International Cargo Bike Festival 2018

INTERNATIONAL CARGO BIKE FESTIVAL 2018
Futures for cycling you
never saw coming
By Dr. Steven Fleming
For a clearer perspective on the future of shopping, we should look to the country
where most of it happens, the United States. Amazon are making it something you
do on a phone screen and that the merchant provides with a warehouse and drone.
As socially isolating as life in cars seemed, at least people used to have malls!
Some will resist. They will patronize
main streets in their hipsterish enclaves
where everyone cycles. However, most of
humanity is along for a very different ride.
They’ll forget the time when attractions
were added to shopping districts—cinemas
and fountains, for instance. The shops
themselves will be the added attractions,
attached to places that still have a reason
for being, such as airports, train stations
and speculative real-estate ventures.
These are all privately owned places, and,
as such, are ruthlessly managed. You’ll
never see private cars there. You might,
however, see bikes. Staff inside airports
already use them. Thousands cycle each
day into the bike entries of Utrecht train
station. How long before train stations
encompass so many real estate ventures
that the only practical way of navigating
their caverns is on a bike?
Those buildings should, if we think about,
be organised around cycling. Apartments
and hotels should spiral upward along
bikeable corridors. Their concourses should
be giant shared spaces, undulating to help
cyclists speed up and slow down.
Shops in mega buildings could be brilliant
to visit by bike, or a cargo bike with children
on board. Amazon’s grocery store, Amazon
Go, shows how it would be possible to use
your cargo bike as a shopping trolley. Just
ride in, fill your bike from the shelves and
ride out with paying. Motion sensors know
what you’ve taken and bill you while you’re
riding away, unaware cycling is something
that ever used to happen outside.
Those who like bikes the way they like
anything old, would rather cycling vanish
than be a part of this future. Those who like
bikes for what they can offer—health, time
savings, equity and low energy transport—
will be interested in ways cycling could work
in mega buildings, particularly in climates
that keep everybody indoors.
Dr. Steven Fleming is an architect and
bicycling futurist working with an international
client base to reveal the full potential of
bicycle transport. His books include Cycle
Space and Velotopia.
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