The Life-Sized City Blog

Many things amazed me about visiting Ferrara, Italy last week. It's a brilliant cycling city with 30% modal share. They don't have a congestion charge, they have a congestion BAN. You pay to get into the city centre if you have stuff to deliver and you can have a resident's permit if you live inside the old city walls. But other than that it's a no-drive zone. There are eight locations with cameras tracking number plates and if you're in there without a permit you get sent a €100 fine. I've recently blogged about the amazing amount of elderly bicycle users in the city. Both the women as well as the gentlemen - over at Cycle Chic . I've never seen so many bicycle users over 'a certain age' in one place anywhere in the world. Another thing that kept astounding me was the bicycles. Easily 80% of the bicycles ridden in the city are vintage. The bike racks outside the train station alone must be the greatest gathering of vintage bikes in one spot o...

So. I bought some groceries and didn't have room for the apples on the front rack. That's what the hook on my back rack is for .

I've been helping out John Pucher from Rutgers University with some statistics for a new book he's writing. We were looking into bicycle parking in Denmark. I found the numbers to be interesting. The infographic above (hopefully) spells it out. Total number of parking spots at 297 Danish train stations and the number of spots reserved for bicycles and cars, including the occupancy rate of those spots. It applies to the national rail network and the S-train network serving Greater Copenhagen. I've combined the two in the stats. There are many trains that have, not surprisingly, occupancy rate of + 100%. A town like Lystrup has a bicycle rack occupany rate of 283%; 250% in Mørke, 147% in Odense, 208% in Svendborg, 121% at Copenhagen Central Station. The country's busiest train station - with S-trains, Metro and regional trains - is Nørreport with 102,189 passengers a day (53,004 arriving/49,185 departing). It has 996 bicycle parking spots (it's going to be renovated ...

A while ago... I'm guessing over a year and a half... I recall a reader emailing me with a request for a post about a bicycle culture tiny detail in Copenhagen. The little hook thingy found on most back racks. It's a practical solution to a question that arose about a century ago. How to transport your briefcase on your bicycle? While I'm quite sure this isn't a uniquely Danish thing, it does however seem to live on more in Denmark than elsewhere. The Dutch evolved a culture for using pannier bags while the Danes preferred the basket. Not many men used a basket and for the better part of a century, briefcases were what men carted around. In the style of the one in the above photo. Soft leather. Widespread use of these briefcases - I'm making a qualified guess here - faded away in the late 1960's. When the grassroots movement to reinstate the bicycle on the urban landscape started in the mid-70's it was borne, by and large, by the flower power culture of the ...