The Life-Sized City Blog

Desire Line Analysis: Choreography of a Copenhagen Corner Cyclist Behaviour at a busy Copenhagen cycle intersection By Marie Lindebo Leth - Anthropologist For the next study in our Desire Line series we have picked a renowned Copenhagen bicycle hotspot: the Søtorvet / Dronning Louise’s Bro intersection. Over 40,000 bicycle trips are made through this intersection at a daily basis, making it one of the busiest in the world in terms of cyclist volume. Such numbers create a special need for appropriate bicycle infrastructure in order to accommodate the bicycle users crossing this point. At Copenhagenize Design Company we have asked ourselves how we can determine the actual needs of bicycle users, and what solutions would be appropriate. This quest requires a greater understanding of the relationship between urban infrastructure and cyclist behavior, which is why we have conducted a Desire Line Analysis of this intersection. The value of studying cyclist behavior Thi...

As  I highlight in this TED x Zurich talk of mine about Bicycle Culture by Design , Copenhagen has the world's best behaved cyclists. Bar none. I've cycled in close to 100 cities around the world and I've never seen anything that comes close. Citizens in any city do not - contrary to popular perception - wander around all day looking for laws to break. Wherever you happen to be reading this from, you're probably aware of the general perception of "those damned cyclists". Even here in Copenhagen, the perception persists, not least from the Copenhagen Police and  their one-man wrecking crew . They - and he - continue to spread personal perceptions about cycling citizens. 52% of the citizens in Copenhagen ride each day and most of the others have bikes that they use regularly. We are dealing with basically the entire population of a European city. The police are out of their league when it comes to behaviour perception. This perception is as old as the bi...

Part 1 - On bicycles & Behaviour “Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets”. The oft-quoted words of Jane Jacobs from her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities ring true even in 2013. Throughout time, there have been key urbanists who are not satisfied with municipal jobs, tucked away from the citizens. These are the urban superheros. The almost mythic figures like Jacobs or William Whyte who intimately know our cities.  A little over a year ago, we blogged about an exciting new project to honour these thinkers’ legacies. We put their methods into action in novel and exciting ways. We study the bicycle users' intricacies on a greater scale than ever before. Enter a simple video camera, an ordinary intersection, and more than 16,000 bicycle users. “The Bicycle Choreography of an Urban Intersection—an anthropological study” was born. Over 200 hours were logged by anthropologist Agnete Suhr as she studied 12 hours of video foota...

This is where we believe it all comes together. As the previous two installments in this series have demonstrated, Copenhagenize Design Co. is unveiling a document to help analyse the intracacies at work in urban spaces. In fact, a fascinating intersection out of our very own window. We show that developing alternatives to mainstream traffic planning is possible with basic equipment and hours to devote to studying human movement patterns.  Without further ado, we now present our “Copenhagenize Fixes”. These fixes are quite simple, but we believe, will go a long way in working with traffic behaviours, instead of policing them. The graphic above shows the following improvements to the streetscape. Each desire line is given a different letter as a label. The numbers are the number of bicycle users. Two numbers? The first is a mounted bicycle user and the second, a person walking their bike (example: through an intersection). For bicycle users: -Bicycle path...

If you’re just tuning in, this series is dedicated to sharing a snippet of the main findings of our report entitled, “The Bicycle Choreography of an Urban Intersection—an anthropological study”. At the end of the series, we will unveil this report for the first time. Our first segment described behavioural findings from the study. The finer details of the urban theater and what we think really makes ordinary movements “come alive”: micro-communication through body language, subtle shifting at stop lines, and any number of other minute details discovered through close observation. Here, we take the quantitative data from the study and tell a story about our cities. A story about how to understand allegedly ‘rule-bending’ behaviour to discover how municipalities can better relate to these users and the desires of all on our roads today. Thanks to some solid work by data wunderkind Pedro Madruga , we were able to visualize the finer details of the 16,631 bicycle u...

“Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets”. The oft-quoted words of Jane Jacobs from her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities ring true even in 2013. Throughout time, there have been key urbanists who are not satisfied with municipal jobs, tucked away from the citizens. These are the urban superheros. The almost mythic figures like Jacobs or William Whyte who intimately know our cities.  A little over a year ago, we blogged about an exciting new project to honour these thinkers’ legacies. We put their methods into action in novel and exciting ways. We study the bicycle users' intricacies on a greater scale than ever before. Enter a simple video camera, an ordinary intersection, and more than 16,000 bicycle users. “The Bicycle Choreography of an Urban Intersection—an anthropological study” was born. Over 200 hours were logged by anthropologist Agnete Suhr as she studied 12 hours of video footage from our camera’s vantage point abov...