The Life-Sized City Blog

The tale of Nørrebrogade keeps getting better. This is the street that the former traffic Mayor, Klaus Bondam, tackled in order to cut the number of cars and increase the liveability for the residents. We're written about the street many times. There is a long list of intiatives that have been tried and tested on the street, which is also the busiest bicycle street in the world. The City of Copenhagen recently published a study about the first stage of the redesign of the street: Københavns Kommunes Evaluering af Nørrebrogadeprojektets Etape 1. Please don't try to pronounce that without qualified linguistic supervision. The results include the following: Car traffic has fallen by 60% from 15,000 to 6,000 a day. This is a neighbourhood where 19% of the residents own a car, so the traffic was/is largely " parasites ". The street had long suffered from lack of development and was a sad, lifeless transport corridor through what is a fantastic, densely-populated ne...

Buttons that pedestrians or cyclists are forced to push in order for a computer program - programmed by a car-centric engineer - to grant them authorisation to cross a street in their city have to be among the most archaeic remnants of a century of city planning that caters only to the automobile. And that was a long sentence. Sorry. I wish for their immediate demise. The only thing goofier is the pedestrian flags in some American cities . Talk about ignoring the bull . Not to mention engineering instead of designing our cities . One of the things I like most about cycling in Copenhagen is that I don't have to push any of these buttons. There have been a few but they tend to get removed and thank goodness for that. Here's one from the archives: (Although now I'll have to check if it's still there...) Still, they are a rarity here and I've only seen them at t-intersections. So why not signage like the graphic up top? If we're going to level the playi...

We've often wondered where the religious types were on intelligent transport. You'd think there would be enough inspiration in their books - Bible/Torah/Koran to support healthy, modern living. Yet it's not often you see churches and religious organistations coming out in support of liveable cities. So then our friend Paul in Vienna sent us a link to an intiative by the Catholic and Protestant churches of Austria. Car Fasting - or Autofasten , in German . A brilliant intiative to encourage people to go on a car fast and seek alternatives. Here's what I lamely translated from their website: Car Fasting is ... - An initiative to encourage a change of independent mobility between Ash Wednesday (13 Feb) to Holy Saturday (30 March). - Suggesting choosing available alternatives like rail, bus, bicycle, foot, car-pooling) in order to discover something new and to experiment. - Contributing to new experiences and to public health. - An opportunity to shape a bet...

Standard cycle track in Copenhagen. Sign indicating that you turn left here for the airport. I will fully admit the irony of my epiphany. It's even a bit silly. The story has, however, a decent ending. The nature of my work involves a great many trips to and from Copenhagen Airport . We're lucky in Copenhagen. The airport is the most efficient and well-designed airport I've seen anywhere in the world. It is easily accessible and is located close to the city. You can get there by bus, metro and train, as well as car or taxi, of course. This being Copenhagen, I knew there was fully separated bicycle infrastructure the whole way out there, as well. From every direction. Last October, on the eve of a journey to Zurich for my TED x talk , my friend Ole - previously written about on this blog - asked why I didn't just ride my bicycle to the airport. I shrugged and said that I live 6 minutes walk from a Metro station and it takes 25 minutes on the Metro to get there. I...

The Robert Moses Fan Club that in Denmark is pushing ahead with their idea of a harbour tunnel that will only serve to increase car traffic and congestion over large swathes of the Danish capital. Here's what we'd rather have for the 27 billion the new underground motorway will cost. Design by Emma Sivell , with Copenhagenize Design Co., for Cykelrepublikken . A larger version is available here .