Marketing Everyday Cycling

This Danish advert promoting everyday cycling is from 1995. It's interesting from a marketing perspective and not a little rare. Usually well-known racing cyclists are enlisted to sell 'gear' and cycling as a sport.

This advert features the Danish racing cyclist Jesper Skibby. By the way, he's the only Dane and one of few professional cyclists to have won stages in the Big Three - Giro d'Italia, Tour de France and the Vuelta a Espana.

In Danish the Vuelta is called Spanien Rundt, or All Around Spain.

The advert rhymes in Danish so my translations are often rendered lame but here goes:

"It's hard to ride all around Spain [hard to ride the Vuelta is what that means]"

"And healthy to ride all year round"

Next to Jesper is the text "Jesper Skibby, winner of the 9th stage of the Vuelta a Espana".

I like the way that a racing cyclist and an everyday cyclist - in the form of the iconic Cycling Girl so well known in Danish history - are presented as equals. As though they each can inspire each other and they are both hardy and deserve respect. A refreshing lack of elitism.

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...

The Copenhagenize Desire Lines Analysis Goes to Amsterdam

Nine intersections. 19,500 cyclists. Nine hours. All in a city considered as a model for many urban planners. The Copenhagenize Design Company Desire Lines analysis tool headed south to Amsterdam to study bicycle user behaviour and how it interacts with - or is affected by - urban infrastructure. In ca lose collaboration between Copenhagenize Design Co . and The University of Amsterdam in the guise of Marco te Brömmelstroet - and for the City of Amsterdam - nine intersections in the city were filmed during the morning rush hour in order to complete the world's largest study of bicycle user behaviour. We're pleased to reveal the results of our study and showcase some of the data, analyses and desire line maps. The bicycle infrastructure in the City of Amsterdam is rather different from the typology used in Copenhagen ,where we did the first anthropological studies of the cyclists - The Choregraphy of an Urban Intersection, and others. It was t...

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