
10.01.2012 / Green Life
A German Miracle
German people do love to ride bicycles, that’s a fact. Just spend one day in Berlin, in Munich or in any other major German city and you won’t help noticing how many perfectly tidy bike paths they have.
What we didn’t expect, though, is that they’d rather get on their bikes and ride for long miles than get stuck in a long queue along the motorway, which is honestly amazing.
Apparently, very soon the bike commuters of the Ruhr, one of the and most economically relevant and densely populated areas of the country, will get their own bicycle highway, a sixty-kilometer long and five-metres wide bike path connecting Dortmund to Duisburg.The route, running parallel to the actual motorway – which is usually so crowded that it has earned the nickname Ruhrschleichweg, “the snail’s pace motorway” – will be slope-free and without crossings.
Given that some 2 million bicycle-loving people leave and work between these two cities, carbon dioxide emissions are bound to lower dramatically.
But what matters the most is the idea that, contrary to what was generally thought but a few years ago, replacing cars with bicycles is not a simple utopia. It is actually happening right now, and hopefully it’s going to be a virtuous example fot the rest of the world.
Links
http://www.greenme.it/muoversi/bici/6645-radler-b-1-autostrada-biciclette-germania




