The Life-Sized City Blog

With my work I travel a lot and that means I meet loads of interesting people and learn a whole bunch of new things all the time. Sometimes you hear the same things over and over when you're dealing with the same subject matter. Often it's no problem. All part of the game. Sometimes, however, you hear certain things in loop. Things that you wonder about. One of them is that North American cities are just bigger. On a recent visit to Calgary a couple of weeks ago I must have heard it a dozen times. It's often a (not so) secret code for "we're not really committed to taking the bicycle seriously as transport." As though trying to brush off comparisons with urban cycling in Copenhagen and other Euro-filth concepts. No matter how often I highlight the fact that Copenhagen has the third largest urban sprawl in Europe and most of Copenhagen outside the medieval city centre is a 20th century invention. Nope. "Ain't gonna work here, bubba. Now git off ma l...

Saw this yesterday on my way to a meeting at 1508 . Four cops were pulling over cars. Two cops in a squad car and two bicycle cops. Couldn't figure out why, but hey. Nice symbolism. Like this shot from last year. Here's the story about it . And this one outside my son's school. Here's the story about it . And here are some bicycle cops in Paris doing the same thing. The police in Melbourne, however, attend to much more important matters .

Paul Martin in Brisbane sent me an online toy this morning and I've been playing around with it. It's a live map of bike share system use in a variety of cities. I decided to compare the levels of bike share use in 12 cities. Nine of them in Europe, as well as Melbourne, Montreal and Washington, DC. I checked the levels of usage at 08:00 AM in all the European cities (I'm including London and Dublin under that label). The morning rush hour is beginning, people are heading to work. I checked the current weather conditions, too. It's late-autumn in Europe and morning temperatures are getting chillier. So, here we go. At 08:00 in the morning local time on a Friday: PARIS - VÉLIB [8 AM / 10°C / cloudy] 753 bikes in use 4.3% in use / Normal 753 is highest so far today MILAN - BIKEMI [8 AM / 8°C / shallow fog] 110 bikes in use 9% in use / High 1142 is highest so far today LONDON - BORIS BIKES [8 AM / 10°C / light drizzle] 404 bikes in use 9% in use / High 404 is highest so fa...

On my trip to Melbourne I arrived on the Monday and was scheduled to give my talk on the Saturday. Felix and I were picked up at the airport, together with another chap who was also speaking at the State of Design Festival . A car designer. Former head of design for BMW. His name is Chris Bangle . Charming and personable with great humour. He gave his talk on the Tuesday at the BMW Edge venue at Federation Square. I was looking forward to hearing about car design - all design is interesting to me - and it was going to be interesting to hear how the automobile industry and its designers are tackling the needs and moods of this new century. According to the State of Design programme's text about Bangle we would hear all about how: "We are becoming more aware of ‘personal mobility’, the choice we make for moving around. However, Bangle perceives the need to consider ‘personal emotional mobility’ if we are to seriously tackle behaviour change and develop more sustainable mobility ...

I had a brilliant week in Melbourne as a guest of the State of Design Festival . Loads of interviews and events that all culminated with my keynote speech on the Saturday. There was, however, an event on the Saturday morning - July 26, 2010 - that was extremely interesting to be a part of. A group of citizens, rallied together by filmmaker and bicycle advocate Mike Rubbo , decided to go for a bicycle ride together on Melbourne's new bike share system bikes. A splendid idea. Melbourne's bike share system is shiny new, although unlike most cities in the world with a bike share programme, only 70-odd people are using them each day. In Dublin, by contrast, there are over 30,000 subscribers. Not to mention the cracking successes in Paris, Barcelona, Seville and most of the over 100 cities with such systems. So, a group of people, many of them Copenhagenize.com readers, fancy a bike ride. Sounds lovely enough. They met up at the bike racks at Melbourne University. Hired the bikes wi...