The Life-Sized City Blog

Article originally published on 19 November 2007. Revised November 2015. Over the years we have realised that a large part of our work at Copenhagenize Design Co. in working towards bicycle-friendly cities is the simple art of mythbusting. While time-consuming and often frustrating, it still appears to a necessary part of the dialogue around the world. It’s interesting how uniform the misconceptions about cycling are, regardless of where in the world we hear them. It’s equally interesting to hear them coming from people who cycle - not just people who don’t. We know that every city in the world was bicycle-friendly for decades, not least until the 1950s when the urban planning paradigm shifted drastically and destructively and started to focus solely on automobiles. People have short - or selective - memories it would seem. They look around their city and assume that it has always just been like that. Civic pride seems to play a role as well. People in winter cities are pr...

A car blocking the bike lane/cycle track. The source of much irritation and many social media photos. This photo, however, is from Denmark and that is a car that we WANT driving down the cycle track. Cities like Copenhagen and Aarhus don't just build the necessary infrastructure to encourage cycling, keep people safe and help make people FEEL safe, they regularly measure the quality of the infrastructure. Citizens always say in polls that the quality of the cycle tracks and bike lanes is of utmost importance to them when they are considering to commute by bicycle. So, specially adapated cars like these are regularly sent down the cycle tracks to measure for bumps and smoothness, among other factors, using laser technology and recording the data. There is a veritable armada of vehicles designed to operate on cycle tracks. Street sweepers, municipal garbage collection and, not least, snow clearance vehicles like those in our classic article: The Ultimate Snow Clearance Blo...

Earlier this year, Mary Hudson Embry wrote about the cycle track addition on Gothersgade . Another "missing link" in the Inner City's bicycle network was just completed, this time on Bremerholm: a small one-way street near Christiansborg (the Parliament and other governmental functions building), Holmen Canal, and Magasin de partment store. The road leads towards other focal points in the Inner City such as the famous pedestrian street ca lled St r øget. Now that Knippels Bridge is the most biked street in Copenhagen according to the newest 2012 Bicycle Accounts, the new cycle track will allow bicycle users to continue on a straight path from the bridge into the inner city. Before, one would have to risk going against the grain of  car traffic  or turn either left or right and take a more circuitous route. Other highlights: fresh bump-free pavement, a separate traffic light for bicycles, and two lanes-- one for those going straight or turning left and another to t...

One way streets. Where do bicycles fit into this ever-present downtown street model? A common question, and [from a car culture kinda perspective] understandably so. The City of Copenhagen answers that question, punctuated with an exclamation point - making Gothersgade a prime example of how to plan for cyclists and pedestrians in one-way situations. A main street in the historic city centre, Gothersgade runs past Rosenborg Castle and the Kings Gardens at a hasty 50 km/h. One segment of it, leading away from Nyhavn and toward the Kings Gardens, is a three-lane one-way stretch of traffic lined by boutiques, bodegas, and cafes. Google Maps view looking east on Gothersgade. The one-way segment, up until the redesign, had a skinny mini sidewalk and three lanes for automobiles which fluctuate between parking and driving lanes. Enter the road diet. Now we've got one lane for traffic, widened sidewalks, and cycle tracks going in on both sides. One-way streets across town are sl...

We have a tendency to give cities human character traits when we describe them. It's a friendly city. A dynamic city. A boring city. Perhaps then a city can be arrogant. Arrogant, for example, with it's distribution of space. I've been working a lot in North America the past year and I've become quite obsessed with the obscenely unbalanced distribution of space. I see this arrogance everywhere I go. I see the insanely wide car lanes and the vehicles sailing back and forth in them like inebriated hippopotami. I was just in Calgary for five days and from my balcony at the hotel I watched the traffic below on 12th Ave. A one-way street that was never really busy at all. From above, the arrogance of space was very apparent. Even more so than in a car driving down the lanes. The photo, above, is the car lines divided up with their actual width. Watching for five days - okay, not 24/7 ... I have a life after all - I didn't really see  any vehicles that filled out t...

Last time I was in Helsinki I took this photo of this century old railway corridor that was used for freight trains. I can heard that it was being converted to a pedestrian and bicycle path and it turns out that it has opened recently. Photo via HBL.fi by Tor Wennström . Martti Tulenheimo from the European Cyclist’s Federation and designer and bicycle user, Arto Sivonen   Helsinki's new "Low Line" (as opposed to NYC's High Line ) opened on June 12, 2012, providing pedestrians and cyclists with a 1.3 km long connector between the Western Harbour area to Kamppi and Töölö Bay. It's called the Baana. It runs through the city centre, providing a safe bicycle route to many points in the city. There four ramps along the way to get back to surface level, as well as entry points at each end. On average, the Baana is 15 m wide, with 34 m the widest point. There are also facilities along the way like basketball, table tennis and petanque and lights and benches hav...

Update: 26 November 2013: New photos of Ubatuba bicycle parking added! Scroll down. Denir, from the Books & Bicycles blog in Brazil sent us these shots from his holiday to the Brazilian town of Ubatuba . It's a surfing mecca and is even nicknamed 'Capital do Surf' so signage in the town is often surf-related. Which also applies to the 'ciclofaixa' or bicycle lanes in the incredibly bicycle-friendly city. Painted lanes, sure, by they are nice and wide - see the red/yellow markings at bottom right in the first shot. Having realised I'd stumbled upon a potential holiday paradise, I did a spot of googling. The name Ubatuba alone just sounds like a surfer paradise and could be worked into 50 different Beach Boy songs. I found this article, in Portugese , about the city wherein it says that 80% of the students of this school ride bicycles to school each day. Impressive. And staying at a little pousada like this one is about €70 a night - about the sa...

Cyclists in Guangzhou, China. Much is said about the rise of Chinese car culture at the expense of the once proud Chinese bicycle culture. Reports from the front lines in the Far East are generally negative, despite Katie's crooning about the 9 million bicycles in Beijing. The country does have problems that need immediate attention. No doubt about it. What we don't hear as often is that many cities are, in fact, addressing the problem. To their credit, they are acutely aware of the rapid onslaught of automobile traffic and are seeking solutions. A colleague of mine, Troels Andersen, is the Danish consultant on a project in Guangzhou, in Southern China, with The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy [ITDP] . Troels is one of Denmark's most experienced traffic consultants and him and I have been invited to speak at many of the same international conferences over the past couple of years. At the most recent one , we did what we usually do - drink beers...

ADDENDUM: 18 Dec 2010. I made this little film and blogged about it . Adding it, rightly so, this post. I spotted one of our lovely street sweepers/snow removers at work the other day. It really is the loveliest sound on the streets during winter. We've had about 45 cm of snow at time of writing but these working class heroes keep the bike lanes clear. The cities of Copenhagen and Frederiksberg salt before snow falls and, after the snow is on the ground, the bike lanes are cleared before the streets. During snowstorms I've seen these bike lane sweepers roll back and forth past my flat six times before any snowploughs cleared the street. I live on a busy crosstown artery. In the above photo it's a bus stop island getting an extra sweep. That's the bike lane to the right of the sweeper. (As an aside, we have many of these bus stop islands in Copenhagen. If there is one present, disembarking passengers have to wait before crossing to the sidewalk. Bicycles have the ...