Think about raging bulls
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Colville-Andersen’s second goal is to “always sell bicycles positively”. He compared the marketing of bicycles to that of cars:
“You never hear them [car industry] talking negatively about their product at all. Never. They’ll never tell you that driving is considered to be the most difficult task homo sapiens have had to master. This is actually true, hunting mammoths is nothing compared to driving a car. They’ll never tell you that the level of dangerous hydorcarbon particles in the air are actually higher inside the car than if you ride a bike next to them… They never tell you your risk of head injury is higher in a car than on a bicycle and at no point have we ever seen the car industry promote motorist helmets.”
A key to making cycling mainstream, according to Colville-Andersen, is to address the dangers of the automobile. He equated the car with a bull running around a china shop.
“Someone has let a sacred bull in society’s China shop… We can all agree that there is a bull in the china shop, we can all be realistic and think the bull’s not going anywhere (it’s gotten too big to fit out the door now). So we bubble wrap all the pieces of expensive china and meanwhile the bull just knocked over eight shelves in aisle 9 and took a shit on the floor. It’s strange, we’ve developed this fantastic capacity to completely and utterly ignore the bull.”
Continuing with the bull/car comparison, he said that knowing that there’s a bull in the china shop, people should do something to “limit its destructive capabilities” such as “castrate it to make it calmer, tie it down, or build a fence around it.”
Colville-Andersen’s third goal is to simply address “the bull”, meaning, if cities really want to attain high levels of bicycle use, they must begin to acknowledge that the cars are causing havoc and their power and dominance on the urban landscape must be reigned in.
On a similar note, Colville-Andersen said he dreams about a day when cars have warning labels similar to those mandated on cigarette packages:
“Imagine if we woke up and all the cars had warning labels on 30% of their surface area [that's the law for cigs]. Imagine what would happen to the mindsets of our population. After two months you’d have people opening their garage, looking at the car, looking at the bike and saying, ‘I’m not going to risk my life, I’m taking the bike’”.
The role of the bicycling “subculture” was also addressed by Colville-Andersen. He feels that in order to “mainstream bicycling” it needs to be re-branded as a “normal, borderline boring transport option.” To do this he feels like cities should “focus less on subcultures”.