This city is what it is because our citizens are what they are.
Copenhagen’s new bicycle and pedestrian bridge, Inderhavnsbroen.
With good reason, hundreds of delegations come to cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam every year to study and learn from the cities’ consistent efforts to make the bicycle a respected and equal transport form and solve all manner of traffic and societal challenges. Copenhagen wasn’t always Copenhagen—and that is so incredibly important to remember. Mistakes have been made, both large and small. This city was as car-clogged as anywhere else on the planet through the 1950s and 1960s. From a cycling peak in 1949, we took the on-ramp to the motorway of two decades of dismantling the city to make space for cars. A great deal of the bicycle infrastructure we had built was removed in the race for automobile space.
From a peak of amazing daily scenes like on Nørrebrogade during the 1940s, cycling started to decline. Following the American lead, plans were drawn up in many European cities for massive motorway systems that would carve their way through the urban landscape. Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam were among the many cities that fostered such plans.
In Copenhagen in 1958, City Plan Vest (West) was hatched as a part of the plan for Søringen—the Lake Ring—and it was bombastic. A massive motorway would sweep down from the north and the ferry from Helsingborg, Sweden, and carve through neighborhoods, turning right and roaring along the iconic lakes to the north of the city center until it hit the Vesterbro neighborhood, where a huge spaghetti junction would be built on the bulldozed remains of a poor, densely populated area. It could not possibly have been more Robert Mosesesque.
From 1962 to 1976, Copenhagen had a lord mayor with one of most ironic names in political history: Urban Hansen. He had a big bucket o’ car Kool-Aid and drank it. His vision for Copenhagen revolved entirely around the car. In 1972, he even removed the city’s amazing tram network, which had been serving the citizens since 1863.The City Plan Vest and the Lake Ring advanced so far that apartment blocks were knocked down to make space, and large buildings were erected in anticipation of the coming motorway. The National Hospital and the Panum Institute are two of them. In Vesterbro, to the west of the Central Station, a strangely out-of-scale building stands on Halmtorvet Square and currently houses a police station. It’s the tall building on the left of the model.
Rush hour traffic on Nørrebrogade in Copenhagen in the 1940s. © The National Museum of Denmark
Model of the proposed Lake Ring motorway junction that would have destroyed part of the Vesterbro neighborhood. © City of Copenhagen
Amsterdam had their bulldozers in action as well, paving the way for a massive motorway development. Luckily, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Oslo, and Helsinki, as well as other cities around the world like Vancouver, didn’t complete the vision due to lack of funds. Sweden was neutral during the Second World War, and the ironic joke in Scandinavian urban planning is that they were never bombed so they bombed themselves after the war. Stockholm, like countless cities that embarked upon such car-centric plans in the 1950s and 1960s, is now struggling to figure out how to rid itself of wide motorways that restrict access to its harborfront. Some cities, like Paris, are ahead of the curve, reclaiming the space allocated to cars along the river—like the Georges Pompidou Expressway—and creating public space instead. They’re giving the citizens their river back.
To say that the two oil crises in the 1970s hit Denmark hard is a massive understatement. Today it’s almost impossible to imagine in a country with such a high standard of living, but families in apartments in the neighborhood where I live had to huddle around wood-burning stoves in one room during the winters.
Later today, after I write this paragraph, I will be heading out with my daughter, Lulu-Sophia, to enjoy Car-Free Sunday in Copenhagen. The first of its kind in Denmark was on November 25, 1973, and was an initiative by the government to save fuel. In many cities in Denmark, every second streetlight was turned off for the same reason.
There were public demonstrations on City Hall Square with tens of thousands of people with their bicycles, demanding safer conditions for cycling.
Sadly, the first oil crisis came only a year and a half after the last tram rolled through Copenhagen. Buses had replaced them, but gas prices went through the roof. At that point, the bicycle had almost completely disappeared in most cities in the world. In Copenhagen, the modal share for bikes was still around 20 percent. The bicycle as a transport form had not been eradicated altogether, though, and people once again took to two wheels to get around. The problem was that cycling fatalities spiked to an all-time high in Denmark due to the lack of proper bicycle infrastructure. The people needed their bikes, but they weren’t safe any longer. But hey, it was the seventies, man. An age of public engagement and of politicians who were willing to respond. At least in Denmark. There were public demonstrations on City Hall Square with tens of thousands of people with their bicycles, demanding safer conditions for cycling.
Efforts were made to improve both mobility and safety and to meet the demands of the people. It wasn’t until the early 1980s, however, that there was the will and the budget to start rebuilding the protected network of bicycle infrastructure. It was a slow process at first, but it slowly accelerated through the 1980s and into the 1990s before really picking up the pace.
The first dedicated space for cycling was in Copenhagen, on Esplanaden, in 1892, when an equestrian path was reallocated for bicycles. The first protected, on-street cycle track in the world, however, saw the light of day in Copenhagen on Østerbrogade in 1915. Despite many decades of high cycling levels, the legacy of two car-centric decades proved challenging when city planners had to go back to the drawing board.
The biggest difference was that there was now a daunting armada of cars and trucks dominating the streetspace. Planners and engineers were initially loath to reclaim space from cars, just like most of them around the world still are today. Cyclists were returning to the streets, and while the safety-in-numbers concept was proving to be true and the rates of cyclist fatalities and injuries started to fall, the space dilemma was at the forefront of planning.
Cyclists don’t want detours. They want full access to the city like everyone else.
In countries like the United States, we have recently seen the emergence of ideas like the Bicycle Boulevard. That has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Some marketing thought was put into thinking that up. A boulevard—all wide and fancy-sounding—for bicycles. As though cycling is being prioritized and nurtured. The reality is quite different. A bicycle boulevard is, in fact, a detour that keeps cyclists away from the natural desire lines of a city—out of sight, out of mind—and does little to prioritize cycling as a transport form. Lazy bicycle planning. Band-aid solutions by politicians.
I hear the same thing in many countries. “But it’s nicer to cycle away from traffic. That’s what cyclists want …” Regardless of transport form, most people don’t want to be forced to take detours. They want to go from A to B. I’ve seen many recreational paths for cyclists in the United States that have a wavy form with curves, even though there are no obstructions and a straight line is totally doable. This is the result of non-bike-riding engineers designing bicycle infrastructure with preconceived ideas like “Must be boring to ride straight. Let’s curve this puppy up a bit.”
This bicycle boulevard lark was tried out in Copenhagen in the early 90s. Cycling levels along the main artery, Nørrebrogade, were increasing exponentially, but there was no infrastructure. Well-meaning city planners thought that cyclists would prefer a less congested and safer route, so a parallel street was blinged up with infrastructure. “There you go, cyclists! THAT’S where you’d rather ride, right?”
Nope. It was a flop. Nobody actually prefers detours. If you have ever visited an IKEA and only needed one specific item, you know how infuriating the labyrinthian route that IKEA has knowingly designed can be. Similarly, when you are heading for work in the morning, you don’t want to be forcibly deflected from your route to roll down side streets. In most cities, the preferred routes have been laid out for a very long time—the natural desire lines to and from the city. Sending cyclists onto a National Geographic expedition to foreign neighborhoods is not promoting or prioritizing cycling; it is reluctantly tolerating them. With a barely audible sigh and a furtive roll of the eyes. “Let’s hope THAT shuts them up …”
In 2016, the number of bicycles entering Copenhagen’s city center exceeded the number of cars for the first time since 1970. Data: City of Copenhagen
The statistics for how citizens of the City of Copenhagen arrived at work or education in the city in 2016. Data: City of Copenhagen
To the City of Copenhagen’s credit, they learned quickly from that crucial mistake, understanding that urban citizens on bikes should be afforded equal opportunity to get around. This was one of the catalysts that started the modern age of bicycle urbanism in Copenhagen. The focus switched to reallocating urban transport space on the main arteries leading to the city center. It was certainly tougher in the nineties than back in the twenties, what with the all the cars that now occupied urban space, but this was the way forward.
Slowly but surely, the network was expanded and cycling levels rose accordingly. The learning curve was steep but short due to the fact that there was still infrastructure in place outside of the city center, so there wasn’t a need to start from scratch and rethink the designs.
For a couple of decades, a rigid transport engineering system had been implemented and adhered to. I liken it to the film The Matrix, and it feels like we, the citizens, just wander around in a fabricated reality, controlled unawares by complicated—and outdated—mathematical models. It was time to punch a hole through the code and start hacking the city back to a place that made sense.
The focus switched to reallocating urban transport space on the main arteries.
All around the world, the Matrix persists. Firewalls and security systems are in place in many countries, making the hacking more difficult, but progress is slowly being made.
The City of Copenhagen had a head start thanks to decades of planning and the establishment of best-practice standards back in the 1920s, but the game had changed. There were attempts to squeeze the bicycle into the Matrix, much like what we see in many parts of the world, but it was clear that if reestablishing the bicycle as transport were to succeed, it would require dedicated space.
Attempts were made to play around with bidirectional, on-street cycle tracks on one side of the street. It’s classic lazy planning, and in Danish bicycle planning this design was thrown out twenty years ago because it wasn’t safe enough and it proved difficult to connect bidirectional tracks up with unidirectional infrastructure. We’ll get back to best-practice design later in the book, but the point is that mistakes were made and then they were fixed. From the oil crises to today, the Copenhagen journey is, in many ways, identical with the journey in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities. The worldwide oil embargo, the crushing blow dealt by OPEC, was handled with simple pragmatism—and the results are spectacular.
One of the trademarks of the cultures of the Nordic countries is a strong desire to seek compromise—to make sure everyone is appeased. On many levels, it is an admirable quality and avoids constant butting of heads in both political and social contexts. Years ago, the City of Copenhagen made a rough guideline for traffic planning, saying that the modal share for bicycles and public transport should never be allowed to fall below 30 percent, and that car traffic should never exceed 30 percent.
The primary data set that the City uses is how people arrive in the City of Copenhagen to go to work or to school. In 2016, the numbers indicate that the 30-30-30 goal is intact. In the current political climate in Copenhagen, it seems that this preestablished compromise is now a hurdle blocking efforts to move forward. The City now has a declared political goal that 50 percent of trips to work and school arriving in the City will be by bike. The original goal was to achieve 50 percent by 2012. Then it was bumped to 2015 and now it is set for 2025. Cycling is increasing in Copenhagen. For the first time since 1970, the number of bikes entering the city center exceeded the number of cars, and the current modal share of 42 percent is impressively high. It is worth mentioning that among people who have an address in the city of Copenhagen, 62 percent will ride a bike to work or school. In order to move forward, however, more space is needed and the old compromise needs to be readjusted to reflect reality.
For all the investment and drive in Copenhagen over the past 40 years in general and ten years in particular, you would think that expensive mistakes would be avoided. Unfortunately not.
One recent mistake occurred when the City decided to play around with the surfacing of cycle tracks. The default, quality asphalt, is always fine, but out in the new Ørestad development, paving stones were implemented. Experimenting is never a bad idea, but this one went south in a hurry. The quality of the stone was substandard and it cracked easily, especially in the winter. The paving stones were replaced with better-quality ones.
Then, in the city center, in conjunction with the street redesign of Vester Voldgade, it was decided to use the same paving-stone concept. There is a clear visual difference between Copenhagen’s sidewalk design and the otherwise clear asphalt on the cycle tracks. On this street, the paving stones were used for both, without any physical demarcation. At first it seemed weird to most Copenhageners, but we had it figured out in no time. The problem is the number of tourists in this area, most of whom aren’t accustomed to looking for bikes, let alone recognizing a cycle track.
The recently redesigned Vester Voldgade street with cycle track surfacing chosen for an aesthetic instead of logic. © Lorenz Siegel
The City has now added some paint to illustrate the two different zones in an attempt to fix the problem, but at City Hall Square, in order to keep tourists off the cycle track they also added a pedestrian barrier, which is never a good idea. If you have to fix a design with extra infrastructure, it wasn’t a good design to begin with.
One of the more recent additions to the bicycle-culture arsenal is the Inner Harbor Bridge—Inderhavnsbroen in Danish—that spans Copenhagen Harbor at a key strategic and iconic point. It links the city center at the end of the postcard-perfect Nyhavn with the Christianshavn neighborhood and the southern neighborhoods beyond. The bridge opened in July 2016 and is one of a series of 17 new bridges or underpasses for bicycle traffic that have been added to the City’s transport network in the past few years. Let me be clear: I’m thrilled that we have a brand-new, modern link over the harbor to accommodate bicycle traffic and pedestrians. I am over the moon that the number of cyclists crossing daily exceeds all projected numbers. The City estimated that between 3,000 and 7,000 cyclists would use the bridge, but the latest numbers as of mid-2017 are 16,000.
Fresh skid marks on the Inner Harbour Bridge leading towards the warning markings. If you need to put warning signs on a design, it’s not a good design.
So it’s a massive success. But sometimes you can see the forest for the trees. I’m sorry, but Inderhavnsbro is a stupid, stupid bridge. Yes, it fulfills its primary function of allowing people to cross a body of water. But it is a cumbersome, beastly thing that is completely and utterly out of place in the delicate urban, historical, and architectural context of its location. A fantastic overcomplication of the simple, timeless art of building bridges that open and close. Designed by an architect named Cezary Bednarski from an architecture bureau with roots in two countries where cycling is no longer mainstream transport, Poland and the United Kingdom, it has failed miserably in respecting the basic concepts of bicycle urbanism and the established standards for infrastructure and facilities.
Crossing the bridge by bicycle involves two sharp turns—two chicanes. Chicanes designed by someone who doesn’t ride a bicycle. Cyclists are shunted sharply and rudely towards the middle of the bridge and then back out to the side again. Best-practice standards for details like chicanes have been in place for a century. We know what degree of curvature works best for comfort and for safety. These chicanes, however, pose serious problems that are clearly visible for anyone to see. You can see from the bicycle tracks on a rainy day that people just cut the corners.
A more serious concern is the many skid marks you see on the bridge as you head downwards in either direction. I stop and study them every time I cross. Have a look if you visit it. There are always fresh ones. People crown the bridge in the middle and then get their speed up, but many people fail to realize that the architect wasn’t capable of a straight line and they have to slam on the brakes and sometimes actually hit the glass. I don’t know if anyone has gone over the edge into the water, but the physics provide a perfect storm of things that can go wrong. The City has realized there is an issue and they have slapped up a large red-and-white warning sign on the glass barriers to inform people that it’s a dead end. Once again, let’s face it. If you need to put warning signs on a design, it is basically a crappy design. Period.
The incline grade to climb the bridge also ignores best-practice standards for bicycle infrastructure, most of which were established in the 1920s and 1930s. The architect probably thought “bike,” and a spandexy dude on a racing bike popped into his head. The bridge is too steep. It is not designed for a mainstream bicycle city, and the architect didn’t bother researching the fact that in Copenhagen we have 40,000 cargo bikes filled with kids and goods.
The basic principles of Danish design—practical, functional, elegant—were sadly forgotten in the choice of this bridge.
On all the other bicycle bridges in Copenhagen, a simple boom will drop along with the sound of a pleasant but insistent ringing bell to stop cyclists and pedestrians when the bridge is opening. Compare that simple design to the huge, groaning barriers that rise like creatures from the black lagoon on the Inderhavnsbro.
Another detail is that there are no ramps on the stairs on the pedestrian side—unusual in Copenhagen, but necessary in this case. That is easily fixed, compared with the rest of the nightmare. The bridge was also funded by a philanthropic fund—but does this mean that we don’t have to be rational when we get free stuff? I can easily and rightfully criticize the architect who failed miserably at his task, but, lest we forget, there was a jury of Copenhageners who actually looked at this and voted “YES!” So there are many fools at this party.
With so many moving parts, breakdowns become inevitable. It’s already happened a number of times, with ships stuck on the wrong side because the bridge couldn’t open. A fancy-schmancy bridge in Kiel, Germany, ended up having so many problems that another bridge was built next to it, to be used when the fancy bridge breaks down. Is that where we are heading in Copenhagen?
The bicycle is returning but unfortunately it is without any decent design consistency. I see weird stuff out there.
The bridge is nothing more than “magpie architecture”—a shiny object that attracted the favor of the people who selected it. Seduced by bling and fake innovation instead of being guided by timeless rationality and the basic principles of Danish design—practical, functional, and elegant. They were sadly forgotten in the choice of this bridge. The shine will wear off and, I fear, we’ll be faced with more-expensive problems. It is important to make mistakes but it is paramount to learn from them.
My work is a roller-coaster ride of emotions. I travel constantly to cities, whether to do a keynote or to work with a client city. I see what is happening all over the world, in the most unlikely places. I am, by nature, an optimistic idealist. I seek out the positive first and drink from glasses that are half full. I get excited to see progress being made in designing for bicycle traffic and reallocating urban space for intelligent transport forms. The bicycle is returning, but unfortunately it is without any decent design consistency. I see weird stuff out there.
And I see a pattern. A mayor sends a directive down the pipeline. “Let’s build some infrastructure for bikes.” You can almost hear the groans coming out of the engineering departments. Much like back in the day when engineers were handed the task of improving traffic safety without any experience or knowledge, engineers are now sent out to squeeze bikes into their Matrix.
Crappy examples of bicycle infrastructure could fill a book on their own, but there are some examples that stand out where the wrong people were sent out to design for bikes. You can see this in the photo from Ljubljana, Slovenia. A classic example of ignoring a great deal of available space off to the left and instead taking space away from pedestrians. Bizarre bollards are added to the mix. Whoever put this in expressed no regard for logic, safety, or the human experience, and was blatantly ignorant of it all. Luckily, the street has been since redesigned for the better.
In 2017, I saw a new design for bike lanes in Barcelona. I laughed out loud when I stood there looking at it. It simply doesn’t make any sense. I showed my two kids this design. “What do you think of this?” Lulu-Sophia studied it for a moment and concluded that “it doesn’t look very clever.” Felix, in the midst of his moody teenager phase, just snorted and said, “That’s so stupid,” and went into his room. Both of them are absolutely right. Bizarrely, the next intersection further along had a completely different spaghetti-serving of painted lines. There is a sign up on a light post to educate people about how to use it. As ever, if you have to put up a sign to explain a design, it’s a crappy design.
Barcelona is a city that is a bit ahead of the curve. They are looking seriously at the bicycle as transport once again and putting money where their mouth is. But they will not accelerate towards a bicycle-friendly future if they let people freestyle like this. They risk having the designs fail, which is ammo for the sceptics.
I don’t know what individual was responsible for the first bike lane in the door zone. It’s easier to make up a list of city planners and engineers in far too many cities in the world who have put them in since. This is not good infrastructure. In fact, it’s not infrastructure at all. It’s paint. Putting cyclists between the door zone in a single-occupant vehicle society and moving traffic is insanity. It makes me throw up a little bit in my mouth. It does nothing to protect cyclists or to encourage cycling. It does a lot to let politicians claim they are all bicycle-friendly without spending much money or making any serious effort.
Sharrows? OMG. Don’t get me started on sharrows. The unwanted and unloved child of bicycle urbanism. I am so pleased that studies out there are now proving what we knew all along: that sharrows are completely useless. Cities shouldn’t be allowed to count sharrows when they publish the total length of their bike lanes. Hastily painted pictograms in the middle of car lanes are not infrastructure. They are the awkward watermark of lazy politicians and lazier transport professionals.
Hastily painted pictograms in the middle of car lanes are not infrastructure.
Then there are center-running lanes. These are the Donald Trumps of bicycle engineering. (Appropriately, Washington, DC, has installed one.) Initially, my international team of planners and urban designers at the Copenhagen Design Company headquarters had a good laugh when we saw a photo of it, but then it sinks in: this is actually a thing. Someone was tasked with putting in bicycle infrastructure and this is what a city ended up with. Taxpayers’ hard-earned money was used. I suggested on Twitter that the person responsible should be identified and promptly fired. A flippant remark—but still a serious one.
Bizarre and failed attempt in Ljubljana to squeeze bicycles into the car-centric Matrix.
One of the world’s most confusing infrastructure designs for bikes in Barcelona.
The stupidest place to put bicycles: in between the door zone and moving traffic.
Center-running bike lanes in Washington, DC ©Ole Kassow
The dreaded sharrow in its natural environment
Why, then, do we see crap like this showing up on city streets? Who, in their right mind, would actually choose to put cycling citizens in the middle of a street with speeding cars on either side? Certainly not anyone with an understanding of the bicycle’s role in urban life as transport, or with a sincere desire to encourage cycling and keep people safe. My first thought when seeing the photo was: How am I supposed to get to a destination in mid-block? Do I go up to the next intersection and walk my bike back? What if I’m cycling with my kids or older people? Would I really would I want to cycle with them on a barren wasteland as motorists fly past like it’s 1962? No humans were considered in the development of this solution. There is no respect for access or safety, and no broader idea of an intelligent, cohesive network. “Oh, but it works!” someone mutters from the shadowy wings of urbanism. What works, exactly? Cycling down this stretch is possible, yes. But it’s not safe. The sense of safety is fake at best and probably nonexistent. We are planning our cities for the next century of transport. It is important to plan properly, drawing upon solutions that are tried and tested. Using cyclists as guinea pigs in solutions whipped together by lazy, car-centric engineers is ridiculous when we know the best way to approach it.
The proponents of this center-running lark call it “context-sensitive design.” Just using the word design is an insult to generations of bicycle planners who worked so hard to establish best-practice. Perhaps the context of which they speak is idiocy. This DC solution is engineering in sheep’s clothing. Built by people who don’t understand human-centric design and who think that bikes are cars. But for those who insist on putting humans in the wasteland, what about just going all in? I tested the theory at my local wine bar the other evening. Didn’t feel at all comfortable. “Oh, but they have them in Barcelona!” Yes they do. And in Nantes. And in Sao Paulo. You know where they don’t have them? In countries that have been doing this for while.
Just because a couple of other cities have made the same mistake doesn’t make it a good idea. Just because Ugg boots or Crocs cover your feet and keep them warm or dry doesn’t mean they make sense as footwear. All that happened is that these cities allowed themselves to put their faith in engineers instead of designers or bicycle planners.
I have ridden on the center-running lanes in Barcelona several times, on holidays with my kids and while working in the city. There is no access to destinations or points of origin in mid-block. There are wide, arrogant intersections that force you to speed across them. The traffic lights are coordinated for car traffic, so you have to muscle it to catch the flow, which proved difficult with a nine-year-old kid. We spent days waiting at the lights at the end of every stretch of stupid. Luckily, the City has been made aware that such solutions are counterproductive to safety and growing cycling in the city, and local advocates have taken up the battle.
The center-running lane in the center of the French city of Nantes is also crappy design, but it is shouldered by low-speed car and tram lanes that allow easy access back and forth across the street. It fails, however, because it hardly provides any separation. It’s a sieve through which anyone can meander. But, at the very least, it has a calm, low-speed feel to it. The one slicing down the middle of São Paulo’s iconic boulevard Avenida de Paulista is an even bigger brain fart than the one in DC. A complete scandal.
One difference about Barcelona, like Nantes, is that much of the city is a 30 km/h (20 mph) zone. The City is focused on slowing the whole place down in order to save lives, reduce injuries, and create a more life-sized city. The center-running lanes lead to large roundabouts, which make at least a bit more sense than throwing you headlong into a car-centric intersection. The infrastructure in DC is focused on the fit and the brave, not The 99%. Hardly an intelligent way to grow cycling as transport.
Bidirectional cycle tracks pose a much higher risk to the cyclists than two one-directional ones. The difference on crossings is by a factor 2.
One rule of thumb to consider is a simple one: If you don’t see a particular infrastructure design in the Netherlands or in Denmark, it’s probably a stupid infrastructure design. If you wouldn’t put pedestrians in a center lane between moving traffic, why the hell would you put cyclists there? A rule of thumb for the ages. Don’t worry. The engineers and planners we need to fire will probably get other jobs. There’s other engineery stuff to do.
Bear with me on this rant. I get so incredibly frustrated thinking and writing about such designs. A major bone to pick is the on-street, bidirectional cycle track or bike lane. For clarity, when I say on-street, bidirectional I mean the creation of one lane for bicycles separated by a dotted line, allowing for two-way traffic—on city streets. I am not referring to a two-way path through a park or other areas free of motorized vehicles.
In Denmark, the on-street, bidirectional facility was effectively thrown out of the standards for bicycle infrastructure over two decades ago. That in itself should be an alarm bell to anyone paying attention. These two-way cycle tracks were found to be more dangerous than one-way cycle tracks on each side of the roadway. Having bicycles coming from two directions at once was an inferior design. It also proved difficult to connect them up with the unidirectional network. Two jigsaw puzzles that got mixed up.
We tried it out when we were getting the bike back into our cities, but this was also in an established bicycle culture where the cycling citizens and motorists are accustomed to one another. When I see this design being implemented in emerging bicycle cities where bikes are still being reintroduced, it makes my toes curl.
This isn’t about building stuff out of asphalt. We are planting seeds in the hopes that lush gardens will grow.
There are bidirectional cycle tracks in Copenhagen, and I’ll get into the best-practice standards in due time. They run through parks and down greenways, separated from motorized traffic, and on occasion they run on streets that have no cross streets. At all times they are placed where they actually make sense, to eliminate the risk of collision with cars and trucks. Cycle tracks are like sidewalks … you put them on either side of the street, except you keep them one-way.
I asked Theo Zeegers, a scientist who used to work at the Dutch national cycling organisation, Fietsersbond, about this issue. You see bidirectional cycle tracks in Dutch cities. He told me that:
“Bidirectional cycle tracks pose a much higher risk to the cyclists than two one-directional ones. The difference on crossings is about a factor of 2. So, especially in areas with lots of crossings (i.e., built-up areas), one-directional lanes are preferred. Not all municipalities get this message, however.”
Imagine removing a sidewalk on one side of the street and forcing pedestrians to share a narrow sidewalk on the other side of the street. You wouldn’t do that if you wanted to prioritize walking. You shouldn’t do it if you were serious about safety and prioritizing cycling.
The bidirectional cycle tracks we see in emerging bicycle cities can’t possibly be put there by people who know what they’re doing or who understand the needs of bicycle users or who really want cycling to boom. You can also see that in the width allocated to many of the tracks—incredibly narrow, making it a lip-biting experience just to pass oncoming cyclists and even making it a bit too hair-raising just to pass cyclists heading in the same direction.
Montreal has long been North America’s premier bicycle city, having been ahead of the curve since back in the late 1980s, when they started putting in bike lanes, most of them bidirectional. In 2017, the City is finally planning on building unidirectional lanes along the sidewalk, but they are discovering the difficulty in connecting them up with the existing infrastructure. My team studied an intersection in Montreal with our Desire Line Analysis Tool, and the cyclists we observed highlighted the difficulty in making the design work.
Another oft-muttered excuse is, “Well … it’s better than nothing”—usually spoken in a defensive tone. This is a flawed argument, lacking vision, commitment, and experience. A chair with two legs is better than nothing if you want to take a load off. But it’s not a long-term design solution, especially when we’re planning for the future.
This isn’t about building stuff out of asphalt. We are planting seeds in the hopes that lush gardens will grow. We have the seeds we need. They are fertile, natural, and ready to grow with minimal maintenance. Instead, though, people are choosing bags of GMO seeds from traffic planning’s Walmart. Limited fertility, modified for the simple needs of visionless gardeners. Potted plants instead of gardens. If someone advocates infrastructure like this and actually believes it is good, they probably shouldn’t be advocating bicycle infrastructure. If I proposed any of the above in a Danish city I would be a laughingstock. Let’s face it: the United States has given the world loads of brilliant, world-changing ideas and technology since the Industrial Revolution, but bicycle infrastructure is not one of them.
After decades of pumping out the same hard-core, failed infrastructure, American traffic engineers finally pulled something new out of their bag. Behold the DDI: Double Diamond Interchange. It is hailed by their industry as revolutionary, but really it’s nothing more than a tweak. In fact, it’s the world’s most expensive transport tweak, which will help them continue to get massive funding for their highways.
Copenhagenize Design Company’s client city, Long Beach, California, has been told by the California Department of Transportation, CalTran, that they’ll be getting two of them to lead the Los Angeles freeway system into their city. The city has always been fortunate in its location in Los Angeles. Freeways ended there but didn’t carve up the cityscape. Long Beach has said they don’t want the DDIs—but Uncle CalTrans gets to decide.
Desire Line Analysis of an intersection in Montreal showing how bidirectional infrastructure has inherent flaws.
The author testing center-running cafe chairs in Copenhagen.
Narrow bidirectional bike lanes in Barcelona. © Lorenz Siegel
We were tasked with improving bicycle and pedestrian mobility through the new interchange. I put a whole bunch of brains on the project to try and figure it out. The engineers who spawned this monster certainly haven’t helped. When you look at the designs, you notice areas marked “non-highway feature.” That is traffic-engineering-speak for sidewalks, which are considered so irrelevant that they aren’t even called sidewalks. Bicycle infrastructure? Completely nonexistent.
After a couple of weeks of brainstorming, we realized that there was no hope for redesigning the DDIs in any coherent way to improve bicycle and pedestrian mobility. Here is what we came up with instead. Sure. Ignoring the bull. But improving the transport network of Long Beach in doing so.
Along with these physical additions to the urban landscape, you can add various campaigns like Share the Road, Take the Lane, and moves to stipulate a minimum passing distance. Less demonstrative than paint, asphalt, and concrete and, no doubt, devised by people who mean well, they are still a declaration of transport bankruptcy. They are still awkward admissions that cars dominate and bikes are regarded as an invasive species.
Highway in Montreal with what engineers refer to as a “non-highway feature.” You know it as a sidewalk.
Copenhagenize Design Company’s solution to make a Double Diamond Interchange in Long Beach, California, bicycle and pedestrian friendly? We simply ignored it. Architect: Kan Chen