Ilove this country. I would want to move here if it wasn’t so gothically expensive and if I didn’t just know I would be so obviously the ugliest person in the entire Danish peninsula that in order to faithfully portray my place in the pecking order I would, by rights, have to waft dark odors and wear a tolling bell.
I love it, yes, because of the bikes — but even before I first flexed my buttocks, as it were, I’d become deeply enamored of the national psyche. The simple and so welcomely different getting-it-rightness of it all. It was explained to me, for instance, in a friendly little jazz club, that I could smoke if I wanted to, because the place held fewer than 40 people. In Britain, this was an early argument for banning smoking in smaller pubs — the beautiful Danish logic surmises instead that, with most places non-smoking, if you go into a much smaller place it’ll be because you really want to and know there might be smoking, therefore don’t mind at all. Flawless when you think about it.
Then there’s the reason I’m here. 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. It’s absurdly flat, everywhere. However, there was real political commitment, a £15 million (US$25 million) annual budget set up and a seven-strong department created, including a chief of cycling, Andreas Rohl. 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.
Today, 55 percent 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 percent 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 percent rise in cyclists and a 10 percent reduction in cars (and new cars are now taxed at 180 percent).
Enough with the percents though, it just works, and the more it works, the more it works, if you see what I mean. I realized, perhaps belatedly, while freewheeling happily down the Torvegade Bridge on my way to see the self-proclaimed “free state” of Christiania (don’t bother, it’s just hippies and graffiti and dope, and the only dirty part of the city), that a kind of tipping point or critical mass has been reached, and passed. After a certain mileage of cycle tracks and lanes has been established, there’s really no need to keep going, no need for any more. The number of cars has dwindled to such an extent that they, the honking growling motors, feel like the threatened species. Sat there hot and sweaty and trying to negotiate the one-ways and bollards and canals and bridges filling the touristy center, while the bikes roll airily, sweetly, by and up, and over and around, and across. There were times it was fabulously easy to forget you were in a capital city, after cycling for five minutes without seeing or hearing one car. The average speed across the city by bicycle is 15kph, for motorists 27kph.
RSS