The Life-Sized City Blog

I gave this TEDx talk in Zurich back in October . It was released online today. Bicycle Culture by Design - the abridged version. If anyone is interested, here's my script. Some deviations, but mostly the same as the talk. Hopefully, watching the TEDx talk is better than reading the words, but hey. I'm an optimist. But I want to put the next 15 minutes into perspective and I need your help. I'd like everyone to clap at the same tempo as me. Not loud, just softly. Like this. (clapping) Thank you. For every time we clapped our hands someone, somewhere in the world was injured in a car accident. 96 beats per minute. 50 million people a year are injured in car accidents. 1.2 million are killed by cars. In both the EU and the US 35.000 people are killed every year by cars. Do you know what that is? That's a 9/11 – collapsing World Trade Center towers every single month. And every month for the last 60 years - at least. I can't possibly be alone in thinking t...

Earlier this year I was working in Rotterdam, a city I had never visited before. You get the impression from Dutch people in the rest of the Netherlands that Rotterdam isn't really Dutch. Generally, the attitude is that Rotterdam isn't very cool. The only way to figure it out is to go there. I was invited to do a spot of Copenhagenizin' at the City of Rotterdam. A brainstorm session about how to promote cycling and perhaps develop a brand for the City's cycling intiatives. A great day with great, positive people. A real pleasure. I was excited to get a Rijkspas - "Kingdom Pass" upon arriving the offices: But soon realised that it was a golden pass to the entire Kingdom of the Netherlands that would get me free beer and cheese and... uh... bouquets of tulips. Just coffee and lunch, but hey. Copenhagenize Consulting was hired by De Verkeersonderneming, a consortium of partners aimed at improving traffic conditions in the city . The partners include the C...

It's be three and half years since I first blogged this video, made by students at the Dutch Film and TV Academy. I'm surprised it only has 5424 views on YouTube. It deserves so much more. The dialogue goes like this: Motorist is shown an ink blot. Doctor: What do you see? Motorist: Car. Doctor: (Voiceover): The first phase is denial. Motorist: Car. Motorist watches bicycle films. Doctor: (Voiceover) You have to present the addict with the cure for the problem. Motorist gets onto stationary bicycle. Doctor: (Voiceover) Then they have to take their own initiative. Motorist outside on bicycle. Doctor: (Voiceover) When they can do it on their own, we'll let them go. Car addiction (or slavery) is a underestimated problem. We have to help these people. Doctor's last line: Yeah, somebody has to do something about traffic jams. Then there's this one. Italian asks how the guy got there today and replies, "Bicycle". Italian men laugh....

The seeds of bicycle culture in Denmark were first sown 120 years ago. We found a fascinating article about some of the historical aspects of Danish bicycle infrastructure history and thought it relevant to include it here. The first bike lane in Denmark was constructed on Esplanaden in 1892 and in 1896, Copenhageners were allowed to cycle on the side of equestrian paths. Marking out bike lanes in Copenhagen, 1915. Bike lanes along roads weren't, however, constructed back then, despite the rising number of cars on the streets and the rise of the bicycle as transport. There was a battle for space in the cities. Between bicycle users, trams and horses and carriages. It was in 1923 that bicycle users and pedestrians were first allowed to use the one metre wide shoulder on country roads. Nevertheless, many bicycle users chose to avoid the shoulder because of the refuse that collected there, choosing instead to ride farther towards the middle of the road where the coast was cl...

This. Is. Brilliant. Once again, once again it's the Dutch who refuse to Ignore The Bull and choose instead to place the responsibility on the motorists. There is the External Airbags on Cars to protect cyclists and pedestrians and now there is this. Look at that film. Not only are there speed bumps in place to slow cars (and provide the cyclists with an even surface), the LED lights warn cars when bicycles are crossing. At the moment there are LED pedestrian crossings at some 20 locations in the Netherlands. In Papendrecht there is now a variation on a roundabout for cyclists as well. According to local authorities this is intended to be a sustainably safe roundabout because of the elevated bicycle and pedestrian crossings and islands. But apparently these measures were insufficient to ensure the safety of cyclists, so additional striking LED lighting was installed in the road surface. The manufacturer provided software made specifically for this location, which would e...

We've written about parking zones before. The City of Copenhagen has been testing painted zones in order to help people park a little less chaotic. It was tested in Amsterdam as well, and in both cities it seemed to work quite well. My friend Michiel from the Dutch Fietsersbond (Cycling Union) sent me the above film about a Dutch artist, Roosmarijn Vergouw, who created sculptures of parked bicycles using only tape and, in the process, discovered that people will park in the zones when they're there. She calls it Fietsenzwermen - Bicycle Swarm (I'm guessing). It's amazing to see how disciplined the cyclists became when there was tape on the ground. Vergouw now has an idea to do a similar project using spotlights. The City of Amsterdam's Bicycle Office is interested in hearing more. Here's a Dutch-language article about it in the Fietsersbond's magazine - opens as a .pdf .

The Dutch national bicycle council - Fietsberaad - has published a paper called "Bicycle policies of the European principals: continuous and integral". In it they compare and analyze the bicycle culture and infrastructure in five Dutch cities and five other European cities. Among the latter, Copenhagen. I've included the chapter on Copenhagen here. It's a long post, but worth a read. As is the entire paper. The link to the .pdf is at the bottom of this post. It's interesting and curious to read what foreign eyes see when looking at the bicycle life in Copenhagen. There are some discrepencies in the stats and opinions in the paper and I've included my own comments in red. Most of the paper deals with the CITY of Copenhagen, which is a small city, and not the entire Copenhagen metropolitan area/urban sprawl. It can often be misleading if you've never been here. The text below is an abridged version. Read the pdf for the full text. Off we go: ----- Unlike mos...

After visiting the Dutch Cyclists Union - Fietsersbond - last week for a business meeting we went on a bicycle ride around the city of Utrecht. What a lovely city with some interesting and enlightening infrastructure for bicycles. Like elsewhere in the Netherlands, Utrecht has a Red Light District. It's called the Zandpad (Sand path) and it is located along a picturesque canal. The women work out of long row of canal boats. Photo by Buzzthrill on Flickr . Together with Suzanne, Wim and Theo from the Fietserbond we cycled past. Suzanne explained how the bicycle path along the canal had experienced some problems with the heavy traffic in area. Cars were parking up on the bicycle lane and customers were walking along it like a sidewalk. In typical Dutch fashion, a solution was sought. Fences were put up between the road and parking and the two-way bicycle lane in order to allow unrestricted access for bicycles to ride past. Taking photos is frowned upon, but I took the photo at the to...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how right turns for cyclists should be allowed at red lights . So it was refreshing to click onto a link sent by a number of Danish readers this morning. The headline was enough to get us excited: Copenhagen Ready to Allow Right Turns for Cyclists at Red Lights . The national police have announced that it will be up to local authorities to decide if they wish to pass bylaws allowing right turns for cyclists at red lights as well as allowing them to continue straight on at T-intersections. The police have traditionally had a less than positive attitude towards making life easier for cyclists. Their announcement comes as a pleasant surprise. The Mayor in charge the Technical and Environmental Administration [councillor for the Dept of Transport], Bo Asmus Kjeldgaard [second from left in the above photo] says: "It's a fantastic, liberating announcment. We want to be the best bicycle city, therefore we need to get more people onto bikes. And th...

Here we have a couple of Copenhageners who are partipating in a "strenuous activity beyond the capability of some people and that may cause minor, severe and/or permanent injuries or death to people who are not in sufficient physical fitness, training and/or experience." And here we have two individuals who have "Acknowledged that some Bicycling is a test of their physical and mental limits and carries with it, regardless of physical fitness or experience, the potential for death, serious injury and property loss. They have assumed the risks of participating in Bicycling. They certify that their level of fitness is appropriate to participate in Bicycling which they are voluntarily undertaking." What am I on about? One of our readers, Dottie , is a lawyer in Chicago and she loves urban cycling. The Dutch Embassy and Consulates in the US and Canada have a bike ride roadshow called Go Green, Go Dutch, Go Bike! wherein they promote cycling and the wonderful Dutch bicyc...

I've called Copenhagen and Amsterdam the Romulus and Remus of modern urban bicycle culture before. Another analogy applies to Denmark and Holland. These two countries are, in many ways, the Galapagos Islands of modern Bicycle Culture. We're different species of Darwin's Finch , yet we both love to fly on human-powered wheels. These two countries and the main city in each have evolved in each their own way over the past thirty or forty years. Many of the details are interesting anthropological observations that would probably be difficult to trace to the root. Here are some of them. Very generally, pannier bags are used in Holland whereas front baskets are the norm in Denmark, usually wicker. This is all very general, of course, but often when the Dutch do have a basket it's a sturdy plastic crate. And you do see pannier containers in Denmark, too. We all agree that carrying stuff on a bike is paramount, but it's fascinating to see how these two standard forms dev...