The Life-Sized City Blog

I'll be speaking in Paris today - 21 November 2015 - about bicycle urbanism and lessons to be learned from Copenhagen. Paris has declared that it aims to be the world's best bicycle city in the world by 2020. This is simply not possible with the current sub-standard understanding of Best Practice infrastructure. The current Mayor Anne Hildalgo, has some good ideas, which we've reviewed here, but until the City understands the basics of bicycle infrastructure,  not much is going to happen. While there are good examples of the City employing Best Practice infrastructure (above left) there are still strange things imagined in the heads of engineers and planners who have little idea of how to do it. Like the weird bi-directional stuff you see like above, right. Or using bus lanes as bicycle lanes on long boulevards where buses can get up to speed (above, left), or strange turn lanes like atabove, right. Best Practice has been established. It's ridiculous to t...

Click here for a version in Catalan and Spanish // Feu clic aquí per una versió en català i en espanyol This week, Barcelona's Mayor Ada Colau and the vice-mayor of the city will visit Copenhagen. Colau was elected in May 2015, for the alternative left and green coalition "Barcelona en Comú" - or Barcelona Together. We're sure there the Barcelonans will harvest a great deal of inspiration on their visit. Regarding bicycle urbanism in particular, there are specific things that they should be looking at, concentrating on and writing down. I'm fond of Barcelona. I, myself, have spent much time in the city, not least on two summer holidays with my kids. We can, by and large, cycle around large parts of the city and feel safe now that some infrastructure and traffic calming has been put into place. I see Barcelona as a city with massive potential for increasing the modal share for bicycles and expanding on their leadership role since 2008. A fair ranking on The ...

Traducción española está en el fondo // Click here for English version   Aquesta setmana , l'alcaldessa de Barcelona, Ada Colau i la tinent d’alcaldessa de la ciutat visitaran Copenhaguen. Colau, forma part de la coalició d'esquerra alternativa " Barcelona en comú " i va ser escollida al maig de 2015. Estem segurs que la seva visita serà una gran font d'inspiració per als barcelonins i barcelonines. Pel que fa a urbanisme i bicicleta en particular, hi ha coses específiques que han d'estudiar amb atenció i prendre nota. Sóc un fan de Barcelona . Jo mateix he passat molt de temps a la ciutat, al menys de dues ocasions en vacances d'estiu amb els meus fills. En general vam poder pedalar al voltant de grans parts de la ciutat i sentir-nos segurs, es noten les millores en infraestructures i la pacificació del trànsit motoritzat. Veig Barcelona com una ciutat amb un enorme potencial per augmentar la quota modal dels desplaçaments en bicicleta i per maxi...

Article originally published on 19 November 2007. Revised November 2015. Over the years we have realised that a large part of our work at Copenhagenize Design Co. in working towards bicycle-friendly cities is the simple art of mythbusting. While time-consuming and often frustrating, it still appears to a necessary part of the dialogue around the world. It’s interesting how uniform the misconceptions about cycling are, regardless of where in the world we hear them. It’s equally interesting to hear them coming from people who cycle - not just people who don’t. We know that every city in the world was bicycle-friendly for decades, not least until the 1950s when the urban planning paradigm shifted drastically and destructively and started to focus solely on automobiles. People have short - or selective - memories it would seem. They look around their city and assume that it has always just been like that. Civic pride seems to play a role as well. People in winter cities are pr...

We like data at Copenhagenize Design Company. It's a major part of our work, not least in our Desire Line Analyses of cyclist behaviour that we have done in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, and planning to do on a global scale. We film an intersection for 10-12 hours and spending a couple hundred hours analysing the behaviour, doing counts of everything we can and producing solutions for modernising intersections to priortise cycling and pedestrians. In association with the current Desire Line Analysis we are working on, on Søtorvet intersection in Copenhagen, we have added some data sets. Including performing a bike helmet count. The reason is simple. There is no reliable data. The numbers we have seen are from the Danish Road Safety Council - Rådet for Sikker Trafik - and we are sceptical about them. They claim that the helmet wearing rate is 26%. Their random counts during rush hour and some telephone surveys do not, however, provide reliable data. Especially considering that...

When I am doing keynotes or interviews I describe the mainstream aspect of our bicycle culture as being nothing more than Vaccuum Cleaner culture . Like bikes, we all have one, we all use it but they are just tools to make our daily life easier. No fetishizing, no naming of inanimate objects, no vaccum cleaning clothes. Our city sucks in other ways in other ways. Almost every day I'm reminded of just how much it sucks. And I love it. I enlisted The Lulu to show how we get rid of our household garbage. Because it's pretty cool. Firstly, as The Lulu's photo clearly demonstrates, we use small bags for daily waste. Nothing bigger than this will do. When we chuck our garbage, we do it in the morning, as we head for school and work. We pass one of the four bike sheds in our backyard. We end up at this little building - there are two of them in the backyard - with this round chute. That's why we have to use small bags - the chute just ain't big enough for bigge...

Urban logistics is just one of the many challenges facing our cities. After Copenhagenize worked for three years on the European Union project Cyclelogistics, we have cargo bikes on the brain and provide cargo bike logistics as one of our services . We also live in a city with 40,000 cargo bikes in daily use. As ever, we look for solutions not only for other cities, but our own. During the Cyclelogistics project we determined that there is a massive potential for shifting goods delivery to bikes and cargo bikes. 51% of all motorised private and commercial goods transport in EU cities could be done on bicycles or cargo bikes . Great. Let's do that. But how to do it best? Lots of small companies are already operating in cities with last-mile service for packages, which is great. DHL is rocking Dutch cities with cargo bike deliveries and UPS and FedEx are getting their game face on, too. But we need to think bigger and better. The City of Copenhagen created the framework for th...

Nice with a bit of activism and rationality on a Saturday. Thanks to our reader Jochen, who sent us some photos from the streets of Germany in reaction to a campaign from the German Ministry of Transport, above. Next to a photo of Darth Vader the text reads: "The saga continues, thanks to the helmet. Works in every galaxy. And on the bicycle." This set cyclists and activists to task. Billboard in Bonn: "Now I'm single... thanks, helmet." Photo: Jochen  In a country where only about 10% of cyclists wear plastic hats, the Ministry of Transport decided to chuck some taxpayer money into a campaign. A lazy move from politicans whose ignorance about the importance of encouraging cycling, building infrastructure and the health benefits of a cycling population has now been broadcast to the planet. They are basically using taxpayer money to advertise how ignorant they are. There's the first problem with their campaign. The choice of Darth Vader is as str...