July 8th

Copenhagenize Design Company:

Today started off with a presentation from Copenhagens former mayor, and current CEO of Copenhagenized Design Co.; Morten Kabell. The presentation touched on the current work his company does; they help cities implement infrastructure to make cities more bikable and inturn better places to live. They work with the idea of "we are not cyclists, we are just people who happen to get around by bike". This really shows how they focus on bringing simplicity, and logic into city planning and design, which has worked nearly everywhere. Something I found very interesting was a graphic Morten showed on how he thinks commutes should be through cities:

If you were to implement this much like Copenhagen has in there transportation design, it would almost force people to use bikes rather than cars. After all, humans are lazy, and we most often do what is easiest. These sort of simple ideas and designs are things I believe all cities could use, especially ones with bad planning infrastructure. 

After Morten talked about the work he does, he gave us a brief background on how Copenhagen came to be what it is today. In fact, we learned that 50 years ago barley anyone commuted or even used bikes to get around the city. Through a push from the people of the city and intense planning since the 1970s, they have made it into the best biking city in the world. It was quite interesting to learn about the logistics behind the infrastructure put into place to make Copenhagen more bikable. Things such as raised bikeways don't allow cars to swerve into them. Bike paths are often wide enough for people to be biking side by side with enough space for people to pass them. They have separate traffic lights for modes of transportation. These designs along with several others not only make the riders experience safer but more pleasant as well.

Infrastructure research:

This is a painted bike lane in an intersection between two raised bike paths. This serves a great purpose. With raised paths it extremely easy to see where the bike lane starts and ends, but you can't have them go through intersections for obvious reasons (cars would have to either go up or down a curb to get onto their preferred street). This fully painted blue box allows bikers, cars, and pedestrians to see where exactly the bike lane continues before the raised pathway begins again. While watching its use there wasn't a single biker who strayed out of the lines and cars stopped well before the blue paint began and left plenty of room for the bikers.

This painted lane does a lot of the same work as the last. This one is here to show bikers who are turning onto this street without a specified bike lane for most of its length what side of the street to stay on. For the most part, it worked. A lot of bikers strayed out of what would be the lines if it continued when there were no cars, but as soon as cars started coming down the road bikers would go back into that area of the street.

Here we have large bike parking racks placed next to a famous shopping street. This is significant because you are not supposed to ride your bike down the shopping street. This bike rack is consistently full, I've walked past it multiple times. This allows people to conveniently park their bike very close to where they're shopping, it also gives a closer parking option than any car parking spot near it. This one of the ways you can convince people to bike more.

This is a bidirectional painted bike path. It cuts right through a city square in which you cant bike. Normally bidirectional paths are bad because they can be very uncomfortable and dangerous (especially through blind corners). But I find that this one works really well. You have no blind corners and it cyclists from two streets on another side to go through the square instead of having to go all the way around the block. It seemed to be used frequently as well. Once again how much like water following the path of least resistance humans will follow the path of most convenience.