The Life-Sized City Blog

There are numerous ways to measure how citizen cyclists feel about cycling in a city. We know that there is no chicken or egg - there is only Best Practice infrastructure. Keeping cyclists safe but also giving them the all-important sense of safety. I have cycled in over 60 cities around the world. In safe cities like those in Denmark and the Netherlands and cities that struggle to emerge as bicycle-friendly cities. In the latter I am rolling through a lion's den, often forced subliminally to speed up because of the pace of the motorised traffic. In these old-fashioned cities that have failed to provide safe infrastructure for cycling, I am quite sure I have never yawned. Too much intensity, too much adrenaline. If we look at revealed preferences, as opposed to declared preferences (asking people in surveys), the urban cycling yawn has to be the ultimate indicator of the state of a city's progress towards being bicycle-friendly. If you don't see people yawning regu...

We like data at Copenhagenize Design Company. It's a major part of our work, not least in our Desire Line Analyses of cyclist behaviour that we have done in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, and planning to do on a global scale. We film an intersection for 10-12 hours and spending a couple hundred hours analysing the behaviour, doing counts of everything we can and producing solutions for modernising intersections to priortise cycling and pedestrians. In association with the current Desire Line Analysis we are working on, on Søtorvet intersection in Copenhagen, we have added some data sets. Including performing a bike helmet count. The reason is simple. There is no reliable data. The numbers we have seen are from the Danish Road Safety Council - Rådet for Sikker Trafik - and we are sceptical about them. They claim that the helmet wearing rate is 26%. Their random counts during rush hour and some telephone surveys do not, however, provide reliable data. Especially considering that...

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Cyclists’ protests can be a good thing arising out of a bad thing. Confused? by Pedro Madruga The Good The number of actions protesting for more cyclist and pedestrian rights is becoming more common, large-scaled and with increased outcomes.  Most of us are aware of the protests in Denmark and Netherlands during the 70’s, aiming mostly for increased safety. If you're not aware of that then here’s a whole article waiting for you here . Back then, a message was sent to politicians: the ink was made of cyclists and pedestrians and the paper was the city hall square – as you can see in the below picture (Copenhagen). It figuratively said: “enough”. And it worked. Without violence, just pure human kinetics. Throughout history there were several protests were cyclists and pedestrians claimed for better rights. Just last year, a massive protest gathered 10 thousand cyclists in the UK and 50 thousand in Italy .  And the list goes on, whet...