The Life-Sized City Blog

This article is a guest contribution from Bartek Komorowski. Bartek is an urban planner and currently Project Leader in Research and Consulting at Vélo Quebec in Montreal . He and his colleagues reacted to a compartive study published last month in Canada and we're pleased to bring his thoughts here. Data is of utmost importance. More often than not, cities simply don't have enough of it. Then you have professionals who taken existing data and completely abuse it. Which is what this piece is about. ---- By Bartek Komorowski Last week, the Pembina Institute, a reputable clean energy think tank, released a comparative study on cycling in Canada’s five largest cities – Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, and Ottawa. The study compares a number of statistics on bicycle use, safety, and infrastructure. The authors spin a narrative about Montreal being a great cycling city, mentioning its presence on the Copenhagenize Index. Strangely, their report provides statistics th...

Just got this from a reader. Bicycle Map of Montreal from... 1897. From an insurance company (follow the money) but still brilliant to see the bicycle infrastructure back then. Reminds us of the maps we got from Helsinki from 1937 showing cyclist counts on certain streets . Up to 10,000 cyclists on some streets back then.

Found this photo in a book at the Texada Island Library book sale yesterday. Even in 1910, the bicycle offered a fantastic mobility option for the citizens battling with sub-standard public transport.

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...

1966 – Bikes at Blundell Elementary School. Continuing the series of bicycle photos that show cycling as a normal transport form in cities, we have moved on to Vancouver, Canada. I used to be seen in the city, riding a crappy bike in regular clothes down from Lynn Valley and North Van, over the Lion's Gate to work downtown in the late 1980's. Or riding around downtown and Kitsalano in the early 1990's.  1943 – Canadian Youth Hostel bicycle hike at the grizzly bear cage in the Stanley Park Zoo. 1943 – Bicycle hike at Douglas Park. 1940s – A boy examines his new bicycle license. 1943 – Lumberman’s Arch. 1932 – Acrobats at the Vancouver Exhibition (now, PNE) 1943 – July 1st celebration in Richmond. 1890s – Bicycle racers and friends at Brockton Point.

Enrique Penalosa, former Mayor of Bogota, spoke at the International Transport Forum in Leipzig today and he brought an interesting observation to the discussion. Millions of dollars are spent protecting frogs and lizards but pedestrians and cyclists often suffer from lack of infrastructure. It's a great comment. Ranking frogs higher than humans in our spending. What he is referring to is the many wildlife crossings that are built to protect wildlife and prevent wildlife/car conflicts. The most well-known examples are in Canada, providing safe passage for wildlife that wish to migrate across the Trans-Canada Highway: What an impressive, expensive structure. I'm pleased that the wildlife doesn't have to suffer the destructive capability of the automobile. Hell, they don't even have to suffer SEEING the cars because of the foliage. 30,000 cars a day pass this point in Banff National Park in the summer. Which, however, is a number similar to the number of cars ...

Right off the bat we're going to link to a recent post featuring photos of cyclists in Copenhagen in the winter . Thanks to Eleanor for the following link. So... Hot of the virtual press of the Thunder Bay News Watch : "Cyclist hit by car. Transported to hospital". (We hope he is okay). Now the comments that often accompany bicycle-related stories in the Anglo-Saxon world are often entertaining and creative - as well as healthy, shocking reminders of the extent of our deeply-rooted car culture. The ones that follow this story are hilarious. Banning cycling in winter! Here are some of the nuggets of hilarity: The Wolf says: With all the laws new and old to protect people from themselves,why have they not made it illegal to operate a bike in the winter? The roads and conditions are hard enough to navigate in the winter never mind having to keep an eye out for someone on an unstable bike. nads74 says: I disagree, about making it a law, honestly why do we ne...

A resident of Vancouver, Canada has started a new church. The Church of Sit Up Cycling. Cycling 'enthusiasts' have long exhibited a passion for their hobby or sport that resembles religious observance. Now the realm of worship has come to the aesthetic art and act of regular citizens riding upright bicycles. We like this theological uprighteousness. Reverend James Twowheeler is the 'nom de plume' of the church's founder. As stated on the church's website: Wearing their normal work and play clothes is an essential religious practice of members of the Church of Sit-Up Cycling. This may or may not include wearing plastic hats. Believers wholly endorse the use of such accident-preventing safety measures as lights, bells, height, strict compliance with traffic signals, a leisurely pace and the use of dedicated cycling streets and lanes. Reverend Twowheeler discovered a potential loophole in British Columbia's Motor Vehicle Act . British Columbia is one ...

Thanks to Bojana for the link to a strange waiver on the website of the town of Perth, Ontario, Canada. It's not as ridiculous as the waiver required for a quiet bike ride in Chicago, as mentioned in the Go Green, Go Dutch, Go Die post , but what makes it odd is that you have to sign it before downloading... cycling maps. Cycling maps. I just had to repeat that. In order to download the pdfs of the Perth & District Cycling Route maps , you first need to read this disclaimer text: Disclaimer: This cycling map has been developed to assist in planning bicycle trips throughout the County of Lanark. Users of this cycling map are responsible for their own safety and use these routes at their own risk. Users should consider not only route conditions but also their level of experience, comfort level riding in traffic, traffic conditions and traffic volume, weather, time of day, and any obstacles, such as construction or potholes, when cycling on any route within the County of Lanark. C...

It's no secret that we're big fans of helmet campaigns for motorists. It would do wonders for reducing car traffic and encouraging people to ride bicycles. We've previously blogged about the first Motoring Helmet, developed in Australia in the late 1980's. Later we covered the Protective Headbands for Motorists developed at the University of Adelaide on the background of an Australian government study that showed that many lives could be saved and serious injuries reduced if car occupants wore helmets or similar devices. We added a blogpost about the headbands here . A few days ago, our colleague, Chris from Britain's CTC, sent us the link to Driving Without Dying. It's a Canadian website called Driving Without Dying by a man named Jack who says, "There are giant gaps in highway safety that need to be filled. My legacy to humanity is to change the driving habits of the entire world and I don't care how long it takes." The man sounds committed. ...

It's not every day you get a legendary environmentalist with a rock star status visiting town, but last week Copenhagenize/Copenhagen Cycle Chic were quite pleased to have hosted David Suzuki, his daughter Sarika and a film crew from the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. [CBC]. David Suzuki, 72, hosts Canada's longest running documentary programme The Nature of Things . He is in Europe filming an hour-long programme on sustainability in Europe and Copenhagen's bike culture will feature prominently. We spent two days cycling around the city, with me leading Suzuki and his daugther, Sarika, on a tour of our bike culture. The goal of the programme, he said, is to highlight how far behind Canada is compared to European countries with regards to sustainability and to encourage Canadians to wake up and smell the renewable energy. Suzuki is a scientist and environmentalist and if you're in Canada, Japan or Australia, you've probably heard of him. When we were down in the tourist...