The Life-Sized City Blog

There was recently a consumer test of bicycle helmets in Denmark, performed by The Danish Consumer Council in their magazine Tænk (Think) . The test involved 15 different skater-style helmets. Two of the helmets failed in the test. One was Etto's "Psycho Street" and the other was Nutcase Helmet's "Street" model. The one with the very appropriate DANGER text on it. (The perfect text, by the way, to describe the helmet industry's eagerness to portray cycling as more dangerous as it is in the interest of profit.) Of the two helmets that flopped, Etto immediately called back the helmets in question and offer refunds to consumers. Nutcase Helmets, on the other hand, refused to react to the results of the test. They replied that their helmets met the demands in "their own tests". The head of the consumer tests, Niels Ebbe Jacobsen, says, " Nutcase is putting cyclists' safety on the line when they choose to keep their helmets on ...

The Danish Meterological Institute also serves the interests of our bicycle culture. They've done a spot of research regarding how likely it is for you to get wet on your daily commute. Important research for any true bicycle nation. Here's the rub, translated roughly from the DMI's article: Let's take a fictional person, let's call her Kassandra. Kassandra lives a little north of Copenhagen and rides every to work every day between 07:25 and 07:55 and back again between 15:35 and 16:05. Kassandra doesn't mind a little light showers, but if the intensity increases to over 0.4 mm over 30 minutes (light rain), then she thinks it is too wet. Kassandra works five days a week and has weekends and holidays free. That gives her 498 trips between September 2002 and the end of August 2003. How often does Kassandra get wet either to or from her job that year? The answer is, in fact, rarely. On those 498 trips it was only 17 times. That is only 3.5% or on average ...

Most regions have been experiencing climate change in various forms over the past few years. One of the changes we're experiencing here in Denmark is sudden and torrential rainstorms in the summer. Epic, tropical rainstorms. One of them hit last Saturday and the capital region recieved in two hours the normal rainfall we'd get over two months. It was, indeed, epic. I was at Bang & Jensen café in the Vesterbro neighbourhood and the storm was a spectator sport for those of us inside. It was a great atmosphere and we had a paper boat competition, setting our contraptions afloat in the street. Needless to say, none of us had cellars to worry about. I've never been so pleased to live on the fourth floor, although my kitchen floor was covered in a thin layer of water because of an open window. Over the past few years of these torrential downpours the talk afterwards is always about the massive cost to the insurance industry in payouts and about the hopeless run-off/se...