As a Dane and living in Copenhagen, this is what I miss everytime I'm in another city (except Amsterdam perhaps). I love how there are bike lanes all over the place. We also have traffic lights for bikes that let's you get ahead of the cars.
Copenhagen has it. So do many cities in the Netherlands. It's great. There's the road for cars, a small curb, a lane for bikes, a small curb, and the sidewalk.
Copenhagen is in a class on its own when it comes to cycling both culture and traffic organization. Pretty much I can't think of any other European capital that comes close (missing Amsterdam out of the bunch, though).
Copenhagen has curbed lanes dedicated to bikes and the people take full advantage. I saw several Christiana Bikes on the road while there (In fact one lady used one to drag back a loveseat sofa!)
And to add to this: I can imagine an urban engineer walking through Amsterdam (or any other dutch city, really) to just despair. The sheer amount of infra Amsterdam has built to be this bike friendly is of an epic scale: The dutch have been doing their infra projects with 'bikes and walking comes first' in mind for about 50 years now; no wonder it seems undoable to reproduce that kind of thing in less than a decade.
For those who haven't been there: Entire, completely separated two-way wide bike paths with their own bridges and tunnels, nowhere near car roads. Huge swaths of the city that are _solely_ for bikes and walking, with only a few roads dedicated for cars. (i.e. to travel between 2 places in inner Amsterdam by car, generally you drive _away_ from your destination towards the ring, hop on a ring road, drive _past_ your target, and then drive back into the inner city. And yet this is faster than the US style because it avoids incessant waiting in queues and traffic lights, and there's far less traffic as bike/walk is a workable alternative). The bikes, where they even have to cross a car road, get preferential traffic lights and all the bike paths have double detector loops - your bike traffic light tends to switch to green just as you approach the intersection, and if you're the last in a peloton of bicycles you might notice the light switching to orange juuust as you pass the light. That's not a coincidence.
Yeah, you can build that up. But it takes quite a while, and requires a financial outlay that seems daunting unless you smear it out over 50 years.
However, perhaps, go to Copenhagen. It's often listed as just as bike friendly, if not _more_ bike friendly than cities in The Netherlands. This is hogwash (SOURCE: I've been in, and biked in, both places, recently). Copenhagen is great, Amsterdam is far better. However, Copenhagen looks much more doable.
Where Amsterdam has completely separated bike infra and no major car roads running through the center, Copenhagen has giant 3-lane-each car highways right through the busy city center, and almost no separated bike infra. What Copenhagen does have, is one entire lane of car traffic dedicated to bikes, with not a painted line, but an actual physical divider (just a curb thing. You can drive over them but if you do it at speed that might cause some damage, that's all. Cheap as heck, but an order of magnitude better than just a painted line of course). They are wider than 'the minimum necessary for the width of one bike' that you often see elsewhere.
A select few tricky intersections have dedicated bike infra. Maybe one bridge is bike-dedicated.
And that is all. That should fill you with hope: __That is enough__ to get the kind of bike-friendly name that Copenhagen enjoys. You can get that done in any major city on an acceptable budget within the span of a decade, assuming non-deadlocked political chaos (unfortunately, US and UK, you may have to return to that feeling of despair). From _there_, by all means, look at The Netherlands as bike walhalla.
Here's a simple formula to 'fix' the stroads of the USA. They tend to be 4 to 5 lanes each side, so there's plenty of room for this:
1. Turn the stroad into a road - few exits (no way to turn right onto a store's parking lot). But only 2 lanes. Reducing 5 lanes to 2 sounds like a disaster but it won't be: Road congestion primarily depends on the exit: If a popular destination cannot deal with the number of cars that want to exit off of it, even if you have 100 lanes, you _will_ end up with a traffic jam eventually. 2 lanes still allows dynamic traffic (faster traffic capable of passing slower traffic). That's 90% of the win right there, any further lanes barely make a dent.
2. Make strips of 'access road' - these are small, 1-lane roads with a low maximum speed, where every few meters an 'exit' to a store's car park or a home driveway. Between the access road and the main car road there's a real divider: A ditch, a small creek, or an actual metal divider if you have to (Especially in the US with all the trucks, I fear folks will just drive across the dirt or grass otherwise). If you wanna throw money at it and really work on making the place look nice: Line of trees does wonders. Only way to switch from the main road to the access road is to exit onto one from the major intersections which are now miles apart. Between 2 intersections there __are no exits at all__ on the main car road. To go to a store you drive to the intersection that precedes it, exit onto the access road, and drive to it from there.
3. We have 1 lane left (2 lanes to the car road, 1 for the divider, 1 for the access road). The remaining road can now be used to become a bike path. It should optimally be between the access road and the main car road, _between_ the trees : You don't want the bikes to have to deal with the exit/entries onto driveways and car park every few meters. You have plenty of space: in this setup, assuming you started with a 5-lane stroad, it's 2 lanes worth of space you get to play with.
It's not exactly cheap but the US is spending literally multiple billions on widening literally 26-lane-wide highways (Katy Highway for example) with some more lanes to 'fight traffic', which seems idiotic and indeed does not work - if you want to fight traffic, reduce traffic. One way to do that: Entice some car traffic to turn itself into bike traffic by making that a viable option. You won't, and can't, replace all the traffic. But if you can eliminate even 5% of the cars, traffic jams are reduced by 50%+. Building these bike strips and turning massive stroads into roads+streets is an order of magnitude cheaper.
Note that the primary problem is that the popular target exits lead into city blocks that simply cannot handle the traffic, hence, 'widen the highway' is a net negative, even: It makes people _think_ the car is now a better option (induced demand), but it didn't do anything at all to address the problem. So you really just need to add some bike infra to these overly busy destination city blocks to replace 5% of the traffic within them with bikes - just the 'local traffic' will easily do that. So, this WILL work.
Denmark is at least as crazy about biking as Amsterdam. In Copenhagen it's a major advantage to be on bicycle, specially in rush hour where you easily get from A to B 2-3-4 times faster than cars.
Rain is not really a factor, Copenhagen is rainy all the fucking time. Steep roads definitely is. But it isn't all. In Buenos Aires, which is relatively flat, I saw maybe 3-4 bikes in as many weeks. The major factor, IMO, is presence of bicycle paths and the fact that bicycles are actually a part of the design of the 'traffic flow', which means that bikers are first class citizen in Danish cities, while I would never even fuckin' dare to ride a bike in Buenos Aires - it's simply not safe.
Copenhagen traffic is a nightmare. Yes, the city is fairly bicycle friendly, but when it's faster to ride a bike 10 km to work instead of taking the subway* then there's a serious public transportation issue no matter how you put it.
Nice cycling lanes and impressive statistics, but I don't get the impression that bicycles are as ubiquitous (yet) as they are in Amsterdam.
I wonder how they handle bicycle parking in Copenhagen, because that's a real problem in most Dutch cities. Especially those cargo bikes take a lot of space.
In Copenhagen, the authorities occasionally clean up an area from abandoned bikes and then you will see literal piles of bikes. Don't have a bike? Take one from the pile without feeling guilty.
I've lived in both Copenhagen and Malmö (the location of the cycle parking in the last picture in the article). What's great about cycling in both places is that cycling is super prevalent so that infrastructure is much better (separate cycle paths, protected cycle lanes, public bike pumps) and drivers are generally more respectful (since they are usually also cyclists) even when you are sharing the road with cars without a bike lane.
An interesting difference from American cycling is the speed at which one should cycle in Sweden/Denmark is much slower. The reason for this is that cyclists are not generally in danger of being smooshed by lots of cars, so more people feel comfortable cycling, even those who are older or not as physically fit or not as suicidal. Cycling fast is a defense mechanism unnecessary in Sweden.
I wrote a bunch about cycle infrastructure on Metafilter:
Cars are indeed around - and Copenhagen was as car-choked as anywhere else as recently as the 70's. DK/NL cuture shifted in part because of protests saying "Stop using your car to kill children"
I've driven in Amsterdam and paradoxically it's a hell of a lot nicer than driving in, say, LA.
I don't wish to conflate Denmark and the Netherlands but they've both made huge improvements in similar fashion with respect to livable cities. If career allows it I might still move because I want to live somewhere my child can ride a bike to school. Houten comes to mind.
In Copenhagen or Amsterdam that's just the case. (Not literally every road, they don't have bike lanes in residential areas, but almost every major road with significant traffic has a bike lane in these cities.)
I’m from America, but I visited Copenhagen a few years ago and was amazed by how many bikes there were. On top of it, most bikes were parked with only a wheel lock and not chained to anything.
About time. In the US, we seriously need more emphasis on bikes and encouraging people to use them for shorter commutes. We either have to drive or walk (mostly). I once met a european lady (from Amsterdam I think) who would not stop talking about how behind the US in terms of bike culture, hardly any bike lanes on roads etc.
I wouldn't say they're widespread in Europe, but I moved from the SF Bay Area to Copenhagen, and they're certainly a big factor here. The "bicycle highways", completely separated and wide lanes that form major arteries through the city, make it much easier to bike to work from most places, without danger of car interference, or of being "doored" by parked cars opening their doors.
Some other efforts: 1) the traffic lights on several major arteries have been synchronized to typical bike speeds, rather than car speeds, so in good circumstances you can ride their whole length without hitting a red light (they call this a "green wave"), and 2) of the three bridges over the central harbor, one is bicycle/pedestrian-only (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryggebroen), with another no-car bridge under construction.
Obviously other aspects also matter, such as a compact and flat city, but I think all these help considerably as well.
It's more than that. Denmark and the Netherlands have bike lanes all over the countries. Basically everywhere. It's weird when you can't find the bike lane.
But Denmark and the Netherlands are also flat like pancakes and therefore just super bike friendly from the get go. So that might be a big reason why people were in favor of making bike lanes in the first place.
Having lived in both Melbourne and Amsterdam, the two crucial differences are in the Netherlands:
1) almost all Dutch drivers are also cyclists. They know how bikes behave, how it feels to be a cyclist around cars, and are therefore far more conscientious of bikes
2) in an accident involving a car and a bike, Dutch road laws have a high presumption that the car is at fault.
In Amsterdam, I don't worry about a car running me over. In London and Melbourne I do, and so never ride there without a helmet.
Hi - I'm living in London right now and from Australia.
Mostly what stands out about Copenhagen is the ridiculously extensive cycling infrastructure. Dedicated lanes, signage, signalling, parking...it's amazing. Also the entire culture is about the bike. People looked at me like I was a bit crazy when I didn't (yet) have a bike to get from one venue to another.
Cycling in Australian cities is nothing like it. It would also be impossible to implement it to the same extent in London.
The public transport is also excellent, the education opportunities and nice, open spaces. :)
You are absolutely right. Streetfilms.org is a great place to see short videos that show how the Europeans/Scandinavians do it. Here are a few examples:
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