The Life-Sized City Blog

A friend of mine took this photo back in 2011 in  Nanortalik , Greenland of a citizen on his Christiania cargo bike . It was only a balmy -10 C at the time but getting around the town is easy peasy on human-powered wheels. Greenland is an area we haven't covered much here on this blog. We've noticed that many Danish online bike shops are keen to point out that they send to Greenland. Being a part of the Danish Kingdom , it's no surprise that bicycles play a role in Greenland. Seeing an iconic Christiania Bike 'up there' is just extra cool. So I was wondering. Could this be the world's most northerly cargo bike? The coordinates for Nanotalik are 60°08′31″N - 45°14′36″W. It probably isn't, as Nanotalik (meaning 'Place of the Polar Bears' in Kalaallisut) is on the southern tip of Greenland, which means cargo bikes in Uppsala, Sweden, just north of Stockholm are farther north. Not to mention other Swedish, Icelandic and Norwegian towns. I started ...

When I was in Helsinki to give a talk a couple of months ago I also had a meeting with the City's bicycle planners and urban planners at their offices. They are keen to transform the city into a more bicycle-friendly area. There is a network of bicycle infrastructure but most of it is hopelessly out of date and not designed particularly well. There is a respectable number of cyclists using it, especially now what with the renaissance of the bicycle. But challenges lay ahead. I was interested to hear that the city used to have a fine network of bicycle infrastructure back in the day. My colleagues at the City's bicycle office sent me these two maps, both dating from 1937. The map above shows the bicycle infrastructure marked in red. A lot of it mirroring Copenhagen's cycle tracks, like this stretch in 1955 . Tracks on either side of the street along the main arteries. This map shows a bicycle count done in 1937. It's not clear from looking at the map, but the City's ...