The Life-Sized City Blog

Originally published on April 4, 2014 Like anyone interested in city life, we like to keep our eyes on the street life of our city. Currently however, the City of Copenhagen is planning to take some away from the street, by forcing people underground, with the 'M3 Cityringen' expansion of the Metro. Instead of investing in the reestablishment of our tram network - so rudely removed by the ironically-named mayor Urban Hansen in the 1970s - Copenhagen seems keen to get people off the street. This doesn’t come cheap: €3 billion gets you an additional 17 stations added to the existing Metro network. Some of the cost can be explained by the fact that  It is not easy to build a Metro in Copenhagen, a city that is on the whole scarcely above sea level, and with a dense urban fabric too.  It's due for completion in 2018, but that's later than the initial estimate and with the date still some way off who knows whether it will actually be ready by then - just ask the ...

This article has been updated and appears on Medium.com So what exactly happens when you're a major train operator and you suddenly make it free for passengers to take bikes on your trains? We know that some rail operators in various parts of the world would have you believe that chaos would ensue and that they would lose passengers. Numbers from Greater Copenhagen and Danish State Railways (DSB), however, seem to indicate that the opposite is true. The S-train network that serves Greater Copenhagen is arguably the most integral part of the public transport mix in the region. Buses, Metro and regional trains are vital parts of the network, but the red S-trains stretching out into Europe's third-largest urban sprawl are in many ways the backbone. The S-train network - with 2 Metro lines at bottom right. Bicycles were allowed on the trains for a fee, which was never prohibitive. Until 2010, that is. In that year, DSB announced that bicycles would be made free on all their...

Another chapter in our ongoing series about The  Arrogance of Space . This photo was taken by a friend flying to Cape Town. We are not familiar with the specifics of the location - probably near the airport - but that doesn't stop us from slapping our Arrogance of Space filter onto the photo. It's a badass intersection - the kind that makes old school traffic engineers feel all warm and fuzzy. It's a monster of extreme arrogance. Let's face it... if you have space for vendors to stroll down the car lanes (top centre), your lanes are arrogantly wide. Firstly, here is how the space is allocated. An ocean of car-centric red. Thin pedestrian crossings with fading paint. No bicycle infrastructure is present. Take away the photo and it looks like this. Making the red all the more shocking. There were a few pedestrians and vendors present when the photo was taken. A couple of mini-vans transporting people, but generally - like most places - just individuals in one c...

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...

Things are changing, no doubt about it. All over the world. Like in every paradigm shift there are cities that move fast, cities that try to play catch up and cities that are still tying their shoelaces in the starting blocks. One of the primary challenges that remains is the perception of who infrastructure is for. I meet many politicians and planners around the world who clearly think that they are expected to provide safe infrastructure for the few people riding bicycles in their city right now. They fail to understand that they should be building infrastructure for all the citizens who COULD be riding a bicycle if they felt safe on a complete network of infrastructure. The Zeros to Heroes cities that are way ahead of the curve - for example Barcelona, Seville, Dublin, Bordeaux, Paris, Buenos Aires - have just rolled up their sleeves and built infrastructure. Infrastructure that actually reflects where the citizens want to go in a city. Which is basically the same as where eve...

I was thinking about designing a family tree. I have a huge family and it's often hard to keep track of all of them. I had a look around the internet and realised that there was little inspiration for designing a family tree, from a graphic design perspective. Shockingly little inspiration. So I thought... what if my family was a metropolitan transit system? What would the metro map look like? It took a while to figure out the details and the design. It's basically an infographic. Family trees are limited to a certain flow and order, which is maybe why there is so little new developments in the design of them. Anyway, here's the result. The Andersen Metropolitan Transportation Map. It goes without saying that bicycles are allowed on all these trains.

It's simple if you want it to be. Copenhagenize Design Co.

In light of the recent launch of New York City's Citibike bike share system, Copenhagenize Design Co. has produced this highly-scientific and frightfully academic statistical graph. Based on the 500-odd bike share systems now in place in the world we have gathered all the public perception of the systems and crunched the data - compressing it rudely but effectively into one easy graph - for use by cities who are considering implementing a bike share system. We have also assisted some NIMBYs in New York. One of them was quoted as saying that he couldn't imagine the Mayor of Paris - the city of arts - placing a bike share rack in front of the Louvre:

In the interest of expediting the journey towards bicycle-friendly cities and eliminating misconceptions, Copenhagenize Design Co. has produced The Copenhagenize Bicycle Planning Guide. Based on Danish Best Practice developed over the past century, since the first separated bike lane was implemented in Copenhagen in 1915. The beauty of the bicycle infrastructure network in Copenhagen is the uniform design of the infrastructure. There are, by and large, four types of infrastructure - all represented in this graphic. Based on the speed limit for cars, you select the appropriate style of infrastructure and off you go. One of these designs fits every street in the country and, indeed, every street in every city in the world. If you fancy sending your local planner/engineer a gift that keeps on giving, this graphic is also available as a poster .

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