Copenhagen, City of Bicycles: Less a Template Than a Set of Questions

One-off construction that shows fast results is easy. Sustained, invisible design is hard.

Copenhagen is a "city on bicycles." In 2016, the number of bikes in the city passed the number of cars for the first time.

Numbers aside, cycling here also means a smooth ride. None of the roadblocks common in other cities are present: parking spaces don't eat into the bike lanes, no path suddenly dead-ends, bikes can be taken onto the metro, buses and ferries, and a clear signage system tells you where you can park.

Anne Katrine Harders has lived in the city for 14 years. These days her family's main vehicle is a cargo bike. The box on the front holds her backpack, her documents, the groceries, her daughter — or an elderly passenger. Anne volunteers for Cycling Without Age, a charity whose volunteers spend their free time taking older residents with limited mobility for rides around Copenhagen. Its slogan is a romantic one: "Everyone has the right to feel the wind in their hair."

Anne studied product design at university, and she tells the story of this cargo bike. It was born in an era of having nothing, designed by a group of hippies on the outskirts of Copenhagen.

In the 1970s, a group of artists occupied a 34-hectare abandoned military base and declared it outside Danish jurisdiction: Freetown Christiania, where residents wrote their own laws and governed themselves.

From the start, the rebels set themselves against the modernist spirit beyond the walls and banned motor vehicles. To solve the problem of getting things from place to place, a blacksmith turned a batch of discarded bed frames into trailers. In 1984 he designed one that could be hitched to a bicycle and gave it to his girlfriend for her birthday.

Outside the Freetown, the Danish government had come through two oil crises with a heavy deficit and could no longer afford to build bridges and roads, while ordinary people could not afford what a car cost. The load-carrying Christiania Bike was cheap, and it swept Denmark, becoming for a time the handiest small vehicle for running a household and moving goods.

"At university I believed that if a product was good enough it would sell itself. Later I found that getting it from the factory onto the street means solving a pile of real-world problems. When you design a bicycle, you can set its performance for a limited number of conditions. But making cycling flow across a whole city is a systemic problem on a much larger scale."

Anne is now a senior project manager at the Danish Architecture Center (DAC), where she studies cycling culture and urban design. Her team is often invited by other cities to come and look at whether a "bike-friendly city" is feasible there.

Before that, though, the people issuing the invitations usually skip a question. This is no longer an era of having nothing; people have far more ways to get around. So why do we still need bicycles? What problem can they actually solve? Will they create new ones?

I Bike CPH: From "Historical Coincidence" to City Brand

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mass-produced bicycles were already on Danish streets, moving from a pastime of upper-class families to transport for ordinary people. Bicycles took over Copenhagen's streets; at first their rivals were horses and carriages, and everyone had to pick a way through narrow, muddy roads.

Cyclists and pedestrians were first threatened by cars in the 1960s. Almost every city then was thrilled by a "city of the future" defined by cars and high mobility — tearing down old quarters to build wide roads and bridges.

We once interviewed the Danish urban designer Jan Gehl. Copenhagen's livability, he said, was not a deliberate choice by far-sighted intellectuals or officials but a historical coincidence.

After the war Denmark also tried to build a city of the future, but two oil crises stopped all the heavy construction. "History is a bit strange," Gehl said. "At the time many people regretted that Denmark had missed the modernist wave, but today people think it was our good luck."

The oil crises pushed the Danish government to develop clean alternative energy and to tax car ownership heavily, and Danish cities began working out how to make walking and cycling quick and easy. From the 1980s to 2000, the Copenhagen government cut parking spaces by 2% every year, clearing more room for bicycles.

"Copenhageners don't think cycling has anything to do with being fashionable. It's simply part of daily life."

It took an American to make Copenhagen see what its bicycles were worth. In 2007 Janette Sadik-Khan, then commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation, visited the city and invited Jan Gehl to New York to remake a "Copenhagen-style" downtown.

Broadway became a car-free zone. During her tenure Sadik-Khan also built 400 miles of bike lanes and more than 60 public plazas. In her book Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, she explains what it means to return a city to human scale: it eases congestion, helps business, and brings the street back to life.

More invitations followed, one after another. In 2008, Copenhagen City Hall launched I Bike CPH. Its purpose-built logo, like "I ♥ NY," took over billboards across the city with a single visual identity, and it became one of the city's most successful pieces of global branding.

Magazines such as Monocle began writing about Danish and Dutch cycling culture, their pages full of fully kitted-out models and handsomely designed bicycle gear. Pushed along by all this, cycling became a lifestyle: fashionable, politically correct, beyond question.

What people tend to miss is that beyond the branding, the plan also included a set of measures to get people riding. The I Bike CPH app, for one, is a map built for cyclists that finds the quickest route. You can also filter for routes suited to cargo bikes, which keeps you off steps and cobblestones.

What Problem Can a Bicycle Solve for Your City?

Anne's colleagues have been everywhere — North America, Europe, East Asia, even Africa — and everyone they meet is enthusiastic, telling Anne how much they love Danish cycling culture and how they hope to bring the same unhurried way of living to their own city.

"At first it felt exciting, but then I began to worry, because most people can't answer one question: why do you like bicycles, and what problem can they solve for your city?"

Whether people treat the bicycle as a fashionable middle-class lifestyle or as a piece of sustainability work, they fail to answer it. Does a city want the bicycle to become its main way of commuting, or to supplement the transport system it already has by solving the last mile, or simply to serve as leisure and exercise?

"All of those are reasonable positions. But if you're not clear about which one you want, that's when the trouble starts."

The Guardian once collected some of the absurd bike lanes found in cities around the world. You will probably recognize them.

On the streets of Marseille, cars sit squarely across the bike lane. In Valencia, a pole of no obvious purpose stands in the middle of one. Bankrupt Greece received 3 million euros from the EU to build bike lanes, but on Crete people found that these "new" lanes had no visible beginning or end — they dead-ended abruptly, then picked up again at some unnamed spot a few kilometers away.

A road sign in Warsaw informs you that a brick-paved sidewalk is also "part of" the bike lane. The reader who uploaded the photo was indignant: "Who cares whether anyone actually uses them? At least people can say Warsaw has 50 kilometers of bike path. That's enough."

"The same design in a different context produces a completely different result."

In 2017 the Xiamen city government invited the Danish architecture firm Dissing+Weitling to build an elevated bicycle skyway through the center of Xiamen, 7.6 kilometers long, crossing five residential districts and three commercial ones. The firm had made its name with Copenhagen's Bicycle Snake bridge in 2014.

"The Snake appears in Copenhagen, and in that spot it is the right design," Anne says. It links two areas that were cut off from each other, so people can move between them. "The bicycle is already the best option in Copenhagen, so building a bridge only for bikes follows naturally."

"But I don't think raising a bike lane into the air is a clever design. It's more of a gimmick, a city landmark."

Like Anne, Jan Gehl has on several occasions rejected the value of elevated bike bridges. The point of cycling, he argues, is to experience street life — to be able to stop whenever you like, walk into an interesting shop, talk to someone.

"An elevated path with the street experience stripped out can only take you from A to B. True, there are no red lights and no cars in the way. But people have other ways to get from A to B, so why must it be a bicycle? The street becomes nothing but your backdrop."

The Xiamen skyway, now open, has drawn criticism, some of it about how awkward it is to get on and off. The architect Steen Savery Trojaborg discussed the compromises at the entrances and exits in an interview: they were to be ramps wherever possible, but space was tight, and in the end he made the entrance a spiral.

"Cycling in Copenhagen is a system. If this were Copenhagen, we would build an entrance convenient enough — convenience comes first, even if it takes sign-off from several departments. That, of course, is also why Copenhagen is so inefficient."

Visible Construction, Invisible Design

More often than not, though, Anne and her colleagues find that what wins a client over is still the construction you can see.

"We put a lot of effort into explaining the invisible but crucial parts of Copenhagen's cycling system — local policy, the supporting facilities and services. Compared with a one-off building project, these small, fiddly things are hard to push through. There's no shortcut."

Mikael Colville-Andersen is the CEO of Copenhagenize, a design firm that promotes "Copenhagen-style" cycling culture. He has gone through the details at length.

Copenhagen's bike lanes are a complete system. Unlike in Chinese cities, where cars routinely take over the bike lane, Copenhagen has cut curbside parking downtown. Most lanes are raised, built with their own curbs and their own drainage.

Within the mixed road system, bicycles enjoy certain privileges. On some streets that are one-way for cars, bikes may travel both ways, and rivers and rail lines are not obstacles either. The city is still building footbridges, underpasses and other grade-separated crossings to move cyclists faster. Most intersections give bikes signal priority and a green wave timed for cyclists, usually at least a four-second head start.

Since 2010, passengers have been allowed to take bicycles onto the metro, trains and other rail transit free of charge. Large stations and interchanges have big above- and below-ground bicycle parking, and even repair services.

Copenhagen also encourages people to find the holes in the cycling system from the bottom up. City Hall built an app called Giv os et praj, which lets people photograph any problem they spot on the road and mark it on a map. Someone comes to fix it soon after — a pothole, a broken traffic light, any of a hundred small nuisances. Users can also track the progress of their report. Anne's mother has filed many, and now and then she points to the side of the road and says she is the one who "got that hole filled."

The harder thing may be changing how people think. Anne says people are pushing Copenhagen City Hall to redesign the yardsticks it uses to measure development.

"For instance, when you count the traffic at an intersection, the traditional method counts cars. Pedestrians and cyclists are obstacles; they are the 'problem' slowing the cars down! That way of counting has to change. Beyond economics, how do you count social costs and benefits? Copenhagen's revolution still has work to do."

Cover image / Danish National Tourist Board