The Life-Sized City Blog

I ventured into the city centre of Copenhagen for a night out yesterday and was thrilled to behold the new cycle track down Gothersgade. It's a one-way street for cars and bikes - until now. This stretch was a missing link for bicycle traffic. Bicycle users had to do a rather irritating detour to get to key destinations. Now a cycle track runs straight down the street towards the harbour while the street is still a one-way street for cars. Mary blogged about it a short while back - you can see what the street looked like before - and now the construction is almost complete. On some stretches The Arrogance of Space has been addressed by adding cycle tracks in both directions, like above. Narrowing the space for cars to create safer conditions. But what started as an article about bicycle infrastructure on a one-way street is now going to morph into an article about the deconstruction of The Arrogance of Space by using bicycle parking. Along stretches of the street, bike ra...

In the interest of expediting the journey towards bicycle-friendly cities and eliminating misconceptions, Copenhagenize Design Co. has produced The Copenhagenize Bicycle Planning Guide. Based on Danish Best Practice developed over the past century, since the first separated bike lane was implemented in Copenhagen in 1915. The beauty of the bicycle infrastructure network in Copenhagen is the uniform design of the infrastructure. There are, by and large, four types of infrastructure - all represented in this graphic. Based on the speed limit for cars, you select the appropriate style of infrastructure and off you go. One of these designs fits every street in the country and, indeed, every street in every city in the world. If you fancy sending your local planner/engineer a gift that keeps on giving, this graphic is also available as a poster .

Late last year I transported myself a bit farther than normal on my bicycle. The occasion was a weekend in the woods with the families in Felix's class. The destination was about 21 km north of Copenhagen. Somewhere near Værløse. Which is "Middle of nowhere" (MoN) to this city boy. Normally, I don't bother going farther than IKEA. But I'll ride my bicycle there every time . I'm not a cyclist. I don't demonstratively ride my bicycle everywhere. Like almost every Copenhagener I don't know how many kilometres I ride each year. I'm just a guy who uses a bicycle because it's practical. With Felix and Lulu in tow, we had three options for getting there. 1. Take the train and then a bus. 2. Take the bikes on the train and ride the last 5 km. 3. Take the bikes. It was number two if the weather was crap. I asked Felix if he thought he could ride 21 km and he was up for trying. Turns out the weather was fine so off we went. If you want to see ...

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...