Budapest to Amsterdamize?

“Races are coming your way, so forget all your duties, oh yeah…” Do these lines ring a bell? Speaking of which, did you know that it is mandatory to have a bell on your bike, at least in Hungary? It was not by accident that Diplomacy & Trade featured an article of bicycling in its recent Dutch country focus.

There are quite a number of cyclists on the streets of Budapest these days. Some 190 kilometers of bicycle routes have been built for them. Bike share programs have been introduced at numerous locations in town. We have just seen bikes on the red carpet, too, during a fashion show at Gozsdu Yard. Organized jointly by InStyle magazine and the crew of the blog Cyclechic.hu, the event took place on May 23 in search of the beauty and the (on the) bike. A photo contest was also announced for stylish urban cyclists. The main prize (two air tickets to Amsterdam) for the most stylish couple was offered by the Dutch embassy, handed over by Ambassador Gajus Scheltema.

“Ride your bike where ever you like to, however you like to,” suggests Cyclechic.hu. “Feel that you own the city. Enjoy every piece of it, because every day is another experience. The bridges, the streets, the houses greet you every morning. Feel like there's no one out there but you, although you are not alone. You need nothing else other than yourself and your bike.”  It looks like biking culture has started to blossom in Budapest. More and more residents use bikes for their local travel, including the city’s Chief Architect Sándor Finta. No one knows exact numbers, but on a major downtown thoroughfare where bike traffic is monitored, cycling levels have been growing steadily, doubling from 2011 to 2012, and in 2013, even the organizers of the Critical Mass (CM) bike rally, said that the growth of everyday cycling levels has made Critical Mass obsolete, at least in Budapest.

“It all began with a handful of cycling demonstrators in Budapest in the mid-2000s, who came together to demonstrate for a more bicycle-friendly infrastructure,” organizers say. “Soon, thousands of bike enthusiasts stood with us, and in the recent years, we managed to organize mass rallies, traditionally launched by a Dutch diplomat, including the late Robert Milders, often referred to as the Bike Ambassador. The final CM event last spring reached an unprecedented scale of nearly 100 thousand participants, making it the largest rally of its kind in the world. The promising signs of the infrastructural shift are already visible, the number of cycle paths in Budapest is on the rise.” As BBC correspondent Nick Thorpe put it a few years back in his article, “eight years of successful lobbying by the Budapest Critical Mass group and the Hungarian Cyclists Association have turned cycling in the capital from an extreme sport, into a normal and relatively safe means of transport.” As the number of cyclists in everyday traffic has actually reached a critical mass, CM organizers want to refocus their energies on ‘serious’ lobbying with concrete aims – and have urged CM followers to join a local cycling NGO.

Bikes on show

Another campaign entitled ‘Bike to Work’, organised by the Hungarian Cyclist Club (www.bam.hu) is gaining more and more ground every year, too. “We can say that this environmentally friendly and healthy form of transport is perfectly capable of mobilising masses and shaping identity,” organizers of ‘City of Cyclists, Szabadka (Subotica) – Budapest,’ an ongoing exhibition at the Museum of Ethnography, add. “Open until September 28, our exhibition seeks to popularise the bicycle, a defining feature of urban life that represents freedom to many. It explores the role of this everday object used in urban settings, and seeks answers to a variety of social questions, for instance, how a vehicle so firmly fixed in the realm of the mundane can have emerged as a symbol for such a wide variety of communities and subcultures. In addition to presenting a line of bike shops and repair shops, the exhibition offers insight into the history of the bicycle, the Hungarian Csepel Factory and ManfrédWeiss, and also presents info on various cycling events, including Critical Mass in Budapest and Trimbi in Subotica.”

A few years ago, an interesting theater production was staged by a Dutch-Hungarian company of three actors, who fiddled with the fictitious idea of what would happen if a tsunami overwhelmed Holland and the six million Dutch living there were all evacuated to Hungary. What can I say? The process has already begun, without the  water level rising, thanks to God. There is a huge number of Dutch people living in Hungary. (They, for some reason, fancy municipalities such as Szentkatalin, Orfû, Boldogasszonyfa, Somogyhárságy and Vásárosbéc in Baranya county and Balatonfõkajár in Veszprém. If they were ever to move to the Hungarian capital, the lack of biking opportunities wouldn’t be a push factor to make them return to the countryside.

DID YOU KNOW?

Budapest introduces the bike share program 'Bubi' with 1,100 bikes in 76 stations.

Bikes and movies

Hungary is becoming Europe’s new Hollywood. Budapest, a genuine chameleon with its eclectic style, can be and has been ‘sold’ as Berlin, Paris, London, Rome and Buenos Aires so far. This year’s Movilfest is to introduce a sightseeing tour to entice you into the saddle. Find out more on the filming locations of Evita, Spy Game, Munich and Die Hard, to name only a few blockbusters shot in the Hungarian capital. What is Movilfest? It is an international mobile device and innovation festival which is looking for works that are made with or for mobile devices. Find out more here: movilfestbudapest.com

Watch Ambassador Scheltema ride his bike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrHJY1iWnXE#t=15

Cycle Chic, a short movie by Áron Halász: http://challenge.docnextnetwork.org/video?id=33189970