The Life-Sized City Blog

The old-fashioned road interests are at it again and the Lord Mayor of Copenhagen Frank Jensen, among others, are pandering to them. The insanity continues in The New Copenhagen. Now they want to build a tunnel for cars and trucks to connect the motorways that come from the north of Copenhagen and end in an area called Ryparken/Hans Knuds Square , to the motorway that connects the West of Zealand (the island on which Copenhagen is located) and the bridge to Sweden.  This motorway also accesses the Copenhagen airport. What is interesting is the development that this will no longer be called the "harbour tunnel", but will instead be called the "Eastern Bypass" - but that's just so that it can recieve funding from the national government. This will, however, mean that the tunnel may have to have more interchanges on its route than a pure bypass road would have, especially as it is being proposed as a "Public-Private Partnership", the investors in wh...

On my recent trip to Zurich to speak at TEDxZurich I was arranging an interview with a journalist for the Swiss paper Tages Anzeiger . I had heard about the motorway tunnel built 20 years ago under the Central Station and asked him if we could visit it. He arranged it and, after a bicycle ride around the city to assess - and mock - the state of the city's bicycle culture, we headed underground, accompanied by two gents from Swiss railways. The tunnel isn't long. It was built two decades ago during the construction of the Museumstrasse line station. It wasn't even intended for immediate use. The plan was that it would eventually be used to connect the A3 and A1 - Allmend Brunau and Neugut motorway junction. I wanted to see the tunnel for two reasons. Firstly, it's just cool to see motorways and tunnels like this that have never been used. Never putrified with exhaust, its walls never shaken incessently by automobile traffic. I also wanted to visit it because I he...

Goodbye, Bycyklen . After 17 years, Copenhagen's renowned bike share system is being pulled off the streets of the city for the winter - and it ain't coming back. As we all know, La Rochelle, France was the first city to establish a permanent bike share system back in the mid 1970s . Sure, there were some hippie attempts in the 1960s) but Copenhagen's Bycyklen was the first system in a large city that involved a deposit system. With a 10 or 20 kroner coin you could unlock a bike and ride off. Nostalgia strikes quickly. The goofiest bicycles in history have only been gone for a few hours but I already miss them. I miss being late for a meeting or just wanting to get home and having to trail behind a wobbly Italian family of four happily enjoying the cycle tracks. The entire width of them. Until we reached an intersection or a wider stretch and I - together with 150 other Copenhageners - could overtake them. I miss seeing them in the far reaches of the city - far fr...

Here is an updated article about this topic over at Medium.com: Longing for a Return to the Danish 180% Tax on New Cars --- Much is said and reblogged/tweeted about the famous 180% on cars in Denmark. Back when rationality was fashionable, this series of taxes was put into place to try and discourage people from driving but also to try and win some money back for society for the destructive nature of automobiles. We know, for example, that for every kilometre ridden by bike, the Danish coffers recieve 23 cents. For every kilometre driven by car, the Danish state pays out 16 cents. Those numbers are from the "Socio-economic analyses of bicycle initiatives - methods and cases", produced by COWI in 2009. For a more local feel, if you ride in Copenhagen from Øster Allé to Nørreport during rush hour here's the societal benefit and loss: Bicycle: 63 cents net profit for society. (3.65 DKK) Car: $1.15 net loss to society. (6.59 DKK) Another way of calculating it ...

Mogens Knudsen, Operativ leder i færdelspolitiet ved Københavns Politi There's a man in Copenhagen named Mogens. Mogens Knudsen. What's interesting about this man is that virtually every single day he goes to work he hurts and, in many situations, kills people. Indirectly, of course. What's more, Mogens actually gets paid to do so. He is a civil servant with a badge. A policeman. The head of the Traffic Dept in Copenhagen Police. Mogens is not particularly fond of those fellow citizens of his who ride bicycles in Copenhagen. He has for many years and has always been vocal about it. If Mogens seems scary, it gets worse. Mogens has colleagues who feel the same way and who also get paid to dish out injury and, in worst cases, death. Mogens and his colleagues make the Danish Road Safety Council's crusade against Danish bicycle culture look like piecemeal. Welcome to the Danish Police. Welcome to The New Copenhagen . By all accounts, Mogens and police seem to ...

DEPRESSING UPDATE - 13 MAY 2013 - SCROLL TO BOTTOM Frederiksberg. The city is an municipal island surrounded by Copenhagen and with its 90,000 residents, it is Denmark's most densely-populated city. Generally, the city is good at providing for cycling and around 35% of the residents cycle to work or school. This is the city in which I live and where Copenhagenize Design Co. has it's offices. There are, however, problems that need solving and there is no solutions on the way. One of them is highlighted here in this article. Even though only 35% of the population of the city own cars (the number is 29% for Copenhagen), the main arteries are clogged with cars and trucks all through the day. Over 26,000 drive past my windows each day. Almost all of them are "parasites", as Italian traffic planners call them . When I looked out the window at the intersection between Nordre Fasanvej and Godthåbsvej (above) I was pleased to see that work was underway on resurfacing...

So, slapped up a Copenhagenize Love Handle in Amsterdam last week, when I was speaking at the brilliant Blogging the City conference. As I promised the audience. Maybe it's still there. Maybe it's not. Let us know if you see it. More on the Love Handles can be read here . The Blogging the City conference , organised by Jeroen Beekmans & Joop de Boer of The Pop-Up City , featured a great line-up of speakers. - Brilliant talk by Charlie Hilton of Urban Times . - Zef Heme l head of the urban planning department of the City of Amsterdam, and blogger at Vrijstaat Amsterdam . - Stefan Höffken from Urbanophil talked about his work and inspiration. - Wouter Boon talked about his successful Amsterdam Ad Blog . - Antonia Märzhäuser on the always brilliant and fascinating Freunde von Freunden site . - Régine Debatty highlighted the story of her inspiration for her blog we-make-money-not-art - Luc Harings from IloveNoord.nl about placemaking and civic pride. -...

Here's the cover graphic of Copenhagenize Consulting's upcoming anthropological project tracking the Desire Lines of all the bicycle users in one Copenhagen intersection over 12 hours one day in April. We blogged about it earlier . Here's a .pdf of a larger version, if you fancy that . Opens in a new window. We filmed the intersection for 12 hours and anthropologist Agnete Suhr crunched the behavioural patterns over two months. Counting bicycle users and cars, tracking desire lines and observing the general behaviour of the bicycle users. While it was a ballet of human-powered movement, it was also a spectacular display of mediocrity. There were only a handful of "rogue cyclists chipping away at society's foundations with their reckless behaviour" out of 16,536 Citizen Cyclists. As we always say, well-designed infrastructure breeds good behaviour. While data maps are great for tracking... data... observing 16,536 bicycle users gives you a whole dif...

I'm heading to Los Angeles this week and I just remembered an article I wrote for the L.A. Times' Bottleneck section. It seems to have disappeared from their online version, but why not just chuck it up here. It's four years old, but hey. If you're following the latest series of articles here on the blog, you can see that The New Copenhagen only vaguely resembles the Copenhagen we thought we knew. Bikes, Copenhagen and Disneyland: what we have in common Los Angeles Times August 08, 2008 A warm hello from me in Copenhagen -– the World's Cycling Capital. The sun is shining here in Copenhagen and the weather begs for a trip to the beach. It's a great city for cycling and on days like this you'll see over 50% of our population riding their bikes to work, school, the supermarket, the cafes and the beach. While thinking about this article for the L.A. Times I found a reference to cycling in Los Angeles the other day: " There is no part of the world wh...

Earlier this year I was working in Rotterdam, a city I had never visited before. You get the impression from Dutch people in the rest of the Netherlands that Rotterdam isn't really Dutch. Generally, the attitude is that Rotterdam isn't very cool. The only way to figure it out is to go there. I was invited to do a spot of Copenhagenizin' at the City of Rotterdam. A brainstorm session about how to promote cycling and perhaps develop a brand for the City's cycling intiatives. A great day with great, positive people. A real pleasure. I was excited to get a Rijkspas - "Kingdom Pass" upon arriving the offices: But soon realised that it was a golden pass to the entire Kingdom of the Netherlands that would get me free beer and cheese and... uh... bouquets of tulips. Just coffee and lunch, but hey. Copenhagenize Consulting was hired by De Verkeersonderneming, a consortium of partners aimed at improving traffic conditions in the city . The partners include the C...