Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label winter

Copenhagen Christmas Tree Transport by Bike

Update: 18 Dec 2013 Lulu and I were on the spot when one of her teachers, Heidi, was buying her tree and taking it home. She borrowed one of the many bike trailers at the school to do so. Standing nice and tall in the Copenhagen evening. UPDATE. Typical. Write a blog post and then two bikes with christmas trees roll past your window. So here's an update. Above: Sorte Jernhest cargo bike , complete with tree and kid wearing an elf hat heading home in the evening. Fantastic. This lady rolled past my window pulling her tree on a trailer. Getting close to Jul here in Copenhagen. Christmas tree sellers are occupying squares all around the city. Many people use their bicycles to get the tree home. Here's a collection of the shots we have of people moving their trees home by bike. This lady had just bought a jule tree and the seller was helping her strap it to her bicycle. It took some work and discussion but they finally succeeded. She didn't have far to go, s...

Bicycle Snowploughs

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...

Overcomplicating Winter Cycling - Why It's Bad

One of the main focuses of this blog has always been on how Copenhagen and other cities have succeeded in increasing cycling levels by approaching the subject using mainstream marketing techniques. Tried and tested marketing that has existed since homo sapiens first started selling or trading stuff to each other. Modern bicycle advocacy, by and large, is flawed. It is firmly inspired by environmentalism which, in turn, is the greatest marketing flop in the history of humankind. Four decades of sub-cultural finger-wagging, guilt trips and preaching have given few results among the general population. When sub-cultural groups start trying to indoctrinate and convert the public, it rarely ever succeeds. For the better part of a century, people all over the planet rode bicycles because they were quick, easy, convenient and enjoyable. In hilly cities. In hot cities. In snowy cities. After the bicycle largely disappeared from the urban landscape because urban planning s...

Ban Cycling in Winter! Thunder Bay, Ontario

Right off the bat we're going to link to a recent post featuring photos of cyclists in Copenhagen in the winter . Thanks to Eleanor for the following link. So... Hot of the virtual press of the Thunder Bay News Watch : "Cyclist hit by car. Transported to hospital". (We hope he is okay). Now the comments that often accompany bicycle-related stories in the Anglo-Saxon world are often entertaining and creative - as well as healthy, shocking reminders of the extent of our deeply-rooted car culture. The ones that follow this story are hilarious. Banning cycling in winter! Here are some of the nuggets of hilarity: The Wolf says: With all the laws new and old to protect people from themselves,why have they not made it illegal to operate a bike in the winter? The roads and conditions are hard enough to navigate in the winter never mind having to keep an eye out for someone on an unstable bike. nads74 says: I disagree, about making it a law, honestly why do we ne...

Useful Snowdrifts

The thaw continues but the icy remants of the many snowstorms are useful on occasion.

Snow Clearance - Tidying Up

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...

Cycling in Winter in Copenhagen

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 ...