Rush hour in Copenhagen is so unusual you can actually enjoy YouTube videos showing it. Instead of gridlock, internal combustion machines spewing their poisons, and maddened drivers sitting on their horns, there are masses of…bicycles! In a city where a third of all journeys are by bicycle, the morning and evening rush hours are dominated by human muscle. One even expects the Little Mermaid to bicycle to work on her rock…
The Danish capital has become renowned as a “city of cyclists.” Or rather, as historian Martin Emanuel, shows, Copenhagen has returned to being a city of cyclists. A hundred years ago, the city already had an international reputation for its friendliness to bicycling. Since the 1880s, in fact, there has been what Emanuel calls a long-term “co-production” or “relationship between user practices and infrastructure provision.” It’s not so much an “if you build it, they will come” situation as it is an “they’re already demanding that you build it so you better” attitude. The twenty-first century “renaissance” of Copenhagen as a bicycle city has roots: a pre-existing infrastructural base and a heritage of motivated cyclists.
Emanuel takes us back to the beginning of Copenhagen’s modern urbanization. Until the 1870s, the city was contained by fortress walls. With the end of military restrictions on building came rapid expansion into working-class districts. These workers needed to get to work: the city’s first bicycle lanes were made by riders themselves by annexing strips of the horse tracks that were adjacent to the cobblestone roads. This led to conflicts with horse-riders, but, recognizing that there were more cyclists than horse-riders, the municipality gave bicyclists legal access to horse tracks in the early 1880s.
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“The safety,” a bicycle with two equal-sized wheels and a diamond shaped frame—it’s still the basic plan of a bicycle today—revolutionized bicycle usage in the city (as elsewhere). By 1897, one in ten city residents owned bicycles. They pedaled, organized, and lobbied. And unlike the Belgians, Italians, and French, Danes “turned their back on racing in favor of touring and utility cycling.”
Emanuel describes Copenhagen between WWI and WWII as “a working-class city [where] cyclists ruled the streets.” Car drivers and car traffic experts would complain about the unruly and unpredictable nature of cyclists for decades.
By 1935, cyclists made up 44 percent of traffic and there were 100km of bicycle lanes, many of them outside the city center. That same year, a proposal to shore up city tram revenues during the Depression by banning bicycles from the historic center was hooted down. In 1940, city bicycle ownership reached 69 percent. Neutral Denmark was taken over by the Nazis in April 1940; the wartime dearth of tires and spare parts meant bicycling declined, but by 1950 bicycle ridership was back to pre-war levels.
Post-WWII Copenhagen saw office and service workers outnumber factory workers. People moved to the suburbs, congregating around commuter rail hubs. The number of cars increased rapidly in Denmark, though less so in Copenhagen itself. Bicycles became associated with recreation or children’s use. The bicycle share of city traffic dropped from 70 percent in 1955 to 17 percent in 1975.
City planners during the 1960s assumed the car would win out, as it did in many places. They wanted to revamp the city center to make it more car friendly. Preservationists fought back, successfully. And then the 1973 oil crisis abruptly pointed out the big problem with cars: energy dependence. It took Denmark a long time to come back from the economic slump of the Seventies, and as it did so, Copenhageners returned to the simple technology of the bicycle. Meanwhile, radicalized bicyclists pressed harder for more purpose-built infrastructure. The decade between 1975 and 1985 saw the bicycle “network’s fastest rate of expansion ever.”
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That 17 percent in 1975 increased to 30 percent in the early 1990s. The city, meanwhile, was becoming cool—in no small part by not having its charming historic center choked by cars. Consciously striving to be a model “livable city,” Copenhagen made bicycle planning mainstream.
“Young Copenhageners own ever more cars, but they use the bicycle for their daily travel. Between 1995 and 2013, car use declined from 41 per cent to 31 percent despite increased ownership.” Emanuel goes on to quote another Danish scholar, who argues that the bicycle can be seen as symbol of Danish-ness, “democratic, modest and quotidian.” This may be less accurate for Denmark as a whole, which does not match Copenhagen’s high bicycle usage, but the city is literally made for bicycles.
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