Two years ago I was lucky enough to spend a few days in Berlin. The first thing that caught my eye was the giant windmills in the fields — a whole system of wind turbines. Not that I had never seen them before, but that was in pictures; seeing them live like this is something else entirely — you grasp the full grandeur of these technologies in the allegory of their sheer size. Had this marvel caught the eye of the futurist poet Mykhail Semenko, I am sure these ultra-modern windmills would have earned a whole poem of their own.
The second touch — tiny and inconspicuous, you might think, next to the gigantic wind turbines, yet even more defining for everything we mean by the word “Europe” — was this. Heavy sleet was falling; the weather was horrendous. We were just approaching the outskirts of the city. On both sides of the motorway stood factories of some kind — an industrial zone. A multi-level flyover loomed above us, and the bus was about to dive beneath it. And in the middle of all this gigantism, amid all this industrial and technological grandeur, on one of the flyovers, through a dense fall of big fluffy snowflakes, you could just make out a lone cyclist, pedalling away with confidence. The bus whisked under the flyover, and we entered Berlin. One could have written this off as a one-off — Berlin has plenty of “freaks”, one more or less makes no difference — but the next sight, a shocking one for me, dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s: the bicycle park under the main railway station. I had never seen so many bicycles in one place at once, not even at Warsaw’s Critical Mass, which at times draws thousands of riders. These were real bicycles belonging to real owners, who locked and unlocked them and really rode them — and all this in the depths, or should I say the slush, of winter, to the “accompaniment” of sleet.
So much for my little excursion into the Europe of 2011. But let us return to our muttons — or should that be our “rams’ horns”? — that is, to Lviv, a city that likes to present itself as European. “Of all journeys made in the city, across all modes of transport (walking, public transport, car), cycling accounts for 0.1–0.3%,” says civic activist Demian Danyliuk, citing the statistics. Meanwhile, according to a survey carried out by the City Institute in May last year, only 18% of Lviv residents own a bicycle. Of these, only 7% use it as transport almost every day, while 65% of all respondents — including those who don’t own a bike — say they are ready to use a bicycle as everyday transport. But the infrastructure, of course, stands in the way: 69% of respondents are inclined to think that cycling in the city is dangerous, and 22% could not make up their minds about its safety. Translating these percentages into more or less real numbers, then, we can say that about 3,000 people use a bicycle every day — although in reality there are no more than 1,000 of them, if that, and these people are kamikazes.
If we do want to compare Lviv and Berlin — which, in principle, we shouldn’t — I can tell you from my own experience that in winter about ten other people besides me ride bicycles, and by mid-January they all know each other by sight and greet one another with a wave, without asking or knowing each other’s names. Happily, the Ukrainian will is unbreakable: even during last year’s “long-drawn-out and knee-deep” March winter, when even I, with my two years of winter riding, avoided, to put it mildly, the funfair ride over 40-centimetre snowdrifts, cyclists did not vanish from Lviv’s roads. I managed to film one near the Stryiskyi market: he was pedalling confidently, ploughing through the drifts. Admittedly, it was still a better alternative to spending hours gazing into the distance, waiting for the minibus of one’s dreams.
“Kto vinovat i chto delat?” (Who is to blame, and what is to be done?)
If the first half of this eternal question is hard and tangled, we can safely start with the second. There are countless ideas and initiatives. Larger and smaller groups of people organise all sorts of events — from the night rides around Lviv started two years ago by Viktoriia Veselovska to the Krytyi Rover festival, which, now in its fourth year, brings fixie riders and track-bike lovers together at Lviv’s SKA velodrome. Some enthusiasts once even had to paint a cycle lane themselves, since, as reported on the Roverom po Lvovu page, Lviv’s former chief architect Yurii Kryvoruchko declared that “cyclists should buy a barrel of paint and paint a cycle route themselves” (http://roverompolvovu.wordpress.com/2010/09/08/akcija-protestu-velodorizhky/). The city has no shortage of bicycle-related absurdities, starting with clumsy traffic rules and the absence of the relevant DBNs (state building standards) — and what more can one say, there aren’t even any special road signs for bicycles on the official list. Nor are there special rollers for laying cycle paths, and, most importantly, there is no money. There are usually more questions than answers, and enthusiasm is a finite resource, so what we end up with is a cascade of interchangeable initiatives which, like shooting stars, burn up in the sooty atmosphere of Lviv’s car-clogged roads.
Looking into the Concept for the Introduction of a Cycling Network and Related Infrastructure in 2011–2020 (http://mobility.lviv.ua/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/04_koncepcija_velo.pdf), we read: “The aim of the Concept is to build in Lviv over the next decade (2011–2020) a network of cycle paths and cycle lanes with a total length of 239 km, together with the accompanying cycling infrastructure. The cost of construction works is 47,815,000 hryvnias, the cost of design works 4,782,000 hryvnias. The total cost of the project is 52,596,000 hryvnias. The construction costs were calculated as of 2010(!), when the exchange rate wasn’t even 8 hryvnias to the dollar.” Lots of figures, lots of money, lots of maps and charts, lots of text — you can look through it all yourself by following the link; I won’t go into the details here. I’ll only add that things are not all that bleak. As of today, more than 30 km of cycle paths and lanes have been laid, the roads have improved, and pedestrians are beginning to tell the footway from the cycle path; and although they still boldly saunter along lanes marked with a bicycle, they have learnt to make way for cyclists.
With this whole mass of problems and troubles on the one hand, and of initiatives and enthusiasm on the other, there arose a natural desire to institutionalise and set up a non-governmental organisation. Having the “NGO” label would certainly make it easier to work with grant-makers, and would also bring together all the scattered initiatives and put the cycling community’s needs and demands in order. At the time of writing, two Bike Roundtables had been held, initiated by the activists together with the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe. As Demian Danyliuk notes, there has been an exceptional amount of talk lately about the need to set up an NGO; the catalyst for this mood was the newly created Bike Patrol. The purpose of the Bike Roundtables is to establish a dialogue between activists, officials and representatives of the cycling business; it is important to set up proper co-operation between them. At the previous meetings, participants put forward their proposals on the role of the future NGO, and a list of existing problems was drawn up. To sum up, what worries the community most is oversight of various kinds: whether of the work of the City Council, of the money, of how works are carried out, or of the contractors; also extremely important is the preliminary review of cycle path designs, so that the paths run where cyclists actually ride. Among the main issues the NGO should deal with, people also named the installation of proper bike racks, especially near universities and schools, the search for stolen bicycles and co-operation with the Interior Ministry, fundraising, the promotion of cycling, and the organisation of cycling events and cycling courses. One of the stated requirements was that the NGO be kept separate from the City Council.
Such is the outcome of the two Bike Roundtables. According to preliminary information, the next meeting will discuss the NGO’s statute, and our colleagues from Kyiv are due to help the people of Lviv with this by sharing their experience in the capital. So keep an eye on updates on the Velo Lviv Online page on Facebook. Let’s make Lviv more of a cycling city.
Dr. Myroslav Trofymuk
Born in Lviv. Designer, director, musician, researcher, founder of ZEMLA STUDIO. Master of classical philology and digital marketing, PhD in the history of Ukrainian literature. Member of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine. Since 2022 he has authored the CENTRUM MUNDI audio show for Polish Radio for Ukraine, continuing the same research into the contemporary music scene in Ukraine and Poland.
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