In the Polish public discourse organized around the economic notions of neoliberalism, information about the action of the City Council in Szprotawa may arouse extreme emotions — the small center decided to prepare a bicycle „layette” for first-year students.
Szprotawa is a small town in Lubuskie province. In this small town, it was decided to implement an interesting social project to equip every first-grade student of elementary schools and the local high school with a new bicycle with accessories.
As part of the „Bike for the First” program, students will receive bicycles as early as September 4 of this year — at the very beginning of the school year. Under the tender, the successful supplier will provide three hundred and thirty-two unicycles — one hundred and eighty-two units for elementary school students and one hundred and fifty units for high school students. These will be mountain bikes (MTB), in addition, each student will receive a protective helmet. The magistrate boasted on its social media with a photo of the sports hall filled with bicycles. The cost of the project is more than three hundred thousand zlotys.
© UM Szprotawa
ewenement and little innovation
The Szprotawa project is difficult to embed in the activities of other urban centers in Poland. Large cities primarily adopt the priority of developing a network of urban bicycles or, like Jaworzno or Kraków, a monthly bicycle subscription.
Szprotawa's action is interested in that it focuses primarily on shaping certain attitudes toward mobility. Giving bicycles to schoolchildren allows not only to create conditions for them to move efficiently around the city, but also shows them the transportation alternative that a bicycle can be on a daily basis. The formation of such attitudes translates not only positively into less exploitation of road infrastructure, but also into public health and sports habits of future townsfolk. Of course, the transfer of bicycles does not replace long-term strategies and plans to expand infrastructure for this mode of transportation. Nevertheless, properly preparing and equipping young people with the necessary equipment can bring significant social and financial returns.
Poland – a zero-sum game
While underneath the post on Szprotawa's social media you will find mostly praise and joy for the relaunch of the program (it had its inauguration in the previous school year), there is a different atmosphere in other online spaces — defined by concepts derived from theeconomics notions such as handouts, meaningless „welfare” or based on negative beliefs that reinforce the conflict between car drivers and cyclists, whom the former call "sacred cows."
The investment made by Sprotava falls into the clinch of criticism we find ourselves in relation to politics at the central level. When articles about homes for people in homelessness crisis or investments in bicycle infrastructure appear on the pages of our portal, it is hard to shake off dehumanizing and hateful comments against the groups in question.
This shows that we are still playing a zero-sum game in Poland — no matter what interesting, socially useful local or supra-regional policy we introduce, there will always be a group of people who think they have lost out on it, because its effect does not directly affect them. This clinch can be seen in the formation of policies concerning not only the issue of social spending, but also infrastructure development, or — most importantly from an urban-architectural perspective — public space, architectural competitions and responsible planning policies.
The Szprotawa project may not be scalable to every city in Poland, but it shows an interesting approach to shaping bicycle policies. Like other cities the size of Chrzanów or Pleszew, it proves that innovation is not reserved for metropolises.
