Inspired by a similar post by Julius, let’s contrast cycling in London with cycling in Munich. Especially as now the weather has been pretty good, so I started cycling to work almost every day.

Munich calls itself the “Radlhauptstadt”, which means the cycling capital. As Julius points out, there are not many capitals in Bavaria, so the competition for the title is rather easy. Am I hinting on what is coming? You bet.

Let’s start with the good things: Munich is contrary to the fact that it is reasonably close to the Alps, pretty flat, which makes overall pretty easy cycling. The second thing that is good in Munich is that pedestrians usually say clear from cycleways (if you see people there it’s 95% chance they are Asian, who don’t care about cycleways, something I’ve experienced in Japan as well).

But cycling to work in Munich is an exercise in frustration and the city doesn’t take this seriously at all. Let me illustrate this with a couple of points.

Cycleways end abruptly

Munich has a number of roads reserved for cyclists. This is all well and good, but unfortunately, you can’t get anywhere using them. They mostly start at some random place and end at some other random place and in between you have to switch to the street.

I can get to the main station in Munich on cycleways but then they completely drop the ball and you have to either take a detour or take the road. The road shared with light trams, huge long distance busses and rush hour traffic.

After surviving the main station, there is some cycleway until you get to the old city, which is also horrible to traverse by bike, due to mixing cyclist traffic with pedestrians, light trains (and especially their tracks, which are deadly to road bike wheels) and paving.

Crappy cycleways

Even if there are cycleways, they are often of bad quality: very bumpy, narrow, badly maintained. In this regard I’ll disagree with Julius, the cycleways on the streets are above and beyond much better quality-wise than the cycleways. Because roads for cars are built with quality in mind so that space to the right reserved for bikes is fine. Usually, they are also wide enough and in Germany, cars tend to leave you alone there. But these are rare, on the 8km I cycle to work, its two stretches, 1km tops.

Mandatory cycleways

There is a certain sign, pretty commonly used in Germany which forces cyclist to take the cycleway. It is incredibly infuriating when you see a really nice, wide street and you’re forced on the sidewalk with some white line drawn on it. You’re losing so much time and comfort, by being, effectively, sidelined.

It gets even better, since the cycleways tend to be directional, so you can’t just return the way you came, you’d have to cross the road. Which on bigger streets would mean that you have to drive around the block to the next crossing. All the downsides of cars, with none of the upsides.

Cars

Even if you are on a cycleway and are going in the right direction (congratulations!), cars like to park on the side and block at least part of it. Also, while german drivers tend to be pretty good, I often get shouted at by some know-it-alls for not obeying some fictional traffic rules. The atmosphere is sometimes quite hostile.

Part of this is surely caused by cyclist breezing through red lights, but some lights are adjusted horribly, cyclists would need to stop every 20m for the next red light. No wonder they often breeze through shortly after it switches to red.

Locking, oh gosh, the locks

So, there are bike locking stands on many places, great. You lock your bike, you come back after a day and what is left is your front wheel.

German locking stands have (for the most part) stagnated since 1927 with the invention of the Quick release skewer. It allows taking of your wheels with no tools required, and conversely also taking of your bike from a bike locking stand which only locks your front wheel to the stand.

I used to think, that these kinds of locking stands were standard, but I have seen exacly none of them visiting London. All locking stands had a way to lock your frame to it, which makes sense if you like to keep your bike. So it is pure ignorance that locking is so bad.

I usually lock my bike to handrails of stairs or similar because proper locking stands are still rare. At least, this is getting better.

Concluding

I don’t see any serious effort of the city to make cycling more appealing. The current traffic rules for bikes are out of touch with reality and to create better infrastructure for cyclists would require rethinking how bicycles, cars and pedestrians interact in a modern city. Maybe cities like Amsterdam or Copenhagen can lead us the way.