For Marco te Brömmelstroet, the so-called cycling professor, good roads aren’t just about getting us from A to B.
“Where’s the greenery and the sense of social connectedness? Where can children walk freely, where can they play cricket on the street?” wonders te Brömmelstroet, who is on a speaking tour of Australia.
The Dutch social scientist and chair on Urban Mobility Futures at the University of Amsterdam could easily deliver the message that Australia’s cities should mimic his home town – arguably the global capital of cycling – by building more bike lanes.
But te Brömmelstroet wants Australians to arrive at the realisation themselves: that redesigning our streets for more bikes, pedestrians and non-car uses are logical answers to stubborn societal problems such as poor physical and mental health, road safety, traffic and even loneliness.
Rather than a turf war between cars and cyclists, te Brömmelstroet wants to draw attention to the cost of our “moto-normativity”, and how it’s at odds with one of the proudest parts our identity and the reputation we project to the world.
“It’s a very Australian idea to want to spend time outdoors in nature, but for so many suburbs here you have to get in a car to do that. I saw people driving [in inner Sydney], parking and getting out of their cars to do exercise here. That’s very sad.
“Streets here have become places that we see through the eyes of traffic, and this is a recent way of thinking because our streets for a long time have served many different purposes. They could be so much more but it’s been given away for the current system.”
Under the car-centric status quo, city and suburban streets are considered dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians. Safety fears prevent potential bike riders from taking it up as a form of transport.
Dedicated and protected bike lanes address many of those safety concerns, but trigger fury from residents and drivers. That fury has prevented cycling infrastructure from progressing in Australian cities, and even temporary lanes that popped up during the pandemic have been wound back.
“Promising bike lanes won’t win votes,” he said. “The point of the resistance and the vitriol shows we are framing it in the wrong way.”
Instead, te Brömmelstroet wants us to be discussing streets as places that can also be used to connect and unwind.
“Talking about lifestyle can help us to realise there’s much more to streets than just getting from A to B, and that cycling and walking … help us connect to each other and engage with the environment.
“When people are not in metal boxes but are meeting and looking at each other and acknowledging them, they have a higher sense of belonging, a higher sense of community and trust.”
Te Brömmelstroet believes even rusted-on cycling opponents can be won over to the cause of more bike lanes if they’re proposed as a balm to common concerns.
“We need to connect the dots for them … No one also wants to be stuck in traffic, no one wants mental health stress, no one wants their children to feel unsafe walking or riding their bikes to school, no one wants the elderly to feel trapped, no one wants endless sprawl,” he said.
Te Brömmelstroet has also come armed with answers to the feasibility of promoting biking in Australia’s largely car-dependent, sprawling cities.
When asked about Sydney’s hilly streets, te Brömmelstroet says:
“Paris is built on seven hills, so there goes that excuse.
“Yes, Sydney is more hectic [than Melbourne] and a real patchwork where you really have to know your way around …. [but] they’re not real reasons against cycling.”
He points to Paris as a model for Australian cities to aspire to. Once clogged with traffic, mayor Anne Hidalgo has waged a war on cars in recent years – including the removal of thousands of parking spots, the introduction of hundreds of bike lanes, planting of thousands of trees and pedestrianisation of certain streets.
Te Brömmelstroet says Amsterdam was once more car-dependant, before being transformed into a cycling metropolis.
He also has an answer when asked about Australia’s love affair with large SUVs and the spectre of aggressive and unsafe drivers.
“If I compare it to the Netherlands, the drivers here are more well behaved in terms of speeding, crossing red lights and being on the phone … it seems that there’s a higher level of punishment [fines] for that behaviour.
“It’s the car itself that is the problem,” he says.
“It’s so big and it has such fast acceleration potential. It’s just not designed for human interaction.
“Even the best behaved driver can kill me. He or she doesn’t want that and I obviously also don’t want that. But that’s the system that we have …. It’s a level of danger around us that we would not accept in any other domain of life.”
Whether Australian society and politics is ready to wean itself off car-dependency now, te Brömmelstroet believes it’s only a matter of time, due to climate change and the limits of urban sprawl.
“The car-based urban system cannot sustain itself over the next 100 years. As a society we need to actively start considering what are the alternatives, and the bicycle comes to the fore as a very interesting lens that can not only answer that question of how to get around … but how to serve a better quality of life.”
