Skip to main content

The Best Bike Story This Week

The Lulu rocking the Bullitt on the school run today #thelulu #copenhagen
Yesterday I took back ownership of my own Bullitt cargo bike, when The Lulu and I picked it up at Larry vs Harry. You might have heard it was stolen back in March. After a week or so, I resigned myself to never seeing it again. I lived in hope, because another time it was stolen, the Danish internet helped me get it back.


On Sunday evening, I got this photo sent via MMS and on Facebook. WTF. My bike parked outside Larry vs Harry. It was found at Christiania by a guy named Danni and taken from there and put outside Larry vs Harry. An amazing story. I called Danni and he was all like "no problem...".

I got the details of the story yesterday when we picked it up from Claus. And it is amazing.

I realised I know Danni. I chat with him every year at the Svajerløb - Danish Cargo Bike Championships and I chatted with him at the recent bike flea market. Ironically, about whether or not I had found my Bullitt.

Danni's own Bullitt is well-known here. He extended the frame to make it extra long. This shot is from the flea market a few weeks back. He has a kid around the same age as The Lulu, too.

So it turns out Danni was out for a ride on his motorcycle and ended up at Christiania. He saw three Bullitts behind the Månefiskeren café and he recognised one of them. Mine. Still with the map of Copenhagen on the cargo bay and even the Copenhagenize Design Co. logo sticker intact.

Danni rode his motorbike home to Hvidovre - a suburb of Copenhagen - and returned with his minivan. He put my Bullitt in the back and went to a bike shop to buy a lock. He then drove it to Larry vs Harry and locked it outside the shop. He let Claus from Larry vs Harry know it was there and he, in turn, notified me.

How amazing is that. 30 km and a couple of hours out of his day. Just to get the Bullitt back for The Lulu and I.

I'm speechless. Grateful. Amazed.

Thanks Danni. The Lulu is making him a drawing and I'll figure out a suitable gift.
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