The Life-Sized City Blog

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...

If we lived in Toy-penhagen, this is what this rush hour would look like. Citizen Cyclists riding through the city. Man in a suit complete with mobile. Supermum with her kid and her coffee. Flowers decorating a bike. The elderly (with baguettes), a doctor, you name it. Businessman with briefcase. 50% + female ridership. Etc. One-handed riding. Yep... it's all there. All we need is for LEGO to make stilettos and mini-skirts if we really want to make a true representation of Copenhageners on their bicycles, but hey. I have also reproduced one of my favourite bicycle posters in Lego. Based on the 1922 poster from Peugeot. Bicycles on top of the world. Felix and I have also played around with Lego as urban infill, if you fancy a look . If you haven't spotted the Copenhagenize Design Company christmas card on Twitter or our Facebook page , here it is. Have a lovely holiday season and a wonderful new year.

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...

Good news this morning. The street here in Copenhagen - Nørrebrogade - that has been closed off to cars for a trial period of three months will now enjoy a permanent status. "Our goal of transforming Nørrebrogade into a better place to be, making it easier to be a cyclist, pedestrian and bus passenger, has succeeded", said Klaus Bondam, the councillor in charge of Traffic and Environment. "Even among those who choose to drive there is a majority for making the initiative permanent", he added. We've covered this exciting development in previous posts. See the link list at the bottom. In summary, Nørrebrogade [North Bridge Street] is a main artery leading into the city. It slices through a neighbourhood where only 30-40% own cars so the traffic isn't local. The street has always had problems flourishing, despite the fact that 75,000 people travel down it each day. It is the busiest bike street in the nation with 35,000 bikes a day. In addition, 65,000...