The Life-Sized City Blog

Nice and simple. A welcome sight in the morning in Copenhagen. After a snowfall - most often during - the sidewalks and cycle tracks are cleared of snow, allowing for trouble-free mobility. Read more about winter maintenance: - The Snow Slinger - eating snow drifts for breakfast - Copenhagen runs out of salt - priortizes only cycle tracks . - Protecting Trees with Salt Guards - and keeping cycle tracks clear - The Ultimate Bike Lane Snow Clearance Blogpost

Update: 18 Dec 2013 Lulu and I were on the spot when one of her teachers, Heidi, was buying her tree and taking it home. She borrowed one of the many bike trailers at the school to do so. Standing nice and tall in the Copenhagen evening. UPDATE. Typical. Write a blog post and then two bikes with christmas trees roll past your window. So here's an update. Above: Sorte Jernhest cargo bike , complete with tree and kid wearing an elf hat heading home in the evening. Fantastic. This lady rolled past my window pulling her tree on a trailer. Getting close to Jul here in Copenhagen. Christmas tree sellers are occupying squares all around the city. Many people use their bicycles to get the tree home. Here's a collection of the shots we have of people moving their trees home by bike. This lady had just bought a jule tree and the seller was helping her strap it to her bicycle. It took some work and discussion but they finally succeeded. She didn't have far to go, s...

This winter has, so far, been rather uneventful. No arctic deep freeze with snowstorm after snowstorm rolling in like the past two winters and many before that . It's been grey and dull and quite boring, with only The Lakes being frozen over to provide a sense of winter and the opportunity to skate. Older people - including my dad - will wax lyrical about the three legendary winters back in 1939/40, 40/41 and 41/42. It was in 1941 that the municipality of Frederiksberg - where Copenhagenize Consulting is also based - needed some new ideas about clearing the obscene amounts of snow. Horse-drawn ploughs were in use all over the nation, as well as teams of men with shovels, due to the petrol shortage during those winters. Frode Nielsen, an engineer at the city's transport department, invented the bicycle snowplough picture above. It was made from two short john delivery bikes attached together with rods. The plough was made of beech, with a 3 mm steel edge, as well as sma...

One of the main focuses of this blog has always been on how Copenhagen and other cities have succeeded in increasing cycling levels by approaching the subject using mainstream marketing techniques. Tried and tested marketing that has existed since homo sapiens first started selling or trading stuff to each other. Modern bicycle advocacy, by and large, is flawed. It is firmly inspired by environmentalism which, in turn, is the greatest marketing flop in the history of humankind. Four decades of sub-cultural finger-wagging, guilt trips and preaching have given few results among the general population. When sub-cultural groups start trying to indoctrinate and convert the public, it rarely ever succeeds. For the better part of a century, people all over the planet rode bicycles because they were quick, easy, convenient and enjoyable. In hilly cities. In hot cities. In snowy cities. After the bicycle largely disappeared from the urban landscape because urban planning s...

I really should get out more. I rarely get to the provinces - whether Danish or otherwise. That's just me. I prefer cities. Once in a while, however, I find myself out there. In the Danish town of Frederikssund last summer I spotted these two simple traffic calming measures. Simply narrowing the street with islands and only allowing for one way traffic through the squeeze. The bicycle lane, of course, allows for free passage. In a small Danish town like this there is often a combination of painted lines, as above, and physically separated cycle tracks - depending on the traffic volume of the street. On a trip to small town in Jutland for a football tournament that my son was playing in, it was reassuring to see that along every road there were cycle tracks - and they were cleared of snow even way out there. Again, bi-directional tracks in some places and - if the traffic volume is sufficient - a track on either side of the highway. With over 10,000 km of bicycle lanes, path...

Might just be me and my secret wish for nicer photography, but it seems that there is an increase in imagery in the Danish press featuring bicycles. Or rather, an increase in the quality of the imagery. I've noticed one national daily, Berlingske Tidende (founded 1749) upping their artistic sensibilities of late. Like the photo, above, taken in Aalborg yesterday morning. It's a simple article about the weather but it features a cyclist rolling on the bike lane in the snow (past all the cars on the road, of course). The temperature was about -10 C, with a wicked windchill. Then there was this weather article from late last year about rain and wind. Beautiful shot. Like all of these photos, showing cyclists adds a human element to the story. In a country like Denmark we can relate to the weather when we see a fellow citizen struggling through the elements on a bicycle. The same newspaper used to have Bicycle Weather included on their weather page in their print version. Showing...

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...

The thaw continues but the icy remants of the many snowstorms are useful on occasion.

We've had a period of "better" weather in Copenhagen, where the temperatures have hovered around freezing, including a couple of days of around 3 degrees. The snow, as snow does when the air is above zero - started to melt. It's still there but there is less of it. In some regions of the country the temperature rose to a tropical 7 degrees and the sudden thaw caused floods on farms and in houses. Fortunately, not so here in the capital. I was heading into the city centre yesterday and came across a bike lane snow sweepr muscling along the bike lane in the City of Frederiksber. The snow had long been cleared but not to the entire width of the bike lane. Now that the pressure is off city maintenence staff because of no recent snowfalls, there is time for the city to tidy up a bit and try to return to status quo. The snow sweeper was tackling the remaining snow and widening the bike lane to it's normal width. And it was nice to see the big boy out getting bu...

Sometimes it's easier to let the photos do the talking. As mentioned before, 80% of Copenhageners cycle through the winter. That number is surely lower when we have hard winters with snowstorm after snowstorm, but the numbers are still impressive. Impressive to me. Probably astounding to others. If you make the bicycle the fastest way to get from A to B in a city - what we call A2Bism for bicycles here at Copenhagenize - the strangest people will be spotted on bicycles. If you prioritize keeping your bicycle infrastructure clear of snow , people will ride. In most of these shots the temperature was well below zero. Much lower with the typical Copenhagen wind. And no bicycle studs were harmed in the making of this blogpost. I never see them here and wouldn't possibly know where to buy them. When you have as much urban cycling experience as the people of Copenhagen or a city like Amsterdam, you are pretty much trained to cycle in any weather. I'll just let my fellow ...