The Life-Sized City Blog

The Robert Moses Fan Club that in Denmark is pushing ahead with their idea of a harbour tunnel that will only serve to increase car traffic and congestion over large swathes of the Danish capital. Here's what we'd rather have for the 27 billion the new underground motorway will cost. Design by Emma Sivell , with Copenhagenize Design Co., for Cykelrepublikken . A larger version is available here .

This article first appeared in the Danish newspaper Politiken on 27 November 2012. It was written by a colleague of ours and her co-workers at Center for Design, Innovation and Sustainable Transitions The Transition of Copenhagen’s Traffic Logic by Anne Katrine Braagaard Harders, Jens Stissing Jensen og Erik Hagelskjær Lauridsen are researchers at the Center for Design, Innovation and Sustainable Transitions, AAU København. The past weeks' heated debate on cyclists’ behavior in Copenhagen reflects intensified tensions between the urban space’s different mobility logics and demonstrates a need for a transition of Copenhagen’s traffic. Cycling is, as an urban mobility form, of a different nature to that of the motorized traffic. A typical picture of the Copenhagen cycling traffic could be young men on their racing bikes, merging in and out between elderly women cycling slowly, dads talking with their kids on the large cargo bikes, and girlfriends chatting and cycling side ...

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...

Copenhagen's Lord Mayor, Frank "Le Corbusier" Jensen continues his fight for a car-centric Copenhagen that would make the 1950s proud. What makes matters worse is that the Robert Moses Fan Club that is the Danish Congestion Commission (Trængselskommission) are also using a time machine to travel back to the congested past at the moment. A colleague told us very recently that they are seriously discussing widening the motorways leading into Copenhagen because of the traffic jams. Can you believe that? With all the available knowledge, with all the moves away from motorways around the world, these clowns are tying us to their back bumpers and dragging us into that previous century that exists in their heads. The subject of 30 km/h zones was brought up at the Congestion Commissions discussions. According to Jens Loft Rasmussen, head of the Danish Cycling Federation (DCF) , the room went kind of quiet. Nobody knew quite what to say. In a flash, the proposal was wip...

A couple of twists of fate and this location in Copenhagen would have been a 12 lane motorway. When looking back over the last century of cities infatuated with Car Culture, it's not hard to see how stupid we were - or almost were. In the 1940s the so-called Finger Plan was developed for Copenhagen . By and large an interesting concept and the foundation for the expansion of Copenhagen. The Finger Plan has, however, some dark secrets. Among them are two connected projects. City Plan Vest (City Plan West) and Søringen (The Lake Ring). The City Plan Vest, in 1958, proposed that Copenhagen be equipped with a Lake Ring. The #19 motorway from the north would continue over Hans Knudsens Plads - in a tunnel to Vibenshus Runddel - and then emerging again to continue along Nørre Allé in a 12 lane motorway down Tagensvej and Fredensgade. It would turn right along The Lakes to Vesterbro, where a comprehensive interchange would be built to lead traffic to the south towards Germany and ...

The old-fashioned road interests are at it again and the Lord Mayor of Copenhagen Frank Jensen, among others, are pandering to them. The insanity continues in The New Copenhagen. Now they want to build a tunnel for cars and trucks to connect the motorways that come from the north of Copenhagen and end in an area called Ryparken/Hans Knuds Square , to the motorway that connects the West of Zealand (the island on which Copenhagen is located) and the bridge to Sweden.  This motorway also accesses the Copenhagen airport. What is interesting is the development that this will no longer be called the "harbour tunnel", but will instead be called the "Eastern Bypass" - but that's just so that it can recieve funding from the national government. This will, however, mean that the tunnel may have to have more interchanges on its route than a pure bypass road would have, especially as it is being proposed as a "Public-Private Partnership", the investors in wh...