The Life-Sized City Blog

Nine intersections. 19,500 cyclists. Nine hours. All in a city considered as a model for many urban planners. The Copenhagenize Design Company Desire Lines analysis tool headed south to Amsterdam to study bicycle user behaviour and how it interacts with - or is affected by - urban infrastructure. In ca lose collaboration between  Copenhagenize Design Co . and  The University of Amsterdam in the guise of Marco te Brömmelstroet  - and for the City of Amsterdam - nine intersections in the city were filmed during the morning rush hour in order to complete the world's largest study of bicycle user behaviour. We're pleased to reveal the results of our study and showcase some of the data, analyses and desire line maps.  The bicycle infrastructure in the City of Amsterdam is rather different from the typology used in Copenhagen ,where we did the first anthropological studies of the cyclists  - The Choregraphy of an Urban Intersection, and others. It was t...

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...

Here's the cover graphic of Copenhagenize Consulting's upcoming anthropological project tracking the Desire Lines of all the bicycle users in one Copenhagen intersection over 12 hours one day in April. We blogged about it earlier . Here's a .pdf of a larger version, if you fancy that . Opens in a new window. We filmed the intersection for 12 hours and anthropologist Agnete Suhr crunched the behavioural patterns over two months. Counting bicycle users and cars, tracking desire lines and observing the general behaviour of the bicycle users. While it was a ballet of human-powered movement, it was also a spectacular display of mediocrity. There were only a handful of "rogue cyclists chipping away at society's foundations with their reckless behaviour" out of 16,536 Citizen Cyclists. As we always say, well-designed infrastructure breeds good behaviour. While data maps are great for tracking... data... observing 16,536 bicycle users gives you a whole dif...

We are in the midst of an interesting little project here at Copenhagenize Consulting . Something we've been planning for a while but only recently got started with. Like everywhere else, the ever-growing urban cycling boom is causing a backlash in Copenhagen. There's a lot of negative press about bicycle users and little happening to reverse that. When the police go out on their Viking raids for a week at a time, ticketing cyclists for trivialities, the press regurgitate all manner of hype about the 'lawlessness' that will surely cause imminent societal decay. Always forgetting to highlight the fact that The 99% ride by the book and have done for 125 years. So. We thought we'd look at an intersection - an average one - to observe behaviour and chart patterns and numbers. The Choreography of an Urban Intersection. We chose the intersection outside of our office window. Not only convenient, but also a unique intersection in that it is primarily a transport hub t...