In the contest between man and machine on the congested streets of Budapest, cyclist Jeff Taylor finds it useful to know karate. On a recent trip, Taylor was riding along one of the city’s more bike-friendly streets, and upon entering the marked cycling lane, he came suddenly upon a parked car.

Taylor braked — but not too hard. As he often does when encountering vehicles on bike paths, he intentionally hit it, smacking its rearview mirror with his handlebar. This time, however, two people were inside. A young man jumped from the driver’s side and charged at the cyclist in a rage. But Taylor, 190 centimetres tall with an athletic build, put a quick end to the scuffle with a mae geri kick to the motorist’s stomach.

If this had happened a decade earlier, Taylor would have been well advised to leave it there. Back then, many transport experts regarded bikes as recreational vehicles that presented a hazard and hindrance to traffic flow. The law clearly favoured motorists.

But as Taylor discovered during his standoff in Budapest, things may be changing. Taylor and the young driver shouted back and forth, the cyclist saying the collision was accidental and the driver not buying a word of it. Finally, they agreed to call the police.

“The police arrived after a few minutes,” said Taylor, an American who has lived in Hungary 10 years and speaks the language fluently. “Two young, well-spoken officers got out. We tell our story. The young man tells his. At which point one of the police officers gives a short speech: ‘During the summer I work as a bicycle cop. And I also find it irritating when drivers park across the bike path. Now, as I can see that no permanent damage has happened to your car, I’d suggest that everybody go their own way and forget about it.’

“And the young man interrupted here: ‘And you damage cars that park on the bike path too?’ And the police officer just smiled and said, ‘Hmmmm...’”

Anyone who has cycled in the cities of Central and Eastern Europe would take heart in this story. Although cycling is gaining in popularity and cities are expanding bike-path networks every year, cyclists know that cars still command a comfortable lead in the struggle for territory.

Bumper to mudguard

	BUSSED IN: A bike courier in Budapest waits for a traffic light to change as a crosstown bus barrels down. Motorists in CEE provide urban bicyclists precious little room on the roads. Photo: HADLEY KINCADE

In the 1990s, car ownership in the then EU accession states rose on average by more than 30 percent per person. Cities such as Bratislava and Parnu, Estonia, expanded their car fleets by more than 50 percent.

The trend is reflected in increasingly congested city streets, with cars clogging up roadways, sidewalks, bike paths and anywhere else that is not fenced off with metal barriers. Cars have offered convenience to millions of individuals who once could not afford it, but only in recent years have people seen the environmental tradeoffs.

“Cities in countries in this region are in the 1980s of Western development and thinking of local politicians,” observed Daniel Mourek, a cycling advocate who works for the Czech Environmental Partnership for CEE Foundation. “Prague is a good example of this mentality — people think cycling is for recreation, not for transport. There is a long way to go …”

Mourek cites some telling figures. In total, Czechs own 4 million bicycles compared to just 3.5 million registered cars. Each year, the country’s prided Skoda autoworks sells 37,000-40,000 cars, whereas Czech manufacturer Author sells 100,000 bikes. Nevertheless, Prague Municipality devotes just 0.02 percent of its transport budget, about CZK 20 million (EUR 615,000) a year, to bike paths.

According to the Prague city government, about 2 percent of commuters ride to work by bike, better than Budapest and Warsaw, both below 1 percent, but well below Copenhagen, where about a third of all trips in the city are by bike. In Amsterdam, bike traffic hit a nadir in the 1970s at 25 percent and today is carefully managed to fall no lower than 35 percent.

Culture shock

The capitals of CEE have good models of cycling culture much closer to home — in their own countryside. Across the region, a tradition of man-powered transport survives in smaller towns and villages out of economic necessity. In the largely rural region of southeast Hungary, for instance, an estimated 15-20 percent of workers commute by bike, according to Gabor Balogh, a spokesman for the Hungarian Cyclists Club. In Czech villages, the figure nears 100 percent, says Mourek.

A good example is the Hungarian village of Tahitotfalu, located just north of Budapest on a difficult-to-access Danube island. There the moneyed class gets around in Socialist-era, two-stroke sedans while virtually everyone else goes by foot or bicycle. Local establishments lack car parks, but not bike racks. On a recent afternoon in front of Tahitotfalu’s Kekduna (Blue Danube) tavern, a half dozen weather-beaten bikes crowded the bike rack. No indexed Shimano gearshifts on these, although one had a handbrake consisting of a pair of hinged rods that pressed directly onto the tire tread.

This vestige of cycling culture is part of what makes riding in the countryside a pleasure. “In smaller towns, literally everybody cycles to work or school,” notes Mourek. “But in larger places the car is taking over.”

The difference in the West, particularly in northern Europe, is that even in tight urban spaces where every square metre counts, communities have prioritised the bike, even at the expense of motorists. This past April, a group of German teenagers accustomed to a strong cycling culture at home tested the waters in CEE during a two-week tour down the course of the Danube. Embarking at the river’s headwaters in the Black Forest, the group enjoyed a pleasant enough ride until they came to their first large settlement in CEE, the Hungarian city of Gyor.

The designated cycling path through town was on a sidewalk, one with steps built into the inclines. For an unencumbered mountain bike, it would have been a mere annoyance, but for fully loaded touring bikes, the steps were a hazard. One of the chaperones on the trip, Daniel Bugert, plucked on a broken spoke and began venting about the local riding conditions.

“The biking is awful here,” Bugert said. The riverside bike path ran almost continuously through Germany and Austria, but became segmented after crossing into Hungary. On the highway from Visegrad, a popular tourist stop on the Danube Bend, the cyclists were forced to share the road with motorists who would race by them less than a handlebar’s width away.

Shifting gears

There are signs that cities are moving in the right direction. Budapest’s mayor, for example, has designated several car-free zones in the downtown core, and for several years the city has employed a full-time administrator to look after cycling affairs.

In the Czech Republic, the government has adopted a national strategy for cycling based on the UK model. Coalitions of cyclists there are succeeding in developing intercity bikeroutes through the Greenways programme. They are lobbying municipalities and the federal government for funding to ensure that reasonable corridors run through large cities.

In Gdansk, Poland, transport authorities are finishing up a USD 2.5 million project funded by the Global Environment Facility that creates 32 km of segregated bike paths and an additional 60 km of bike friendly roads with traffic-calming measures. The goal is for bikes to make up 5-10 percent of all trips in the city, compared to 2 percent now.

Cycling advocates take heart in the fact that EU structural funds can help their cities develop cycling infrastructure. The city of Krakow, where bikepath spending was a professed priority of every candidate in last year’s mayoral campaign, is using EU money to flesh out its intracity cycling grid.

“The process of introducing the cycling culture is faster here than it was in the Western countries,” said Dominika Zareba, Greenways coordinator for the Environmental Partnership for Central and Eastern Europe. “In most Central European cities, local governments know that cycling paths will be an inevitable part of the transport system and infrastructure.”