there is a general problem that bikes are used in 30kmph  zones as traffic calming devices.  This might work for most drivers who drive carefully in these unclear road mazes.  However it does not create a good cycling environment if your role as a cyclists is to slow the aggressive drivers and you have to put your body in the way of their badly driven speeding cars.

The Dooring debate continures.

The standard modern best practice in Vienna is to paint narrow cycle lanes along side of parked cars forcing bikes into the door zone and induing very stressful and unpleasant conflict with overtaking cars.  The debate about this kind of infrastructure continues in Vienna but in my mind there is no debate and this kind of infrastructure is nothing but total crap.

If they are painted wide enough with buffer zones either side they require more space than other proper solutions.  If they are not wide enough they induce danger and conflict.They get parked in and provide a stressful experience to all cyclists and frustrate car drivers.

Maybe Peter Bals has a solution:

The  Radwegbauprogramm 2014 consists mainly of this total crap so we can expect more doorings more conflict and increasing frustration and anger on the roads of Vienna for years to come.

The reality of cycling in Vienna

3 days after her picture was taken riding this cargo bike this happens:

She went to work today, on her bike. At Waaggasse, a rather small one-way street (bikes have the option to go both ways) a car gets behind her and hits the horn a couple of times, then overtakes with next to no space between her and the car. Also, we are in a 30km/h - zone here and she is not a slow rider. 

The car has to stop at the next crossing, She asks the driver what the fuck is up with him.He accelerates and hits her bike on purpose. She starts yelling at him, he hits her again, with the car, and speeds off. 

She is in shock, but is alright. 

And now off to the best part: 3 hours later, after finally having calmed down, she goes to the police and tells them, what happened. Their response: "You are lucky that you don't have to pay a fee now, because you too have committed Fahrerflucht because you didn't come to us within 20 minutes. Also it was an accident and nothing else and will not be processed in any way." 

A month ago my wife was hit by a car that overtook her as they dashed for the flashing green light.  The car speed off and she recovered after a wobble and shock.  She did not even bother reporting this to the Police who are clearly not interested in the safety of vulnerable road users.  They are too busy at the moment controlling the size of bike reflectors and issuing fines.

This is the reality of cycling in Vienna and frankly it disgusts me.  Campaigners and the City needs to stop all the "Safety in Numbers" bullshit and understand that "Safety is Numbers".

What is the point why do I bother?

After 2 years trying to understand and explain how the Dutch have been so successful with main stream cycling I still hear the same old excuses again and again and again and again....

The Cycling Agency have switched focus from last years marketing initiative to this years cyclist behavior initiatives. ( An idiotic blame the users response to their focus on marketing which unsurprisingly has not worked as well as they hoped... )

The politicians and planners continue to produce "cycling infrastructure" (or useless paint as it is more accurately known) that will only increase the polarizing conflict which the Cycling Agency continues to ignore.

Vienna is spending millions and millions on the rebuilding of motor way connections and considering spending billions on building a new U-Bahn line, while ignoring the value for money benefit of good cycling infrastructure.

The Rad Lobbies are still struggling to decide if useless paint is a good idea or not.

The pathetic political cock blocking continues in the MaHü  even after the referendum resulted in a close win for the new people friendly street with bikes.

As Chris Cummings summaries here: http://fm4.orf.at/stories/1736436/

"After the marketing frenzy of the last years’ Vienna Year of the Bicycle (Radjahr) participation rates rose from 6.3% to 6.4% in comparison with the previous year. That is hardly a revolution and the number of journeys made by cars rose instead of falling."

So what is the point why do I bother?

I am now again able to answer that question after one of the better marketing initiatives: "The Rad parRade".  I and ~9000 others rode around the car free ring and it was wonderful.  I went with a mate and his family and we even got our picture in a populist tabloid paper.  I am the chap chatting to the wonderful Margit who invests a great deal of time and energy getting people together and patiently trying to improve cycling conditions.



Seeing kids riding independently and remembering how that freedom feels has reminded my why I bother.

The point is we are doing this for the future generations who just need the opportunity and they will be able to enjoy mobility.  Our idiotic overuse of cars and road design has destroyed cycling as an option for most of the population.  Build the infrastructure and make cycling safe, pleasant, fast, direct and easy and people will choose that option and we can all reap the many benefits of their modal shift.

We have to keep trying to tell the main stream cycling success story because it is a damn good one.

Circular Vehicling Campaigning.

This is a tale of 3 roundabouts:

One near Vienna that has shown to be good for cars but dangerous for cyclists.

http://diepresse.com/home/panorama/oesterreich/1564400/Tulln_Kreisverkehr-fur-Radler-unsicherer

and one in the UK designed by an bunch of cretins, to be paid for out of cycling infrastructure funds and approved by cycling organisations.

http://departmentfortransport.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/bedford-borough-council-traffic-department-you-are-a-bunch-of-cretins/

Both are designed purely for cars and both have cycling organisations encouraging cyclists to take the lane for better safety.

I could go on and try to explain why this is stupid but Austrian and some British cycle campaigning organisations clearly think they know better than the Dutch.  They are clearly not listening to anyone who tries to explain why the Dutch systems work and that putting yourself in the way of something dangerous is not a natural response normal people will choose as a pleasant method of stopping that thing from hurting them.

The third roundabout is the downward spiral of the road environment. If we really care about main stream cycling, and want the society our children live in to benefit from its many positive effects,  then we have to break the circle of expecting cyclists to behave like cars and drivers to behave like cycles.  This only creates more people forced to use cars even for short urban trips and road design focused on coping with higher and higher volumes of dense motor traffic.  The resulting conflict and pressure for space polarizes groups and makes sensible policy politically impossible.