Day 4 began at 6:29 this morning as I pedaled down Ville de Luxembourg’s avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt . . . followed rue Ulric into the Grund and climbed the cobblestones of the Montée du Grund towards the Ville Haute. I passed the Lëtzebuerg City Museum and the very old Église Saint-Michel before turning towards home.
The eBike’s Bosch Computer’s map recorded 19.94 kilometers in 59 minutes, although no KPI can quite measure the pleasure of watching Luxembourg awaken from a bicycle: movement, memory and morning light.
This past Tuesday evening, the same bicycle carried me to TERRA Community Supported Agriculture Farm to collect my weekly groceries from local Farmers: bread, eggs, plums, bok choy, tomatoes, aubergines, peppers, courgettes, spring onions and greens traveled home without requiring a 2-ton steel box. Some became a generous vegetable soup. This is why more and more people hesitate to describe Active Mobility merely as “exercise”: walking and pedaling connect movement with food, health, place and community. What changes when physical activity is no longer something separated from life, but becomes one of the ways we live it?
As I climbed through Luxembourg’s layers of history this morning, I found myself thinking about Monday’s journey home from London: I left St Pancras Train Station by Eurostar, crossed beneath the Channel and arrived in the heart of Paris. After a brief pause, an approximately €40 TGV carried me east through Champagne, towards Metz and Thionville, and home to Luxembourg City. The journey was smooth, productive and unexpectedly delicious. More importantly, it gave me time to meet a Japanese couple with whom I spoke for hours. They invited me to visit Japan, and I invited them to Luxembourg. Train’s carriages make room for conversation that no transport emissions calculator can value.
Railways carry us through European memory: at St Pancras, railway workers who died during the First World War are remembered through Fabian Peake’s permanent memorial on the Grand Terrace. Its column of white enamel plaques carries no individual names. Instead, handwritten job titles such as “meat pitcher,” “scotcher” and “junior chain-horse youth” evoke the working community that once animated the station, hotel and goods yard. Unveiled in 2018 near areas damaged by air raids in 1918 and 1941, the memorial finally realized an ambition abandoned for lack of funds in 1921. It remembers the fallen not as an anonymous total, but through the everyday work and lives interrupted by war. At Gare de l’Est, remembrance is woven into a station from which soldiers once departed for the front. Further east lies Château-Thierry, marked by the terrible losses of 1918, followed by Metz and Thionville, places repeatedly pulled between nations before becoming part of today’s peaceful European connections. What does Remembrance require of us? Surely more than plaques, paintings and ceremonies. The same rails that once carried soldiers towards war can now carry travellers towards conversation. The same streets once designed around fortifications can now make room for children, adults of all ages, people of all abilities, and everyday life.
That is why I take the train. That is why I bicycle. That is why my work with Youth4Planet matters so much to me. That is why I volunteer with the European Climate Pact. The Velo-city community belongs to the same story. We do not need to wait for miracles before building cleaner, healthier and more peaceful mobility. Much of what we need already exists. We need the courage to connect it, improve it and make it available to everyone.
Could every major European station offer safe bicycle access, secure parking, affordable folding-bike hire and genuinely integrated rail tickets? YES.
Could our transport choices help us remember the past without repeating . . . the mistakes of the past? YES
Decency matters . . . and . . . as we are learning every day: Decency needs to be pollinated.
