The Life-Sized City Blog

I gave this TEDx talk in Zurich back in October . It was released online today. Bicycle Culture by Design - the abridged version. If anyone is interested, here's my script. Some deviations, but mostly the same as the talk. Hopefully, watching the TEDx talk is better than reading the words, but hey. I'm an optimist. But I want to put the next 15 minutes into perspective and I need your help. I'd like everyone to clap at the same tempo as me. Not loud, just softly. Like this. (clapping) Thank you. For every time we clapped our hands someone, somewhere in the world was injured in a car accident. 96 beats per minute. 50 million people a year are injured in car accidents. 1.2 million are killed by cars. In both the EU and the US 35.000 people are killed every year by cars. Do you know what that is? That's a 9/11 – collapsing World Trade Center towers every single month. And every month for the last 60 years - at least. I can't possibly be alone in thinking t...

Fellini's 8 1/2 was a comedy. Kind of like Copenhagen City Hall at the moment. Yep, it's the early 1950s at Copenhagen City Hall. Tonight, politicians voted yes to a harbour tunnel that will cost our city a whopping 27 BILLION kroner. ($4.5 billion) Despite the fact that the only damned thing we know from a century of traffic engineering is that when you create more space for cars, more cars appear. See a vision of City Hall's tunnel here. Lars Barfred, who writes here on the site, has done some rational calculations. For about the same price as a ridiculous harbour tunnel, we could have things we ACTUALLY NEED. Lars has calculated that we could have - instead: 2.5 billion: 250 km of high-class bicycle infrastructure along all S-Train lines, the east coast route and the Helsingør motorway all the way to Trørød 1 billion: 330 km of bicycle superhighways 13 billion: Converting the A-bus network to 65 km of tramways 3 billion: Fully automated S-Train syste...

Robert Doisneau - running pedestrians in Paris We recently covered the disturbing and archaeic 85th percentile method and how it is applied for (and by) vehicles. If you thought THAT was fun, you might also enjoy The 15th Percentile. It is frequently used to determine the time between the WALK and DON'T WALK crossing signals -  in other words, how much time the engineers computer models allow for human beings to cross streets. It's not as rooted as a standard as The 85th Percentile, but it is still widespread. In a nutshell, we should be paying more attention to pedestrian crossings, when you consider statistics that say that " 40% of accidents involving pedestrians occur at these intersections ". In Europe, one in four pedestrians die on a crossing . What seems to be the problem? In the U.S., the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) establishes a “normal” pedestrian speed at 1.2 metres per second (m/s), so traffic signal times are set according...

Here are some historical photos of a cargo bike life in Copenhagen. Above, King Christian X on one of his daily rides through the streets during the Second World War occupation. He always rode without official guards through the streets and was much loved for it. Here, however, he was guarded by the bicycle messengers from the company Achilleus. Here is a link to an earlier post about the Svajere - or cargo bike messengers of Copenhagen. The bicycle messengers at the headquarters of the Post & Telegraf service in 1917. Dressed splendidly. The bike messengers - or Svajere - in official service were usually uniformed until the end of the 1940s, when casual wear became the norm. The bicycle messengers for Illum department store in the 1940s, during the occupation. A double cargo bike nicknamed Skildpadden - or The Turtle - in the service of Illum department store. 1940s. The bike messenger team at Byposten messenger company. Bicycle messengers from the telegraf ser...

Erik Griswold , one of our team members here at Copenhagenize, found some retro photos of Copenhagen. More specifically, Frederiksberg. Even more specifically, my front door. I promptly went out and took photos from the same angle. The couple of steps at the bottom right of the 1960s photo, below, are the main door to my building. Interesting to learn that back then I would have had the penthouse flat, because since then someone added some floors. What I find most interesting is the comparison of the two photos. While it is certainly true that road space and parking for cars were removed in Copenhagen to reestablish the bicycle infrastructure back in the early 1980s, it's plain to see that space - on certain streets - was reclaimed from other sources, as well. Look at the paving stones outside my door in the modern photo, at right. There's some asphalt and then two rows of paving stones. In the vintage photo, the sidewalk is four paving stones wide, narrowing a bit in ...

Copenhagen's Lord Mayor, Frank "Le Corbusier" Jensen continues his fight for a car-centric Copenhagen that would make the 1950s proud. What makes matters worse is that the Robert Moses Fan Club that is the Danish Congestion Commission (Trængselskommission) are also using a time machine to travel back to the congested past at the moment. A colleague told us very recently that they are seriously discussing widening the motorways leading into Copenhagen because of the traffic jams. Can you believe that? With all the available knowledge, with all the moves away from motorways around the world, these clowns are tying us to their back bumpers and dragging us into that previous century that exists in their heads. The subject of 30 km/h zones was brought up at the Congestion Commissions discussions. According to Jens Loft Rasmussen, head of the Danish Cycling Federation (DCF) , the room went kind of quiet. Nobody knew quite what to say. In a flash, the proposal was wip...

A couple of twists of fate and this location in Copenhagen would have been a 12 lane motorway. When looking back over the last century of cities infatuated with Car Culture, it's not hard to see how stupid we were - or almost were. In the 1940s the so-called Finger Plan was developed for Copenhagen . By and large an interesting concept and the foundation for the expansion of Copenhagen. The Finger Plan has, however, some dark secrets. Among them are two connected projects. City Plan Vest (City Plan West) and Søringen (The Lake Ring). The City Plan Vest, in 1958, proposed that Copenhagen be equipped with a Lake Ring. The #19 motorway from the north would continue over Hans Knudsens Plads - in a tunnel to Vibenshus Runddel - and then emerging again to continue along Nørre Allé in a 12 lane motorway down Tagensvej and Fredensgade. It would turn right along The Lakes to Vesterbro, where a comprehensive interchange would be built to lead traffic to the south towards Germany and ...

It's not like we needed any more proof that we live in car-centric cities. When you start scratching just a little below the surface, however, you start to discover that we are not so much citizens in cities but rather a flock of reluctant characters in The Matrix. You discover that we live in cities that are controlled by bizarre and often outdated mathematical theories, models and engineering “solutions” that continue to be used despite the fact that they are of little use to modern cities. One of them is called The 85th Percentile. It's a method that cities all over the planet use to determine speed limits. It's the standard. Nobody questions it. Certainly not the engineers and planners who, for decades, have been served it up and who have swallowed it whole during their studies. Which reminds us of the old traffic engineer joke: Why did the engineer cross the road? Because that's what they did last year. The concept is rather simple: the speed limit of ...