Pieter Jan M. Stallen & Henk Jelle Zandbergen
Article
Leiden University
WORK IN PROGRESS DESIGNING SUBJECTIVE (AND OBJECTIVE) SAFETY OF BICYCLE UNDERPASSES:
The Netherlands is well known for its exceptionally high frequency of bicycle rides/person (with Denmark as a solid second), whether for shopping, commuting (commonly across distances up to 7 km) or recreational purposes. Well over 80% of the population of the Netherlands have at least one bike. For a number of reasons the future of bicycle riding remains shiny. Beyond the happy bike riding citizens, policy makers also love the bike as it reduces both obesity and pollution. Dutch cities regularly compete for the title of Bike-City of the Year. To that end, various efforts are spent to promote and facilitate bicycle use, e.g. by priority green at traffic lights and by the creation of bicycle freeways. However, one obstacle has not yet received much attention: bicycle underpasses.
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early half of the riding public, women more often than men, avoid using underpasses at night. Admittedly, this number is likely to be less dramatic for new underpasses which are meeting stricter standards such as unrestricted lines of sight throughout the entire tunnel and adequate transitions of lighting at either end. Yet underpasses have qualities that make them inherently unattractive. Typically, an underpass needs to be seen as the best option for getting from A to B to everybody. It can achieve that end only at the expense of personal costs. Underpasses per se impose behavioral constraints by offering no exits within them, and they force uniformity upon users because everyone without exception has to proceed in the same direction.
The resulting high imbalance of predictability between self and some supposedly hidden other (imbalance of power) can fuel feelings of insecurity. To offset these psychological drawbacks several ideas are practiced nowadays in building underpasses, ranging from costeffective graffiti-painting by members of the community to more expensive interactively illuminated walls. Most of these techniques aim at affecting sensory perception, whether via conscious or unconscious routes. Although this may successfully alter impressions of an underpass’ for users, it is less likely that this type of positive stimulation will also take the worrying individual sufficiently away from his particular (in this case, underpass-related) negative sentiment (see, e.g., Josephson,