The Life-Sized City Blog

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...

This article first appeared in the Danish newspaper Politiken on 27 November 2012. It was written by a colleague of ours and her co-workers at Center for Design, Innovation and Sustainable Transitions The Transition of Copenhagen’s Traffic Logic by Anne Katrine Braagaard Harders, Jens Stissing Jensen og Erik Hagelskjær Lauridsen are researchers at the Center for Design, Innovation and Sustainable Transitions, AAU København. The past weeks' heated debate on cyclists’ behavior in Copenhagen reflects intensified tensions between the urban space’s different mobility logics and demonstrates a need for a transition of Copenhagen’s traffic. Cycling is, as an urban mobility form, of a different nature to that of the motorized traffic. A typical picture of the Copenhagen cycling traffic could be young men on their racing bikes, merging in and out between elderly women cycling slowly, dads talking with their kids on the large cargo bikes, and girlfriends chatting and cycling side ...

An American-style shopping centre on the outskirts of Copenhagen - Fields - has now created specific bicycle parking for cargo bikes. With 40,000 cargo bikes in Copenhagen, it really is a no brainer. Architect Lasse Schelde, head of the Bicycle Innovation Lab and environmental NGO Miljøpunkt Amager was responsible for this little pocket of visionaryness. I know that's not a word. Well, maybe it is now. Great to see cargo bikes prioritised, not least because so many people use them. And a sensible solution, too, with railings to lock your bike to. Copenhagenize Consulting is working on similar projects with our Cyclelogistics EU project .

Motorway 16, north of Copenhagen. Cycle tracks on either side. The discussion continues unabated, around the world, about whether the bicycle can perform as a transport mode at distances above 5 km and thus present itself as alternative for motorized vehicles. First, let's consider this quote: ”In the late 19th century, large numbers of women were already using bicycles to get to work, women office workers and shop assistants wending their way each weekday morning from the suburbs to the town. They found the bicycle a convenient form of transport for distances up to, say, ten miles”. Plucked from John Woodeforde's book ”The Story of the Bicycle”, 1970 So the bicycle as an effective performer at longer distances is nothing new. Nevertheless, we're relearning the bicycle story. A published peer-reviewed conference paper (full version here - on google docs ), based on my Masters’ degree thesis in Environmental Engineering (specializing in Urban Planning), incl...

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...