Skip to main content

I Got My Bike Back!

Crescent
No, it wasn't my Bullitt, unfortunately. But two weeks before the Bullitt got stolen, my other bike - pictured above - was nicked. It's a 1955 Swedish Crescent. Bloody irritating. Vintage bicycles are in high demand at the moment, fetching a high price. Bicycles that only three years ago wouldn't even garner a second glance by bicycle thieves are now targeted.
I was sad to see it go but didn't bother blogging about it.

However.

A month or so ago, Hans from Larry vs Harry was standing with Claus, who works at Larry vs Harry. Hans spotted a bicycle rolling past and noticed that it was the Crescent. It's an incredibly unique bicycle and it's hard to miss. Hans mentioned it to Claus. Claus - the reigning Danish cargo bike champion by the way, we call him Copenhagenthighs - took matters into his own hands. He hopped onto his Bullitt and set off after the Man on the Crescent.

He gave him a bit of a shock braking hard next to him and shouting "Where the hell did you get that bike!?" The guy riding the Crescent was not a little spooked. He explained that he had bought after seeing an ad on the bulletin board at at the Faculty of Life Sciences at Copenhagen University for 500 kroner.

For a bike that can fetch 4000+ kroner at the moment, that was a bit disappointing, but hey. The guy was cool about it and instantly agreed to deliver the bike back to me. Claus called me from the spot and told me about it.

A week later, an Austrian guy studying here in Copenhagen came by. Elio. My favourite Austrian of the month. He had the Crescent with him and was happy to hand it back. I promptly gave him four beers out of the fridge for his trouble.

Brilliant. Not only is this social media lark sometimes quite cool, I'm also grateful for Hans and Copenhagenthighs for keeping their eyes on the street.

The whole Bullitt episode earlier this year was a brilliant rush but this little episode also help restores my faith in humanity.

I attended the TEDx Copenhagen Community Event last week and one of the TED talks we saw was Jonathan Zittrain about Random Acts of Kindness. I feel it appropriate to embed it here:



Thanks to Hans and Claus and also to Elio!

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Read more

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...
Read more

Desire Line Analysis in Copenhagen's City Centre

Continuing in our series of Desire Line Analyses, we decided to cast our critical and curious eyes on yet another Copenhagen intersection, this time where Bremerholm meets Holmens Kanal. We decided to be more specific and focus on one part of the intersection - a location that we know well and one with a specific congestion problem in rush hour. We filmed for one hour from 08:15-09:15. Behaviour vs Design With the massive numbers of bicycle users in the mornings in Copenhagen, bottlenecks occur at a number of locations, particularly where many bicycle users need to turn left. This is something that all of us at the company experience each morning so we decided to study it. It was a November morning and it was party-cloudly, dry and 6 degrees C. The focus was to determine how bicycle users react to the sub-standard design of this location. How they react to having to battle with motorised traffic - something that is unusual in the city. Yep, even in Copenhagen, The Arroganc...
Read more