The Life-Sized City Blog

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

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 ...

ADDENDUM: 18 Dec 2010. I made this little film and blogged about it . Adding it, rightly so, this post. I spotted one of our lovely street sweepers/snow removers at work the other day. It really is the loveliest sound on the streets during winter. We've had about 45 cm of snow at time of writing but these working class heroes keep the bike lanes clear. The cities of Copenhagen and Frederiksberg salt before snow falls and, after the snow is on the ground, the bike lanes are cleared before the streets. During snowstorms I've seen these bike lane sweepers roll back and forth past my flat six times before any snowploughs cleared the street. I live on a busy crosstown artery. In the above photo it's a bus stop island getting an extra sweep. That's the bike lane to the right of the sweeper. (As an aside, we have many of these bus stop islands in Copenhagen. If there is one present, disembarking passengers have to wait before crossing to the sidewalk. Bicycles have the ...

The City of Copenhagen issued a press release last Friday about how the City's stash of salt for the roads and bicycle lanes is very low due to the snowstorms of the past few weeks. Salting: Bicycle Lanes and the main roads have the highest priority Because of the hard winter conditions of the past several weeks there is a shortage of road salt all over Denmark, including Copenhagen. We must therefore prioritize which roads and paths we salt. At the moment we are prioritising the bicycle lanes/cycle tracks as well as the main approach roads to the city, so that the police and ambulances can get in. Nice to see they have their priorities right. And even with another snowstorm on it's way to Denmark - the third in a week - the bicycle lanes must be kept clear.