The Life-Sized City Blog

Photo by Dennis Steinsiek from Dutch-it.eu The news today out of Copenhagen is about the imminent failure of the city's new bike share system. Copenhageners are ignorning the bikes, few trips are being taken on them and they have become a tourist gimmick, not the commuter dream they hoped for. It's a rare event that a bike share system fails. Only a very few systems around the world have folded. Melbourne was the poster child for failure thanks to their helmet laws, helmet promotion, lack of infrastructure and anti-cyclist laws. Now it looks like Copenhagen will step into the failure spotlight. I am in two minds. I have never been a fan of the bikes or the system and have done little to conceal that fact. I said it was doomed to failure back in 2013 . I have wondered why Danish State Railways didn't just copy the decade-old OV-Fiets system from Dutch Railways instead of being seduced by useless, overcomplicated technology. You can read all about why I think the sys...

UPDATE 10 OCT 2014 The Copenhagen bike share bikes we talk about in this article have been on the streets for a few months now. The goal is that each bike is used 3 times a day - by local commuters. So far they are used 0.8 times a day - by tourists. Oops. Fail. These $10,000 shiny toys are already a tourist gimmick - like the originals in Copenhagen - and that does not encourage locals to use them. Locals never want to looks like tourists. Keep reading for more rationality. ---------- While La Rochelle, France can boast about having started the first proper bike share system in the mid-1970s , Copenhagen introduced the Bycyklen - City Bike - in 1995. Picture above and below, the bikes were cute gimmicks that lasted until late 2012. They worked on a shopping trolley system - put a 10 or 20 kroner coin in and get it back when you return it. The bikes were horrible to ride and it didn't take long for them to become tourist magnets. Most Copenhageners wouldn't touch th...

In light of the recent launch of New York City's Citibike bike share system, Copenhagenize Design Co. has produced this highly-scientific and frightfully academic statistical graph. Based on the 500-odd bike share systems now in place in the world we have gathered all the public perception of the systems and crunched the data - compressing it rudely but effectively into one easy graph - for use by cities who are considering implementing a bike share system. We have also assisted some NIMBYs in New York. One of them was quoted as saying that he couldn't imagine the Mayor of Paris - the city of arts - placing a bike share rack in front of the Louvre:

Goodbye, Bycyklen . After 17 years, Copenhagen's renowned bike share system is being pulled off the streets of the city for the winter - and it ain't coming back. As we all know, La Rochelle, France was the first city to establish a permanent bike share system back in the mid 1970s . Sure, there were some hippie attempts in the 1960s) but Copenhagen's Bycyklen was the first system in a large city that involved a deposit system. With a 10 or 20 kroner coin you could unlock a bike and ride off. Nostalgia strikes quickly. The goofiest bicycles in history have only been gone for a few hours but I already miss them. I miss being late for a meeting or just wanting to get home and having to trail behind a wobbly Italian family of four happily enjoying the cycle tracks. The entire width of them. Until we reached an intersection or a wider stretch and I - together with 150 other Copenhageners - could overtake them. I miss seeing them in the far reaches of the city - far fr...

Filmmaker and bicycle advocate Mike Rubbo continues his series on bike share programmes with this film about the success of the Bicing programme in Barcelona. Here is our collection of Bicing shots in Barcelona on Flickr .

It was a long-time coming this little film. It's about the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and how bicycle friendly the university is. I shot it when I visited Mexico City last year and spoke at UNAM's architecture faculty about promoting bicycle culture. I figured I'd whip it together after reading James' article on The Urban Country about how McGill University in Montreal has banned bicycle riding on their campus. After rolling my eyes and lamenting the lack of rationality at such an esteemed place of learning I revisted the footage from UNAM. The main campus, by the way, is stunningly beautiful and is a World Heritage Site. The campus is largely car-free and as far back as 2004 they started a bike share programme called BiciPuma. It has since grown and the university has wonderful bicycle infrastructure all over the campus. The university's bicycle friendly policy and resulting infrastructure and facilities are the yardstick by which all other u...

Paul Martin in Brisbane sent me an online toy this morning and I've been playing around with it. It's a live map of bike share system use in a variety of cities. I decided to compare the levels of bike share use in 12 cities. Nine of them in Europe, as well as Melbourne, Montreal and Washington, DC. I checked the levels of usage at 08:00 AM in all the European cities (I'm including London and Dublin under that label). The morning rush hour is beginning, people are heading to work. I checked the current weather conditions, too. It's late-autumn in Europe and morning temperatures are getting chillier. So, here we go. At 08:00 in the morning local time on a Friday: PARIS - VÉLIB [8 AM / 10°C / cloudy] 753 bikes in use 4.3% in use / Normal 753 is highest so far today MILAN - BIKEMI [8 AM / 8°C / shallow fog] 110 bikes in use 9% in use / High 1142 is highest so far today LONDON - BORIS BIKES [8 AM / 10°C / light drizzle] 404 bikes in use 9% in use / High 404 is highest so fa...

I had a brilliant week in Melbourne as a guest of the State of Design Festival . Loads of interviews and events that all culminated with my keynote speech on the Saturday. There was, however, an event on the Saturday morning - July 26, 2010 - that was extremely interesting to be a part of. A group of citizens, rallied together by filmmaker and bicycle advocate Mike Rubbo , decided to go for a bicycle ride together on Melbourne's new bike share system bikes. A splendid idea. Melbourne's bike share system is shiny new, although unlike most cities in the world with a bike share programme, only 70-odd people are using them each day. In Dublin, by contrast, there are over 30,000 subscribers. Not to mention the cracking successes in Paris, Barcelona, Seville and most of the over 100 cities with such systems. So, a group of people, many of them Copenhagenize.com readers, fancy a bike ride. Sounds lovely enough. They met up at the bike racks at Melbourne University. Hired the bikes wi...