Growing car ownership and usage, which is currently transforming our motorways into permanent tailbacks, has been congesting our city centres for years. In the medium-sized cities, where distances can easily be covered by bicycle, policies are being developed to encourage city centre visitors to get out of their cars and onto their bikes.

It is, obviously, a rearguard action. Without radical measures at national level or a spontaneous change in the population’s attitude all such a policy can do is delay the worsening of the congestion. But at least the problem would be acknowledged. Tilburg is a good example of towns that are giving more attention to cycle policy. What is more, its ‘bicycle shelter plan’ has even added an architectural dimension.

In 1993 Tilburg Council published a Cycle Plan as a first step towards implementation of the 1990 report On the way to 2000 which sets out a strategy for tackling the mobility problem. This report states that if bicycle usage were to increase by 20% between 1990 and 2000 Tilburg would remain an accessible and inhabitable city. The Cycle Plan gave priority to realizing ‘a clearly recognizable and coordinated network of cycle routes’. According to this, the hub of the scheme should be a so-called ‘star network’ consisting of a coarsely woven net of seven cycle routes, three north-south and four east-west. This star network should include short cuts offering cyclists advantages over other road-users, consisting partly of separate cycle paths, and signposted and illuminated and consistently surfaced in red tarmac or red paving slabs (‘Get on your bikes! Tilburg rolls out the red carpet for you!’ urges the promotional folder). That the council meant business was clear from the budget reserved for implementing the plan, a cool 74 million guilders.

The proposal included special attention to bicycle storage. In 1993 Tilburg agreed to participate in the state’s pilot anti-bicycle-theft project. An important aspect of this project was the improvement of bicycle storage facilities. Research showed that 52% of Tilburg’s bicycle owners do not, or at least not always, use their bikes because they are afraid they might be stolen. It was concluded that bikes should be stored at the beginning and end of every ride. Mindful of this, the Bicycle Shelter Plan of 1994 signalled the need to realize supervised storage facilities on the various sides of the city centre. No sooner said than done: in 1996 a new bicycle shelter was completed in Heuvelplein, designed by Bert Dirrix, who was also responsible for the redesign of the entire square.

So far so good with the emancipation of the bicycle as a mode of transport. But the city council went over the top. The Bicycle Shelter Plan warned that the ‘size and appearance’ of the desired shelters conflicted with the pursued improvement of the overall climate of the city centre. And the Cycle Plan was even more explicit in its concern: ‘Shelters also serve to prevent the chaos created by bikes being left all over the place. This type of chaos mars the view and obstructs the passage of other road-users. … Where necessary, police supervision … must ensure that bikes are parked in the designated places.’  Love of the bike is clearly not an unconditional thing. The emancipation of the bicycle goes in tandem, so to speak, with a fear of chaos and a tendency towards overregulation.

Compared to the situation in Eindhoven, however, Tilburg’s concern is mild. Where in Tilburg the seven cycle routes – which are steadily taking shape – make it easier not only to reach but also to cross the city centre, the policy in Eindhoven seems to be designed to keep the cyclist out of the centre altogether. The cycle policy is merely a derivative of the pedestrian policy. Design programmes are turning the city centre more and more into an island where nobody is welcome except pedestrian consumers.

This attitude can be detected in other measures. For the past few years it has been prohibited, in the centre of Eindhoven, to park bicycles in the way that is accepted all over the world: on the bike’s own stand. Cyclists are obliged to use the council’s storage facilities on the edge of the centre. Anyone who refuses to go along with this ‘store and walk’ policy runs the risk of having their bike impounded by the vigilant city watch. Tilburg has also recently adopted this lamentable strategy. It is a step which seemingly fits in with the set of measures regulating cycle traffic whereby the bicycle is put on an equal footing with motorized transport, with the same rights and obligations as the car. But what this policy overlooks is that a new cycle culture is being forced upon the cyclist. From the moment the Dutch embraced the bicycle as a means of transport they have used it to travel from door to door, not from shelter to shelter. The attraction of the bicycle has always lain in the fact that it has functioned as an extension, as a prothesis, of the human body. In that sense it would be much more natural to create drive-in shops for cyclists than to forbid them to park their bikes against the shop window. But, sadly, things are more likely to swing in the opposite direction. The next step in tackling the mobility problem after barring cyclists could well be to oblige skaters to exchange their skeelers for free council city-centre slippers on entering pedestrian precincts.

Given Eindhoven’s repressive climate, it is all the more surprising that the light-minded firm of Staal/Christensen was singled out to carry out a design study into the possibility of a bicycle shelter to the north of the centre, next to the multi-storey car park in Mathildelaan. Their recently presented blithely caricatural design reveals no trace of the typical Eindhoven aversion to cyclists. The supervised shelter for 1000 bikes has a roof which doubles as a sloping and slightly tilted cycle deck, a mini cycle freeway going from nowhere to nowhere intended for the unsupervised storage of a further 1000 bikes or as a platform for urban events. Typical of the situation is that the council has simultaneously commissioned a study into the possibility of realizing yet another office block on this site. But why not build the shelter in the place where it really belongs, in the centre, on the Markt, opposite the stuffy Heuvelgalerie?