In the movie Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner plays a farmer grieving the death of his father. Ray’s father, Costner’s character, had been a baseball fan in life. One night of sadness, while walking through his cornfield, Ray hears a voice that tells him, “if you build it, he will come” (If you build it, he will come). Ray interprets that this voice wants him to build a baseball field, a task to which he dedicates himself despite the economic risk, the strange look of his friends and the misunderstanding of his family. When he finishes building it, the playing field is filled with legendary players who come and go from the cornfield. The phrase became popular and with repeated use the subject of the sentence changed from the first person singular to the first person plural: “if you build it, they will come”. Time also made it separate from the movie reference. Nowadays it is almost a mantra for entrepreneurs and there are debates about its origin. There are those who maintain that it comes from the Old Testament, from the book of Genesis, when Yahweh asks Noah to build an Ark that must contain a couple of each animal species.
The difficulty of the task makes Noah hesitate. Yahweh tests his faith. Despite everything, Noah continues before the incredulous gaze of those around him. As in the baseball field, when the Ark was ready the animals arrived.
My earliest memory of that phrase comes not from the movie, but from a blog about cycling infrastructure called Bicycle Dutch. A rough translation of that name may be Cycling in the Netherlands. As a whole, the blog describes the cycling culture of that country with an emphasis on infrastructure. The author maintains that the first step for the number of cyclists to grow in a city, a region or a country is to create the conditions for them to feel safe. He then claims that if you build it, they will come. The Netherlands is like the cultural other in terms of urban and interurban mobility. They are aliens, they come from the future or from a very different past. Building cycling infrastructure for them exceeds the first representation that, I believe, comes to mind for most of us, bike paths or bike lanes. The infrastructure for cyclists can be and is much more.
Although the objective of cycle paths and bike paths is to generate greater safety for cyclists, they are not enough. For that reason, infrastructure improvements are being explored. Among those improvements are bike-only streets. In Germany they are called Fahrradstrassen. Bicycles take up all the space, they cannot be overtaken, the maximum speed is 30 km/h, and cars can only enter as guests. In the Netherlands there are also exclusive routes. There they use colors and layouts for the road that indicate in a self-evident way that cars are exceptionally accepted. Another version of the Fahrradstrassen is the Sharrow Marking, which began in the city of Denver, in the United States. In this case, it is a space shared with cars, but cyclists are allowed to use the entire lane and cannot be displaced or overtaken. Less ambitious are the Bike Boxes that are located at signalized intersections to allocate space for cyclists when the traffic light is red. The Bike Boxes are located at the end of the bike lanes and occupy the entire width of the street. Cars should always pull up behind bikes and allow them to go first. In Copenhagen there are traffic lights for cyclists that are located next to those for motorized transport. Traffic light timing is staggered so cyclists can go first. In the Netherlands there are also traffic lights that give priority to cyclists. In many cases they are combined with roundabouts that fulfill the function of calming traffic.
There are other initiatives around the world to encourage the use of bicycles and increase their safety, such as exclusive and free parking lots, exclusive bridges, 45º curbs, space to carry bicycles on the train or in buses, bicycles that take into account the needs of users according to their age, and many more. The future arrived a long time ago and aliens are among us.
