bike

Amsterdam: Bike Lover City

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Amsterdam is one of the busiest cities in the world especially with its tourism activity. Millions tourists come to Amsterdam every year and as one of the best tourist destination in the world Amsterdam not only famous with its life and beauty but also with their much love towards bicycle. This city probably one of the friendliest city in the world in term of the non-motorize transportation use.

Young people, old people, rich people, poor people, stylist or odd loved to bikes. Each person in Amsterdam at least has one bike to accommodate their activity. The only use public transport like train and tram when it does not possible to take their bike. They working, shopping, studying, and playing with their bike as their companion.  Besides its citizen love towards bicycle, integrated bicycle track is the strongest part on bringing bicycle as a popular transportation mode here supported by another factors such as economic and health reasons.

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Bicycle track probably one of the image of Amsterdam in the eyes of many peoples who already come and see Amsterdam. Every street in this city not only facilitated by bicycle track but also another facilities for bicycle such as parking area and bike traffic light. Its citizen culture towards bike users also become one of the best thing in Amsterdam, bicycle is always become the first priority in the street so the other transportation users like motorcycle and car have to yield. Its citizen also tries to transmit their love to bike by creating some bicycle rent shop as one of tourist attraction.

People space

In this earth everyone need spaces, working space, eating space, sleeping space, and other need. More space means freedom, freedom to express and feels. There are two kinds of spaces in this world, individual space and public space. Individual space is a private space for people to express themselves with their own rules and limitation, and public space is a place where everyone could come and use it for any kind of activities but still have to considering rules and social limitation. Our own room and houses are the example of individual spaces. City plaza, garden, pedestrian ways and streets are the example of public spaces that built for everyone.

Gil Penelosa once said that one of the biggest public spaces is streets which mean everyone has the same right in the street. Rich, poor, farmer, president, and student, all of them have the same right and opportunity to use it and shares it. In the past street was made to occupied people mobility to move from one place to another by walking, cycling, and horsing, but today basically street is the home of millions cars and motorcycles. Bigger the street made, bigger the number of cars found. People with cars and motorcycle occupied all street spaces only for them. Street vendors occupied pedestrian ways for trading activities. There are not enough spaces for people to walk and cycling just like what our grandfather did. So when the street is too much filled with cars and motorcycle, the poor access to the road become less especially when they could not access cheap transportation.  This condition also harming our environment and earth so much, but many people did not realize or maybe tend to ignore it.

Here in every city in the world we can see that we need something to change for the future generation. Because cars and motorcycle are not only affected our environment but also people mindset and behavior which become the biggest challenge for every party that working hard on introducing sustainable transportation now. Including Mayor of Suwon City, Mr Yeom Tae-Young, he as the mayor where ecomobilty congress takes place have to work harder to convince the citizen to participate as the first ecomobility village in the world. People did not want to change! They were too comfortable lived with their cars.

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Not only Suwon City that located in the develop country South Korea facing social behavior as the main challenge, Indonesia and other developing country found it as a bigger challenge. Why? Because people behavior in this country cannot be solved easily, this problem emerges as the result of trust problem. Trust towards the government, trust towards the planning decision, trust toward everything especially related with government performance and finance. But whether this issue emerges or not most cities in the world have to change! People have to start sharing, sharing street and pedestrian ways for walking and cycling because street is not an individual spaces, it is a public spaces. People need to change their point of view that cars and motorcycles are not as healthy as walking and cycling. People need to understand that our earth is old enough to take care of us. It is the time for us to take a good care of our mother earth and giving back its strength to once again give us a healthy and livable environment.

Amsterdam had already started it long time ago in the 70’s, Suwon, Kyoto, Changwon, Paris, Freiburg, Lagos Moreno, and Kaohsiung city had started to change today. What about Jakarta? Manila? Nairobi? We can start it now! What we need are commitment and willingness of people and government as the main actor of urban planning.

Reviving Bicycle Track in Semarang City, Good or Bad Choices?

In recent years many concepts of planning appear as solution of environmental degradation. Peoples in the world start to think again about the sustainability of mother earth. One of the popular concepts is sustainable transportation. Many countries including Indonesia are in the state of transportation planning and readjustment. Here, transportation sector seen as one big sector that responsible towards pollution and global warming, because peoples activities now seems to have high dependency on transportation sector especially in developing countries where most people still prefer to have their own private car than taking public transportation or even biking or walking. Here in this essay the main discussion would be around the importance of reviving bicycle use in Semarang City Indonesia.

In Indonesia many people becomes dependable towards transportation especially private vehicle. It creates many problems inside some big cities, for instance in Jakarta congestion is daily routine activities for its citizen which further create pollution as the long term impact of uncontrollable private car use. Some issues like less efficient and effective, less integrated public transportation and infrastructures, uncomfortable and inflexible public transport condition is the reason behind low number of public transport use in Indonesia. More over the low price of petroleum and taxes becomes the next reason on people mode choices preference toward private vehicle.

Semarang seems to learn from the condition of Jakarta. This city now tries to introduce the concept of sustainable development towards its citizen. At first, BRT project appear as one of potential public transport facilities created to attract people leaves the use of private vehicle. Then the government introduces car free day program in the city center, and the latest one is the development of bicycle track in some main streets in Semarang. The development of bicycle track is basically the implementation of sustainable development using non-motorize transportation. It always become a good idea to use non-motorize transportation to reduce the environmental impact, but it tend to be useless when it created and developed when the citizen are not ready yet. Semarang citizen in Central Java Province, Indonesia, still has low willingness on using bicycle as their mode choices to support their activities. Low willingness of its citizen usually related with some common reasons such as hot weather issue, geographical reason, less integrated bicycle track and lack of supporting facilities such as bike park zone. Based on those reasons, for now bicycle track development in Semarang could be seen as imprecise choice in managing private vehicle use. So the question is how to develop it into good choices? Create and learning new innovation is the answer.

Learn from some cities in develop countries like Paris and Amsterdam, greeneries are important especially alongside the pedestrian ways and bicycle track. Greeneries definitely can reduce tropical weather condition of Indonesia. Regarding with the geographical issue, bicycle lift (trampe) innovation in Trondheim, Norway is a good choices to be try. Basically it uses is to help biker and his bike to reach higher place easily. And at last integration of non-motorize transportation and public transportation will help biker reach far places that are difficult to reach only by bike. It would be great if biker could bring their bike inside the public transportation just like in La Rochelle or providing bike parking facilities in every train station or bus stop like in Japan and Netherland cities.  If Semarang or other Indonesian cities could learn from those cases above, development of bicycle track would not only stay as a dream.

 

 

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