The Life-Sized City Blog

Standard cycle track in Copenhagen. Sign indicating that you turn left here for the airport. I will fully admit the irony of my epiphany. It's even a bit silly. The story has, however, a decent ending. The nature of my work involves a great many trips to and from Copenhagen Airport . We're lucky in Copenhagen. The airport is the most efficient and well-designed airport I've seen anywhere in the world. It is easily accessible and is located close to the city. You can get there by bus, metro and train, as well as car or taxi, of course. This being Copenhagen, I knew there was fully separated bicycle infrastructure the whole way out there, as well. From every direction. Last October, on the eve of a journey to Zurich for my TED x talk , my friend Ole - previously written about on this blog - asked why I didn't just ride my bicycle to the airport. I shrugged and said that I live 6 minutes walk from a Metro station and it takes 25 minutes on the Metro to get there. I...

Copenhagen's Lord Mayor, Frank "Le Corbusier" Jensen continues his fight for a car-centric Copenhagen that would make the 1950s proud. What makes matters worse is that the Robert Moses Fan Club that is the Danish Congestion Commission (Trængselskommission) are also using a time machine to travel back to the congested past at the moment. A colleague told us very recently that they are seriously discussing widening the motorways leading into Copenhagen because of the traffic jams. Can you believe that? With all the available knowledge, with all the moves away from motorways around the world, these clowns are tying us to their back bumpers and dragging us into that previous century that exists in their heads. The subject of 30 km/h zones was brought up at the Congestion Commissions discussions. According to Jens Loft Rasmussen, head of the Danish Cycling Federation (DCF) , the room went kind of quiet. Nobody knew quite what to say. In a flash, the proposal was wip...

Earlier this year I was working in Rotterdam, a city I had never visited before. You get the impression from Dutch people in the rest of the Netherlands that Rotterdam isn't really Dutch. Generally, the attitude is that Rotterdam isn't very cool. The only way to figure it out is to go there. I was invited to do a spot of Copenhagenizin' at the City of Rotterdam. A brainstorm session about how to promote cycling and perhaps develop a brand for the City's cycling intiatives. A great day with great, positive people. A real pleasure. I was excited to get a Rijkspas - "Kingdom Pass" upon arriving the offices: But soon realised that it was a golden pass to the entire Kingdom of the Netherlands that would get me free beer and cheese and... uh... bouquets of tulips. Just coffee and lunch, but hey. Copenhagenize Consulting was hired by De Verkeersonderneming, a consortium of partners aimed at improving traffic conditions in the city . The partners include the C...

If you're wondering about the sporadic publishing here on the blog over the past while, it's simply because we have so many exciting projects on the go around the world at Copenhagenize Consulting . One of the projects has been preparing our offering for the upcoming exhbition The Good City - Visions for a City on the Move , which the Bicycle Innovation Lab is curating. The exhibition opens on June 8th in Copenhagen, the first stop on a world tour. It's an exciting exhibition. We're presenting our own vision from here at the company but we are also curating the vision from a third-grade class at LaCour Vej School. Nine and ten year old urbanists. They have been working hard on the redesign of the roundabout next to their school. Here's the spiel about the exhibition from Bicycle Innovation Lab: THE GOOD CITY MINI-CONFERENCE AND EXHIBITION Friday the 8th of June at 12 o'clock, Bicycle Innovation Lab will inaugurate the international traveling exhibiti...

A couple of years ago the national government announced a economic package for promoting cycling and building infrastructure. We posted about it in "94 Billion for Bikes" in early 2009 . In the latest round of project funding, we at Copenhagenize Consulting received funding for two different projects. One is Bicycle Innovation Laboratory - Denmark's first Cultural Centre for cycling (more on that in the coming days) and the second project is a research project regarding marketing bicycle ridership. We have teamed up with Thomas Krag Mobility Advice in the application and the project. Tomorrow we have a focus group seminar with various professionals to gain feedback moving forward. It's a very exciting project and we're looking forward to the continued work. We have had interest from a number of large cycling organisations about a further development, as well. On this blog we often highlight positive campaigns for promoting cycling - as well as the negative ...

We always have a bunch of ideas kicking around at Copenhagenize Consulting . We are always working on individual, tailor-made solutions when we work with other cities - every city is unique - but last month we decided to try out some ideas right here in Copenhagen. In our own backyard. Earlier this year we blogged about how Copenhagen tries to keep Holding On To Cyclists by placing railings and footrests around the city to let bicycle users rest against them whilst waiting at red lights. Brilliant idea and we love it. The text on the footrest is a communications template we developed for the Bicycle Office . These railings, are, however, limited in that these railings can only be implemented in certain locations where they don't interfere with pedestrian mobility. There are eight of them around the city now. Copenhageners, however, will lean up against anything they can at red lights. We have a whole photo series dedicated to it . Have a look around the city. The metal pol...

Copenhagenize is pleased to be involved in the creation and design of a bike event that will take place in conjunction with the Roskilde Festival and Roskilde Municipality on June 26th, 2011. Rock Ur Bike will take place on Sunday, June 26th. Roskilde Festival starts on June 30th but the camping areas open on June 25th and warm up music starts on the Sunday, to entertain the tens of thousands of festival-goers. It is a simple celebration of the bicycle as an integral part of society. As the poster says, "Pimp your bike and ride show-off through the city!". The ride is inspired by the crazy bike goodness at Burning Man festival in the USA. Roskilde Festival, since its inception in 1971 , has become one of Europe's largest music festivals, with 80,000 people taking part, not to mention over 20,000 volunteers. The City of Roskilde is a bit older. A thousand years older, give or take. This year the city has a bicycle campaign to promote cycling called Roskilde ...

For Copenhagenize the Velo-City conference in Copenhagen was a whirlwhind of meeting wonderful people/colleagues from all over the planet. 'Networking' is far too dull a word for it and doesn't do it justice. The League of American Bicyclists collaborated with Copenhagenize Consulting on a series of bicycle tours before and during the conference. Bike rides around the city to see the infrastructure highlights in the Danish capital. We, in turn, enlisted the help of Biomega and Baisikeli to provide the bikes. One of the tours was with New York's Dept of Tranport Commissioner Janette Sadikh-Khan and her crew. I was impressed to hear that the New Yorkers all took time out of their annual holiday leave to come to Copenhagen for the conference. What commitment. Another tour with the League and Copenhagenize was a ride to show John Burke, the president of American bike company Trek , around the city, along with some other Americans. Andrew, City Councillor from Dublin and...