Skip to main content

Vacuum Cleaner Culture

Vacuum Cleaner Culture

When I travel around with various lectures I tend to open with a crash course in understanding Copenhagen's bicycle culture. I explain how my friends and colleagues get a kick out of the demand for me to travel around the world talking about something as dull and everyday as 'bicycle culture'. I call it Vacuum Cleaner Culture. I have even made a logo to explain this.

We all have a vacuum cleaner, we've all learned how to use it and we all use it. But we don't go around thinking about our vaccum in the course of a day. Only when the bag is full do we roll our eyes and sigh. Kind of like when our tire is flat/chain is loose and we chuck our bike into the bike shop.

We don't have a 'stable' of vacuum cleaners. We don't buy vacuum cleaning clothes from our LVS or wave at other 'avid' vacuum cleaning 'enthusiasts' on the street. The relationship to our bicycles is the same as to our vacuum cleaners. They're both merely incredibly effective and useful tools for making our daily lives easier.
We don't have bicycle culture in #copenhagen. We have vacuum cleaner culture
In my Four Goals for Promoting Bicycle Culture lecture I compare the marketing of bicycles from the dawn of the Safety bicycle in the late 19th century - and up to the early 1950's - with the marketing of vacuum cleaners in the post war years.

It was all mainstream marketing. Aimed at selling the product to regular citizens, as opposed to sub-cultural groups who fancied the Ordinary (penny farthing) and other contraptions.

When technology made vacuum cleaners accessible and affordable, the same marketing prinicples were applied as to bicycles.

ANYWAY... one of our readers sent us a link about a vaccum cleaner fetishist. A boy who LOVES his vaccum cleaners.

I got a kick out of this. Of COURSE there are people out there who fetishize about simple, practical machines. Why not? It's just not for everyone. (I bet he rides a lazy bike - a.k.a. e-bike, but that's another story...)

For fun I thought I'd search for stats about how DANGEROUS vacuum cleaning is. I figured this writer over at Spacing Toronto could use some inspiration for articles that don't promote cycling negatively.

Imagine that. According to the Royal Society for Prevention of Accidents in the UK, there were the following statistics regarding vacuum cleaner related accidents:

Object or product involved: Vacuum Cleaner
Year Victims
2000.... 9,118
2001.... 9,104
2002.... 10,783

Where are the safety nannies on THIS issue?! Every bloody household must have a vaccum cleaner! And these stats are only for the UK. How much carnage is going unchecked around the world?
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

7550 New Bike Parking Spots at Copenhagen Central Station

For all of Copenhagen's badassness as a bicycle city, there remains one thing that the City still completely sucks at. Bicycle parking at train stations. At Copenhagen Central Station there are only about 1000 bike parking spots. Danish State Railways can't even tell us how many spots they have. They're not sure. Even in Basel they have 800+. In Antwerp they have this . Don't even get me started on the Dutch. 12,500 bike parking spots are on the way in some place called Utrecht . Amsterdam has a multi-story bike parking facility, floating bicycle barges round the back and are planning 7000 more spots underwater . Even at the nation's busiest train station, Nørreport, the recent and fancy redesign failed miserably in providing parking that is adequate for the demand . Architects once again failing to respond to actual urban needs. It is time to remedy that. Here is my design for 7550 bike parking spots behind Copenhagen Central Station. Steve C. Montebello i...
Read more

The New Question for 21st Century Cities

It's all so simple if we want it to be. For almost a century we have been asking the same question in our cities. "How many cars can we move down a street?" It's time to change the question. If you ask "How many PEOPLE can we move down a street?", the answer becomes much more modern and visionary. And simple. Oh, and cheaper. Let alone the fact that the model at the top can move 10 times more people down a street than the model at the bottom. When I travel with my Bicycle Urbanism by Design keynote , I often step on the toes of traffic engineers all around the world. Not all of them, however. I am always approached by engineers who are grateful that someone is questioning the unchanged nature of traffic engineering and the unmerited emphasis placed on it. I find it brilliant that individual traffic engineers in six different nations have all said the same thing to me: "We're problem solvers. But we're only ever asked to solve the sam...
Read more

Desire Line Analysis in Copenhagen's City Centre

Continuing in our series of Desire Line Analyses, we decided to cast our critical and curious eyes on yet another Copenhagen intersection, this time where Bremerholm meets Holmens Kanal. We decided to be more specific and focus on one part of the intersection - a location that we know well and one with a specific congestion problem in rush hour. We filmed for one hour from 08:15-09:15. Behaviour vs Design With the massive numbers of bicycle users in the mornings in Copenhagen, bottlenecks occur at a number of locations, particularly where many bicycle users need to turn left. This is something that all of us at the company experience each morning so we decided to study it. It was a November morning and it was party-cloudly, dry and 6 degrees C. The focus was to determine how bicycle users react to the sub-standard design of this location. How they react to having to battle with motorised traffic - something that is unusual in the city. Yep, even in Copenhagen, The Arroganc...
Read more