The Life-Sized City Blog

Danish State Railways [DSB] have been doing some good things for bicycles this year. First they made it free to take your bicycle on the S-Trains serving Greater Copenhagen . Now it seems that people transporting their bicycles by train can exploit their travel time a little more effectively. DSB had a competition for customers where ideas for how to improve service were sent in. Four customers had the same idea and it was the idea that won. Placing bicycle pumps in the existing bicycle compartments. Not bad. Not bad at all. The pumps will be installed in the new year. In addition, DSB are doubling the capacity of the so-called flex compartments to allow for even more bicycle capacity. At left: A bicycle/pram/wheelchair compartment on a Copenhagen S-train. At right: the flexible wheel holders hold the back wheel and allow for swaying movement. When DSB announced that bicycles were now free on S-trains, they put up this tunnel on Nørrebrogade - the busiest bicycle stre...

Tom Vanderbilt over at How We Drive was playing around with Google's Ngram Viewer in his post about pedestrians . As he wrote: "As I’m sure most of you know, Google’s NGram Book Viewer provides an invaluable window, via written texts of the last century or so, onto what the culture was collectively thinking. Not surprisingly, there’s much to be gleaned here from an urban or transportation point of view." Cool idea. So I put a few search phrases through the machine. Above we have "Bicycle" and how many times it was mentioned between 1800 and 2000. A peak in the 1940's, a fall and then a rise again in the 1970's.  I was interested about the English slang "Bike" and found out that it really has had an interesting journey. As well as having a root farther back than I would have guessed. Here's the graph for "Cycling". Again, an interesting journey. It really came into its own as a word in the 1970's. "Velocipede...

Ole's new Batavus bicycle. The whole day at the recent TEDx Copenhagen event was brilliant. I was especially thrilled that so many good people came up to me after my own talk and relayed positive feedback. It was quite humbling and inspiring. I'll have a hard time forgetting one man in particular. His name is Ole. There is an old children's song in Danish called Oles Ny Autobil / Ole's New Autocar. Ole's new autocar drives 8 miles in an hour (the old Scandinavian mile is 10 km) Ole said he enjoyed the talk but then he revealed that Copenhagenize and Cycle Chic are the direct reason that he and his family sold their Volvo station wagon. These blogs have generated an incredible amount of positive feedback over the years and it is especially when I'm giving talks abroad that I get fantastic face-to-face experiences with readers. For some reason, Ole's revelation was more moving and touching. Perhaps because I was on my home turf in Copenhage...

Unless you've been living in a shoebox (or Prague) for the past three or so years you've probably noticed that cycling levels have been rising in cities all over the world. This is a good thing. Through this blog and through numerous journeys I've done to four continents over the past two years I've seen in great detail how various people in various countries and cultures are working to promote urban cycling. One thing I've noticed by haven't really commented on at length is how cycling promotion is largely divided into two schools. Two genres, if you like. For the purpose of this article I'm not going to get into how far too much bicycle advocacy leans up against environmentalism with its preachy, jehovas witness messages about health and saving the planet and fun . We're here to talk about these two aforementioned genres. They are: Bicycle Commuting. Bicycle Culture. To many they may sound like the same thing, pedalling hand in hand dow...

What a brilliant - and simple - idea. Playing out. Children playing in the streets. As children did, including yours truly, before the Culture of Fear (and its army of profiteers) clenched its fist around our societies. Playingout.net is the website. This is the film about it. Transforming the streetspace into playspace. "When we limit our children to organised activities and formal playspaces we reduce their opportunities for play. Particuarly the kind of free play that develops really important life skills, their physical well-being and their sense of belonging." Brilliant. WARNING! DISCLAIMER! The faint of heart and safety nannies alike should refrain from watching this. It features not only rational dialogue and sensible parents but also children playing happily in all manner of 'extremely dangerous' situations. I spotted dozens of children inhaling chalk dust, a great deal of 'irresponsibly unprotected' skateboarding, scootering and bicycle ri...

ADDENDUM: 18 Dec 2010. I made this little film and blogged about it . Adding it, rightly so, this post. I spotted one of our lovely street sweepers/snow removers at work the other day. It really is the loveliest sound on the streets during winter. We've had about 45 cm of snow at time of writing but these working class heroes keep the bike lanes clear. The cities of Copenhagen and Frederiksberg salt before snow falls and, after the snow is on the ground, the bike lanes are cleared before the streets. During snowstorms I've seen these bike lane sweepers roll back and forth past my flat six times before any snowploughs cleared the street. I live on a busy crosstown artery. In the above photo it's a bus stop island getting an extra sweep. That's the bike lane to the right of the sweeper. (As an aside, we have many of these bus stop islands in Copenhagen. If there is one present, disembarking passengers have to wait before crossing to the sidewalk. Bicycles have the ...

The Dutch national bicycle council - Fietsberaad - has published a paper called "Bicycle policies of the European principals: continuous and integral". In it they compare and analyze the bicycle culture and infrastructure in five Dutch cities and five other European cities. Among the latter, Copenhagen. I've included the chapter on Copenhagen here. It's a long post, but worth a read. As is the entire paper. The link to the .pdf is at the bottom of this post. It's interesting and curious to read what foreign eyes see when looking at the bicycle life in Copenhagen. There are some discrepencies in the stats and opinions in the paper and I've included my own comments in red. Most of the paper deals with the CITY of Copenhagen, which is a small city, and not the entire Copenhagen metropolitan area/urban sprawl. It can often be misleading if you've never been here. The text below is an abridged version. Read the pdf for the full text. Off we go: ----- Unlike mos...