Looking longingly at Danish cycling culture

©CPH-bike-right-turn-lane_0064
15 years ago ago by Matthew Blackett.
(Photo: mattblackett)

This Guardian journalist, Euan Ferguson, has some nice things to say about Danish bike culture and feels out of place with their overabundance of beautiful people, most of whom happen to be on bikes.

Copenhagen is the future: Copenhagen is Cycle City. And, gloriously, unlike perhaps everything else called an "urban initiative" since about the dawn of time, from cave boot sales to recycling schemes, this actually works.

Just a couple of years ago the city decided to go green in a big way, and one of the first things it did was get big on cycling. It wasn't the hardest of calls. Already there were a lot of bikes, and Copenhagen isn't Lisbon or Rio or even Sheffield (you really wouldn't mistake it for Sheffield). It's absurdly flat, everywhere. But there was real political commitment, a £15m annual budget set up and a seven-strong department created including what we would doubtless call a Cycling Tsar, Andreas Rohl; and now there are 20km of 2m-wide raised cycle tracks and a further 150km of marked cycle lanes on the roads. And it has, honestly, worked beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

So that's the trick, isn't it? Just take cycling seriously and put some money towards it?

Today, 55 per cent of those working or studying in Copenhagen now commute by cycle. Add in leisure pursuits and shopping, and the figure rises to an astonishing 89 per cent - of all people in this city of 1.7 million, old and young, hearty and halt. Every time a new track is established the instant change is a 20 per cent rise in cyclists and a 10 per cent reduction in cars (and new cars are now taxed at 180 per cent).

©CPH-bike-parking-transit_0318
15 years ago ago by Matthew Blackett.
(Photo: mattblackett)

Unlike Britain, where still there's a kind of vague if fading camaraderie among cyclists, with occasional nods of recognition - and certainly many tribal feelings, given that the whole damned thing's a battle against the car - Copenhagen cyclists no more notice the fact that someone else is on a bike than they notice that someone else is in possession of a head. Absolutely everyone cycles. Which was terribly handy, regarding shaky confidence, for those who, like me, hadn't been on one in a couple of years. I expected to be overtaken, constantly, cheerfully, by the city's many long-limbed young things; but nothing gets you over any junction jitters, or gets your own legs working in something approaching an acceptable rhythm, like being passed breezily by an 80-year-old woman carrying the weekly shop on her back while talking on her mobile. Shame is the spur.

I see a day when I can be ho-hum about all the cyclists on the road and start blogging about something else such as martinis. (Or the best martini to drink while cycling?)