The Life-Sized City Blog

With my work I travel a lot and that means I meet loads of interesting people and learn a whole bunch of new things all the time. Sometimes you hear the same things over and over when you're dealing with the same subject matter. Often it's no problem. All part of the game. Sometimes, however, you hear certain things in loop. Things that you wonder about. One of them is that North American cities are just bigger. On a recent visit to Calgary a couple of weeks ago I must have heard it a dozen times. It's often a (not so) secret code for "we're not really committed to taking the bicycle seriously as transport." As though trying to brush off comparisons with urban cycling in Copenhagen and other Euro-filth concepts. No matter how often I highlight the fact that Copenhagen has the third largest urban sprawl in Europe and most of Copenhagen outside the medieval city centre is a 20th century invention. Nope. "Ain't gonna work here, bubba. Now git off ma l...

One way streets. Where do bicycles fit into this ever-present downtown street model? A common question, and [from a car culture kinda perspective] understandably so. The City of Copenhagen answers that question, punctuated with an exclamation point - making Gothersgade a prime example of how to plan for cyclists and pedestrians in one-way situations. A main street in the historic city centre, Gothersgade runs past Rosenborg Castle and the Kings Gardens at a hasty 50 km/h. One segment of it, leading away from Nyhavn and toward the Kings Gardens, is a three-lane one-way stretch of traffic lined by boutiques, bodegas, and cafes. Google Maps view looking east on Gothersgade. The one-way segment, up until the redesign, had a skinny mini sidewalk and three lanes for automobiles which fluctuate between parking and driving lanes. Enter the road diet. Now we've got one lane for traffic, widened sidewalks, and cycle tracks going in on both sides. One-way streets across town are sl...

We have a tendency to give cities human character traits when we describe them. It's a friendly city. A dynamic city. A boring city. Perhaps then a city can be arrogant. Arrogant, for example, with it's distribution of space. I've been working a lot in North America the past year and I've become quite obsessed with the obscenely unbalanced distribution of space. I see this arrogance everywhere I go. I see the insanely wide car lanes and the vehicles sailing back and forth in them like inebriated hippopotami. I was just in Calgary for five days and from my balcony at the hotel I watched the traffic below on 12th Ave. A one-way street that was never really busy at all. From above, the arrogance of space was very apparent. Even more so than in a car driving down the lanes. The photo, above, is the car lines divided up with their actual width. Watching for five days - okay, not 24/7 ... I have a life after all - I didn't really see  any vehicles that filled out t...

The neverending story of car dependency: (c) Todd Litman, 2013. " Smart Congestion Relief - Comprehensive Analysis of Traffic Congestion Costs and Congestion Reduction Benefits ". Victoria Transport Policy Institute. FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. This is the general feeling when drivers know that the street they usually drive on, may soon be closed to vehicular traffic. This feeling has, to some degree, been used by those who decide to build new roads. In other words, we still live according to Henry Ford's motto, “With mobility comes freedom and progress”. As someone who works with urban planning this can be viewed as when the ends actually justify the means – cities scratched by black tar marks, roads planned and built with eyes closed. Now, the results of unconsidered planning are here - we feel these impacts on a daily basis. Currently, that paradigm is slowly shifting to a new one. In a rather considerable number of cities, city centres, as well as ma...

The tale of Nørrebrogade keeps getting better. This is the street that the former traffic Mayor, Klaus Bondam, tackled in order to cut the number of cars and increase the liveability for the residents. We're written about the street many times. There is a long list of intiatives that have been tried and tested on the street, which is also the busiest bicycle street in the world. The City of Copenhagen recently published a study about the first stage of the redesign of the street: Københavns Kommunes Evaluering af Nørrebrogadeprojektets Etape 1. Please don't try to pronounce that without qualified linguistic supervision. The results include the following: Car traffic has fallen by 60% from 15,000 to 6,000 a day. This is a neighbourhood where 19% of the residents own a car, so the traffic was/is largely " parasites ". The street had long suffered from lack of development and was a sad, lifeless transport corridor through what is a fantastic, densely-populated ne...

Buttons that pedestrians or cyclists are forced to push in order for a computer program - programmed by a car-centric engineer - to grant them authorisation to cross a street in their city have to be among the most archaeic remnants of a century of city planning that caters only to the automobile. And that was a long sentence. Sorry. I wish for their immediate demise. The only thing goofier is the pedestrian flags in some American cities . Talk about ignoring the bull . Not to mention engineering instead of designing our cities . One of the things I like most about cycling in Copenhagen is that I don't have to push any of these buttons. There have been a few but they tend to get removed and thank goodness for that. Here's one from the archives: (Although now I'll have to check if it's still there...) Still, they are a rarity here and I've only seen them at t-intersections. So why not signage like the graphic up top? If we're going to level the playi...

We've often wondered where the religious types were on intelligent transport. You'd think there would be enough inspiration in their books - Bible/Torah/Koran to support healthy, modern living. Yet it's not often you see churches and religious organistations coming out in support of liveable cities. So then our friend Paul in Vienna sent us a link to an intiative by the Catholic and Protestant churches of Austria. Car Fasting - or Autofasten , in German . A brilliant intiative to encourage people to go on a car fast and seek alternatives. Here's what I lamely translated from their website: Car Fasting is ... - An initiative to encourage a change of independent mobility between Ash Wednesday (13 Feb) to Holy Saturday (30 March). - Suggesting choosing available alternatives like rail, bus, bicycle, foot, car-pooling) in order to discover something new and to experiment. - Contributing to new experiences and to public health. - An opportunity to shape a bet...

Standard cycle track in Copenhagen. Sign indicating that you turn left here for the airport. I will fully admit the irony of my epiphany. It's even a bit silly. The story has, however, a decent ending. The nature of my work involves a great many trips to and from Copenhagen Airport . We're lucky in Copenhagen. The airport is the most efficient and well-designed airport I've seen anywhere in the world. It is easily accessible and is located close to the city. You can get there by bus, metro and train, as well as car or taxi, of course. This being Copenhagen, I knew there was fully separated bicycle infrastructure the whole way out there, as well. From every direction. Last October, on the eve of a journey to Zurich for my TED x talk , my friend Ole - previously written about on this blog - asked why I didn't just ride my bicycle to the airport. I shrugged and said that I live 6 minutes walk from a Metro station and it takes 25 minutes on the Metro to get there. I...

The Robert Moses Fan Club that in Denmark is pushing ahead with their idea of a harbour tunnel that will only serve to increase car traffic and congestion over large swathes of the Danish capital. Here's what we'd rather have for the 27 billion the new underground motorway will cost. Design by Emma Sivell , with Copenhagenize Design Co., for Cykelrepublikken . A larger version is available here .