Biketown Münster

Münster, the comfy German town I live in, is often also called 'The Biketown'. Altogether there are about 281'000 inhabitants, suburbs included. About 40'000 of them are students. And students often tend to move around with bikes for obvious reasons. (The favourite means of transportation for this species are bikes and busses.)

To cut it short, there are about 300'000 bikes in town. That's almost 1.1 bike for each biped. I can confirm this myself as I still possess the front lamp, bell and dynamo of an old 1950s bike in addition to my roadworthy bike. I'll come to talk about the 0.1 bike again for some reason later on.

There are basically three different kinds of people in town:

1. the car drivers (bus drivers and truckers included),
2. the bikers and
3. the pedestrians.

So, who do you think is the most influential group among these?? Let me give you a rough sketch of what I'm talking about for to better envision the scenery:

Legend:

Blue thingy = car,

Green thingy = bike,

Orange = bike path,

Undefinable = sidewalk.

Now: The blue thingy wants to turn right. If it's an unexperienced driver or driver from out of town he/she is not used to the presence of those green thingies and most probably will not watch out for them. BAD MISTAKE!

If the driver is lucky, the biker will just make an elegant jump onto his engine hood, curse terribly and get his new bike financed by the driver of the blue thingy.

However, if the driver of the blue thingy is not that lucky the motorist will wake up pretty guilty for the rest of his life. So... you see... that's what drivers fear most. Bikers know this, of course, and therefore keep their speed whenever there is a road to cross.

Pedestrians on the other hand are dumb bikers' food. They never know who they are nor where they are: They tend to turn left or right, turn back and forth, dance around and actually never know when they are on a suicidal path called bike path. BAD MISTAKE!

Frontal crashes between peds and bikers are luckily pretty seldom though (at least in cases when bikes' brakes happen to work). Side crashes and striping crushes even do have instructive benefits as they usually remind the peds to better keep well away from the red bikers' flight path next time. Probably this makes sense since bikers never look back and also dont wear number plates.

To be continued...