Friday, May 14, 2010

cycling evidence


We all see cycling porn shots of Holland and other European countries. A favorite is to show a gizillion bikes parked outside a train station or on a central square.

This Ottawa picture is taken up close, so the whole thing is filled with a sea of parked bikes. Alas, the sea does not continue out of the frame, this is all there were. It's a exposure of cycles, but really our bounty is modest.

Next time I get into the Constitution Square garage, I will take a picture of the ever-increasing size of the popular indoor cycle parking garage there. It's a well-endowed cycle parking lot.

I suspect people from a very poor country are impressed by our large parking lots full of cars at big box malls. Certainly car aquisition rates high on newcomers' priority lists. But for jaded Canadians, large parking lots are not something to celebrate, but to lament.

Last time I was in Den Hague in Holland I felt rather repulsed by the sea of cycles parked outside. It was out of control, a mess of bikes. In some European cities, the shear mass of parked and abandoned bikes becomes an eyesore, a trip hazard, visual clutter ... rather like our car parking lots. We have to be careful what we wish for.

2 comments:

  1. My favourite "Cycling porn" picture is one I took myself, of literally 1000+ bicycles parked outside the main factory of Audi in Ingolstadt. That's right, people who put together cars for a living commute to work by bicycle. Only in Europe. The pic is here...

    http://wandel.ca/pic.cgi?17b3c080

    Markus

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  2. I have a 'cycling porn' shot from outside a train station in Hiratsuka, Japan, where I lived for a couple of years around 2001 - a shot from two floors up of a parking-lot-sized space so tangled with bikes (and the occasional Vespa) that you couldn't imagine how you would ever get a single bike extracted from the inner rows... I was almost appalled by it myself, so I can relate to the reaction. But then, Japan is also where they developed the automated, underground bike storage space...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE4fvwTBtno

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