Sweden

Monday was our first official day and was spent in Malmo and Lund, Sweden. These two cities have a friendly competition to see which one is the most bicycle friendly. They are both doing many things to make bicycling a top transportation priority. Malmo has been working on an extensive network of bike paths adjacent to streets. Where paths and pedestrian crossings meet major streets, they almost always put a speed hump in advance of the crossing since their research has shown that slowing cars is critical to making the crossings safe. This is done at the many roundabouts as well. They have instituted a campaign called "No ridiculuous car trips" that has reduced vehicle trips by something like 20%. Where major bike paths have to cross major streets, they have built a couple of bike underpasses or tunnels, but with much care going into the design to make sure they have good sight lines, plenty of width and are not intimidating to use. They have automatic bike counters on a couple of major paths and they show a real time digital display of how many cyclists have passed. One path sees 10,000 cyclists a day!! They have a Friendly Ways to School program that is much like our Safe Routes to School effort and they work on educating parents with a focus on kids ages 6-8. The City of Malmo just purchased a fleet of around 40 bikes for their employees to use to go to other city offices during the work day so that they aren't forced to drive.
Lund is a big university town with about 30,000 students. They just reconstructed a major shopping street to a "shared speed" street with no curbing between sidewalk and the area where cars and bikes share a very narrow space. The concept is that all users essentially are forced to travel no faster than a slow bike and it works well. The majority of traffic was bicyclists and pedestrians. Lund has a major transit center where city busses and trains to both Malmo and Stockholm and also to Copenhagen depart. This transit center has bicycle parking for 3,300 bicycles, including a building with two floors of roll in bike spaces where you can also get air for your tires and bike maps and other information. In both cities, there is a real emphasis of integrating bicycle and pedestrian needs with City planning and all levels of traffic safety work. For example, in Lund, development is focused within a 4km radius of the city center, which they consider bicycling distance. If you can't develop there, then the next priority is to develop along routes that have good public transit. This ensures that most development will not generate as much new car traffic. Our meeting and site visits today are in Copenhagen.