Skip to main content

July 5th

I arrived in Copenhagen last night after a grueling 10-hour layover in Iceland due to layovers. On my way to the hostel, I got lost multiple times. If it weren't the open friendliness of the people who live here I might not have ever found my hostel in the first place. Someone actually went out of their way to ask if I was lost and give me directions.
Due to jet lag and people who snore louder than Snorlax himself, I could barely get any sleep. So I decided at 6:00 AM to get up and get lost... this was the best decision I could have made! During my exploration, I started noticing things about the city that make it seem so ideal. There's a park every few blocks, barely any litter, beautiful street art, everyone bikes, and everyone to respect one another as well as there surroundings.


Later on in the day once our group had settled in and rented bikes, we made it a goal to get lost again. This was a completely different experience on bikes. Not only can you see much more of the city faster on a bike, but you also start to get an understanding of Copenhagens prominent bike culture. Here, transportation is an ecosystem in which everything has respect for their counterparts, whether that be drivers respecting cyclists, cyclists respecting each other, or even public transportation and pedestrians be respected by cyclists. This is not how I see America's transportation situation. In the U.S. All anyone seems to care about deeply is drivers. In Copenhagen they also allow cyclists to use nearly any street safely. Nearly all major streets have a raised bikeway, allowing the cyclists to get to where they're going as fast as possible while being safe. So far Copenhagen seems like what I've always learned a city should be,  except for the severe lack of minorities and people of color. But that's another issue. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

July 21st

On Sunday the group and I had the opportunity to tour the countryside surrounding Utecht by following the river Rhine, as well as experience the suburb master-planned for bike use known has Houten. The ride to Houten was absolutely beautiful. Full of great views, WW2 bunkers, tons of sheep and cattle, and even a stop to swim, I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it. A lot of this ride was either on or adjacent to the roadway in which cars and motorcycles were going pretty fast. At first, this was a scary thought, but to our luck, the power bikes have over moto vehicles in the city carried over to the countryside. Cars and cycles would either wait until they had a safe way to pass us and go around if needed and all of them slowed down significantly when coming near and passing us. This reassured me that I, in fact, was safe. This experience was a little to me. Not that I felt unsafe biking around the countryside of Denmark or Sweden, but here it really felt like I was the m...
Post a Comment
Read more

July 17th

July 16th was the first and only full day we had in Malmö. It started with a lecture from two of Malmö's urban planners in their city hall building. Malmö is growing extremely fast and what the citie's plan is to not increase car use as the population increases. They plan to do this in many ways, one being infrastructure. Right now they are trying to rethink the street, they call it Bicycle streets 2.0. Their ideas include cutting cars out of roads and making them specifically for bikes, giving bikes right aways in intersections and adding in bidirectional bike paths. I found that the idea of bidirectional pathways bad, and even unnecessary at some points, even though the Malmöplanners decided on them through doing tons of research. I didn't spend to much time on the cities bike lanes but when I was on the bi-directional pathways, I felt very uncomfortable. Bikes are coming at you from the opposite direction, often in very close quarters. I understand that on some small s...
Post a Comment
Read more