Saturday, April 18, 2015
"Bikes vs Cars" lays out the pressures on cities to squeeze out cyclists (and public transportation)
The documentary “Bikes vs Cars”, by Swedish director Fredrik
Gertten, places most of the emphasis on the dilemma specified by the title on
two big cities, Sao Paulo, Brazil and Los Angeles, CA, with one major excursion
in Copenhagen, Denmark.
In Sao Paulo, the narrative focuses on a young woman who
moves to the city, and gives up driving and using most busses after a few
months and becomes increasingly venturesome going everywhere by bike in heavy
traffic.
Along the way, the film recounts some horrific accidents in
Sao Paulo, where a young woman was crushed between two busses, and where a male
cyclist literally had his arm ripped off by a passing car and didn’t know it at
first. The huge city has given up on
rail transit and watched the expansion of auto use by the population.
A similar narrative exists for Los Angeles, which once had a
decent trolley system. The automotive
lobby gradually pressured the City to become car friendly and to dismantle the
trains, by 1960. In 1900, there had been
good bicycle trails throughout LA, and gradually they were abandoned.
The film covers “Carmageddon”, a weekend in July 2011 where
the I-405 freeway was closed for construction, and local people stopped driving
altogether, resulting in a great decrease in smog. One cyclist illegally rode down that highway
Saturday night and felt like he was in a kind of heaven. I stayed in the Angelino Hotel on the 405
myself in May of 2012 and remember the highway well. I was lucjy that week not to run into any
real “Traffic Jam”.
Copenhagen (and Amsterdam) have invested heavily in bicycle
lanes and have heavy bicycle use because their countries don’t have their own
auto industries. Compare even with
Germany, where Angela Merkel gives in to the lobbyists.
As a practical matter, and as a driver who doesn’t bike much
at my age, my biggest concern is safety. Cyclists should not ride the wrong
way, go through lights, ride between lanes (the girl in Sao Paulo does), or
make movements from directions where drivers will not normally see them. (In one of the Sao Paulo accidents, the
people say no one is at fault, just a faulty system. Baloney.
Bikers should not pass vehicles from blind spots.)
But I love to see dedicated bike lanes, and will always try
to give any cyclist I pass at least three feet of room. That’s why I don’t want to be surprised by
them coming up on me sharing a lane when a slight ca shift could cause a crash.
(I last covered this, with some links,
on my Issues blog March 19, 2015).
The film does have a few shots in many other populous
cities. One of the most stunning is Beijing in the smog.
The official site is here (WG Film). This will surely find a regular US distributor.
The film opened the DC Environmental Film Festival in March,
and I missed that party, but I saw it at FilmfestDC at Landmark E Street, late
afternoon, on Earth Day (nearby), show nearly sold out.
Wikipedia attribution link for Sao Paulo picture by Flavio
Ensiki, Creative Commons License 2.0 But note also my own photos of the 405 from the Angelino, and of freeway traffic near downtown LA (2012).
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