#modal share

Bicycle is the fastest, funniest, healthiest and most sustainable way to move around a city. Besides that it is absolutely chic. As the city cycling movement has grown in Western cities, urban pedallers have faced a new problem: How to bicycle everywhere AND still look good?

To see how the professionals do let’s look at the grand masters of city cycling: the Danes and the Dutch. Look at these girls and boys of Copenhagen Denmark! They really know how to stay chic while swinging themselves through the city. They don’t mind wearing a skirt or suit while pedalling flamboyantly through the city.

City cycling is all about getting around in seemingly casual style. Sitting in café table by the pavement can be best of the places spotting stylish urban pedallers.

If one wants to discover how the real urbanists cycle, one must travel to Amsterdam or Copenhagen. Both cities have more than 30 % of cycling modal share according to the European Cyclicts’ Federation. It means that over one third of all the trips made in the city has done with bicycles. It means a lot of everyday bicyclists and a lot of experience of functionality and comfortableness of urban cycling.

Traffic is a big deal when it comes to real estate development. Residents are almost always concerned about the additional traffic that a development might bring to their community. And who can really blame them. They're frustrated by traffic as it is in the city and so they naturally assume that more residents in their community will translate into more cars on the road.

But as natural as this reaction might seem, I don't believe that opposing intensification is the right long-term solution. In fact, I would argue that the question of traffic is a bit of a red herring. Because as Toronto's Chief Planner Jennifer Keesmaat explains in this blog post, density can actually go a long way to reducing traffic congestion. And it does that by placing people closer to where they work, and by creating an environment that's more conducive to other forms of mobility: walking, biking, and public transport.

So instead of becoming fixated on traffic, I think there's another, perhaps more relevant, question that we should be asking ourselves: Will this development, over the longer term, help to encourage a modal split that leads to more transit usage and less driving?

Because if it doesn't, well then we're not doing anything to correct the problem we already have. In fact, if we don't allow intensification to happen, it means we're simply pushing demand outwards, horizontally. And the more you push people out of a city, the more likely they are to drive. In which case we're only delaying the inevitable -- which is more traffic.