Borrow a Bicycle – How individual cities are gearing up to meet the challenges of climate change
By Naomi Conrad
An early morning rush hour in Brussels: black cars, many with diplomatic number plates, slowly make their way towards the gleaming buildings that make up the centre of European power, united in a daily traffic jam. A confluence of often conflicting cultures, as Italian fonctionnaires in two-seaters try to jostle past Germans waiting at the traffic lights and Bulgarian bureaucrats taking their offspring to the European private schools: the ever closer integration of impatience and exhaust fumes.
Bureaucrats in suits on bicycles weave past the long queues; precariously overtaking at traffic lights, suicidal as they race down wide boulevards on recently built cycling lanes. Many of the bicycles are sturdy yellow bikes, which commuters pick up from at drop off at docking stations outside of metro stations and office buildings.
The distinct bikes are part of an effort to green the city, reduce traffic and turn Brussels into a modern, environment-conscious city. Other big cities, such as Berlin, Paris or Copenhagen, have already introduced similar bike schemes, and London and Singapore are also gearing up to meet the challenges of climate change by introducing bike hire schemes: fighting climate change has become sexy, and mayors and urban planners have realised that individual cities have much scope for introducing green schemes. Urban spaces, after all, bear a high responsibility for greenhouse emissions, consuming 75 percent of the world’s energy and producing an equal amount of greenhouse gas emissions.
Today, roughly 50 percent of the world population lives in urban environments. This figure is set to rise dramatically in the coming decades, as people continue to stream to urban conglomerates in search of jobs and opportunities, depopulating the countryside. While this is starkly symbolised by the ever-expanding sprawling and polluted mega cities in many developing countries, European cities too are finding it hard to cope with the increased demand on public transport, housing and water and energy supplies. In Europe the percentage is even higher, with 80 percent of its citizens living in towns and cities.
Yet while cities bear their responsibility for climate change, it is their national governments who meet at the international negotiating tables to discuss emission reductions and green technologies. In the run-up to the UN Climate conference in Copenhagen in December, national governments are still struggling to come up with a coordinated approach to fighting, or at least stalling, climate change. The biggest challenge to a common stance is how to share the reduction of global emissions between rapidly developing countries, such as say India and China, and industrialised regions. However, the need for a unanimous decision within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change makes the negotiations even harder.
So while their national governments continue to squabble over emission targets several enterprising cities have begun to act, introducing various measures to cut greenhouse emissions and make their urban environment a more liveable - and breathable place to live. The bike scheme is just one of the different measures available, such as sustainable building, congestion and pollution charges, expanding green belts and investing in public transport schemes.
Yet while the bike scheme is popular, for example, Paris saw 1.6 million bike hires in the first month after the scheme’s introduction, problems persist. According to press reports, many of the bicycles used in the Paris scheme, have disappeared or been vandalised, with bikes allegedly having been spotted in Eastern Europe and Africa. In Brussels, it is up to the various independent local city authorities to sign up to the bike scheme. Less enterprising, and often poorer, neighbourhoods are as yet bike-dock-less and many have yet to introduce cycle lanes, forcing commuting cyclists to revert back to cars or metros. This is compounded by the notoriously bad Belgian weather. So it seems that for now there are still many spokes in the wheels of the scheme, the early morning union of exhaust fumes is unlikely to break up very soon.