Café Racer: An Alive Place

I never met the victims of the Café Racer shootings, but I knew a few of them by sight. Café Racer is my neighborhood coffee shop, just a few blocks away from the house where Kristen and I live, and every once in a while I would walk over there to read and I’d see the regulars sitting on their stools, chatting with whoever was behind the bar at the time. Joe Albanese and Drew Keriakedes were particularly memorable characters.

I didn’t know those people personally but I do know the space. Café Racer is a neighborhood gem and is obviously a labor of love. It has the kind of character that cannot be manufactured, but rather accumulates over time like the patina on an old wooden bannister. It feels alive. Which is why, once my initial shock at the news of the shootings had passed, I realized that I was grieving not only for the murdered human beings but also for the space. This maniac came into a beautiful place—a place that sheltered a unique social ecosystem—and he defiled it. He killed my neighbors and splashed my favorite local spot with their blood. I harbor a great, primal anger over this.

An open letter from staff assures us that Café Racer will survive this shooting. In fact just the other day Kristen and I noticed that the piles of memorial flowers had been removed from the front of the establishment, and we could see people working inside. I hope it happens soon. This whole sad story has reminded me just how precious places like Café Racer are, and that they need our support to thrive. It has reminded me not to take them for granted. 

More evidence of a distorted taxi marketplace

NYTimes: 2 Taxi Medallions Sell for $1 Million Each

Why are taxis so expensive?

I wonder this every time I’m planning a night out with friends. It’s stunning. TaxiFareFinder.com quotes a taxi ride from the University District in Seattle to Downtown Bellevue at $28.59, or about $1.70 per minute including a 15% tip. At that rate, an hour’s worth of travel would cost about $101—a rate closer to some lawyers’ fees than to other, comparable point-to-point transportation services. Zipcar, a subscription-based car rental company, charges $7.75 an hour for its basic vehicles, which includes fuel and insurance. Zipcar subscribers must drive themselves, of course, but the cost gap between a car-sharing service like Zipcar and a taxi ride—over $90 per hour, based on my calculations—seems too large to be explained solely by the driver’s wage. According the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics the 2010 median wage for taxi drivers in the Seattle metropolitan area was just $10.39.

It’s a shame that taxis cost so much. Cabs fill an important niche in the ecosystem of transportation choices, providing on-demand, point-to-point service, useful for time-sensitive trips, or those involving cargo. If taxis were more affordable, more people might choose to use them instead of committing to the fixed costs—and temptation to drive—presented by an extra car. Having traveled overseas, I know that paratransit (the variety of services that fall between the private automobile and the conventional bus) can represent a much bigger slice of the transportation pie than is the case here in Seattle. In Mexico City 73% of all transit trips are completed using paratransit. In the Puget Sound region, taxi, shuttles, and wheelchair-compatible vans serve just 1.5% of all trips. I am guessing that for most people, taxis are too expensive to be useful as anything beyond the occasional high-value trip.

To satisfy my curiosity about taxis’ price point in our part of the world, I started looking deeper into the issue, suspecting that our regulatory environment might contribute to their cost. Seattle, like many U.S. cities, limits the number of taxicab licenses. In 2010 there were 659 outstanding licenses, or about 1.1 per 1000 Seattle residents. Basic microeconomic theory holds that in a perfectly competitive marketplace, supply limitations distort the supply curve and lead to higher prices for consumers. In the conceptual graph below, the solid magenta line shows the how the market might respond if entry into the taxicab market was unrestricted: as the market rate for a cab ride increases more people start driving, attracted by the potential profits. Eventually supply and demand come into balance, yielding a price of P1.

If we restrict the supply of taxicabs by limiting the number of licenses, then we might experience the situation represented by the dashed portion of the magenta line. Past a certain quantity of taxi service demanded, the market cannot respond with more cabs (because the City won’t allow it). So the supply curve goes vertical, and consumers pay the higher rate represented by point P2. The horizontal difference between points 1 and 2 is what economists call a shortage.

Shortages reduce the overall well-being of consumers (their “utility” in economics-speak) since the service is now more expensive than it should be. That leaves buyers with less money for other things they might want or need. Some cab drivers will enjoy a windfall, assuming they were able to get a license cheaply. But as time goes on, drivers are no longer buy a license from the city; the city-bought licenses, available for a nominal fee, have been snapped up. The only licenses a newcomer can buy are from other cab drivers in the secondary market. The price of those licenses rises until the cost balances out the wage gains resulting from the restricted supply (currently, licenses in Seattle can cost up to $100,000). If we were to tally the utility losses suffered by consumers and the utility gains made by those lucky early cab drivers, we would find that the losses outweigh the gains, meaning that society is overall poorer as a result.

Of course, all of this depends on an assumption that I slipped into the beginning of this discussion: that the taxicab market is perfectly competitive. A perfectly competitive marketplace exists when

• There are enough buyers and sellers that no individual can affect market price
  
•  Firms (in this case license holders) are free to enter and exit the market
  
• The product is homogeneous
  
• Buyers have perfect information about the product (like the comfort and safety of the ride).

In the real world, almost no industry meets all of these conditions, although a few, like the agricultural commodity sector, come close. Market failures occur when a given marketplace does not meet one or more of these conditions, and the presence of market failures is a commonly used rationale for government intervention in a sector. If the taxicab market indeed suffers from market failures, then the regulation we see today might be justified. I was particularly interested in what market failures might explain our prohibition on new cab licenses in Seattle.

In the coming paragraphs I will show you that the taxicab market indeed suffers from market failures. And while many of the regulations currently imposed on the taxi market can be explained by these failures, I am not convinced that supply limitations—my prime suspect for the high cost of taxis—are justified.

It turns out that when we refer to the “taxi market,” we’re actually talking about three related sub-markets. The cruising or hailing market consists of taxis that drive the streets looking for customers (or fares). The fare hails the cab, which pulls to the curb and picks them up. The taxi stand market consists of rows of cabs that wait for customers, usually outside major origins like train stations or airports. By tradition, the drivers guide the fare to the first cab in the line, after which the remaining cabs pull forward. Finally there is the dispatch market, in which customers call in a request for a cab. The dispatcher sends a cab to pick up the customer. These three markets have distinct economic characteristics that prevent them from functioning as perfectly competitive markets in the absence of regulation.

In the cruising market, an individual cannot easily compare rates between taxis. Waiting for a second taxi to drive by takes time. The customer does not know whether that second cab is nearby, or how long it might take to arrive. The customer cannot keep the first cab on hand, in case it turns out that the second one costs more. Then there is the awkwardness of turning away the first driver, if the second turns out to be a better deal. Without the ability to easily compare rates, the customer has no way of knowing whether the advertised rate is reasonable. This lack of price information is a market failure known as costly search, and it violates the perfect information condition of the perfectly competitive market, described above. This can lead to monopolistic pricing practices. Indeed, at the moment that the fare is considering whether to hire the taxi, there is only one firm ready to provide the service. Not only does the unregulated taxicab operator have little incentive to lower their prices in this situation, they in fact have an incentive to increase rates late at night, for example, or during foul weather.

One might expect that the taxi stand would be free from the costly search problem, and it is true that customers in that market segments can more easily compare prices. But there are barriers to competition here, as well. At the taxi stand, customers are pressured to take the first cab in the line. As long as this tradition persists, comparison shopping is at least awkward, or at most impossible if the drivers refuse to break ranks.

Of the three market segments listed above—hailing, stand, and dispatch—the dispatch market is the one least afflicted by market failures. Assuming that there is more than one taxi company to choose from, the customer is free to search out the best deal by calling around or using the internet. The ability of the customer to comparison shop should theoretically bring down prices by rewarding those companies and individual operators who, through efficiency improvements, are able to offer the lowest rates. But the dispatch market has flaws as well, flaws that are held in common by all three markets. First, a second information problem arises from the characteristics of the service itself. A trip in a taxi is known as a “credence good”—a good the quality of which is difficult or impossible for the customer to gauge before the purchase. For example, a given cabbie might be a frightening driver, but you wouldn’t know until you began the trip. Branded fleets (Yellow Cab, Checker Cab, etc) go some way toward ameliorating this by introducing accountability—you can call the company and complain—but the root problem remains. Second, the literature suggests that in taxi markets where pricing is not regulated, operators tend to adopt complex pricing structures that make it difficult for customers to compare costs.

In addition to the issues above which interfere with competition, all three taxicab markets exhibit externalities, or impacts on society that are not reflected in the price of the good, assuming that the market is free to set the price. Externalities are another kind of market failure that governments use to justify intervention in markets; when left uncorrected by public policy they reduce the overall well-being of society by encouraging too much or too little of a good. A positive externality is present in the dispatch market: the larger the fleet, the more valuable it is to a potential customer, since there is a greater chance that a member of the fleet will be nearby when the customer calls. Without intervention—such as a requirement that all cabbies be a member of an association—these fleets will not reach the size necessary to provide the maximum benefit to consumers. Negative externalities include collisions caused by taxicab drivers and congestion, although I would argue that taxi trips tend to be high value, and that if regulation is warranted to prevent congestion it should be targeted instead toward private leisure trips. In addition, the argument that taxis cause congestion should be weighed against the increase in private auto trips that may result from a limitation on the number of taxis.

So far we’ve covered two kinds of market failures that spur regulation in the taxicab industry: competition flaws and externalities. Here are a few other issues that don’t fit neatly into those two categories.

Driving a taxicab requires relatively little specialized skill, and so incumbent drivers in an unregulated environment face stiff wage competition from entrants. Some claim that the low wages resulting from competition are unfair to incumbent drivers and are a justification for limiting the number of taxicab licenses. The idea is that each driver gets a bigger slice of the “pie,” the pie being total industry revenues. But in theory, the act of liming supply will shrink the size of the pie, even as each individual driver gets a bigger slice. This has ramifications for the public and the economy. With fewer drivers on the road, we face longer wait times and lower business tax revenues. The governmental limitation of competition in order to advance the commercial interests of a special group is termed “regulatory capture” by economists, and regarded as a form of government failure that reduces the overall economic wellbeing of a society.

As mentioned above, once a system like this is put into place, dismantling it is difficult, since new cabbies will have sunk considerable sums into buying their licenses.  As I write this, we are seeing an example of cab drivers fighting to retain such a protectionist policy: the Greek state is attempting to open its taxicab markets to competition, a condition of the bailout loans, apparently, and in response cab drivers are staging strikes and rolling protests across Athens. Most paid dearly for the licenses they own now, licenses that would be next to worthless if issued freely by the government. This issue of economic incumbency is the heart of the matter for income restrictions, and I will return to it later.

Non-market aspects of the taxicab market are also used as justification for regulation. Entry regulation is regarded as a way to limit aggressive sales behavior by competing cab drivers. Also, in theory, unregulated taxis will gravitate to high yield locations and to ignore areas with low demand, a practice known as “cream-skimming.” This practice interferes with the social goal of cross-subsidizing trips in low-demand areas with profits from high-demand areas, and can be the target of regulation on equity grounds.

As I said at the start of this post, taxis are heavily regulated in Seattle, and in many places around the world. With the economic characteristics of the industry’s three sub-markets on the table, let us now take a look at some of the most common forms of regulation, and see how well of a job they do at advancing the public interest.

First, we have safety and quality standards for taxis and taxis drivers. These include special driver safety training for cabbies, vehicle inspection regimes, and the requirement to belong to branded associations. The latter seeks to promote standards of conduct and to reduce wait times through economies of scale. In my reading I found that economists were supportive of these sorts of regulations, since they give customers a measure of certainty about the sort of ride they are able to take. Since vehicle safety and driver competency are otherwise invisible to the prospective customer, the government intervenes, and communicates the results of safety and quality testing to the customer through an official license on the dashboard.

A second common form of regulation on the taxi markets is the imposition of fare controls. Like control on supply itself, interference in suppliers’ ability to set prices can lead to surpluses or shortages: think gas lines in the 1970s. So I expected to find that economists were united against the idea of price controls in the taxi market. Not so. Some support governments’ efforts to establish uniform prices, the rationale being that in a free market, cabs tend to adopt confusing pricing structures that are difficult to compare, and that cab drivers gouge customers when they are desperate for a ride. I find the first point reasonable, if such complex structures were in fact to appear. But my personal experience abroad, where taxis and tuk-tuks competed in wild, wooly freedom, suggests that a complex fare structure would scare off prospective customers, and that flat rates prevail. Instead of setting a price cap (which dampens the market’s response to additional demand from customers), why not simply require that cabbies display their rates conspicuously, in a standard format, and let them set their own prices? Then if the going rate should rise, more drivers would serve that time or location, attracted by the potential for profits, which in turn would put downward pressure on price.

Entry restriction—limitations on the total number of licensees who can operate in a given jurisdiction—are a third type of regulation that is common within taxicab markets. Unlike the previous two regulatory frameworks, economists, as a whole, are much less favorable toward entry restrictions. The reason is that entry restrictions appear to be driven not by market failures in the taxicab submarkets, but by the desire of existing drivers to limit the competition they face. My research supported this contention; I read of several cases in which drivers and taxi associations organized to lobby for a restricted licensing regime. At this point in my reading I believed I had reached the heart of the matter. With economic theory predicting higher prices under supply limitation, and the near-consensus among economists that entry restrictions were a form of protectionism, it seemed that deregulation (at least with respect to supply) would bring prices down, reduce wait times, and make taxis a viable form of transportation for more people. Real world examples of deregulation, however, show that the issue is not so simple.

In a 1987 article for the Journal of Transport Economics & Policy, Roger Teal evaluated the impacts of cab market deregulation in six U.S. cities, including Seattle, which had experimented with loosening its entry restrictions in the years prior. Some of the results were expected, others surprising. In every city that reformed its regulations to allow free entry, the size of the taxi market in terms of the number of drivers increased substantially, between 18% and 127%. Turnover appeared to be substantial among small operators (usually individual owner-drivers), while entry and exit among larger firms was limited. There were not many new entrants into the dispatch market due to strict service standards that remained on the books, and due to the high cost of entry; it takes a lot of money and time to establish a new taxi service brand and recruit enough drivers to make your business viable. Response times improved slightly, while refusal rates (the frequency that a customer is turned down by the driver) increased. What surprised economists most, however, was the increase in rates charged. In every city studied, rates increased in real terms, with higher increases at cab stands than in the telephone market due to the former’s inelastic demand. Teal suggests that the increase in rates may have been due to pent up inflation that had been restrained by price controls in the past, and that the prices charged by cabbies were justified given their expenses.

A more recent experiment with taxicab deregulation took place in Ireland, where the country’s regulatory agencies lifted entry controls on the taxi markets following a High Court judgment in 2000. Price caps remained. Economist Sean Barrett examined the aftereffects of this reform, and wrote them up in a 2010 article for Economic Affairs. Like the cities documented by Teal, Ireland did not see major price drops. But there were a number of other positive effects. By 2008 taxicab numbers had increased five-fold compared to pre-deregulation figures, and waiting times had decreased: the percentage of customers waiting ten minutes or less for a cab increased from 58.3% pre-regulation to 85.7% in 2008. Goodbody Economic Consultants, hired to study the effects of Ireland’s deregulation, valued the time saved by Dublin cab riders at €780 million country-wide for the year 2008. The problems predicted by deregulation skeptics failed to materialize. Disorder on the roads did not occur, unless one counts rolling protests mounted by incumbent drivers. Order was also maintained at taxi stands, with no systematic fighting among drivers. Taxi drivers did not engage in “cream skimming”; outlying areas continued to be served. Vehicle standards remained high, along with customer satisfaction.

These, and the other deregulation examples I reviewed suggest that opening the taxi market is not a sure-fire way to bring down prices, but it would still be a net gain for a city, creating hundreds of new jobs and making taxi travel faster and more convenient. It is still a mystery to me, however, why cab prices are so out of sync with comparable travel options. It could be that current prices reflect the true cost of operating a cab. Or it may be that competition between cabs is muted by customers’ inability to quickly and easily compare prices. I do not know. Perhaps you would like to offer an explanation in the comments.

If Seattle did decide to ease or eliminate its restriction of taxicab supply we would need to decide how to address the impacts to individual license holders. To those people suddenly able to find work as cabbies, of course, the financial impacts will be dramatic and positive. But the Irish example shows us that the easing of entry restrictions is ruinous to incumbent drivers who have purchased scarce, expensive licenses on the secondary market. In Ireland it was these drivers who took to the streets, outraged that the government would first erect a regulatory regime that forced them to pay a small fortune for a license, and then turn around and render the license worthless. Sean Barrett, one of the economists I mentioned earlier, is unsympathetic. He regards those purchases not as an investment, but as a bet that the government would continue to regulate the market the way it always had. If that bet failed to pay off, well, better luck next time. I see things a little differently. Driving a cab is a job that almost anyone can do, and—based on my experience—is an economic stepping stone for immigrants who do not have many employment options. I am sure that they would have preferred not to spend $100,000 on a license if they could have avoided it, and so it does not seem fair to me to pull the rug out from under them. At the same time, continuing the current structure in order to shield members of a mature industry from competition is not good public policy. It distorts the economy, eliminating jobs and reducing access to a valuable service.

Ireland offers one model for how to balance these public and private interests. In 2002 they established a Taxi Hardship Panel to distribute public funds to licensees who had suffered particularly serious financial side effects as a result of deregulation. 

Grids, novelty

Last fall I had the chance to study urban design at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.  It was my first experience at an architecture school, and the contrast with the UW’s planning department was stark.  Rather than the practical, almost technocratic bent of planning school, the Academy encouraged students to approach the process of urban design like a painter or sculptor would approach their art.  This has its ups and downs.  On one hand, you can’t build delightful urban places by applying a template.  You need the right brain for that.  On the other hand, treating a neighborhood like a canvass can have unfortunate consequences.

For example, I noticed more than once that my colleagues resisted the idea of laying out streets in a grid pattern.  They considered them boring and repetitious.  Instead they gravitated toward organic forms: snaking paths, or angular, chaotic networks.

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition No. 8

I’ll admit that these plans looked nice from above, when viewed in plan.  Rather like good pieces of abstract art, which I’m sure, at some level, they were inspired by.  But I had to come to the defense of the grid.  When you’re walking down a street, you’re not comprehending the neighborhood’s entire street network at once.  From an aesthetic poi­nt of view it doesn’t matter if the next road over is parallel to the one you’re on, or veers off at an angle.  You’re looking at the shops, the plants, the pavement in front of you.  And (usually) you’re finding your way, walking with a destination in mind, which you may not have visited before.  It’s hard to find somewhere new when you keep encountering irregular intersections, and when there’s not a straight path to where you’re going.  I think the novelty of living amidst a whimsical street plan would get old after the 15^th or 20^th time you get lost, or the umpteenth call from a lost guest trying to find your house.

Piet Mondrian, Composition With
Red, Yellow and Blue

Grids have their downsides, of course.  You might find them monotonous if you’re behind the wheel of a car.  They tend not to be responsive to topography.  Assuming they’re fine-grained, they necessitate a lot of pavement, which is bad for water quality.  But there are ways to deal with these problems.  You can lay out larger blocks and section them with pedestrian and bicycle paths.  You can install green infrastructure for stormwater treatment.  And if you allow sufficient density, the water quality impacts of the grid are balanced by the mitigation of sprawl.

The main point here is not that creative street layouts are a bad thing, just that they should be considered from the point of view of the average user.  If you’re ever in a position to judge an urban design proposal and the designer tells you that a regular street layout—or any traditional feature, for that matter—would be “boring,” think carefully about the day-to-day users of the space, and about what long-term value novelty would bring to the project.

Nifty tools

ArcGIS can be slow.  Why not use these tools when you need that quick measurement?

• Distance Calculator
• Area Calculator
• Find Altitude

Way to go, Daft Logic!

Happiness is in the eye of the socket

Denmark is the happiest country in the world. So claims a 2006 report written by Adrian White at the University of Leicester. Recently, the Gallup World poll again put Denmark on top of the list. Why are Danes so happy (or content, as some assert)? Is it the social safety net? Is it the time off? Is it the social ties?

We can never know the answers to these questions. Never know them, that is, unless someone choses to read the report's results section and methodology, or a good analysis of it.  Uh, yeah.  So.  Short of that, let me offer you my theory about why the Danes are happy.

It's their electrical outlets.

A conversation with Søren Elle

Copenhagen wasn't always the world capital of bicycling.  In the early 1970s she faced the same automobile-related pressures that many other cities struggle with today: noise, pollution, congestion, and deteriorating street life.  Traffic planner Søren Elle began work in 1972, and over the past 38 years he has overseen the transformation of Copenhagen into a model of sustainable transportation policy, including the installation of hundreds of miles of bicycle tracks.


I recently had the opportunity to speak with Søren about his experiences, and about some of the challenges that Copenhagen faces going forward.  This is a transcription of that conversation.


My questions are in italics.

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DevelopersWhen you’re working on bicycle projects in places like Ørestad, where there’s a developer who has a plan, what’s your relationship like with those developers and how much influence do you have over the final design of the streets and the buildings?

I wouldn’t say “I,” I would say “we” as the Municipality of Copenhagen.  When we want to develop new areas we talk all the way, the discussions with the developers all way through the project, designing the project to fit into our traffic policy and details.  In the end we have to give planning permission, and we make the final [inaudible] and do exactly what we want to in the question of bicycle tracks, bicycle parking, everything about bicycling.  So it’s a nice conversation through a long period.  We do recommend it to the last meter, the last square meter of bicycle facilities. 

Does that include facilities in the building?

Yes.  Primarily parking.

And that’s overseen by your department or another one?

No, it’s not my department, it’s the City of Copenhagen, which is split up into many, and the city plan, the municipal plan for Copenhagen is designed here, in my department.  Another department, Traffic and the Environment, design the details of these policies, given the Lord Mayor’s proposals get a majority in the local parliament.

PoliticalHas that been a problem in the past, getting majority approval for designs or projects that you think are good?  Are there examples where that didn’t happen?

There are opposition against it.  For example, if you built bicycle tracks along a shopping street, we often find the room in the street for this two and a half meter wide cycle track by taking away the parking possibilities in front of the shops.  So the shop keepers are not for this plan.  But the majority in the parliament is for the plan.  So we build those cycle tracks then in Copenhagen.

I imagine that’s helped by the fact that so many people here bicycle.  When you first started working on installing cycle tracks in Copenhagen, was there that kind of political support or was that a harder fight then?

We’ve been very lucky.  We’ve had close to consensus about the policy in Copenhagen since the Second World War.  So it’s really easy to be a traffic planner in that aspect.  You have to make a lot of good designs to get approved by a majority in the parliament, but it’s been a very positive approach to anything about cycling.  So I started off here 38 years ago, and since then we’ve doubled the bicycle traffic, it was at a high level before that, but now we more than doubled it.  So it has not been a big problem.  But I should say that if you start off by this kind of planning in any other city you’ll see some problems because…during the war everybody was cycling.  You just took the train or the bike.  Most used the bike.  We had huge amounts of bikers in 1945.  We were a very poor country, and we had a tax policy so we had a special offer for you if you wanted to buy a car: you can do that, you pay for two or three cars.  So for a poor population getting that they should pay for three cars, nobody bought a car.  We had a very, and still have a very low car ownership in Copenhagen.  That’s a gift if you want to improve bicycling facilities.  So in the lowest point in 1975, thirty years after the world war, we still had a lot of cycling.  By then we enforced the ideas of putting more cycle tracks and so on, and raised since 1975 to 2000…we doubled the amount of bicycling traffic.  Most of this period the car ownership didn’t grow.   We’re still a poor city, poor inhabitants, we still have to pay for three cars when we buy one.  So for 25 years, from ’70 to ’95 we had no raise in car ownership in the City of Copenhagen, and we had no raise in the traffic amount in the streets, the car traffic.  But we doubled the bicycling traffic.  So that’s a very special situation.  So if we had this success with cycling traffic in Copenhagen, we couldn’t just go to your city and do that because you might have 1% or 3% cycle traffic and we started off with a lot more than that. 

That was going to be one of my questions; back home we have something of a Catch-22 where people don’t feel safe enough to ride, and so the rate is very low, in the single digits.  But because the rate is low, elected officials are reluctant to pay for additional facilities because they say “Why?  There’s not very many people out there.”   Do you have any advice for bicycle supporters who want to…

Break the ice?

Exactly.

I think what they’ve done in New York is fantastic.  Bloomberg’s cycle tracks all over Manhattan is just fantastic.  But nobody uses them because in New York you don’t own a bike, you don’t know how to use it.  So I go walking in Manhattan and I see maybe ten bikers in my whole day.  And in the same area, the same size, downtown Copenhagen I might see 50,000 cyclists.  They did the best they could and made cycle tracks but they still have this break the ice problem, so you make it common to own a bike and use a bike.  In think in Copenhagen between 95 and 98% of Copenhageners own a bike and they all know how to use it.  20% of people own a car.  So that’s why a bike is the most normal way to get around in Copenhagen, so it’s a very different situation from starting off at zero and…whew!  How do you convince people that the bike is a good idea, and especially how do you convince bikers that it will be safe in the future.  It’s relatively safe in Copenhagen but you know as a car driver in Copenhagen when you turn right that you have to look back over your shoulder and there will be cyclists.  You can be sure there will be cyclists.  In your city you might be surprised if you saw a cyclist.  So it’s more dangerous, and very few cyclists, and some of those might be hit by cars.  It happens in Copenhagen, but compared to the amount of cycle traffic it’s few very.

SuburbsI assume in the suburbs of Copenhagen bicycling is less common, perhaps still quite common.  I don’t know where your jurisdiction exactly ends, but are there different strategies that you use in the less dense areas than in the city center?

No, not in Copenhagen, but the neighboring municipalities have the same strategies: bicycling tracks along all major roads.  But of course the distances get longer and car ownership might be 50% or 100% higher than we have in the City of Copenhagen, so they have a different modal split, and the further you get out into the finger system you have a modal split more like you have in the other countries.  So the parts of this region that are far away from the finger tips you have maybe 80% car modal split and 10% public transport and 10% cycling or something like that.  In the city of Copenhagen we have, if you take all trips, including all trips in and out of Copenhagen we have about 50% car traffic and 25% public transport and 25% cycling.  But if you look at the trips inside Copenhagen, and how do Copenhageners go to work in Copenhagen, then the cyclists’ share of the transport is 59%, close to 60%, so it’s just so common to do that.  And most amazing I think is that half of those who actually own a car—there are only one out of five that own a car—but half of those leave their car and use the bike for their daily transport.  The car is for the weekend.

FactorsI was interested to read on your website that the cyclists who were surveyed said that the number one reason they rode was because it’s easy and convenient.  I was a little surprised, because I thought that money would have played a bigger role in that choice.  Do you think that has to do with [car] parking?  I was thinking about that question of convenience and wondering if that’s because parking is scarce.

Well I had a trip… very few times a year I use my car, never for day to day transport.  Sunday I had a transport from my daughter’s old apartment to her new apartment within the dense part of the city.  One and a half hours it took me by car.  On a Sunday!  I could have done that in two and a half minutes on a bike. 

So it’s traffic?

It’s so much easier, yeah!  And there’s a lot of road work…we’re building Metro lines all over.  There’s a lot of road works.  And then it was impossible to find a parking and so on.  But it’s so much more convenient.  You like this, you use your body, and it’s the only sport I have, it’s one half hour in the morning and one half hour in the evening.

Of course.  Clear your head…

Yes, clear your head.   It’s funny.  You never have to wait for a parking place or public transport or anything.  You just go, you park your bike just outside.  You don’t have to look around, you just park. 

FundingCopenhagen has some ambitious plans for increasing the mode split and adding facilities.  How are these plans to be funded?  Are they currently funded and is there any question that they will be?

It’s very different from Mr. Bloomberg’s New York.  We have to pay for our cycle lanes by public money, by tax money.  Some of the other things we do to lower our car transport is to raise public transport by building Metro lines.  We do that in cooperation with the Danish state.  It’s also partly financed by the income from the ticket sales.  The cycle tracks and things are paid by tax money.

And that’s funded at 100%?  The plan you have, it’s a go?

Yeah. 

Great.  That’s been a problem in Seattle.  They have a plan, maybe not as ambitious, but pretty reasonable.  But the money isn’t there.

Yeah.  But there’s an agreement every year, the last five, six, seven years to raise the amount of money they use for cycle tracks, and it’s huge around town, you can really make a lot of bicycle tracks.  It takes a lot of time to plan it because you have to look after the cyclists, the pedestrians, the bus stops, the bus driving, the cars, and so on.  It’s not always easy but it’s a go.  There’s money for it.

BusesThat's fantastic.  You mentioned coordinating with buses, and trucks for instance.  What are some challenges you’ve had with those users of the road, and maybe some groups that represent them, and how have you addressed those challenges?

Well I think there might be groups that would like we didn’t have any bicycles at all, and to rebuild all the streets for cars, but they are not very big [inaudible] in Copenhagen.  Our main problem with lorries is that they might come from other countries and they do not know that when you turn right it’s dangerous to cyclists or the pedestrians.  So I think the former Lord Mayor, who started in 2006, the first year we had three of those accidents.  A lorry turned right and killed a child.  So we really had to do something to try to find some policies to avoid that.  And it’s really hard.  Some of our big crossing sections are rebuilt now, so they have a bicycles only phase.  So if I just go ahead on a bike I have my own green light.  And after that it’ll be the right turning light for the cars.  So we separate.  Normally situation is you all get green, direction north, so some are going north and others are turning right, to the east.  But you can separate that.  It reduces capacity to some degree, but it’s more safe.  I think that’s the way to do it.  Because you’re on the bike lane, which is separated from the car lanes with the curb and a difference of 15 centimeters, you feel safe, and you are pretty safe.  But in the crossings, the big signalized crossings, that’s where the accidents happen.  And if you have this conflict between turning wheels and bikes, it could be dangerous.  It’s also very hard for some places in the city for car drivers to turn right or the bus drivers to turn right, because there are so many bikes, and you have to wait and wait and wait.  So again it’s better to separate it, I think, the signals.  And reduce capacity a bit.  And then we’ve had too much success on this policy so we’ve had to rebuild some of the cycle tracks, for lots of money, 15 or 20 years ago.

To make them wider?

Yes, to make them wider.

What’s the preferred width today?

We started off normally with two and a half meters in each direction.  Some narrow streets we reduce it to two meters.  It’s terrible, the traffic.  We would like some of those to go to three or four meters.  And then we’d have to take away the cars.  Most of the cars.

SitingHow do you think factors outside of the road itself affect bicycling?

We built cycle lanes in Copenhagen since 1909.  More than 100 years.  Every year.  So it’s not like we suddenly decided to build things like that.  Like they did in Bloomberg’s New York.  It’s been all the way, through the centuries.  But in ’75 we pushed for better cycling politics, we discussed the difference between the Danish and the Swedish way to do it.  In Sweden they’ve built cycle lanes totally separated from the big streets, in green areas, though parks, where there’s room for that.  So we could have that situation where as a car driver you go directly from your dwelling area to your job on a big street, very fast.  And as a cyclist you have to go some routes behind and everything [makes a back-and-forth gesture].  Could be nice, to go some green routes, but it takes time, so we continued the old policy just to build on any street with some car traffic some cycle lanes.  Because that’s often the shortest way between A and B.  And in these streets often were shopping streets also where you could do your shopping.  We took away the parking possibilities in front of the shop and gave them a cycle lane with 10,000 cyclists on it, and they shop.  They shouldn’t be so scared about this but they are.

Unless they sell refrigerators.

Even that!  I’ve seen that too.  We’ve got special bikes for any purpose.  

                                    

So we added a policy of building green bike routes through the parks, combining parks and nice areas behind the big streets to give a possibility of going through a green, combined with the possibility of talking to your neighbor cyclist because on the big streets with lots of car traffic there’s a lot of noise and it’s hard to have a nice conversation.  So we started off building these very expensive special cycle routes, we had a plan for many kilometers of those, and we’ll add some of those, but it’s very expensive.  I think the best thing has been added to this cycle policy lately has been that we build bridges over barriers, so making the opposite situation of the one I told you about in Sweden versus Denmark.  We have situations now where you have a new developed area on one side of the harbor and a shopping center on the other side of the harbor and there’s a bridge for cyclists and pedestrians.  No cars.  So the absolute shortest way to get to and from is by bike.  So a shortcut where the other ones don’t get this shortcut.  That’s number one, that’s a very good idea.  We will build, in I think next year four more bridges and in the future even more bridges crossing the harbor.  To make it the fastest way to go from A to B.

We measure this sort of thing.  Have you seen this?  This is the bicycle account, have you seen it?

Yes, I was looking at this earlier.  You sent me to the web page…

Yes, so we try to measure that every year or every other year, to ask the bikers and other users: ‘how do you think about it?’  What do you think of Copenhagen as a cycling city, what do you think of the condition of the cycle tracks and so on, do you feel safe, what they like.  And then try to get a bit better on each one.  I think that’s an important part of the cycle policy.  Important to observe whether we are doing better or not.  What are the problems.  Then there’s a union of cyclists in Denmark and Copenhagen also, so we have conversations with those, like what do you call those automobile associations in USA…?

Triple A.

Yeah, AAA.  Yes, we have the same thing for cyclists.  They have some ideas, some lists about what should be better.  But they are floating in success because everything they point at we just do!

[Laughs]

[Laughs] So it’s a very win-win situation.  So just go biking! 

I know in the US when planners want to change the width of roadways or affect the turn radii, for instance, often there’s a conflict with emergency vehicles, or the emergency services will say: ‘we need a very wide turn because our trucks need to get in.’  Do you have that issue here?  Are emergency services involved in street design? 

Oh yes, but I don’t think it’s such a big problem.  They can turn around a corner.  They operate in old, narrow streets every day; that’s what Copenhagen looks like.  But corners are a severe conflict between turning lorries, fire trucks, and buses and so on, and bikes.  How to see that, how [inaudible] to see that, a bike on your side.   Something that you couldn’t have seen.  And that’s quite dangerous.  Of course we had to make street design, so every lorry, every bus can turn around the corner and…hopefully he looks in his mirror before he turns. 

Does the city have, for the lack of a better word, a cookbook for street designs in different situations?  For example, if you know that you have an intersection and you have a certain number of lanes coming in, do you have a design template that you refer to, or is each intersection design…

I guess some of my colleagues in the Center for Traffic and the center for actually building these things, both in the Department of Traffic and the Environment have something like that.  I don’t know about it.  There might be, I’m sure there are some manuals.  But also there is a change in these things all the time.  I can imagine that first things in the crossing giving cyclists a special signal.  They have their own small red, yellow, green, and the green for cyclists goes two seconds before green for cars.  So the cyclist is in the crossing before the car driver starts off.  So he can see the cyclist.  Next phase was to shorten off the waiting lines for the cars so the last five or ten meters are for cyclists.  So a cyclist can go all the way to the light, to the crossing, but cars are going to stop some meters behind him.  And then they can see the cyclist.  And then third phase you can enlarge the waiting area for cyclists to be the half of the street so that they actually stop in front of the cars.  So even the cars heading right away have to wait until the cyclist has left the waiting area in front.  So they can be sure they can see the cyclist.

I don’t know that I have seen one of those yet in Copenhagen. 

Oh there are many of those.

There are? Okay, maybe I just didn’t notice.  Yeah, we call those bike boxes.  Is that the same?

SignalsYeah.  And then the later thing in the very big, dangerous crossing sections we have a policy of separating the signals, with different phases for right-turning cars and cycling drivers.   But we’re still improving it, and finding better and better, and we have a lot better accident situation now than we used to have.  When I started it was 120 killed per year in the capital, and now it’s about ten, twelve on the bad years.  Maybe five, eight in good years.  And they have a mode split like one third cyclists, one third pedestrians, and one third motorbikes.  So typically we have three killed as cyclists.  That’s three too many, but we have many streets with 20,000 cyclists per day.

If you think about the rate, it’s incredibly low.  Seattle gets maybe one cyclist killed per year, but it’s a city about half the size of Copenhagen [ed. This is incorrect.  The Copenhagen and Seattle cities proper are about the same size], but we have far fewer riders. 

[Chatter]

CurrentDo you have any final advice for me as I prepare to go back to the USA and change the world?

You should show them the film, I think I sent you on the website.  It’s a nice film.  Of course the film is made by someone who likes to bike, but many, many, many Copenhageners love to bike.  It’s fun, it’s healthy, it’s just…try it!  You’ll love it!  And then work to get better and better conditions to bikers.  I don’t think it’s easy.  You have some work in front of you.  Even my Swedish colleagues in the traffic planning were more used to biking than you might be in the States.  [Inaudible]  But you don’t mean that people with little children go by bike.  Most children families in Copenhagen do not have a car and they have an even more positive attitude to cycling than the average.  It’s okay, what’s the problem?  Even in the winter, yeah.  You just go by bike.

We had two problems, of course not so wonderful.  We had more and more car owners—it’s still a low figure, maybe 200 out of 1000 have a car.  But some of those car drivers, they go with their kids to the school in the morning, and kiss and ride, and go to their job.  That gives some car traffic around the schools that shouldn’t be there.  They should go by bike and teach their children to go by bike to the school.  And then maybe go back and get their car, I don’t know.  You have to really, really make campaigns to teach the parents.  You might have a car, you might go by car to job, but you should spend the ten minutes on your bike, with your kids to school.  That’s the way to go to school.  So when you’re ten years old you should be able to go by bike in Copenhagen. 

And the other challenge is that all those people coming from Turkey, or Pakistan, or Afghanistan come from cultures where girls are not allowed to bike.  It’s against something in their religion.  So these girls don’t bike.  So we have to do some special bike schools to teach them how to use a bike.  To teach them and their parents that it’s okay for a girl to go biking in Copenhagen, and that it’s important to do so.  If you want to be able to use the city you need to have a bike to get around.  So women from Third World countries and these parents, that’s a long challenge we have.  To make it even better.