The Life-Sized City Blog

A number of readers spotted this on the internet today. It's a fake viral film from our Danish Cyclists Federation . Slowing chipping away at Danish bike culture without worrying about facts and science. It's also funded by Aalborg County - who should be spending their money on better infrastructure an education instead of fearmongering - and the police, who should be spending their strained resources on clamping down on speeding motorists. [our source 'Deep Throast' suggested that it was our car-centric Road Safety Council who was behind the viral film, but we've corrected that. Same family of fear-centrics, though] It's funny and well-made. But imagine what good they could do if they used their energy to promote cycling instead of making cycling appear dangerous here in the world's safest bicycle nation. Instead, they are quite keen on selling cars. As many readers pointed out, there is no fitting of the helmet, no instructions on how to wear it properly, ...

Now I've been keeping an eye on the Danish press over the past year or so. I always make a mental note of any article about cycling and several friends are good enough to send me or mail me articles on the subject. It was strange to read this article from Søndagsavisen - a free, national newspaper that everyone gets through their letterbox whether they like it or not. It was strange because I had to read it twice to realise that it was completely positive. No fear-mongering, no 'oooh it's dangerous', no helmet rhetoric. Just a positive article about cycling. I'll buy the journalist a beer if I ever meet them. The Danish media has engaged in one big blood orgy over the past year or more, focusing on anything and everything negative. For example, this post earlier this week . This article above is a ray of sunshine. It's about Bech-Bruun, Denmark's largest law firm. I translated it roughly and briefly. Barristers on Iron Horses [Danish slang for the bicycle] ...

A Swedish reader of Copenhagenize.com sent in this photo of a billboard in Stockholm. It is paid for by a non-governmental organisation called Nationalförenigen för trafiksäkerhetens Främjande [NTF] or The National Society for Road Safety . There is no mandatory helmet law in Sweden for adults but these NTF seem to think there should be one. The billboard reads: "A helmet law protects in more ways than one" Notice the bird shit on the helmet. You know you don't have a solid scientific case when bird shit is your best Unique Selling Point. Anyway, our reader doesn't fancy seeing fewer Swedes cycling - which is one of the primary consequences of a helmet law. A drop of 20-40% in the number of cyclists, which has been the decrease in all the regions with mandatory helmet laws, would be a catastrophe for Sweden. Our reader took the liberty to inform people of the dangers of a helmet law. The grafitti underneath the message "A helmet law protects in more ways than one...

As strange as it may sound, Copenhagen just got a police bicycle unit last week. Why we haven't had one before is beyond me. There was a media frenzy about it and the 8 officers paraded about town in the sunshine, showing themselves off. Many other cities in Europe have had bike units for ages and ages, so it it about time that we joined the crowd. My mate Theis saw them and snapped these photos. The cyclist above ran a red light. Boy, did he pick a bad day to do that. Two of the cops, including the blonde, set out after him and pulled him over. They didn't give him a ticket - you can't hand out tickets on your first day for heaven's sake, that's just not cricket - but instead let him off with a smile. The photo reminds me of a passage in a travel writing book by Bill Bryson called Neither Here Nor There , where he travels through Europe. He loved Copenhagen, and was convinced that we send our elderly and ugly people away during the summer. On the City Hall Square h...

I was sent a link to a paper from the Technical University of Denmark's Dept of Transport . The paper was published in November 2008 and I was surprised I didn't see it. I was less surprised to realise that this paper was not covered in the press here in Denmark. The media, egged on by various organisations, has revelled in an orgy of violence over the past year. The main headlines on the news have been a constant stream of horror and destruction. It isn't suprising that a headline like this - Safety in Traffic Continues to Improve - doesn't fit in well with the bloodthirsty angle the Danish media has promoted of late. The paper from DTU Transport [ available here in Danish as a pdf ]shows that the risk rate in traffic fell between 2000-2007 for all users except for scooter riders. And this fall is a continuation of the fall measured between 1992-1999. Improving risk rates for cyclists between the ages of 16-74 between 2000-2007. Good news. Great news. Did it get into ...

ADDENDUM: This Desire Line has now been made permanent! What we have here is a Desire Line. I walked around the corner last week and saw it freshly painted on the sidewalk. Right at the intersection between the nation's busiest bike street, Nørrebrogade, and the street along The Lakes. Most cyclists will head straight on here, towards the city centre, but many others ride up onto the sidewalk to get to the next street over. They always have. Now, technically, this "sidewalkin'" is illegal but when you have a few thousand people doing it each day you have two options. You can stand there and issue fines until you're blue in the face or you can do what the City of Copenhagen does: respect the peoples' Desire Line - as decided by subconscious democratic consensus - and turn it into a bike lane. The phrase Desire Line, or Desire Path, was coined by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his book The Poetics of Space, from 1958. It describes the human t...