The Life-Sized City Blog

Photo by Dennis Steinsiek from Dutch-it.eu The news today out of Copenhagen is about the imminent failure of the city's new bike share system. Copenhageners are ignorning the bikes, few trips are being taken on them and they have become a tourist gimmick, not the commuter dream they hoped for. It's a rare event that a bike share system fails. Only a very few systems around the world have folded. Melbourne was the poster child for failure thanks to their helmet laws, helmet promotion, lack of infrastructure and anti-cyclist laws. Now it looks like Copenhagen will step into the failure spotlight. I am in two minds. I have never been a fan of the bikes or the system and have done little to conceal that fact. I said it was doomed to failure back in 2013 . I have wondered why Danish State Railways didn't just copy the decade-old OV-Fiets system from Dutch Railways instead of being seduced by useless, overcomplicated technology. You can read all about why I think the sys...

Photo: City of Copenhagen/Rambøll Here's a little story about some innovation soon to show up in Copenhagen. In a city with many busstops and cycle tracks, there is the question of coexistence. For a number of years, the City of Copenhagen has worked hard to establish islands at busstops for the bus passengers to use when disembarking. It really is the baseline for infrastructure and the City, by and large, prefers it over anything else. Since the City starting retrofitting busstops to provide islands, safety has increased dramatically across the city. In 2015, The City of Copenhagen will establish LED bus islands at certain locations where there isn't space to build a proper island. When there is no bus, there will be a green strip along the curb. When a bus rolls up, the LED light show will expand across the cycle track to indicate to all traffic users that passengers have the priority. When the bus leaves, the LED lights revert to the green strip. The Mayor for Traff...

The City of Copenhagen established the first Green Wave for cyclists back in 2007 on Nørrebrogade and, since then, the concept has spread to other major arteries in the city. The idea is simple. Coordinate the traffic lights for cyclists so that if they ride at a speed of 20 km/h, they will hit green lights all the way into the city in the morning rush hour. The wave is reversed in the afternoon so bicycle users can flow smoothly home, too. 20 km/h was decided upon as the speed in order to improve the traffic flow of bicycles. The average speed of bicycle users in Copenhagen is about 16 km/h. A wave of 20 km/h encourges some to go a bit faster but it also encourages the faster cyclists to slow down in order to benefit from the green lights. The rush hour on the cycle tracks is intense in Copenhagen and speed demons do more harm than good regarding safety and, almost more importantly, perception of safety. As it is now, the Green Wave is in place on Nørrebrogade, Amagerbrogade, p...

UPDATE 10 OCT 2014 The Copenhagen bike share bikes we talk about in this article have been on the streets for a few months now. The goal is that each bike is used 3 times a day - by local commuters. So far they are used 0.8 times a day - by tourists. Oops. Fail. These $10,000 shiny toys are already a tourist gimmick - like the originals in Copenhagen - and that does not encourage locals to use them. Locals never want to looks like tourists. Keep reading for more rationality. ---------- While La Rochelle, France can boast about having started the first proper bike share system in the mid-1970s , Copenhagen introduced the Bycyklen - City Bike - in 1995. Picture above and below, the bikes were cute gimmicks that lasted until late 2012. They worked on a shopping trolley system - put a 10 or 20 kroner coin in and get it back when you return it. The bikes were horrible to ride and it didn't take long for them to become tourist magnets. Most Copenhageners wouldn't touch th...

The city of Malmö, Sweden is no stranger to bicycle infrastructure. Just across the bridge from Copenhagen, Sweden's third-largest city has over 40 miles of bicycle lanes. Now those are Swedish miles, mind you, and a Swedish 'mil' equals 10 km so even I can figure out without a calculator that we're looking at 400 km of bicycle infrastructure. (The City of Copenhagen has about 350 km although Greater Copenhagen has over 1000 km of cycle tracks and bike lanes). The point being that Malmö , with a population of about 300,000 plus the metro area, is quite a brilliant cycle-friendly city. Anyway... this is the GPS age. The City of Malmö decided that many bits of bicycle infrastructure should be given names so that they can be plotted into GPS gadgets. It doesn't apply to cycle tracks that run along streets - those streets have names already - but the City has named a long list of bits and pieces of infrastructure that are separated from traffic. Paths that run do...

Copenhageners line up on City Hall Square to get an RFID chip installed on their bicycles. The City of Copenhagen has just launched an innovative program aimed at tracking down stolen bicycles. The program is called "Få en lille chip på" or "Get a little chip on" and involves handing out 5000 free RFID chips that Copenhageners can put on their bicycles in order to participate in the pilot program that will run until May 2010. Here's a little film made about the first chip-handing-out event. Roughly 18,000 bicycles are stolen in Copenhagen each year [there are 1.9 million bicycles in Greater Copenhagen]. Many of them end up taking up space on the sidewalks and bike racks. The City wants to be able to track them down for you but also be able to keep the sidewalks and bike racks clear of bicycles that aren't being used. On June 4th, Copenhageners could show up on the City Hall Square [pictured] to get a chip installed and so many showed up that many ended going...