Streetfilms: Copenhagen’s Climate-Friendly, Bike-Friendly Streets

Tens of thousands of people from nearly every nation on earth have descended on Copenhagen this month for the UN climate summit. As the delegates try to piece together a framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, they’re also absorbing lessons from one of the world’s leading cities in sustainable transportation. In Copenhagen, fully 37 percent of commute trips are made by bike, and mode share among city residents alone is even higher.

Copenhagen wasn’t always such a bicycling haven. It took many years of investment in bike infrastructure to reclaim streets from more polluting, less sustainable modes. Last week, I was able to squeeze in a whirlwind tour with Mikael Colville-Andersen, the bike culture evangelist behind Copenhagenize and Copenhagen Cycle Chic, to get a taste of the city’s impressive bike network and cycling amenities. Watch this video and see how Copenhageners flock to the streets by bike even in December, when average temperatures hover just above freezing.

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T.A. Rides with the Mayors of Sydney & Copenhagen

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T.A. Rides with the Mayors of Sydney & Copenhagen A StreetFilm by Clarence Eckerson Jr. Running Time: 3 minutes 3 seconds On the closing day of New York City’s historic C40 Climate Summit, Lord Mayor Clover Moore of Sydney, Australia and Copenhagen’s Mayor of the Technical & Environmental Administration Klaus Bondam took a lunch break […]

Building a Better Bike Lane

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This weekend’s Wall Street Journal has an massive, full-page report on bike friendly cities in Europe. Initially the arguments for more biking were mostly about health and congestion, but in the last year concern for the environment has become an important factor compelling people to travel by bicycle: Flat, compact and temperate, the Netherlands and […]

Copenhagen Cycle Ambassador Says Bikes Are Hot

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If you’ve been following bicycle blogs for any amount of time at all, you’ve probably stumbled upon Mikael Colville-Andersen, who runs the blogs Copenhagenize and Copenhagen Cycle Chic. (We often feature his posts on the Streetsblog Network.) On Tuesday afternoon, he brought his inimitable style of bike advocacy (pretty spiffy, though low-key) to Columbia University […]

Biking the Last Mile in Suburban Copenhagen

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Tooling around on Google, Dan Malouff at Greater Greater Washington stumbled on the above image from suburban Copenhagen. What’s right with this picture? Note the (a) bike parking lot at the Friheden Street transit station, just across the (b) sidewalk from the (c) bike lane. Writes Malouff: One of the most important uses for bicycles […]

Notes on Bicycling in Copenhagen

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Copenhagen, Denmark is not a natural bicycling city. In the early 1960’s it was very much of a car town. In 1962 the city created its first pedestrian street, the Stroget, and every year since then Copenhagen has allocated more and more of its public space to bicycles, pedestrians and people who just want to sit […]