The Life-Sized City Blog

The tale of Nørrebrogade keeps getting better. This is the street that the former traffic Mayor, Klaus Bondam, tackled in order to cut the number of cars and increase the liveability for the residents. We're written about the street many times. There is a long list of intiatives that have been tried and tested on the street, which is also the busiest bicycle street in the world. The City of Copenhagen recently published a study about the first stage of the redesign of the street: Københavns Kommunes Evaluering af Nørrebrogadeprojektets Etape 1. Please don't try to pronounce that without qualified linguistic supervision. The results include the following: Car traffic has fallen by 60% from 15,000 to 6,000 a day. This is a neighbourhood where 19% of the residents own a car, so the traffic was/is largely " parasites ". The street had long suffered from lack of development and was a sad, lifeless transport corridor through what is a fantastic, densely-populated ne...

I've been quietly looking into noise recently. There was an article back in November in a Danish newspaper about the negative effect traffic noise has on the population. A good, informative article stating that 800,000 Danes are exposed to harmful levels of traffic pollution in the form of noise alone. That's about 15% of the population. The article goes on about how very little is being done in Danish cities about reducing traffic noise. 400 million kroner were earmarked by the current government for noise reduction in 2009 but the government only manages the national roads. They have spent money on reducing noise on motorways but it's the municipalities that manage the city streets - along which most people live, 90% of them in fact - and here there is little being done. Shockingly so. What didn't really surprise me was that the article didn't mention anything about speed reduction. It was all about windows. Classic ' ignoring the bull ' talk onc...