Parting reflections

We got back home to Oregon last night. While it may be true that there’s no place like home, I can’t help but feel like I’d rather be in Denmark. With our ultra-right extremist Supreme Court, rampant gun violence, and out of control poverty and houselessness, the U.S. feels more dystopian than ever, while Denmark feels like a utopia in so many ways.

Streets are for people, not for cars.

The quality of the transportation systems and public spaces, and the communal spirit of everyone looking out for each other just don’t exist in the U.S. Take for example our trip to the Copenhagen airport yesterday morning. We were in the city of Odense, which for comparison purposes is conveniently about the same size as Eugene and at 165 km is the same distance from Copenhagen as Eugene is from Portland. We took a train from Odense to Copenhagen airport that only takes one hour and runs every half hour. The train from Eugene to Portland takes three hours on a good day and runs only four times per day. Oh, and it doesn’t even go to the airport. For that, you would have to transfer to MAX light rail.

Riding in style. Copenhagen’s Metro system is extremely modern and efficient, featuring automated (driverless) trains, platform screen doors, 24-hour operation, and headways of 4 minutes or less.

My fellow Scan Design Fellow, Andrew Martin and I were talking about these themes while on a bike ride the other day. The Danish transportation system has a level of redundancy built in for all modes that the U.S. system only has for automobiles. You can get where you need to go faster and more easily by biking, taking transit, or a combination of both, than by driving. Trains and buses run frequently enough and to and from enough places that you don’t really need to plan your trip, you just go at the nearest station and the system takes care of you.

The same is true for biking. As you would with a car in the U.S., you just hop on your bike and go. If it starts raining, as it did on Andrew and me during our ride, just go to the nearby transit stop and hop on a train or a bus.

On the left, motorists wait in traffic as cyclists leisurely pass them by on the right.

Andrew and I reflected on the feelings of joy and freedom we experienced when biking through Copenhagen. The transit consultant and author Jarrett Walker writes a lot about freedom as a benefit of good transit service, but it wasn’t until coming to Copenhagen that I’ve fully experienced this sense of freedom for myself. In Copenhagen, no one has to think or worry about paying for a car, parking a car, insuring a car, or sitting in traffic. (As an aside, many people there choose to own cars anyway, but I’ll save that topic for another post.)

City-sponsored marketing campaign banner on a busy street in the Nørrebro neighborhood. “Nørrebro cykler for ren luft og klima.” “Norrebro bicycles for clean air and climate.” Copenhageners are proud of their status as the best bicycling city in the world, and are quick to talk about the joy that cycling brings them.

It’s hard to comprehend until you’ve experienced it just how liberating it feels to get wherever you need to go, whenever, without a car. Yes, a lot of people live carefree in Portland or New York or other cities around the world, but what I experienced in Copenhagen is different. The bike network and transit network are faster, easier, cheaper, and as well-connected as any typical city’s street network is for cars. The same cannot be said for Portland or New York. In Copenhagen you don’t spend time waiting for a Metro train to come, because trains come every four minutes or less. You don’t plan out your bike route because literally every single street in the city is safe to bike on, so if you miss your turn, you just turn on the next street.

Why do Copenhageners choose to cycle for their daily needs? Because is the fastest, easiest choice. Why have government officials made cycling faster and easier than any other mode? For the climate and for livability.

It’s a transportation utopia. Biking there feels liberating, and that feeling of freedom leads directly to feelings of peace and relaxation in your mind and body. Riding a bike in Copenhagen is quite literally euphoric.

Freedom and joy aren’t just incidental. They are intentional outcomes of public policy set by elected officials and bureaucrats over the past few decades. Danish government officials are quick to point to the recent past when cars ruled the streets and families were fleeing Copenhagen for the suburbs.

Cycling is a way of life in Copenhagen for all age groups. The pink and white kid’s bike on the left has a miniature baby seat for a doll on the back.

Government officials use the disciplines of urban planning, architecture, landscape architecture and civil engineering to develop and implement plans that cater to residents’ needs while responding to the climate crisis. On the face of it, this is essentially the same approach we use in Oregon, but four things stood out to me about the Danish approach.

• First, Danish planning efforts focus much more on the concept of livability than we do in Oregon. Making the city livable is as important as climate, safety and equity.
• Second, as much as we emphasize climate change and climate adaptation in our planning, the Danes emphasize it that much more. They walk their talk. Climate (as with livability) is at the center of ever project.
• Third, plans in Denmark are much more likely to be implemented. There is less planning for planning’s sake. Plans lead directly to new infrastructure.
• Fourth, and most important, the Danish public have a much higher degree of trust in all levels of government than what exists in the U.S. This is confirmed by public research polling and by comparisons of voter turnout and tax evasion between the two countries. Danes are generally happy to pay their share in taxes knowing that in return the government will provide an exceedingly livable built environment.

Context sensitive design

In wide, unconstrained greenway corridors, the pedestrian tread often deviates from the bikeway alignment. This particular greenway corridor is a luxurious 120-feet wide, allowing the bikeway to be 12-feet wide and the pedestrian path to be 6-feet wide, leaving ample room for every type of park use imaginable, including playgrounds, skateparks, sports courts, community gardens, coffee kiosks, and even a petting zoo!

One last reflection to share before I finish up this post is the notion of context sensitive design. This is something we talk about a lot in the U.S. I heard the Danes talk about it, too, and I saw a ton of great examples of it. But I also saw a lot of cookie-cutter design where they clearly applied the same standard across various settings.

A standard Copenhagen cycle track is 2.2 meters (7.2 feet) wide. The cycle track in this photo is a little wider because the context — following a major thoroughfare with plenty of right-of-way — called for a wider facility.

Greenway trail widths vary quite a bit based on context. In inner Copenhagen neighborhoods, greenways have a 2-meter wide bidirectional bikeway and an adjacent (sometimes separated) 2-meter wide bidirectional pedestrian path. The total width for bikes and pedestrians is 13 feet.

The Danish approach is pragmatic, recognizing that sometimes the context calls for a one-off, unique design, while other times an off-the-shelf approach is more appropriate, and that off-the-shelf approach is always one that’s safe and comfortable for cyclists.

In the most dense urban contexts, the typical 13-foot wide path isn’t sufficient. This is a picture of the widest bike-ped facility I’ve every seen, anywhere. I’d be surprised if a wider facility exists. It has two 16 feet wide bike lanes with an additional 18 foot wide space for pedestrians and bike parking, for a total width of 50 feet.

At the other extreme, this rural trail along a former railroad grade is only 5 feet wide and accommodates not only bidirectional bike and pedestrian traffic, but also mopeds! For scale, Andrew is 5’6” tall. We found the width to be sufficient, though we would have appreciated a couple more feet.

Danish roadway engineers clearly have standards and warrants that they design to, but they also have flexibility to design outside the box. I think what the Danes mean when they talk about context-sensitive design is that they always consider the context, even in instances where they end up applying a cookie-cutter design. I believe cyclists and pedestrians in the U.S. would be better served if our state roadway engineers adopted this more nuanced, flexible approach.

Two-way cycle tracks aren’t used in Copenhagen, except through parks or along water bodies. But in a rural context, such as this road in Funen, outside Faaborg, two-way cycle tracks are more common.

In the most rural, low-traffic contexts — even on Denmark’s national bike route network as in this photo — pavement markings and physical separation of modes isn’t necessary.

Tread materials also vary by context. This path is right outside a small town and is used for both recreation and transportation. 1/4” minus gravel is used instead of a harder paving service in order to preserve the pastoral aesthetic.

This bikeway along the harbor, near the center of Copenhagen, uses the same paving stone as the rest of the promenade, allowing for an uninterrupted aesthetic, but if you look closely you’ll see that the stones along the bikeway have been polished to provide a smoother ride and to subtly delineate the space.

Greenway trails within parks are more likely to use decomposed granite than asphalt for the pedestrian tread in order to serve joggers and other recreational users.