Poor La Rochelle, Visionary La Rochelle

With all the hype about urban bike sharing and the Vélib/Velov/Bycyklen/Bicing/Bixi/etc/etc let's send a warm thought to the forgotten city that started it all, shall we? La Rochelle, on the French Atlantic coast had a legendary mayor back in the 1970's. Michel Crepeau. He was quite the urban planning revolutionary and the rest of France thought he was quite mad. At that time progress was built in concrete and asphalt.

Inspired by Copenhagen, he created pedestrian streets in the city centre and, in 1974, he started a bike share programme. Both Amsterdam and Copenhagen flirted with bike share programmes back in the 60's, but they didn't last. La Rochelle was the first city to make it stick. Until Copenhagen, in 1995, started their City Bike (Bycyklen) system and the idea started to spread.

He bought a load of yellow bikes and slapped them into racks by the harbour. The original idea was merely "take one, use it, bring it back." These days you can borrow them free for two hours if you leave some ID.

The programme never had a fancy marketing name like ByCyklen, Velib, VeloV, SEVici or Bicing, which is probably why nobody knows about it. But La Rochelle was the first, so hats off to them.

The classic yellow bikes have now been replaced with a modern bike share system, like in so many other cities in France. Indeed, there are over 30 cities in that country alone with modern bike share systems. And the fancy name came with it: Yello. But hey.

If you're ever in the neighbourhood, be sure to pay a visit. In the summer season the whole centre of the city is closed off to cars and the street life is absolutely brilliant.

It's my favourite city in France and the nearby Ile de Ré is a bicycle paradise.

7550 New Bike Parking Spots at Copenhagen Central Station

For all of Copenhagen's badassness as a bicycle city, there remains one thing that the City still completely sucks at. Bicycle parking at train stations. At Copenhagen Central Station there are only about 1000 bike parking spots. Danish State Railways can't even tell us how many spots they have. They're not sure. Even in Basel they have 800+. In Antwerp they have this . Don't even get me started on the Dutch. 12,500 bike parking spots are on the way in some place called Utrecht . Amsterdam has a multi-story bike parking facility, floating bicycle barges round the back and are planning 7000 more spots underwater . Even at the nation's busiest train station, Nørreport, the recent and fancy redesign failed miserably in providing parking that is adequate for the demand . Architects once again failing to respond to actual urban needs. It is time to remedy that. Here is my design for 7550 bike parking spots behind Copenhagen Central Station. Steve C. Montebello i...

The New Question for 21st Century Cities

It's all so simple if we want it to be. For almost a century we have been asking the same question in our cities. "How many cars can we move down a street?" It's time to change the question. If you ask "How many PEOPLE can we move down a street?", the answer becomes much more modern and visionary. And simple. Oh, and cheaper. Let alone the fact that the model at the top can move 10 times more people down a street than the model at the bottom. When I travel with my Bicycle Urbanism by Design keynote , I often step on the toes of traffic engineers all around the world. Not all of them, however. I am always approached by engineers who are grateful that someone is questioning the unchanged nature of traffic engineering and the unmerited emphasis placed on it. I find it brilliant that individual traffic engineers in six different nations have all said the same thing to me: "We're problem solvers. But we're only ever asked to solve the sam...

City Plan Vest and Søringen - 1958-1974 - Copenhagen

A couple of twists of fate and this location in Copenhagen would have been a 12 lane motorway. When looking back over the last century of cities infatuated with Car Culture, it's not hard to see how stupid we were - or almost were. In the 1940s the so-called Finger Plan was developed for Copenhagen . By and large an interesting concept and the foundation for the expansion of Copenhagen. The Finger Plan has, however, some dark secrets. Among them are two connected projects. City Plan Vest (City Plan West) and Søringen (The Lake Ring). The City Plan Vest, in 1958, proposed that Copenhagen be equipped with a Lake Ring. The #19 motorway from the north would continue over Hans Knudsens Plads - in a tunnel to Vibenshus Runddel - and then emerging again to continue along Nørre Allé in a 12 lane motorway down Tagensvej and Fredensgade. It would turn right along The Lakes to Vesterbro, where a comprehensive interchange would be built to lead traffic to the south towards Germany and ...

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