The Life-Sized City Blog

This article is written by Copenhagenize Design Company's former urban planner, Leon Legeland. Originally from the least bicycle friendly city in Germany, Wiesbaden, he has lived, studied and worked in Vienna, Malmö, Copenhagen and currently Berlin. He has a master in Sustainable Urban Management and is recently finished his second masters in Sustainable Cities here in Copenhagen. He now works in Berlin. Last year we covered the state of cycling in Berlin . It’s time for an update. Berlin has a quite ambitious bicycle strategy and the city administration, on some level, understands that urban cycling improves the quality of life and that it needs to be promoted and supported . As cosmopolitan cities the world over, cycling rates in the last decade have been on the rise. The substandard infrastructure built to date has been partly responsible, but in order to get the 99% on bikes, Berlin will have to turn to best practice infrastructure. Progress is painfully slow and there i...

A reader pointed us to a forum discussion at a website called CycleChat.net regarding infrastructure for bicycles. A poster on the forum named Tommi published a post about the positive aspects of implementing bicycle infrastructure. He did so, we gather, as a counter to the tiresome rants of members of cycling's secret sect who continue to oppose infrastructure for bicycles because it interferes with their testosterone thrill of 'running with the bulls'. We thought it highly appropriate to republish Tommi's search results here on Copenhagenize.com. They deserve a wider audience. This is on the same day that David Suzuki published this piece calling for infrastructure . Here's what the post at CycleChat.net looked like: Well, I did some digging and it seems Australia, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Wales, as well as UK and US and OECD believe cycling infrastructure (cycle lanes and cycle tracks) incr...

By coincedence I've found myself explaining Cycling's Secret Sect to a couple of colleagues on two separate occasions over the past couple of months. Bicycle planners the both of them. Neither had heard of the group before and in both situations the discussion was whether or not countries like America and the UK would ever get on the bicycle bandwagon in any great numbers, as well as why they haven't done already. Especially considering the fact that so many cities and towns in Europe have rapidly and impressively increased the numbers of everyday cyclists of the course of two short years. The secret sect I'm referring to is known in some circles as Vehicular Cyclists and is largely unknown in most international circles. I've had a draft of this article for a while but reading this post over at Crap Cycling in Waltham Forest yesterday made me dig it out. I explained this Vehicular Cycling theory to my colleagues in brief. Saying that this group fight tooth and nail...