WHY?

The question we’ve been chasing this week is why does Copenhagen have the transportation system that they do? What we are learning is that they intentionally re-constructed and continue to build out their transportation system to help them meet their community values – these are some questions they asked themselves:

• what is the life we want in our city?
• what do people enjoy?
• how can we keep our children safe? (how can we keep everyone safe?)
• how can we keep our air clean?

I think it is most interesting that they base engineering and planning decisions on values, in addition to metrics and goals.  While they have strategic goals and create projects and programs to meet them, this is just more heart-centered than I have seen in other cities.

Copenhagen proper is 6.2 miles north-south and 8.6 miles east-west, so just 53 or so square miles. It is one of the most rapidly growing communities in Europe. In 2012 Copenhagen’s population was 549,050. In 2022 it has grown to 644,431.

In 1982 Copenhagen introduced its first protected bike lane. This was the result of many conversations with their community as they were exploring these questions. They were growing, and the only way to get around was by car. If it was hot, people loaded into their cars and headed to the beach. To get the kids to soccer and school, they loaded into the car. The streets were clogged, and becoming worse with congestion and air pollution. There were fatal crashes. Many good development sites were devoted to parking lots.  It really started to seem that this path forward was not sustainable.

But they were thoughtful in their approach.  As their thinking evolved, so did their metrics. They are currently working through projects in an adopted plan that runs from 2011 to 2025. So their big push for a protected bike network really began then. We are NOT that far behind!  The Copenhagen City Council adopted this plan to be carbon neutral by 2025.  But their growth plan adopted metrics such as:

• comfort
• safety
• speed (to prevent injury)
• and city life.

By creating a network of safe and comfortable bicycling, designing neighborhoods to support bicycling and community, and using many policies to make bicycling the easier choice, Copenhagen has been able to provide:

• strong sense of community
• serve an ever increasing population on a fixed network without congestion back ups
• low carbon emissions – low pollution – high air quality
• reduced crashes and injury rates
• less noise
• and a longer lasting pavement (less wear and tear)
• physical activity – lower preventable diseases
• low blood pressure
• low anxiety
• high happiness index.

Andreas Rohl from Jan Gehl Architects explained that for them, they think about public right-of-way differently – their main ROW concept is “this space is too important for a living space to have it be working just as a link for car traffic.”  This may be a new and uncomfortable idea for us in Bend, but it is interesting to think about how many citizen service requests we receive each year from residents who are incredibly uncomfortable in their own neighborhoods. How many times we hear that the speed of traffic on their neighborhood street is too fast? Do our neighborhood streets promote livability? Do they help connect neighbors on a personal level? Do they help our senior citizens feel welcome and able to walk around? Meet their neighbors? Have small daily chats? Do our kids know each other? Are their really close playgrounds for them to meet at and interact with each other?  Here playgrounds are different than parks.

The planners here seem to have a strong sense that their work is about increasing Invitation, Increasing Choice, and really understanding who they are designing for. Do people feel invited to explore public spaces? Do they feel welcome to play? Are neighborhoods exclusive and thus divisive?

Today’s meeting with Copenhagenize’s James Thoem shared some community surveys with us answering that question listed at the start of this blog – WHY do people bike in Denmark, or in Copenhagen?

1. Quick and Easy – 53%
2. Easy 50%
3. Exercise 40%
4. Cheap 27%
5. Environment 7%

Note that those aren’t going to add to 100%, because it was a ranked survey.

It is interesting that their city council voted for this awesome bike network to meet an environmental goal. But the residents bike for many other more personal reasons, but mainly because Copenhagen has designed their transportation system to make biking somewhere easier than driving.

They fabricate space for open space, plazas, even new development space by allowing their rights of way to be more versatile.

They find that they can move 10 times the number of people down the street when they changed the metric to how many people can we move rather than how many cars can we move. They note that it is simple math.

James recommended cities do the following:

• find your inertia breakers – if you have a certain awesome facility build on that – extend it, connect to it, have several awesome facilities – connect those with protected bikeways.
• communicate intentional policies – because we simply can’t serve everyone using a car in the future as we grow but also include things people will relate to (clean air, safer children, more livable neighborhood)
• pilot projects so they can be experienced – frame it as a research project, and plan to keep tweaking it until it works well.
• Adjust development codes to make walking and biking easier than driving (elevators don’t go to the parking garage level of the apartment complex – but let you out on the ground floor so you have to walk past your bike parking space first (there is still ADA parking close to the building) is just one example; others include bike/ped routes are primary into a new apartment complex – they connect people from their front doors as well as play areas directly onto the connected walk/bike network – whereas driving routes are not direct, less convenient, and circuitous.