Copenhagen focuses on the perception of safety as much as on actual safety.
The citizens should feel safe while cycling, as well as actually being kept safe. Working recently with the London Borough of Southwark, it was interesting to hear how they saw road-warrior cyclists roaring through the area as a hindrance to their plans for developing a bicycle-friendly corner of the city. For many years the city has chucked good ideas on to the streets to see if they work and become great ideas.
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They are, as a rule, well thought out before they are trialled and most of them end up permanent. Sceptical citizens are enlisted as test participants and instead of letting ideas get squashed by public protest and ignorance, citizens can see the good idea actually working. Generally they will understand the intention and the project will stick.
The great green wave
If an idea fails, it can easily be removed — but not before a huge amount of data and experience has been gathered, making future good ideas even better. Sometimes it happens inadvertently. A new metro ring is being built and 17 stations are under construction at once, making driving difficult.
People are like rivers: Nobody saw that jump in modal share coming. I hope the city embraces this opportunity and maintains it — otherwise the number will merely fall again in when the metro is finished. For many years Copenhagen has had a deep understanding of the urban anthropology of its cyclists. Back in the 80s, when separated cycle tracks were being rebuilt after three decades of car-centric planning, people were returning to the bike in great numbers. The city saw them heading down the main car-clogged arteries and decided to try building a high-quality route down a parallel quiet street.
To their surprise, nobody used it. The result was a sea-change in modern bicycle planning, with cycle tracks built along the busy streets leading to and from the city centre. Rather, they will show you where they want to go and you should listen to them and plan accordingly.
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City residents are sending subliminal signals about urban design 24 hours a day — and the modern metropolis watches and redesigns accordingly. Building a network of bicycle infrastructure and taking cycling seriously as transport requires investment. Copenhagen puts its money where its mouth is. What started with the first new link over the harbour in seven centuries — the bicycle and pedestrian bridge Bryggebroen in — has accelerated rapidly. As well as the cycle superhighways, there are eight new bridges for cyclists and pedestrians either under construction or planned for Copenhagen harbour and its adjacent canals.
The Cykelslangen — or cycle snake — is the newest addition and it is simply beautiful. It fulfils all the requirements of Danish design: Copenhagen knows that iconic structures are important — so long as they serve a functional purpose. Cyclists are just fast-moving pedestrians; so all attempts at mating them with cars or other forms of transport will fail.
They belong on infrastructure along the streets, cycling to work and to shops, businesses and schools. Copenhagen continues to work towards becoming even better for cyclists by bringing more of them to streets to contribute valuable life to the urban fabric and to improve mobility for this intelligent transport form. Rest assured, Copenhagen can make mistakes, too; sometimes expensive ones. Suddenly, several lanes of cars and buses are zipping past, but Calvo pays no heed — we are on a smooth, green-tarmacked bike lane, separated from motor traffic by both a raised kerb and a waist-high fence.
And people do, in large numbers. They do so to such an extent that Seville, the capital of Andalucia in the far south of Spain , has become something of an unlikely poster city for sustainable transport. It is, proponents say, living proof that more or less any urban area can get lots of people on the bikes by the relatively straightforward means of building enough connected, safe lanes on which they can ride. Unlike the Netherlands and Denmark, the usual European exemplars of mass cycling, Spain remains far from a paradise for the two-wheeled.
According to EU statistics a mere 1. Almost half say it is a car. For many years Seville had only about 0. A small group of cycle campaigners spent years vainly pushing for change, among them Ricardo Marques Sillero, who recalls first arguing for bike lanes in His campaign eventually gained support from the United Left IU , a political alliance led by the Communist party. In elections the UI won enough council seats to jointly govern with the Socialists, and managed to get the cycling plans in the coalition agreement. He hired Calvo, who describes himself as sustainable mobility consultant, to design a hugely ambitious network of completely segregated lanes, a full 80km 50 miles of which would be completed in one go.
Segregation — separating bikes by a physical barrier like a raised kerb or fence — is something of a holy grail for campaigners, who argue it makes cycling accessible to people of all ages, allowing them to trundle along at slow speeds in everyday clothes. This is in contrast to the scene in most UK cities, where mainly young, generally male riders speed alongside motor traffic dressed in helmets and luminous high-vis jackets. But segregation necessarily involves removing space from another group, usually motorists.
In London, even a mayor with the political clout of Boris Johnson is currently struggling to push through plans for a pair of new bike routes against fierce opposition from business and driving lobbies. In Seville one of the paradoxical reasons for the success of the bike lane project was that so few people believed it would happen at all.
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The opposition only started when the infrastructure was being built, and by then there was no way back. Even before lanes were finished some cyclists squeezed between fences to use them, an unlucky few crashing into barriers marking the end of completed sections while riding at night. The came from all over the city. The completed lanes are narrower than a Dutch cyclist might expect, and occupy what space they can, with riders very occasionally having to steer around a small tree or other obstacle.
They also run along just one side of the road, making the lanes two-way. While this was the product of necessity, Calvo says he now likes this: When the paths meet a road junction they curve gently on to a controlled crossing where, officially, cyclists are supposed to wait for a green bike symbol. In practise most pedal across if the way is clear, Calvo among them.
Much of the space, Calvo says, was actually taken from bus or parking lanes but the kerb was raised to pavement level to offer more protection. The net result is not Dutch or Danish levels of cycling, but nonetheless impressive. The average number of bikes used daily in the city rose from just over 6, to more than 70,