Both local Singaporeans and Western migrants were present, when Danish founder of Cycling Without Age visited Singapore to speak about his project.
In the back end of the Shimano Cycling World facilities, a crowd of 35-40 people is gathered. They are listening to a man with a PowerPoint show, a project and a wide smile. It’s the Danish entrepreneur Ole Kassow, who is Singapore to talk about Cycling Without Age, which he is the founding father of. The project that recently started up in Singapore.
A brand new rickshaw specially designed for the project is parked next to Ole Kassow while he is speaking. In a contest with many other countries, where Cycling Without Age has also recently started up, the branch in Singapore won the bike, which is very important to the project, since the bike itself cost around 6.000 SGD.
And Ole Kassow is excited about the prospect of Cycling Without Age in Singapore.
“To me, Singapore is an ideal cycling city since it’s so flat – like in Denmark. So I think it’s going to be great. And there are some enthusiastic volunteers who put a lot of work into this, which means that I can safely let them run it in Singapore by themselves while I serve as a sparring partner,” Ole Kassow says after the presentation.
Practice on a new bike
Through the 45 minute-long speech, Ole Kassow doesn’t help from a cue card at any point. The info, the story behind and the anecdotes floats from his mouth in natural flow. Even though he has given this speech many times in the past three years, it is as if he is passionately telling a friend about the idea. And the audience is buying in to his stories and ideas.
After a big applaud, Ole Kassow gathers people outside where they can practice riding the tricycle. Because, as he explained sitting on the bike with people surrounded, it is not as easy as riding your ordinary two wheeled bike.
Outside, Ole Kassow smilingly observes and helps if needed, while people, who are both locals and Western migrants, take turn at riding the new transportation form. He has been in Singapore since Thursday and enjoys it.
“We took a ride earlier today and it was amazing to see the smiles on everybody’s faces. And nobody honked at us when we were on the road instead of the park connectors,” Ole Kassow laughs.
The story is missing the point; what’s this “Cycling Without Age” all about?
OK, I’ll help you out:
http://cyclingwithoutage.org/
A small quote from the homepage:
Cycling Without Age is a movement started in 2012 by Ole Kassow. Ole wanted to help the elderly get back on their bicycles, but he had to find a solution to their limited mobility. The answer was a rickshaw and he started offering free bike rides to the local nursing home residents.
He then got in touch with a civil society consultant, Dorthe Pedersen, at the municipality of Copenhagen, who was intrigued by the idea and together they bought the first 5 rickshaws and launched Cycling Without Age, which has now spread to all corners of Denmark, Norway, and it’s now taking off in several countries around the world.
Only it’s extremely dangerous to ride a bicycle in Singapore. Buses, Trucks, Vans and even car drivers don’t respect you and the vulnerability of riding a bike in traffic. I had several near Death incidents when I lived there, despite in some cases having had eye contact first. Why is there no bicycle path on large and wide roads like Bukit Timah? Go Green Singapore??