The Life-Sized City Blog

A car blocking the bike lane/cycle track. The source of much irritation and many social media photos. This photo, however, is from Denmark and that is a car that we WANT driving down the cycle track. Cities like Copenhagen and Aarhus don't just build the necessary infrastructure to encourage cycling, keep people safe and help make people FEEL safe, they regularly measure the quality of the infrastructure. Citizens always say in polls that the quality of the cycle tracks and bike lanes is of utmost importance to them when they are considering to commute by bicycle. So, specially adapated cars like these are regularly sent down the cycle tracks to measure for bumps and smoothness, among other factors, using laser technology and recording the data. There is a veritable armada of vehicles designed to operate on cycle tracks. Street sweepers, municipal garbage collection and, not least, snow clearance vehicles like those in our classic article: The Ultimate Snow Clearance Blo...

Nice and simple. A welcome sight in the morning in Copenhagen. After a snowfall - most often during - the sidewalks and cycle tracks are cleared of snow, allowing for trouble-free mobility. Read more about winter maintenance: - The Snow Slinger - eating snow drifts for breakfast - Copenhagen runs out of salt - priortizes only cycle tracks . - Protecting Trees with Salt Guards - and keeping cycle tracks clear - The Ultimate Bike Lane Snow Clearance Blogpost

Been busy lately. Running behind with articles but doing lots of great projects with Copenhagenize Consulting. I figured I'd post some of the photos I've taken recently. Citizen Cyclists carrying stuff around is the theme. Shoes and a suitcase. Suitcase and a group of friends on a stag night by bicycle. Two cargo bikes filled with beer. New frame heading home. Kids' bicycles in transit. That's me and Lulu-Sophia on the right, taking her new (used) bike home. Transporting a guitar by trailier in Copenhagen and a trailer by trailer in Strasbourg. The City of Zagreb has a respectable fleet of cargo bikes for cleaning the streets. As well as for bakery deliveries. Cool wooden crate in Copenhagen. Cool Danish Ambassador to Croatia, and his wife, on a Christiania Bike in Zagreb. Muffins on the move.

This winter has, so far, been rather uneventful. No arctic deep freeze with snowstorm after snowstorm rolling in like the past two winters and many before that . It's been grey and dull and quite boring, with only The Lakes being frozen over to provide a sense of winter and the opportunity to skate. Older people - including my dad - will wax lyrical about the three legendary winters back in 1939/40, 40/41 and 41/42. It was in 1941 that the municipality of Frederiksberg - where Copenhagenize Consulting is also based - needed some new ideas about clearing the obscene amounts of snow. Horse-drawn ploughs were in use all over the nation, as well as teams of men with shovels, due to the petrol shortage during those winters. Frode Nielsen, an engineer at the city's transport department, invented the bicycle snowplough picture above. It was made from two short john delivery bikes attached together with rods. The plough was made of beech, with a 3 mm steel edge, as well as sma...

We've had a period of "better" weather in Copenhagen, where the temperatures have hovered around freezing, including a couple of days of around 3 degrees. The snow, as snow does when the air is above zero - started to melt. It's still there but there is less of it. In some regions of the country the temperature rose to a tropical 7 degrees and the sudden thaw caused floods on farms and in houses. Fortunately, not so here in the capital. I was heading into the city centre yesterday and came across a bike lane snow sweepr muscling along the bike lane in the City of Frederiksber. The snow had long been cleared but not to the entire width of the bike lane. Now that the pressure is off city maintenence staff because of no recent snowfalls, there is time for the city to tidy up a bit and try to return to status quo. The snow sweeper was tackling the remaining snow and widening the bike lane to it's normal width. And it was nice to see the big boy out getting bu...

Sometimes it's easier to let the photos do the talking. As mentioned before, 80% of Copenhageners cycle through the winter. That number is surely lower when we have hard winters with snowstorm after snowstorm, but the numbers are still impressive. Impressive to me. Probably astounding to others. If you make the bicycle the fastest way to get from A to B in a city - what we call A2Bism for bicycles here at Copenhagenize - the strangest people will be spotted on bicycles. If you prioritize keeping your bicycle infrastructure clear of snow , people will ride. In most of these shots the temperature was well below zero. Much lower with the typical Copenhagen wind. And no bicycle studs were harmed in the making of this blogpost. I never see them here and wouldn't possibly know where to buy them. When you have as much urban cycling experience as the people of Copenhagen or a city like Amsterdam, you are pretty much trained to cycle in any weather. I'll just let my fellow ...

I love these groovy little street sweepers. They are designed to fit perfectly on the bike lanes of the city. In the winter they also have snowplough versions in the same size that keep the bike lanes clear. Another example of how an established bicycle culture breeds the necessity of developing relevant gadgets to maintain them.