Copenhagen is Great ... but it's not Amsterdam

Copenhagen is a great city one of the world's best if you follow urban planning at all you'll see that Copenhagen comes up constantly as a gold standard that all other cities should aspire to especially when it comes to cycling when you visit it's not hard to see why Copenhagen is full of great walkable neighborhoods that are some of the world's best urban environments there are fantastic cafes shops and restaurants busy all year round there are lots of these great pedestrian streets too and it's easy to get around the city by public transport and by bicycle in fact Copenhagen was even rated the best city in the world for cycling by people who live in Copenhagen we took the train to Copenhagen late last year which was great because we were able to take the train ferry between Germany and Denmark before it was shut down to build a tunnel I love trains that go on boats it's really interesting to go to Copenhagen from Amsterdam because the difference has become really clear Copenhagen is great but it's not Amsterdam or any other Dutch city for that matter and I think it's interesting to look at the reasons why because it gets to some of the finer details of great urban design for example some of the roads here in Copenhagen are really wide like really really wide without much to break them up and like any wide road some drivers drive really fast on them which is pretty unpleasant if you're outside of a car you'll see some traffic coming in Copenhagen but it's nothing like the countrywide and consistent safe street design that you'll find in the Netherlands for example I was surprised to find wide streets like this that were right in the city centre without any traffic coming at all here's an unusually wide road for Amsterdam built in a car friendly 1960s but today you see that there are grassy tree-lined medians wide cycle paths and a dedicated transit right-of-way this road in Copenhagen is just huge a sea of asphalt no median no transit lane no trees and a very wide but totally unprotected bicycle lane this would never fly in the Netherlands speaking of trees there aren't a lot in Copenhagen they do have some trees of course but it's remarkable how much of my footage has huge streets with no trees at all that's unheard of in Amsterdam there are trees everywhere here I've looked through hours of video footage and I've only found this once tree without trees on it if you know of another one please let me know in the comments there's a lot of buses in Copenhagen which is great but unfortunately there are no trams which are my personal favourite form of public transportation the last tram lines were torn up in the 1970s and none has been rebuilt and unfortunately those buses get stuck in traffic a lot as there are surprisingly few dedicated bus lanes considering how why the streets are there are a lot of trains however it's mostly heavy rail but the coverage in the frequency is more like a metro and a true modern metro system has been built over the past few decades one nice thing is that it's very easy to take your bicycle on the train in Copenhagen much more than medellin however I think if you tried this in the Netherlands the train would become so full of bicycles that it would be completely impractical but let's talk about the big one the one the planners swoon over and awards are one for let's talk about cycling in Copenhagen there's no doubt that a lot of people cycling Copenhagen and they have some great cycling infrastructure too so I think the guy that designed this cycling bridge with a completely unnecessary sharp turn has never been on a bicycle in his adult life coming from the Netherlands though I find the black asphalt of the cycling path to be confusing at times the asphalt looks like the rest of the road and like the sidewalk so I'm sometimes not quite sure I'm in the right place I definitely prefer the distinctive red asphalt of the Netherlands cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands is so ubiquitous and polished that most people assume that it's always been this way but it hasn't the Netherlands just started improving their streets before other countries did so they have a head start by comparison a lot of Copenhagen's bicycle infrastructure still feels bolted on even some of the new looking infrastructure feels very basic and just made with paint and there are a lot of these weird blobs of asphalt all over the place where it looks like somebody decided after the fact to let people cycle here here's a good example I've heard this is the widest cycling path in the world and I can believe it this is obviously a city that cares about cycling but then look at the entrance to this bridge this giant 2-way cycling path connects to one way cycling pass at the junction it's so convoluted that they had to put up this sign to explain it now I know why this was done because the bridge was retrofitted and the retrofitted part wasn't strong enough to carry cars so the bicycles all needed to go on one side but to me it shows that Copenhagen is still car-centric enough that this bridge in junction design was considered good enough for such a major through affair connecting to one of the most significant cycling bridges in the city it was painful to watch this intersection at rush hour with lots of people just saying screw it and riding on the opposite side walk in general the intersections in Copenhagen are just bad in the Netherlands it's hard to find a major junction without these protective islands and other safety features but in Copenhagen you're just dumped into these wide intersections with only blue paint to protect you from cars and in general you find yourself at intersections a lot in Copenhagen there are almost no roundabouts and I had trouble finding good routes that avoided major junctions it definitely made me miss the Netherlands where there's a concerted effort to allow people to cycle long distances without ever needing to stop but the worst part of all is these combined bicycle lane car turn lanes that aren't everywhere in the city one moment you're riding on a nice curb protected bicycle path on the next moment you're dumped into a shared Lane with turning cars this design is legitimately scary when the vehicle next to you is a bus I have never felt this nervous riding a bicycle anywhere in the Netherlands if you ask me this feature alone never mind the rest of the intersection design should automatically disqualify Copenhagen from being the world's most cycling friendly city as for bicycle parking in Copenhagen it's generally not very good even at major train stations and metro stations there are almost no indoor bicycle parking lots it's nothing like the futuristic bicycle garages that you'll find in the Netherlands and as you get out of Copenhagen into other cities in Denmark the cycling facilities are a bit hit-and-miss and often not as good as they are in Copenhagen for example look at how narrow this cycling path is in viola that's quite different from Amsterdam where cycling is good but the best cycling facilities are often found in the smaller cities and towns in the Netherlands and not in Amsterdam so the question remains if Copenhagen is nowhere near Dutch cities when it comes to bicycle infrastructure or street design in general then why is it so popular among urban planners from car centric places there are several possible explanations but I actually suspect that the biggest reason why Copenhagen is so well liked by foreign planners is because it's achievable when a planner from somewhere car-dependent visits Copenhagen they'll be blown away by the number of people walking cycling and taking public transit especially cycling but more importantly all of this exists despite the roads not being that different from where they're from so our hypothetical planner will look at this and think ok ok the bike lanes have a curb they're wider than where I'm from but I can deal with this I need some blue paint for the intersections and there have to be a few good quality cycling roads into the city centre but I don't need to put bicycle paths on every big street bus service is more frequent but I don't need to remove a car lane in most cases and I don't need to build any light rail yeah I can do this but when that planner comes to a Dutch city they'll also be blown away by the number of people walking cycling and taking public transit and that's especially the cycling but it will look like some kind of alien planet by comparison wait there are protective curbs at every intersection you're telling me that cars aren't allowed to go here buses and trams get their own lane and a green light before the cars there's cycling facilities on every major street and on top of all of this there's a whole parallel network of bicycle paths separate from all the car streets I have enough trouble getting approval for a painted bicycle gutter how the hell am I gonna explain this from an urban planning perspective I think this is the real value of Copenhagen it's the achievable sellable believable next step in urban design Copenhagen has cars and wide streets but still has great walkability and good public transport Copenhagen has bad weather and winter but it still has massive amounts of year-round cycling and successful pedestrian streets it's the excuse busting example that should be followed by cities all over the world there's really no good reason why most of the world cities couldn't be like this in ten years if they made it a priority so let's hold up Copenhagen as an example and allow cities of the world to leave their 1960s car centric streets behind them and when those cities are as good as Copenhagen they can look to Amsterdam and the rest of the Netherlands to learn how to build the really great people centric city of the 21st century because once you've cope and agonized then it's time to Netherlands eyes

Channel: Not Just Bikes

Views: 828,859

Keywords: urban planning, copenhagen, cycling infrastructure copenhagen, cycling infrastructure netherlands, cycling infrastructure, urban design, copenhagenize

Id: HjzzV2Akyds

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 23 2020