People wanted Lego bike paths, and Lego is finally listening

A thousand years ago, in 2019, a regional adviser in the Netherlands named Marcel Steeman undertook an apparently impossible challenge: convincing manufacturers of one of the most popular toys in the world to do something a little different.

He wanted Lego, the toy producer based in Billund, Denmark, to add bike paths to its small brick towns.

For years, the streets of urban Lego sets – formerly called base plates – had space for cars, people, even small culverts, but no designated lane for vehicles powered by zero-emission human energy like bicycles. Worse, it seemed that the Lego streets had become more hostile to pedestrians and cyclists over time. Compared to Lego sets from years ago, the cars seem to have gotten bigger – evolving from four to six beams wide – and the roads seemed to be getting wider, while the sidewalks were getting narrower and narrower.

“It really caught my attention that Lego City is a car-centered city,” Steeman told me by email.

Steeman posted his bike path proposal on Lego’s “Ideas” website, where enthusiasts can share and vote on each other’s ideas. Really popular ideas may have a chance to climb the ladder and become part of an official Lego set – although only 33 have actually been produced in the program’s 13-year history. Ideas range from elegant, like this incredibly accurate-looking violin, to idiosyncratic, like this map of Middle-earth by JRR Tolkien. Others got enough support to move on to complete Lego sets, such as this re-creation of the famous Sesame Street brownstones.

Steeman’s idea caught the eye of Marco te Brommelstroet, associate professor of urban planning at the University of Amsterdam who tweeted under the name Cycling Teacher. And one of Brommelstroet’s tweets caught my attention, prompting me to write a story that asked the question: “Where are the bike paths in the Lego world?”

But as the idea gained more traction on social media, Lego remained frustratingly silent. And Steeman’s posts on the Lego Ideas website continued to be rejected. “I’ve tried it several times,” he said. “Sometimes [they were rejected] for no reason, once with the reason it was just a political statement and not a set, and it really confused me. “

Rendering of Marcel Steeman

Several people who supported Steeman’s idea of ​​adding bike lanes to Lego’s urban landscape tried to contact the company, but without success. (A spokesman did not respond to a request for comment for my original story, nor for the most recent one.)

Meanwhile, Steeman and Brommelstroet continued to dig into Lego’s history and discovered that, in the 1980s and 90s, the company produced street signs with small green-painted cycle paths. But in the end, the lanes disappeared, and in the years that followed, the roads got bigger, and Lego cars went from four pins wide, to six pins, to eight pins.

Not only that, but they learned that the absence of bike paths can have something to do with the Lego supply chain. Thalia Verkade, a journalist who was collaborating on a book on mobility with Brommelstroet, found that Lego hired a third-party company for road signs, which were among the last pieces made by a company other than Lego itself. According to Verkade, Lego was trying to buy the contract to return the production of street signs to its own facilities, Steeman said.

At about the same time, Matthew Ashton, an official Lego Master, suggested in a tweet that some new form of road would be arriving at the sets of the city of Lego “in the not too distant future”. “A moment of anguish,” said Steeman.

Meanwhile, Steeman worked as a regional advisor for the province of North Holland, where he regularly addresses issues related to mobility. When the pandemic hit, Steeman started working from home, sharing the third floor of his home with his 9-year-old son and all of his Legos. “There are Lego everywhere,” he said, “and I need to tilt my camera up to save my face in the many digital meetings I have for my work.”

Just before the pandemic, Steeman heard rumors that Lego was going to revolutionize its road system using adjustable assemblies and real bricks, not just large flat plates, as a way to play with road designs. Would this allow for the inclusion of pedestrian crossings and speed bumps – and perhaps bicycle lanes?

These redesigned street sets (# 60304) were finally launched last year, along with a small shopping district (# 60306) that included a pretzel shop, a sporting goods store, a crosswalk, some streetlights and – finally – a thin blue bike path.

Print Screen: Lego

Steeman was shocked, but instead of resting on his laurels, he immediately took stock of all the ways in which this updated urban landscape still fell short of what he really wanted. The bike path was small, really small, just two nails wide, enough space for a cargo bike. In addition, the box art represented a bucket truck parked in the middle of the bike path. However, he considered this a “small victory” and went back to work promoting his idea of ​​a wider and more comfortable bike path.

He generated a new representation of his idea using the new road signs as a base. He also added some bike racks, a bicycle with a child seat and, most importantly, large, wide and blue bike paths. He chose blue as his color, knowing that this is the color used in Billund and Denmark, where Lego is based. Bike paths are painted red in their native Holland, to prevent people from mistaking them for water in the canals.

Steeman reluctantly uploaded his new rendering to the Lego Ideas website, anticipating another rejection. But instead, he had another big shock. “To my surprise, the idea was accepted in one day,” he said. It was posted on the Lego website and now Steeman can try to garner enough support to make it a real set.

Lego gave him 60 days to get 100 supporters; he did it in 4 hours. Now he has just over a year to get 10,000 supporters. The odds are against him – remember, only 33 ideas were accepted – but he is confident that this can be done. And if he doesn’t, he knows that the seed has already been planted with Lego designers. A narrow blue bike path can eventually turn into something much bigger and safer with the smiling inhabitants of Legoland. Everything is possible.

“In the end, I just want a world generation to grow up with a sustainable, healthy and above all safe alternative to the world centered on the car we live in,” said Steeman. “And in fact there is no bigger city in the world to start this revolution than Lego City.”

He added: “So Lego was probably a little right when it said it was a political statement.”