Bikes vs Cars: why it’s war between cyclists and drivers on city streets

Bikes vs Cars: why it’s war between cyclists and drivers on city streets
In Toronto, they’ve painted over the bike lanes. And in São Paulo, a cyclist got his arm torn off by a car that didn’t even stop … We knew it was bad on the world’s crowded roads, but a new film reveals it’s a fight to the death


(Guardian UK) Fredrik Gertten is a Swedish documentary-maker: he made a film about the banana industry, and then he made a film about being sued by the banana industry. He has recently been anointed one of Sweden’s “top environmentalists” – which, although the title is fairly broad, has got to be good. And he has now made Bikes vs Cars, which is as confronting – though I don’t think you’d call it exactly confrontational – as you would expect.

I have, give or take, mainly peddled the line that it’s not a war between the two-wheeled and the four-wheeled: how could it be, when a lot of us are both drivers and cyclists (and sometimes, inevitably, also pedestrians)? It seemed to me, much as it does on the road itself, safer not to be adversarial. This film’s message – from the streets of São Paulo to Los Angeles, via the toxic situation in Toronto – makes it plain that a war is exactly what it is: cities are designed for cars and are hostile to bikes. And cars are not designed for life.

“Car dependency,” Gertten says, “is a disease for society. If you’re dependent on having a car every day, you have lost your freedom. It’s very sad. Most people are unhappy in traffic. The people who bike their cities, they become city-lovers. When you’re in a car, you don’t see the city, you are only watching the road. On a bike, you can see the sky, you can see the trees. People get to know their countries in a different way.”

The way he describes it, which comes across even more intensely in the film, is not so much a clash between bikes and cars as a battle of love and hate. How do you know the contours of where you live? Do you dart across them like an urban hummingbird? Or do you crawl sightlessly along them in a tank? .....................(more)

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/may/03/bikes-vs-cars-film-war-cyclists-drivers-fredrik-gertten-interview