Örgryte and Gothenburg

At first today we just wanted to write about a new old bicycle club here in Gothenburg. We read about them in the newspaper today, and we say "new" because they started their activities just last year and we say "old" because the club was originally founded in 1913. Wow! That's a long history! The club is Örgryte Velocipedklubb, and you can read about them here. We noticed one thing, however. Örgryte is really close to where some of our club members (including yours truly) live, and we have to say one thing about their kits: They're really good looking

and quite similar to

Quite the coincidence!

But then, just an hour later we stumbled across something in our facebook feed. Yesterday the chairwoman of the Swedish parliament's Traffic committee, politician Karin Svensson Smith, and emeritus professor at the Department of Technology and Society at the Faculty of Engineering, LTH, at the University of Lund Christer Hydén had a discussion article published in the newspaper Göteborgsposten. The article didn't really say anything very provocative, you can read it here (Sori! Swedish only! But there's of course google translate...). They simply said that it would be good if bicyclists could ride their bikes in the car lanes, that more and more people are riding bikes today and that riding bikes is good, for a lot of reasons. There's really nothing wrong with that, is there? The most provocative part was maybe that they thought that bicyclists should be able to ride their bikes in the car lanes, but... Well, people do that already.

However, the newspaper's feature editor Malin Lernfelt seems to have went through the roof over this. We can honestly say that we don't like Malin Lernfelt. (Or rather we don't like her opinions. Maybe she's really nice if you know her personally, but we don't.) She hates new architecture. She's super conservative - she makes the Old Testament feel like rather progressive reading compared with some of the things she writes. And a couple of years ago she was all about home language teaching, because apparently she is married to a Finnish man and she wanted her children to learn Finnish in school. Except for the fact that the whole thing smelled of personal gain that's cool and all - usually it is easier to learn other languages if you have good knowledge of your own language, the language that is spoken in your home. She wrote a couple of articles about it, but then she went on national radio as a sort of spokeswoman for this and talked about "us", as in "we who have Finnish roots". That sent some of us through the roof. Some of the members of Ensliga Bergens cykelklubb have Finnish roots, but you don't Malin Lernfelt! You might be married to a Finnish man but that does not make you Finnish. You are not a spokeswoman for "us"!

Anyway, the title of Malin Lernfelt's reply was "Should the mamils be allowed to destroy the city?" and that kind of says it all. You can read it here, but take heed - if you like bicycles and riding bikes reading it might send you through the roof! She wrote that the article was "totally detached", put everyone who rides a bicycle tantamount to mamils, raged over the "aggressive anti-car politics", stated that everyone can't or doesn't want to ride their bikes several tens of kilometres dressed in lycra to work and then sit at their workplaces sweating and concluded that the best solution to all traffic related problems was to tell the bicyclists... sorry, the mamils, to slow down. Oh. My. God.

We guess that there's really no use in arguing with her, she seems... No, let's not go into that. We do have two questions, though:

1. How, exactly, are mamils destroying the city? Are they rubbing the city to pieces with their wheels? Are they secretly sneaking around in the night, hacking away pieces of the city? And if she means "destroying" figuratively, that it's more about the people who live in the city, then aren't mamils included, if they live in the city too?

2. Young mothers with child's seats on their bicycles who are leaving their children at the daycare centre on their way to work, old men who go shopping with a plastic bag hanging from the handlebars, children who ride their bikes to school... What about them? Why doesn't she mention them? Or are they really included in the mamils? Most of us, in Ensliga Bergens cykelklubb bicycling club don't wear lycra when we ride to work or school and we avoid sweating too much by taking our time. And of course it happens, we get late or something happens on the way there, but hey, is that really so bad? There are showers and washbasins (and washing machines) and you can bring along an extra shirt.

Calm down. Try riding your bike in the city to see what it's really like before you state how it is. And ride safe.