Urban planners and architects have a vital role to play in turning Australian cities into bicycle friendly environments, according to a visiting Danish expert.
“One of the barriers is that the infrastructure provided is not really coherent, you have to work well on providing infrastructure for bicycles, especially safe infrastructure,” said Niels Tørsløv, traffic director for the City of Copenhagen (Denmark).
“You need safe infrastructure - because otherwise you will only have the very courageous young bike riders and you will never make it into a mainstream issue.”
Tørsløv, who started his career as a landscape architect, before working on the design of recreational landscapes, pedestrian streets and urban space design, said bicycles play an important role in increasing the number of people in urban areas and open spaces.
“A greater number of bicycles, means a greater number of people in the street, this of course exposes them to urban living and creates a nice safe feeling to be in the city where a lot of people are visible and exposed to city life and not hidden in cars.”
In his homeland of Copenhagen, 36 per cent of all people arriving at workplaces or educational institutions travel on bikes.
However, this has led to issues on what to do with the bicycles once they have reached their destination.
“In Copenhagen we have an enormous amount of bikes and its really becoming a mess, so what we are planning to do is design new bicycle parking facilities- some of them underground.”
While Melbourne has potential to increase its bicycle capabilities, Tørsløv said this would require some tough decisions.
“It’s a matter of how you allocate space between buildings; you have to face some tough choices sometimes — between car parking space and bicycle lanes. Not that easy always.”
