With the many hours of daylight (around 18-19 hours) comes busy days for the students and professionals. We generally start the day around 9:00 or 9:30, meeting with local professionals or city staff. In the past week, we met with representatives from the Traffic Playground (Trafiklegepladsen), Gehl a local urbanism/design firm, and Copenhagenize a local firm that specializes in bicycle transportation.
Gehl and Copenhagenize gave us overviews of Copenhagen’s approach to urban living and transportation, and then showed around town via bike. It’s always interesting for students and professionals to hear there is no “silver bullet” to urban transformation. In Copenhagen’s case, they were relatively broke in the 80s (oil crisis) and as the city grew they needed better ways to transport people around their city. For them, it was easy and inexpensive to construct bicycle lanes on the edge of their existing roadways. This created the backbone of their future cycle network, a raised, unidirectional bike lane between the motor vehicle road and sidewalk. However their real transformation didn’t begin until the early 2000’s with the leadership of a mayor invested in adding more cycle infrastructure. But, perhaps their biggest difference compared with the US, and one of the bigger surprises Americans learn is that they don’t stop improving their infrastructure, and don’t stop improving their overall network. They are continually working to add more cycle infrastructure. After presentations in the office we always go for a cycle tour around the city. We generally end around 12:30 or 1:00, and then give the students an afternoon assignment that involves cycling around the city exploring. We intentionally send them off in pairs or on their own, so they get the true experience of being a local traveling by bike, as opposed to a group of 17 tourists biking around together. Rebecca and I will generally head back to where we’re staying to relax and catch up on a few things, and then venture back out for happy hour, dinner, or evening drinks with some of the professionals. Copenhagen is such a stimulating city that it can be hard to ever want to go home, but we would typically get back to our flat around 10:30 or 11:00 and head to bed before waking up at 7:30 to do it all over again! Here are some photos of the group biking, happy hour at the docks, evening bike rides, and other neat stuff from bike tours!
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AuthorLover of bikes, bread and people. Transportation nerd by day, salty New Englander most of the time. ArchivesCategories |