The Life-Sized City Blog

As we highlighted last week , the Danish police announced they would be going after bicycle users this week and sure enough, they were at it. Hiding behind a tree along The Lakes, as above. This officer was largely stopping bicycle users who were scooting over the sidewalk, as illustrated below, in order to turn right while avoiding the hundred or so bicycle users waiting at the red light. Yes, hundreds of the world's best behaved cyclists waiting for red lights and once in a while a citizen on a bicycle rolls across the sidewalk (red arrows), only to be stopped by this police officer. I watched for a while and the policeman spent more time leaning against a tree than writing tickets. And this was rush hour. He did get to unfreeze the ink in his pen a few times though. None of the bicycle users who cut the corner did so at any great speed and none of them bothered any pedestrians on their A to B journey. Anette Jerup Jørgensen is a researcher at Danish Cyclists Federation ...

It's something we read regularly in the Danish press. The police had out traffic fines in order to make their statistics look good and to reach certain goals set for each police district. The article, above, is from November, 2011, but there are articles about it every year. The photo in the article is police handing out fines to bicycle users in Copenhagen. Cyclists are often the easiest target. You park your police car or police bicycle ( illegally ) on a busy street and starting writing fines. It is often near the end of the year that police - if it looks like they're lagging behind in reaching the goal - will hit the streets to hand out of flurry of fines. The article highlights the irony that in many police districts they become so focused on traffic fines that they use less time on crime. Jørgen Jensen, a policeman from the western suburbs, is quoted in the article as saying, "Based on the bare figures, we go after certain areas in order to reach the targets...