Submarine cycling

Here's a local cycling underpass as it appeared Friday afternoon (July 29). This tunnel lies on the bike path between Békásmegyer and Szentendre on the west side of Route 11. It's been flooded to varying degrees since the middle of the month, when summer apparently decided to clock out early and leave us under overcast skies and a drizzly cold front that seems to have no back end.

This underpass was created 8-9 years ago, when a Cora "hipermarket" opened in Budakalász. To give convenient access for potential customers to the east, they built a huge interchange that brings traffic right under Route 11, over the bike path and into the store's massive parking lot.

At the time, I was pleasantly surprised that they'd forked over for such elaborate infrastructure to maintain the continuity of the mere bike path. But time has shown that the net effect for cyclists has been for the worse. The underpass is a metre or two below grade -- often below the water table as things have turned out.

It's a rough guess, but I bet that at least 20 percent of the time there's at least 15 cm of water under there. At that depth, you can ride slowly through the tunnel, and even keep your feet dry if you're very careful. But during rainy stretches like we've had, it's too deep to cross. So you have to take a detour through the parking lot, around a McDonalds, and across some beaten down dirt paths created by the significant bike traffic that the situation has created.

Path to Perdition

There's been another delay in what has to count as one of slowest road-work projects in Budapest history. The paving of the bike-pedestrian path on the upper Buda bank has been left half finished because of a hold-up involving a permit from a District I arborist.

The path (between Margit and the Chain bridges) was torn up 2-3 years ago for a project involving the reconstruction of the adjacent tracks for the 19 and 41 trams.

About a year ago, work on the track bed was completed, but the path was left unfinished. In fact, it was left in worse condition than before the work started. A trench had split the path up the middle for installation of utilities and, for reasons I never understood, the contractor didn't repave the path after the lines were laid. Instead, he did an improvised patch job with asfalt in some places and concrete in others. It was a shoddy job and made riding on the path dangerous, particularly for children or after dark. It was said to be temporary situation, but as I say, that was a year ago.

This spring, crews started in a proper resurfacing, but when they disappeared, the path -- amazingly -- was in worse shape yet. I took my first ride on it two weeks ago only to discover that the smooth new tarmac was interrupted, about every 20 metres or so, by 10-metre sections of dirt. The tarmac segments are about 6 cm higher than the dirt parts and the edges are abrupt -- sharp even. If you're not careful, you could easily dent a rim getting up from dirt to tarmac, which is why a lot of cyclists avoid the path altogether and ride instead on the tram tracks.

According to an article on Index.hu, the reason these sections have been left unpaved is because they have been designated as tree planting sites. And before the tarmac can be laid alongside a tree bed, a permit must be obtained from a tree expert at the District I local authority.

You would have thought these permits would have been sorted long ago. But they weren't, so the contractor was forced to go ahead and pave what he could with the intention of doing the rest once the permits are obtained.

Despite all this, the contractor has told Index.hu that he'll finish the bike path by the project's finishing deadline on July 31. However, it was not certain whether the permits will be in the offing that soon.

Copenhagen Cycling Sheiks

Like a heedless cabal of eco-warrior chieftains, local authorities in Copenhagen are turning car lanes to bike lanes all over the city -- sometimes in the middle of the night when no one's looking.

A Danish acquaintance who lived a few years in Budapest and returned to Copenhagen this last year, writes:

Attached is from our hood this morning, without debate or warning they just steal (another) 90 centimeters from the cars and give them to the cycles.
Goddamn eco-freaks!

Although it sounds like he's taking it with a sense of humour, there's unmistakable vitriol there. I can only guess that his Budapest years left him with an exaggerated sense of car-owner's entitlement (virtually free street parking for all home owners, thank you Mr. Demszky!). And now that he's back in a city with sensible transport policies, he's suffering from reverse culture shock.

Righteous Paths

View Thököly út and kiskörút bikeways in a larger map
While out of town on a work trip, I missed the opening of a ground-breaking piece of cycling infrastructure: the new bike lanes on Vámház körút in front of the Nagycsarnok (Big Market Hall). The new lanes are a big step forward for local cycling development for a few reasons: they're actually painted on the carriageway, not on the sidewalks; they're on BOTH sides of the street rather than on just one (e.g., the Bajcsy-Zsilinszky path); and they're right on a main thoroughfare rather than on a parallel, less-trafficked side street.
The lanes cover a short stretch of the Kiskörút starting from Szabadság Bridge: the lane on the eastbound side runs to Lonyai utca while the opposite-side lane runs slightly longer from Kalvin tér to the bridge. The lanes are part of a major upgrade of the street, including a pavement resurfacing and a new tram stop. In fact, the whole Kiskörút -- from the bridge to Deák tér -- is being reconfigured, and when the project's through, it'll include two-sided bike lanes over the street's entire length. Allowing for a few gaps -- including the absense of a lane on the bridge itself -- this will complete a loop comprising the Buda korzó, Margit and Szabadság bridges, and the soon-to-be contiguous bikeways that roughly trace District V's eastern border.
This was actually the second two-sided cycling accommodation to open in October; a couple weeks earlier, an even longer stretch of new bike lanes were christened on the newly resurfaced Thököly út. This project was an especially nice surprise for cyclists, as the smooth new tarmac replaces a badly degraded cobblestone surface that was torture to bike on. The new lanes run along Thököly út from Dózsza György út to Gizella út.
Both the Vámház and Thököly út bike-lane projects were piggybacked onto road improvements. This is par for the course. In Budapest, bike accommodation cannot get built as stand-alone work, which has been a major hindrance to the development of a coherent network of bikeways. But for Budapest's cycling community, even piecemeal progress can be counted as a victory. (Consider that cyclists have been fighting since the start of the decade for lanes on Rákóczi út/Kossuth Lajos utca; the last time the road was resurfaced, the city broke a promise to create bikeways, saying the six-lane artery wasn't wide enough.)

However, the paths on Thököly and Vámház are especially encouraging as they finally give recognition to cycling as a serious form of transport. Until now, virtually all bikeways in Budapest have treated cyclists as recreational traffic -- they belonged in parks and riverside paths, and for the purposes to getting from home to these greenways, sidewalks and sidestreets were perfectly suitable.

The placement of the new paths on main arteries is a victory for transport cyclists, who finally have been allotted their own road space on two high-demand arterials.
An amazing thing about the kiskörút lanes is that they have actually DISPLACED CAR PARKING. See the photo below. I believe this is a first in Budapest. When plans for the lanes were first unveiled, local merchants made the inevitable complaint that they would lose car-driving customers. Naturally, the new paths will disrupt old traffic patterns, but, as happens time and again with these sorts of projects, the new patterns that emerge are often even better for local commerce. Let's hope that this will be the case once again so that the new lanes can serve as guiding examples for future street development.

Street Work Leaves Bike Path in Worse Shape

Arriving back to Budapest from summer vacation, I was pleased to see that the Buda-side korzó, after months of being ripped up due to road work, was again open for cycling. I was down there with my four-year-old boy, Lance, who started riding without training wheels just this spring. As Lance is still a little wobbly on his pint-sized one-speed, the korzó is the safest place for him to ride in our neighbourhood.

During the road work (involving a reconstruction of the No. 19 tram line which runs alongside the korzó), we'd limited our ride from Margit híd to Batthyányi tér. But this morning, seeing that the mess along the tram line was cleared up, we ventured on past Batthyányi toward the Chain Bridge.

I immediately noticed that the patchwork they'd done following the construction was awful. During the project, they'd dug a trench about 30-40 cm wide right down the middle of the korzó to install a rain gutter. After filling it in, they capped it not with tarmac, which is what the path is surfaced with, but with concrete. Not everywhere, though. In scattered segments, for some reason, they filled it with asphalt.

At any rate, the job was incredibly shoddy, the worst part being the deep grooves along the seam between the old surface and the patchwork. As any cyclist knows, these kinds of longitudinal grooves are a major hazard, as bike tires are prone to slide into them and throw you off balance. In the 8 years I've been riding in Budapest, I've had three fairly nasty falls, two of them because of these sorts of patches.

No sooner did I take note of this crappy patch job than Lance goes tumbling over his handlebars after getting his tire caught in one of these grooves. Luckily, his injuries were only a scraped knee and scuffed-up palms. He cried a little bit but dusted himself off and got back on his bike. Even so, it's hard
to overstate how angry I got that the city thinks so little of its cycling (and walking and skating) citizens, that they would do such a half-assed patch job on one of our main promenades.
Hundreds, and on summer weekends, thousands, of citizens use this path each day, not just for recreation, but increasingly for daily transportation. With all the cracks, tree-root bumps and poorly done patches, the korzó is long overdue for a complete resurfacing. The work on the adjacent tram track provided a prime opportunity for such a renewal. Instead, the work finished with the path in an even more degraded state.

I keep reading about City Hall's progressive plans to double cycling's modal share and launch a world-class bike sharing system. Meanwhile, it can't manage such a basic task as bike-path maintenance. It seems to me that the cycling movement goes forward in Budapest not because of City Hall's efforts but despite them.

Thanks, Mr. Fisherman

View Larger MapHere's grassroots action in its purest form. I'm riding on the dedicated path from Békásmegyer to Szentendre, the one along Route 11, and as I'm going through the underpass tunnel just north of Omszk Lake (see map), I come upon this gnomish guy next to a parked bicycle, and he's got a primitive broom in his hands and he's sweeping up the path.

I knew exactly what he was doing because a couple days before in the same tunnel, I'd had to swerve to avoid a bunch of broken green glass. On that morning, I made a mental note to bring a hand broom on my next ride. But, of course, I forgot and never did follow through.

But while I had ridden on by without doing anything, this guy had stopped and taken action. He didn't bother with going home to get a broom. He bundled up an armload of willow switches from the grass nearby and fashioned a rudimentary broom that was doing a perfectly good job. I stopped to ask if he might be a worker for the city (this part of the path is the responsibility of the Municipality of Budakalász), and he said no, he was just a fisherman, and he wanted to get rid of the glass so that his fellow cyclists wouldn't blow their tires. I thanked him and rode on, reminded that sometimes community activism can be as simple as sweeping up.

Head Makes a Good Ice Breaker

This morning's ride was more treacherous than usual thanks to a night of freezing rain. But at first I didn't appreciate how hazardous it might be because the streets were merely wet. I rode up above Városmajor liget to drop off my boy at day care, and then back down the körút to the river without slipping or even seeing much ice at all.

Then I turned onto the riverside bike path just north of Battyannyi tér -- and bam! Down I went, as my tires slipped on a gleaming sheet of rain-slickened ice. It was so slippery, I could barely get back on my feet and onto the bike. I started peddling ever so gingerly, but my back wheel spun out anyway. Regaining traction, I followed the path very slowly to the next crossing, and then got onto the road. I wasn't keen to get into rush hour car traffic, but at least the road wasn't icy.

I was wondering why it is that while the bike path was glazed over with a half-centimeter sheet of frozen rain, the road was merely wet. It was the same last night up in Szentendre. The walking paths around our office were encrusted in ice but the roads perfectly safe.

I guess the difference is that the roads get a lot of car traffic, which wears away the ice before it can build up, and also the ever-present residue of salt from the frequent passings of salt spreaders during the winter season.

With bike paths completely neglected during winter, the only safe way to ride in snow and sleet is on the streets. This isn't the case in better biking cities. In Gothenburg, Sweden, for example, the city's "biking highways" are the first things to get cleared after a snowfall. There's a city that takes its cyclists seriously.

Prague Envy

Cycling development in Prague is going gangbusters compared to Budapest -- or at least it would seem so. A recent article gives a concise but comprehensive picture of the transport cycling scene in the Czech capital.

Official data from Prague City Hall shows cyclists with a 0.5-2 percent modal share, on par with the figures from Budapest. But Budapest's data is more than 10 years old, and the numbers have clearly gone up since then, especially considering the whole Critical Mass phenomenon only got started in 2004. (Tellingly, Prague's most recent Critical Mass drew 4,000 riders, compared to about 15,000 at Budapest's last one and 80,000 during the spring 2007 ride.)

Despite the fact that more people bike in Budapest, Prague seems to be doing a better job at cycling development.

A few tidbits from the article:

• Budapest has about 160 km of paths and routes while Prague has 135 km of bike paths and 360 of signed routes.
  
• Prague's long-term plan calls for the completion of more than 670 km of routes. Budapest is shooting no higher than 500.
  
• Prague has a new bike-share system (see photo). Budapest has none.
  
• Prague City Hall has a monitoring system in place to follow trends in cycling traffic (cycling trips are up 47% over the last three years). Budapest has no such system. And with no data on cycling levels, what rational basis is there for developing infrastructure and other services?
  

How can it be that the city with more demand for cycling improvements is getting less supply?

Go Guerrillas!

A writer for Bicycling Magazine emailed the other day asking about the guerrilla bike lanes in Budapest. From the wording of her query, it seemed she was already acquainted with a guerrilla bike lane movement here. She was just counting on me, as a local cycling blogger with his ear to the ground and feet in the clips, to fill her in on the nitty gritty -- its history here, some specific local examples and a quote about the importance of this particular form of civil disobedience to the larger cycling movement.

But she caught me flat-footed. It wasn't just that I didn't know the nitty gritty -- I'd never heard of guerrilla bike lanes, not in Budapest or anywhere else. In a panic to come up with some authoritative info, I fired off messages to some cycling friends to bail me out. But I got just one reply, and it offered no inside dope, only the contact details of another local cyclist.

My tentative conclusion was: there's no guerrilla bike lane movement here, or at least not one to speak of. However, by some strange coincidence, the next day, there appeared two unauthorised bike signs on the Pest end of Margit bridge -- about a 5 minute ride from our flat. The guerrilla lanes I'd been seeking.

The sign in the photo has a twin on the opposite sidewalk. I assume it's inspired by the current controversy (or more detailed info in Hungarian) about the cycling facilities envisaged for the pending renovation of Margit bridge. According to current plans, the main cycling accommodation would be a single bi-directional path on the north side of the bridge. Many transport cyclists, myself included, favour a solution with wide single-direction paths on both sides of the bridge, and a provision that allows cyclists to continue riding down the körút once off the bridge.

Not long ago, if you wanted to ride straight off the bridge and down the körút, you were confronted with a steel fence. The only open route was to go down the ramp beneath the bridge, and then to the footpath/bike path on the Danube bank. Which, of course, is of no help to those heading toward Nyugati station. But, according to the typical paternalistic philosophy of Budapest traffic planners, cyclists belong on sidewalks and out of the way of cars, regardless of the inconvenience to the former.

Of course, cyclists have always gone around the barriers in order to get to where they're going. And at some point the barriers were removed, as you can see in the picture. The improvised signs are the coup de grâce that give the go-ahead to körút-bound cyclists.

These signs mark out the first example I've seen of guerrilla bike lanes in Budapest. As far as I'm concerned, they're an act worth following.

Local Cycling Gets Dutch Boost

View Larger Map
Here's some postive news -- a story that shows how good cycling initiatives can start from the ground up, with a bit a vision and teamwork and a network of well-placed friends.

Some parents and staff at the American International School of Budapest, which has a spectacular but fairly remote new campus some 15 km northwest of Budapest, in the village of Nagykovácsi, decided they needed a bike path. Such a path would not only allow students and staff to bike to and from school, it would also provide a new recreational route for weekend cyclists and enable bike commuting for those who have made Nagykovácsi a budding bedroom community.

It's probably no coincidence that the impetus behind the path was the Dutch. The idea came from a Dutch member of AISB's building committee, Jaap Scholten, a writer who lives here with his Hungarian wife and who has three children enrolled in the school.

The original concept was to make a 4 km path from Nagykovácsi to Petneházy, which would almost connect to the Hűvösvölgy path. Scholten enlisted the help of the Dutch ambassador to Hungary, and through him, got hold of Hungary's Deputy Minister for Cycling Adam Bodor and the local office of the Dutch engineering firm Grondmij.

During the planning, the AISB group discovered that several of the surrounding villages were championing a 17 km path that would intersect with theirs. The two projects were merged and are now in a brainstorming phase. The village councils have taken the reins of the project, with AISB and the Dutch Embassy reverting to advisory roles and helping with contacts.

Timing was fortuitous: 90% of the project will be paid for with EU money (presumably through the Cycling Hungary Programme, a EUR 250 million pot of money that's up for grabs to municipalities that can put together well-considered proposals. In addition, Grondmij has offered to do the feasibility study free of charge. That leaves only 10 percent to be picked up by the local councils and Hungarian government.

Of course, this project is a long ways from being a done deal, and the fact that so many parties are involved adds to the complications. But the prospects look quite good for an idea that started with a parent who wanted a bike path for his kids.

Same Old Solutions for Margit Bridge

The twin bike lanes envisaged in the impending refurbishment of Margit bridge are under threat, as cycling activists and city officials debate how to best accommodate different types of non-motorised transport on the busiest river crossing in Budapest.

According to the latest reports, the project, scheduled to start in early 2009, would include a bi-directional cycling path on the north side (island-facing) of the bridge. A waist-high guard rail would separate it from from motor traffic while coloured paving tiles would visually distinguish it from the adjacent footpath. However, no physical barrier would separate pedestrians and cyclists. The Hungarian Cycling Club had argued that the path should be 2.5 m wide to safely accommodate two directions of bike traffic, but this has been pared down to 1.8 metres.

On the opposite (south) side of the bridge would be a more basic shared-use path for both cyclists and pedestrians -- basically the same as the existing set up except that it would be signed as one-way for cyclists.

In fact, the whole scheme is sounding quite a lot like the existing set-up, with the main difference being the addition of coloured paving to mark cycling territory on the north side foot/cycling facility. I have to say I'm skeptical whether this is enough to impose order on the current free-for-all on the bridge's two walkways.

From a transport cycling point of view, the best solution would be to have one-way cycling lanes on both shoulders of the bridge, physically separated from the pedestrian traffic. I've extolled the virtues of such solutions before, with the best local example being on Alkotmány utca. It's another question how much they should be separated from motor traffic. Some users would prefer a physical barrier -- like the guard rail now proposed -- while others would just as soon have no barrier and only a marked lane. The latter solution would take up less space, while the former may better serve recreational riders, including children, who use the bridge to access Margit Island.

Including a two-way path on the island-facing side of the bridge was also seen as a way to ease island access, as, under the current set up, the only way to get to the island from the south-side path is to go down through the underpass below the tram stop. I would argue, why not create a level crossing there? The main argument against it, I imagine, would be that this would interrupt the flow of car traffic. This, of course, is the main thing blocking development of non-motorised transport and better traffic safety in Budapest -- the idea that the road system has to be designed everywhere to foster fast-moving, high-volume car traffic.

In Budapest, major cycling infrastructure rarely happens as a stand-along project. It generally can only be justified as part of a larger road reconstruction. The renovation of Margit Bridge, therefore, is a rare opportunity to get things right where cycling is concerned. It could be the first step of a first-class cycling accommodation around the whole körút, one that's modelled on the best examples from Amsterdam, Berlin and Copenhagen. Instead, it's so far looking like business as usual, with a staunch refusal to do anything that would challenge the supremacy of cars.