The Life-Sized City Blog

It's all so simple if we want it to be. For almost a century we have been asking the same question in our cities. "How many cars can we move down a street?" It's time to change the question. If you ask "How many PEOPLE can we move down a street?", the answer becomes much more modern and visionary. And simple. Oh, and cheaper. Let alone the fact that the model at the top can move 10 times more people down a street than the model at the bottom. When I travel with my Bicycle Urbanism by Design keynote , I often step on the toes of traffic engineers all around the world. Not all of them, however. I am always approached by engineers who are grateful that someone is questioning the unchanged nature of traffic engineering and the unmerited emphasis placed on it. I find it brilliant that individual traffic engineers in six different nations have all said the same thing to me: "We're problem solvers. But we're only ever asked to solve the sam...

We have a tendency to give cities human character traits when we describe them. It's a friendly city. A dynamic city. A boring city. Perhaps then a city can be arrogant. Arrogant, for example, with it's distribution of space. I've been working a lot in North America the past year and I've become quite obsessed with the obscenely unbalanced distribution of space. I see this arrogance everywhere I go. I see the insanely wide car lanes and the vehicles sailing back and forth in them like inebriated hippopotami. I was just in Calgary for five days and from my balcony at the hotel I watched the traffic below on 12th Ave. A one-way street that was never really busy at all. From above, the arrogance of space was very apparent. Even more so than in a car driving down the lanes. The photo, above, is the car lines divided up with their actual width. Watching for five days - okay, not 24/7 ... I have a life after all - I didn't really see  any vehicles that filled out t...

The neverending story of car dependency: (c) Todd Litman, 2013. " Smart Congestion Relief - Comprehensive Analysis of Traffic Congestion Costs and Congestion Reduction Benefits ". Victoria Transport Policy Institute. FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. This is the general feeling when drivers know that the street they usually drive on, may soon be closed to vehicular traffic. This feeling has, to some degree, been used by those who decide to build new roads. In other words, we still live according to Henry Ford's motto, “With mobility comes freedom and progress”. As someone who works with urban planning this can be viewed as when the ends actually justify the means – cities scratched by black tar marks, roads planned and built with eyes closed. Now, the results of unconsidered planning are here - we feel these impacts on a daily basis. Currently, that paradigm is slowly shifting to a new one. In a rather considerable number of cities, city centres, as well as ma...

A Short History of Traffic "Engineering". Get this design as a poster in the online shop .

Great little video from Italy, made by Ivan Conte. Look what kind of inhuman cities we have created with our primitive, vehicle-based traffic engineering over the past century or so. Pedestrians are at the mercy of the motor vehicles, sure, but at the root at the mercy of traffic engineers who fail to plan for pedestrians and cyclists. Chaos ensues. Pollution runs riot. Cities are dead or dying ... unless we choose to think differently .

Fellini's 8 1/2 was a comedy. Kind of like Copenhagen City Hall at the moment. Yep, it's the early 1950s at Copenhagen City Hall. Tonight, politicians voted yes to a harbour tunnel that will cost our city a whopping 27 BILLION kroner. ($4.5 billion) Despite the fact that the only damned thing we know from a century of traffic engineering is that when you create more space for cars, more cars appear. See a vision of City Hall's tunnel here. Lars Barfred, who writes here on the site, has done some rational calculations. For about the same price as a ridiculous harbour tunnel, we could have things we ACTUALLY NEED. Lars has calculated that we could have - instead: 2.5 billion: 250 km of high-class bicycle infrastructure along all S-Train lines, the east coast route and the Helsingør motorway all the way to Trørød 1 billion: 330 km of bicycle superhighways 13 billion: Converting the A-bus network to 65 km of tramways 3 billion: Fully automated S-Train syste...

It's not like we needed any more proof that we live in car-centric cities. When you start scratching just a little below the surface, however, you start to discover that we are not so much citizens in cities but rather a flock of reluctant characters in The Matrix. You discover that we live in cities that are controlled by bizarre and often outdated mathematical theories, models and engineering “solutions” that continue to be used despite the fact that they are of little use to modern cities. One of them is called The 85th Percentile. It's a method that cities all over the planet use to determine speed limits. It's the standard. Nobody questions it. Certainly not the engineers and planners who, for decades, have been served it up and who have swallowed it whole during their studies. Which reminds us of the old traffic engineer joke: Why did the engineer cross the road? Because that's what they did last year. The concept is rather simple: the speed limit of ...

DEPRESSING UPDATE - 13 MAY 2013 - SCROLL TO BOTTOM Frederiksberg. The city is an municipal island surrounded by Copenhagen and with its 90,000 residents, it is Denmark's most densely-populated city. Generally, the city is good at providing for cycling and around 35% of the residents cycle to work or school. This is the city in which I live and where Copenhagenize Design Co. has it's offices. There are, however, problems that need solving and there is no solutions on the way. One of them is highlighted here in this article. Even though only 35% of the population of the city own cars (the number is 29% for Copenhagen), the main arteries are clogged with cars and trucks all through the day. Over 26,000 drive past my windows each day. Almost all of them are "parasites", as Italian traffic planners call them . When I looked out the window at the intersection between Nordre Fasanvej and Godthåbsvej (above) I was pleased to see that work was underway on resurfacing...