What you see above is one of the best recent additions to passenger transportation in Helsinki. Beginning with this spring these riders will take you on their bike rickshaws anywhere within the Helsinki city center. I have seen them in front of the main railway station in Helsinki and it seems that that’s where their main base is.

I think that both idea and realization are fantastic, but it seems that people in Helsinki still have to catch up with with it. Just a few meters away from where I have taken this picture at Helsinki main railways station was a 30 meter long regular car cab queue.

One of my first thoughts was that even though this manual cab is a payable service, I would still most likely have a feeling that I am exploiting the bicycle rider. I guess because one can immediately see the result of someone’s manual labor.

Nevertheless, these bicycle rickshaws are an excellent solution for the modern city. As far as I know, there are only five operating in Helsinki at the moment, but if there were more, they could definitely contribute to decreasing the downtown short-range traffic. Environment and citizen friendly mode of transportation. Whoever is behind this idea just needs to grab the opportunity here in Helsinki where for more than a year now there has been a serious shortage of car cab drivers.

Mladen

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 9th, 2007 at 11:51 pm and is filed under Environment, Finland, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.