Food, Fashion And...Bike Lanes?

This post will be a tale of two cities--without the capital letters. 

They have roughly the same population.  One is the capital of its nation; the other is, at least in some senses, in its country.  They could be said to be rivals because they are renowned for many of the same things:  food, fashion, finance, the arts, education and technology.

Now one of those cities is not only wants to emulate something the other has been doing; it plans to do even more of it.

I am talking about urban bike lane networks.  While Copenhagen and Amsterdam are seen, perhaps rightly, as the most bike-friendly capitals in Europe, Paris is leading the way in creating new bike infrastructure.  It plans to have 680 kilometers (423 miles) of bike lanes in the City of Light and its surrounding areas.  

Rental Bikes by the Duomo Cathedral, Milan.  Photo by Alessia Pierdomenico for Bloomberg

Well, in the city's chief rival for food and fashion--Milan--the City Council has approved a plan that will include 750 kilometers (466 miles) of lanes that will connect not only major areas of the immediate city, but also its suburbs and some rural areas.  The goal of the Cambio Biciplan is to make bicycling the "first and easiest" way of getting around Metropolitan Milan.

One of the motivations for this plan is a problem the city is trying to tackle.  Among Italian cities, only Turin has worse air pollution; both have some of the worst air quality in Europe.  The factors contributing to that toxicity are similar in both cities: population density, industrial activity and automobile density.  That pollution intensifies in winter, when temperature inversions trap pollutants in the lower atmosphere, leaving a toxic blanket of smog.  Also, I suspect that each of those cities shares a problem with Denver: the mountains that surround (Turin) or abut (Milan) those cities also trap some of the pollutants. (Denver consistently has some of the worst air quality in the US.)

So, in the near future, bike advocacy groups may well emulate fashion and culinary institutions in seeing their "capitals" as New York, Paris and Milan!

Faster Than Amazon?

The mayor of my city and the governor of my state raise the possibility of new lockdowns, which would mean "non-essential" businesses would be closed.  Government officials in other places are also speaking of such things.

At the same time, they are encouraging people to support small businesses.  I wholeheartedly agree, whether that "small business" is a bike shop, book store or beauty salon.  

One thing I fear, though, is that this might be the "last chance" for some establishments that barely survived the lockdowns of last spring. Whatever business they do might tide them over for the next couple of weeks, or however long they can operate before they're forced to close.

Another worry is that some customers who resorted to Amazon during the lockdowns won't return to their old shopping habits.  They may have been lulled by the convenience of having PlayStations or whatever brought to their doors.

What some small business owners have done, of course, is to start making deliveries.  Luca Ambrogio Santini is one of them.

He operates LibriSottoCasa, which he describes as "the smallest bookstore in the world."  How small is it?  Oh, about the size of one of those boxes that fits on a porteur-style front rack.

Santini once operated one of the best-known independent bookstores in Milan, Italy.  That is, until rent and management costs rose too high.  So, five years ago, he started to operate without a storefront--and with a delivery bicycle. Customers place orders on his Facebook page, on Whatsapp or via e-mail, and he delivers, mainly in the southern districts of his city.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the pandemic has been good for his business.  While he concedes that Amazon and other forms of e-commerce are convenient, he says "the physical presence of the bookseller who can advise and communicate with the customer" is "an added value" that "is disappearing" but "we must not lose."

In addition to being that bookseller we all love, he has another aspiration:  "I want to be faster than Amazon."