The Life-Sized City Blog

Bicycles outside Palace Cinema in Cairns, 1937. We all know that it's too hot to ride a bicycle in your regular clothes in Queensland. You need all manner of special clothing and a lightweight bicycle to be able to tackle the heat and topography. And an electric assist motor if you can get your hands on one. Everybody knows that. That's why nobody ever rode bicycles in the state until 1975. Or maybe we just have short term memory loss. It's actually called "generational forgetting" - how we have little regarded for what came before us. Here are vintage photos from the State of Queensland, Australia that show the bicycle was a normal transport form all over the state for decades. Bicycles parked outside the City Baths in Maryborough. 1940s. Bicycles parked in Mackay, 1948. Bicycles parked outside the Lands and Works Office, 1904. Bicycles parked outside the Hotel Boyd in Mount Isa, Queensland, 1952. Unidentified father and son posing with a bicycle for a trav...

I headed west last week for a meeting with the Danish company Veksø , who produce urban furniture as well as the bicycle counters that featue in so many Danish cities, as well as international cities. There are 33 bicycle counters in 10 Danish cities alone. On the way to Fredericia - "Gateway to Jutland!" - the Intercity train stopped at a few stations, one of them being Middelfart. From my seat I watched three ladies in wheelchairs boarding the train. The conductor and a stationmaster worked quickly and efficiently to get each lady onto the lift, raise them to the level of the train and get them on board. This is a major route that connects east and west Denmark, there are timetables to be kept, and still Danish State Railways take the time to get three passengers with special needs on board. It was impressive to watch. In a perfect world the platforms would be level with the trains but there are different models of trains - regional and national - so this isn't possi...

Photos found on Flickr. Click on them to go to the source. The other day I recalled those classic New York signs brought to the streets during the reign of Mayor Ed Koch. Simple texts that defined the New York attitude and that became instant classics. "No Parking, No Standing, No Stopping - No KIDDING!" And, let's not forget, "Don't even THINK of parking here!" There must be millions of tourist photos featuring these signs in drawers all over the world. All well and good. I just figured that it was time to update the signs for the new millenium. I humbly offer you: And true to the entrepenurial spirit of New York City, I'm selling the fukkers. Over at the online shop . On tote bags, messenger bags and coffee cups . On t-shirts for men and t-shirts for ladies . Whaddya gonna do? Sue me.

I'd forgotten about this photo from last summer. Two postmen racing down the bicycle path on their Christania bikes after finishing their rounds. Heading back to the post centre on Finsensvej. Enjoying every minute of it. Love it.

A drawing from 1900. Road rage and motorists taking over the roads got an early start. Very a propos this recent post about the Fighting Traffic book .

One-Way - Cyclists Excepted The City of Copenhagen is currently working on some small but important changes on our cityscape that will make things a bit easier for the city's cyclists. There is a network of one-way streets in the city - both the city centre and the surrounding neighbourhoods - which is mostly directed at motorised traffic. In some instances the one-way restriction applies to bicycles. Not that it means much. Bicycles regularly follow these desire lines. The City is now tidying up and legitimising bicycle traffic in the opposite direction down one-way streets. This is, of course, the norm in many bicycle-friendly cities. From left: Vienna, Prague, Paris Here's an excerpt from the City of Copenhagen's press release: Small sign on the road - big help for cyclists It's not just bicycle bridges and massive intersection redesign that make the city better for cyclists. Often a simple sign or a small piece of bicycle lane can make things better ...

This. Is. Brilliant. Once again, once again it's the Dutch who refuse to Ignore The Bull and choose instead to place the responsibility on the motorists. There is the External Airbags on Cars to protect cyclists and pedestrians and now there is this. Look at that film. Not only are there speed bumps in place to slow cars (and provide the cyclists with an even surface), the LED lights warn cars when bicycles are crossing. At the moment there are LED pedestrian crossings at some 20 locations in the Netherlands. In Papendrecht there is now a variation on a roundabout for cyclists as well. According to local authorities this is intended to be a sustainably safe roundabout because of the elevated bicycle and pedestrian crossings and islands. But apparently these measures were insufficient to ensure the safety of cyclists, so additional striking LED lighting was installed in the road surface. The manufacturer provided software made specifically for this location, which would e...

Right off the bat we're going to link to a recent post featuring photos of cyclists in Copenhagen in the winter . Thanks to Eleanor for the following link. So... Hot of the virtual press of the Thunder Bay News Watch : "Cyclist hit by car. Transported to hospital". (We hope he is okay). Now the comments that often accompany bicycle-related stories in the Anglo-Saxon world are often entertaining and creative - as well as healthy, shocking reminders of the extent of our deeply-rooted car culture. The ones that follow this story are hilarious. Banning cycling in winter! Here are some of the nuggets of hilarity: The Wolf says: With all the laws new and old to protect people from themselves,why have they not made it illegal to operate a bike in the winter? The roads and conditions are hard enough to navigate in the winter never mind having to keep an eye out for someone on an unstable bike. nads74 says: I disagree, about making it a law, honestly why do we ne...

Cyclists in Guangzhou, China. Much is said about the rise of Chinese car culture at the expense of the once proud Chinese bicycle culture. Reports from the front lines in the Far East are generally negative, despite Katie's crooning about the 9 million bicycles in Beijing. The country does have problems that need immediate attention. No doubt about it. What we don't hear as often is that many cities are, in fact, addressing the problem. To their credit, they are acutely aware of the rapid onslaught of automobile traffic and are seeking solutions. A colleague of mine, Troels Andersen, is the Danish consultant on a project in Guangzhou, in Southern China, with The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy [ITDP] . Troels is one of Denmark's most experienced traffic consultants and him and I have been invited to speak at many of the same international conferences over the past couple of years. At the most recent one , we did what we usually do - drink beers...

From a graphic design perspective, the above - sent to us by the Bristol Traffic team - is quite beautiful. The word 'Desire', and the chosen font, send positive signals and the map has strong graphic elements. And then you learn what it is. A map from 1965 taken out of a master plan by Scot & Wilson, Kirkpatric & Partners proposing the future of motorized traffic. At the bottom right it reads: " Desire lines of Traffic - 1990 ". It's a positive, glowing vision of the future of transport. This is apparently where 'Traffic' desired to go. The thick, coloured lines are motorways. Somewhere underneath is Glasgow. Bristol Traffic sent a link to this website - Report on a Highway Plan for Glasgow, 1965 - featuring the above map and other drawings, where excerpts of the plan can be read: "The very nature of this motorway will define the City into understand­able units each with its own identity and from this it will be possible for the c...

The thaw continues but the icy remants of the many snowstorms are useful on occasion.

"Five o'clock Rush, by John Fischetti" Carlton Reid tweeted about these today. Travel sketches from the John Fischetti Manuscript Collection at Columbia College Chicago from the BibliOdyessy blog . In 1949, Mr Fischetti couldn't help but notice the five o'clock rush of bicycles in Copenhagen. This one is just odd... Loads more sketches from many places over at BibliOdyssey .

We've had a period of "better" weather in Copenhagen, where the temperatures have hovered around freezing, including a couple of days of around 3 degrees. The snow, as snow does when the air is above zero - started to melt. It's still there but there is less of it. In some regions of the country the temperature rose to a tropical 7 degrees and the sudden thaw caused floods on farms and in houses. Fortunately, not so here in the capital. I was heading into the city centre yesterday and came across a bike lane snow sweepr muscling along the bike lane in the City of Frederiksber. The snow had long been cleared but not to the entire width of the bike lane. Now that the pressure is off city maintenence staff because of no recent snowfalls, there is time for the city to tidy up a bit and try to return to status quo. The snow sweeper was tackling the remaining snow and widening the bike lane to it's normal width. And it was nice to see the big boy out getting bu...

Just got a book in the post today. "Fighting Traffic - The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City" by Peter D. Norton. It's looking good already. Under 'The Social Reconstruction of the Street' I can read that: "Until the 1920's, under prevailing conceptions of the street, cars were at best uninvited guests. To many they were unruly intruders. They obstructed and endangered street uses of long-standing legitimacy. As a Providence newspaper editor expressed the problem in 1921, 'it is impossible for all classes of modern traffic to occupy the same right of way at the same time in safety.'" And: "Today we tend to regard streets as motor thoroughfares, and we tend to project this construction back to pre-automotive streets. In retrospect, therefore, the use of streets for children's play (for example) can seem obviously wrong, and thus the departure of children from streets with the arrival of automobiles can seem an obvious and si...

Katherine sent us the link to this lovely photo from the Metropolitan Museum of Art . It was taken in - we believe - New York by the Hungarian-born photographer László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946). The title is 7 A.M. (New Year's Morning) and it was taken around 1930. Ironically, the credit for the photograph reads, " Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987 " Lovely shot. Reminds us of this Copenhagen version, taken in 2007:

We've written about parking zones before. The City of Copenhagen has been testing painted zones in order to help people park a little less chaotic. It was tested in Amsterdam as well, and in both cities it seemed to work quite well. My friend Michiel from the Dutch Fietsersbond (Cycling Union) sent me the above film about a Dutch artist, Roosmarijn Vergouw, who created sculptures of parked bicycles using only tape and, in the process, discovered that people will park in the zones when they're there. She calls it Fietsenzwermen - Bicycle Swarm (I'm guessing). It's amazing to see how disciplined the cyclists became when there was tape on the ground. Vergouw now has an idea to do a similar project using spotlights. The City of Amsterdam's Bicycle Office is interested in hearing more. Here's a Dutch-language article about it in the Fietsersbond's magazine - opens as a .pdf .

Sometimes it's easier to let the photos do the talking. As mentioned before, 80% of Copenhageners cycle through the winter. That number is surely lower when we have hard winters with snowstorm after snowstorm, but the numbers are still impressive. Impressive to me. Probably astounding to others. If you make the bicycle the fastest way to get from A to B in a city - what we call A2Bism for bicycles here at Copenhagenize - the strangest people will be spotted on bicycles. If you prioritize keeping your bicycle infrastructure clear of snow , people will ride. In most of these shots the temperature was well below zero. Much lower with the typical Copenhagen wind. And no bicycle studs were harmed in the making of this blogpost. I never see them here and wouldn't possibly know where to buy them. When you have as much urban cycling experience as the people of Copenhagen or a city like Amsterdam, you are pretty much trained to cycle in any weather. I'll just let my fellow ...