Transportation stereotypes, like stereotypes of any sort, are silly. But they can also make streets more dangerous On a recent trip to Copenhagen with my two kids, we became mesmerized by the creative ways that families traveled using bicycles. Although we sometimes get our own kids around Los Angeles using seats on the back of our bikes, it was nothing compared to seeing the sheer inventiveness of parents of all backgrounds, in all neighborhoods, employing a parade of seats, trailers, and wagon-like buckets to move together as a family unit.
But on the second day I was there, a friend sent me a story that made me look twice at a particular family bike, known as the cargo bike, or bakfiets. ?Cargo-bike moms? are gentrifying the Netherlands? read the headline of the story, which I read while riding a Copenhagen bus, my jaw visibly dropping at the audacity of its thesis. (It was a bad month for transportation at The Atlantic?this was a week after publishing a story that recommended abolishing the New York City subway.) The bakfiets?or at least the modern, kid-transporting version of it?was actually invented in a Copenhagen neighborhood near where we were staying. The idea behind it was born out of necessity, parents adapting a century-old delivery vehicle to their daily needs in an attempt to wrest their neighborhood away from what they saw to be the undesirable environmental and economic impacts of cars.
But the argument made in the story?and by an academic white paper...