Cycling up hills suck – but not in Zurich | Why Not Just Bikes is wrong about hills

Just to be clear, this isn’t a video dunking on Not Just Bikes at all. It’s simply an in depth look at the issue of hills and commuter cycling. They certainly are a problem for cycling uptake but also for other non-motorised transport users.

i’m back there are so many stupid reasons anticycling people bring up as to why we can’t increase cycling uptake through simple improvements these reasons are often hilarious and easily debunked oh we don’t have the weather for it it’s too hot and what happens when it rains or snows i got to take my kids to school how will I do the weekly shopping what about old people who need to drive and the most hilarious of all oh Europe is flat they don’t have the hills like we do in Australia or the old US of A [Music] actually this one makes sense it’s easy for us to look at the Alps in Europe to laugh at them and dismiss this claim as ignorant but even though Switzerland is 2/3 mountainous the cities are mostly flat and when we look at other parts of Europe such as everyone’s favorite cycling country the Netherlands that country again is famously flat it’s clear that the Dutch cycle only on flat grounds given their standard Dutch bike is a single geared bicycle with carrying racks whilst the Swiss bike has gears to deal with the hills and for anyone who dares threaten the neutrality and sovereignty of the bike lane a panza is on hand but what about Switzerland surely there are cities amongst those mountains or hills they can’t all cram into the flat lands you might ask and that is a good question and the answer is yes swiss cities do have hills and yes people still do cycle them a lot but the thing is the hills in Zurich aren’t really an impetus to casual or commuter cycling you’ll find casual bike riders of all ages heavy cargo bikes and even single speed bikes in the hills of Zurich but when you look at my home city of Brisbane the city is nowhere near as hilly or mountainous as Zurich but I can assure you those hills aren’t full of people cycling and neither are they a joy to ride in fact they suck mega balls i’m Streets and Scars and today we’re going to have a look at why a city literally at the foot of large hills and mountains is a lot more enjoyable to ride than a city with much smaller hills we’ll also look at why I’m going to throw fuel into the already extinguished fire of why grid cities can suck ass and we’ll also find out why you will hear me puffing and panting up this hill on a bike science zurich is an amazing place to cycle in it isn’t quite Dutch city or Copenhagen level of great cycling infrastructure but it is on the whole great to cycle i know urbanism Jesus’s not just bikes mentioned that Zurich has some horrible places to cycle and Switzerland isn’t the best place for cycling but he’s not entirely wrong but the specific streets he referenced are often the exception the vast majority of the city is quiet streets where bike lane isn’t necessary and although the painted gutters are quite shitty fortunately at least the rather pleasant Swiss drivers respect the yellow line for any Swiss who disagree go cycle in English-sp speakaking countries where the yellow painted bicycle gutter means come and die and you have to prove they did something wrong but it’s not just bikes wish to see at the end of his video switzerland has a lot of potential and Zurich is living up to that potential constantly improving city cycling infrastructure and proposing semi-radical plans to improve it further not just bikes if you’re watching this video I’m pleased to report that on Cass and Strasa the whole right side lane has been converted to bicycle only we’re getting there though the auto lobby is still strong here so each bicycle plan has push back that delays projects like many other European cities Zurich used to be a car brand hell hole cars used to be absolutely everywhere in the city even in the old town streets even though Switzerland is a very small country with amazing public transport system the country has a very high rate of car ownership for its size with approximately 600 cars per thousand people which is a relatively high rate in Europe over the years the city was consumed by cars but it slowly fought back and regained control of the streets and reversing past mistakes in road design preferring people over cars and somehow somehow it dodged the most drastic disastrous heinous road plan a beautiful city like Zurich could ever do though that will be the topic of another video zurich managed to turn streets from this to this and the city continues to do so every year especially this one which will have to be a video for another time along with this mysterious destructive road parade jake you’ve probably noticed that every city I’ve covered has had a topography gradient of water meaning flat what about the hills anyone can cycle on flat land I hear you say for those who haven’t noticed Zurich predominantly lies in the flat area between the hills and mountain ranges the space is in between these mountains is quite flat as over millions of years sediment was deposited during floods and glacial movements creating a nice flat landscape amongst the mountains but from the early settlements up to around the industrial revolution the city grew gradually with the old town and railway station being the center of commerce the city grew around these areas and slowly but surely development started to creep up the hills you can see on maps throughout time that the city slowly grew further and further up the hill but in lower flatlands you’ll see an interesting phenomenon of urban planning history before the advent of mass car ownership what you notice is that to the east of the city on the hill known as Sudekburg development continued to spraw but on the flat land to the west of the city development just densified not so much expanded the dense areas also took on more of a grid style geometric design whilst the hilly areas didn’t so much by a few infill areas why you’ll find grids in the lower areas and not so much in the hilly areas will become very apparent soon but let’s park that for a moment because I need to expand on hills specifically hills and cycling do they actually negatively affect commuter cycling rates the short answer is yes they do affect commuter cycling rates i’m going to push back on urbanist Jesus not just bikes here who cites a paper from Justin Tindle that says hills are not a contributing factor to cycling rates in every city I’ve ever been to all around the world I’ve seen a direct correlation between cycling safety and the number of people cycling the hills aren’t really a contributing factor and that has been confirmed by research too whilst yes the paper does come to the conclusion that topography plays no role in cycling rates it doesn’t tell the full story about cycling and hilly topography there’s more to it than hills equals bad in the paper not just bikided the author mentioned that research done in Belgium England and Wales that hills do in fact have an effect on cycling rates oddly enough it also cites a study done on Dutch cities showing that the notoriously low and flat country is also affected by wait for it hilly terrain huh what hilly terrain crossing an arching canal bridge oh no yep there is a hill in the way we must take another route hilly terrain can have a significant impact on casual or commuter cycling for primarily two reasons it’s hella uncomfortable and it massively slows you down of course there are people out there who absolutely love taking hills on bikes unfortunately or rather unfortunately this isn’t most people they just want to get to work or get to the shops and if a hill between their home and work means an extra few minutes of arriving sweaty then of course they’ll opt for the car there are other solutions to riding hills that don’t include physical exhaustion such as ebikes or regular buses you can put your bike into or in Stoodgart they had this cute little wagon at the front of their tram train Uber and thingo where you can put your bike onto and it’ll take you up the hill or like in Norway this silly bicycle foot kick machine that yeets you to the top of the hill these solutions are great but they have some mega drawbacks ebikes are expensive and even in wealthy Zurich bike theft is rife public transport doesn’t go everywhere nor is it always that great to put your bike inside a busy bus it also scales back in peak hour times and finally this bicycle machine doesn’t scale well it’s tricky to use not that much faster than just pedaling really fast and its usable design is somewhat restricted in length and location in Zurich bar a few really cool finiculars that let you take bicycles you don’t really need fancy gizmos or novelty solutions because for over 100 years the solution has been there the whole time you see it’s not about how high a hill or mountain is it’s the gradient of the climb when it comes to cycling hills comfortably gradient is everything it’s a basic principle in physics if you want to reduce the effort and thus make the ride more comfortable you have to double the distance casual and commuter cyclist have limits and cycling starts to get really uncomfortable around a 6% grade depending on how far you ride well we all can’t be riding around with legs like Quadzilla Robert Ferschamon to yeet us up steep hills with enough power to toast bread and this is what the paper not just by cited was talking about it didn’t necessarily say that hills are a barrier to commuter or casual cycling but rather the steepness of the slopes is the biggest factor when you have a look at the hilliest parts of Zurich you’ll notice the street design starts to alter itself from straight geometrically organized streets into elongated curved streets as an example you can see the streets in the area of the Hankk region of Zurich are mostly all parallel with barely any streets going perpendicular apart from a few pedestrian only stairs this is because this area is a steep slope and in order to reduce the gradient street pathways had to follow the contours basically following the contours means going along the slope not directly up the slope this street design reduces a direct uphill average gradient from a soul busting 26% to around 5% yet the distance is more than double but remember to have the effort or gradient we need to double the distance and half a 26% gradient is still 13% which is still a bit too uncomfortable for casual commuter cyclists so I chose a route that’s nearly seven times longer to prove that to bring that gradient down a fair bit to a relaxing 5% average you’re wondering why I started all the way to the east and not right next to the river well the roads don’t really cater for direct routes from the bottom of the hill here to the top to allow these cars to drive straight up and there’s a reason for that i will get there soon but let’s quickly look at Brisbane and see what their steep streets are like and my golly god let me introduce you to Goa Street in West Brisbane with a maximum gradient of around 30% yes I know New Zealand’s Baldwin Street holds a title for steepest street in the world but I’ll be referring to Brisbane a lot so I’ll keep it simple right go street very steep very residential the YouTuber Mitch Boyer tested himself riding up this hill on a very expensive and very light road bicycle and he peaked himself at just over 700 W pushing it up the hill just so he can make a 30 second split now if a trained cyclist on specialized equipment using that much power imagine how a casual commuter cyclist would feel just trying to get to work and Goer Street isn’t just an outlying example where once you ride it you’re on gentle slopes no everywhere else is just crappy undulating hills steep hills like this are everywhere in Brisbane although predominantly on the western side of the city it seems like the Brisbane street network was designed by massochist cyclists once you complete a hill you have to ride down it and then do it again at the next hill and this is another factor in discouraging cycling uptake steep hills are one thing but repeated hills just compound the barrier to cycling as an example here is my cycling routes terrain profile from my home in Zurich to a major university that is situated on the other side of a valley it’s a gentle slope ride down and then a gentle slope ride back up to the university quite relaxed able to be done on a single speed bike if I’m feeling adventurous and most of all I can keep a steady pace without arriving and dripping in sweat now here’s my ride from my home where I grew up in Brisbane to my high school it’s just repetitive annoying hills the path is just constantly going up and down steep hills it’s not fun it’s exhausting and there are no bike lanes which makes me more vulnerable on my significantly slower uphill speeds relative to the fast cars and with frequent hills it takes longer than it should yes that’s correct overall cycling hills slows you down even if you did the equivalent downhill as you do the uphill cuz even though you’re a lot faster on the downhill it still isn’t enough to make up the lost time on the uphill the physic law of conservation states that energy used to cycle up a hill will be saved on the downhill much like a pendulum but that’s assuming there are no other influences however in the real world we have air resistance that is quadratic as speed increases there’s friction from moving parts that also increase with speed and a whole bunch of other things but most importantly riding a bicycle really fast down suburban roads is absolutely mental and dangerous especially without a bike lane and therefore unfortunately some of the energy that you stored while going uphill originally intended to be released during the downhill now has to be dissipated as heat through your brakes because a lot of bike paths or roads are completely full of danger so what does this look like in the real world well using my 8 km and in freedom units because some Americans complain they don’t understand metric approximately 20,000 AR-15 barrel lengths long bike ride to high school in Brisbane google’s Gemini AI estimates the hills add about 10 minutes compared to an equivalent flat route while 10 minutes might seem minor factor in the exhaustion heat sweat discomfort safety concerns and general annoyance that hills introduce and it’s clear why they can be a significant deterrent to casual or commuter cycling it might be really hard to verify this information in real world testing but I’m pretty sure you get the gist of why tour to France riders are exceptionally fast on flat ground and why the most exciting stages are mountain stages where the boys are separated from the men steep roads aren’t fun on a bicycle but I find it ironic that when a new highway is built they actually keep gradients to a minimum so the engineers that designed roads recognize that it’s not suitable for large trucks with large and heavy cargo but somehow they find it acceptable for a low horsepower human it boggles the mind and one more thing against steep roads they don’t go well with these bad boys unless it’s a Lisbon tram but how is it that Brisbane has street design that is completely inappropriate to its topography and Switzerland doesn’t what went wrong in Brisbane before we get into the why I need to preface this part by fully acknowledging the difference ingraphy between Zurich and Brisbane zurich has hills and mountains but the landscape is best described as being river plains where sediment was washed down off the mountains over millions of years to create flat landscapes in between the large rolling hills whilst Brisbane’s topography has been eroded over millions of more years to create small rippled hills compared with Zurich’s large gentle hills the best way I can describe it is that Switzerland’s landscape is a chiseled buff tide abs with definable smooth and visible peaks and troughs whilst Brisbane’s hills are like well an old dude’s wrinkled scrotum look if you have a less erotic way of describing the differences in topography I’d like to hear it until then it’s abs and scrotums from here on out what do chiseled abs and old wrinkle scrotums have to do with street design well not much really apart from the fact that street design difficulty changes depending on which body part you’re designing for the wrinkle scrotum represents a lot of little undulating hills and designing streets for that is probably overly burdensome or steep streets are likely unavoidable without major earthworks but even in the predictable and singular large hills of Zurich there are a few steep hills you can often come across depending on your daily commute route and here is where you’ll now have to hear my struggling up the steep hill on the way to a top technical university in the world actually one where Albert Einstein was a professor in 1912 except at the original central campus not the Hunkerbag campus where that in 1912 was just a farm so did Zurich make the same silly mistakes as Brisbane during their street design well yes but sort of not really you see those steep streets where you have to hear my panting and struggling weren’t really made for commuter traffic at all when they were first laid as I mentioned about this place being farmland decades ago nearly a century ago no one else came up here except the farmer and probably some hiking dogs only the farmer was up here only the farmer needed to come here this was considered the outskirts of Zurich all those years ago and even though now there is a residential on both sides of the uni back then no one went between these two places it just wasn’t necessary because you see as a city’s residential areas grew outward it wasn’t a growth in farmers on the hills that spurred housing development it was a growth of wealthy city-wide college jobs this is why you won’t see a road going directly up the side of this hill but instead gently radiating up the steep slopes from the city center because workers were primarily going between the city of Zurich and their home and even before these residential areas were developed the only roads that existed beforehand were gentle sloped roads going to the older villages because these roads had to carry the traffic of horse and cart unpowered transport walkers farmers taking their produce to the city and so on and so forth even when the first internal combustion engine car was created it was only able to convert about 1 liter of petrol to 75 horsepower making early motorized transport not really viable for steep hills 75 horsepower is already a struggle on flat ground imagine how it would do on a hill this is why most roads are gentle slopes back then and even now it cemented this culture and design philosophy of minimizing gradients that inadvertently created a great solution to cycling steep hills although these organically developed streets are great for the city commute they’re kind of annoying if you need to traverse these parallel streets with a car in the modern day cars can shoot straight up a 20% gradient no worries so being forced to drive the long way around is quite annoying and that’s a fair statement to make this brings me to the question of why grids can be bad for not just cycling but other things too i’m going to throw a bit of fire onto the already extinguished flame of beef between Alan Fischer and OBF we all remember Alan Fisher’s video dunking on the YouTube channel OBF he tried to fellaciously not fellaciously justify why grids are all around bad it was pretty haha worthy to watch those flimsy arguments get dunked on you can watch the video yourself but to summarize OBF just correlated bad urban design like urban heat island effect traffic and aesthetic outcomes with grids when in fact those problems stem from other general planning failures however one of OBF’s strongest possible points against the grid was his shortest and least expanded point and that is hills what OBF said about grids on hills is they’re bad because they aren’t appropriate for varying topographies and you’d have to flatten the topography in order to make grids work there is so much nuance to this argument that he could have expanded on to strengthen his point but he left himself open to Allen easily and rightfully dunking on him obf is correct in saying that applying grid design to steep gradients presents significant challenges but his point just stops at the amount of earth works necessary to flatten everything which we know is not true at all and actually creating steep roads reduces the amount of earth works as you don’t need to do cut and fill when you go parallel what OBF didn’t highlight with grids in hilly areas is that they limit the use of longer heavier trams create poorly engineered intersection approaches with reduced sight lines for large vehicles and severely hinder accessibility for people with mobility impairments these are the actual problems of grids applied to unsuitable topography except the grid itself isn’t the problem it’s the rationale of the grid design application grid design isn’t a new phenomenon it’s rather ancient as evidenced by old Roman settlements but in the modern world it has had varied ration relating to its application it can keep things orderly egalitarian easy to manage infrastructure- wise and property parcels are easy to divide and survey grids are easy and quick to design and that’s why you’ll find them in many cities around the world particularly in what we would call the new world or colonies but when it came to colonization and development of land in quote unquote the new world developers of urban planners if you could call them that had little idea about the topography of an area nor do they really care because appropriate design costs time and money they didn’t really know the organic pathways developed over years of human settlements in the area who naturally find the easiest pathways over time a lot of the times the surveyors tasked with creating the settlement or development pattern just drew a grid because it was just easier it was quicker than going out to properly survey the topography and creating topography appropriate street design that’s just what surveyors and developers did at the time which inadvertently resulted in streets going straight up the steepest hills in the area it’s no surprise that the most of the steepest hills in the world are found in English-speaking colonies like the USA Australia and New Zealand europe and in particular Zurich on the other hand had centuries of human movement that carved predominant pathways through the mountain passages you see those awesome switchback mountain roads that every with a hot adapt Japanese import hoons around on do you think the mountaineers created these curves for our automative fun hundreds of years before the car was invented no it was simply the only way to push their crap around steep hills even if it took longer and this is what grid design and biking on steep hills have to do with each other the natural pathways of old established cities were carved out in times when transport was primarily human or animal powered inadvertently making them easier to navigate in the contemporary world on a bicycle but when cities were divided up in the new world they completely disregarded topography as it was just easier as heavy industry wasn’t located on the hilly areas just residential so developers didn’t need to think too much zurich’s urban fabric tells a fascinating story many of its steep gritted streets were laid out long before the advent of the private car their fundamental purpose was to provide efficient housing for a workforce that largely commuted on foot or public transport and didn’t need to maneuver heavy cargo consequently you’ll observe a distinct pattern flat areas boast a dense grid for industry and residential whereas the hillsides are generally characterized by gentler slopes with residential homes the steeper sections up on the hills tend to be remnants of former farmlands or historic worker neighborhoods where walking was a primary mode of transport fast forward a few years and it turns out that when you let what is essentially community-led street design you get slopes and layouts that are appropriate for the topography and human use instead of these rubbish hillsides where you just absolutely avoid cycling unless you have to so it now begs the question what do we do about existing steep streets how do we make them more accessible for cyclists and mobility impaired people has the damage already been done is it fixable fortunately or perhaps unfortunately we don’t yet have a strong-handed leader who’s willing to tear up the existing urban fabric to fix poorly planned hilly streets in the name of better cycling infrastructure so instead we’ll have to rely on practical policy decisions and in this case well the obvious answer is the cyclist ye cannon in Tronheim Norway now as cool as it seems to just turn up and be shot up a steep hill it’s a highly specific solution but it doesn’t scale well and has some restrictions in application with regard to street design scalability and usability really the most obvious solution to steep hills are simply ebikes or electrical mobility the wheelchair users can also use it to get up the steep hill and on the way down I guess they let Jesus take the wheel and race down without brakes but seriously ebikes have been the biggest solution to biking hills but it’s not the only solution it has opened up hills to nearly everyone and often in the middle of mountains in Switzerland you’ll find pensioners getting their exercise with the help of ebikes it’s the most obvious practical and cost-effective solution though for those who can’t afford an ebike I guess it’s stiff here’s another solution for hills topography specific public transport yeah sure buses and the like can just drive us up but they have to go up windy roads and if the roads follow the topography of the hill you can’t feasibly run a bus line on every parallel street so either wheelchair users have to go the long way around or magically discovered walking again to go up some stairs so we need to tailor the solution a little bit more i present to you the finicular or cog wheel train these are great because they take you up to the level you need to go as fast and direct as possible and they’re often very easy to automate or make automatic and remotely controlled because what you can do with these finiculars is you’ve got these parallel streets and you just have the finicular have a stop at each street and you just go up take the finicular to the stop and walk along the street you need to get to quite simple zurich has two finiculas and one cog wheel train but other cities that solve the steep hill problem using specific public transport are Loausan with their rubber tide metro going from the lake shore up to the main station and Lugano that has a picular from the main station down to the you guessed it lake shore in Oldtown but probably one of the simplest public transport solutions to navigate a steep hill is the humble elevator or escalator i mean if these things can take you from one building floor to another surely you can apply them in the hills escalators are not uncommon in hilly cities they offer high-capacity transport but they are unsuitable for wheelchair users and can be costly to maintain particularly when exposed to weather conditions for a capacity in excess of what is necessary therefore they don’t really offer much difference than the humble stairs elevators on the other hand while suitable for wheelchairs their capacity isn’t that high are also expensive to maintain and very expensive to build as you either need to jut the walkway structure out over the terrain or dig a tunnel into the train and put the shaft up and they also often stink of piss as they are by nature an enclosed public cubicle but they do have that application and aren’t uncommon in Switzerland if by any chance you happen to be skiing in Zamat and you want to go up this hotel for uprek ski drinks but you’re staying down in the town well your options are walk 900 m approximately 155 Dodge Rams long up and around or pay an expensive micro electric cab just to end up about 150 m where you started there’s no bus because the narrow roads really don’t permit that but here’s the cool option walk down this random tunnel about 180 m into the mountain at which point you will find an elevator that will whisk you all the way up above the plebs to allow you to get sufficiently booed it is such a cool idea and the fact you have to go into a mountain in order to appear up on top makes it feel like a James Bond villain layer or like in the 1971 Willy Wonka film where Willy Wonka took his theavator yeah it’s a pretty cool solution to be shot up and out of the factory but that’s not the main reason why this was built usually at the end of popular ski runs you expect to get back onto a lift to go back up the mountain do you see any lifts here no well that’s because the ski lift is underground so when you ski down this track you get in the elevator down and you turn right and you’ll find a fully underground finicular that takes you back up the mountain now that’s two public transport options combined together it’s just so crazy that in this rich ski resort you’ll find ingenious transport solutions hidden amongst picturesque village okay yes on the topic of skiing some of you might be screaming “What about cable cars?” into the screen and I hear you they are very effective to transport lots of people on difficult terrain but they’re very very expensive if you don’t have enough demand willing to pay for it they are great but also a very specific and limited solution i mean in the case of here in Zamat they couldn’t really drive a cable car directly into the town so they had to pretty much go underground which only left finicular as the option but expensive infrastructure solutions aside the best way to improve steep hill cycling is honestly just to make cycling everywhere else suck less steep hills are a very niche problem in barriers to cycling but they represent a larger problem at play here and that is urban design for people not cars i guess if you do have a steep hill to cycle a grade separated bike lane definitely helps a lot and reduces the speed differential gap and physical gap between you and passing cars and for the love of God please remove parked cars that can allow dooring at fast speeds this is deadly so there it is yes hills are a barrier to cycling and Zurich has mostly inadvertently overcome most of it not just by creating a good cycling culture across the whole city but by historic streets designed and laid out by the community over hundreds of years as the least ex exhausting way to get around without a large motor pushing you around whilst in Brisbane the streets were just plonked down willy-nilly disregarding any organically delineated pathways across the tricky topography resulting in frustratingly repetitive steep hills that combined with the already terrible cycling infrastructure makes the commuter cycling experience much worse so if you if you’ve lasted until the very end of this video first of all thank you very much well done and second of all sorry for the delay in the videos coming out in the next one um I was quite a bit busy in my life but now some of that’s cleared up so we uh Thunderbirds are go for the next few videos that come out at bit higher frequency so stay tuned