Copenhagen wasn't always the world capital of bicycling. In the early 1970s she faced the same automobile-related pressures that many other cities struggle with today: noise, pollution, congestion, and deteriorating street life. Traffic planner Søren Elle began work in 1972, and over the past 38 years he has overseen the transformation of Copenhagen into a model of sustainable transportation policy, including the installation of hundreds of miles of bicycle tracks.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Søren about his experiences, and about some of the challenges that Copenhagen faces going forward. This is a transcription of that conversation.
My questions are in italics.
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DevelopersWhen you’re working on bicycle projects in places like Ørestad, where there’s a developer who has a plan, what’s your relationship like with those developers and how much influence do you have over the final design of the streets and the buildings?
I wouldn’t say “I,” I would say “we” as the Municipality of Copenhagen. When we want to develop new areas we talk all the way, the discussions with the developers all way through the project, designing the project to fit into our traffic policy and details. In the end we have to give planning permission, and we make the final [inaudible] and do exactly what we want to in the question of bicycle tracks, bicycle parking, everything about bicycling. So it’s a nice conversation through a long period. We do recommend it to the last meter, the last square meter of bicycle facilities.
Does that include facilities in the building?
Yes. Primarily parking.
And that’s overseen by your department or another one?
No, it’s not my department, it’s the City of Copenhagen, which is split up into many, and the city plan, the municipal plan for Copenhagen is designed here, in my department. Another department, Traffic and the Environment, design the details of these policies, given the Lord Mayor’s proposals get a majority in the local parliament.
PoliticalHas that been a problem in the past, getting majority approval for designs or projects that you think are good? Are there examples where that didn’t happen?
There are opposition against it. For example, if you built bicycle tracks along a shopping street, we often find the room in the street for this two and a half meter wide cycle track by taking away the parking possibilities in front of the shops. So the shop keepers are not for this plan. But the majority in the parliament is for the plan. So we build those cycle tracks then in Copenhagen.
I imagine that’s helped by the fact that so many people here bicycle. When you first started working on installing cycle tracks in Copenhagen, was there that kind of political support or was that a harder fight then?
We’ve been very lucky. We’ve had close to consensus about the policy in Copenhagen since the Second World War. So it’s really easy to be a traffic planner in that aspect. You have to make a lot of good designs to get approved by a majority in the parliament, but it’s been a very positive approach to anything about cycling. So I started off here 38 years ago, and since then we’ve doubled the bicycle traffic, it was at a high level before that, but now we more than doubled it. So it has not been a big problem. But I should say that if you start off by this kind of planning in any other city you’ll see some problems because…during the war everybody was cycling. You just took the train or the bike. Most used the bike. We had huge amounts of bikers in 1945. We were a very poor country, and we had a tax policy so we had a special offer for you if you wanted to buy a car: you can do that, you pay for two or three cars. So for a poor population getting that they should pay for three cars, nobody bought a car. We had a very, and still have a very low car ownership in Copenhagen. That’s a gift if you want to improve bicycling facilities. So in the lowest point in 1975, thirty years after the world war, we still had a lot of cycling. By then we enforced the ideas of putting more cycle tracks and so on, and raised since 1975 to 2000…we doubled the amount of bicycling traffic. Most of this period the car ownership didn’t grow. We’re still a poor city, poor inhabitants, we still have to pay for three cars when we buy one. So for 25 years, from ’70 to ’95 we had no raise in car ownership in the City of Copenhagen, and we had no raise in the traffic amount in the streets, the car traffic. But we doubled the bicycling traffic. So that’s a very special situation. So if we had this success with cycling traffic in Copenhagen, we couldn’t just go to your city and do that because you might have 1% or 3% cycle traffic and we started off with a lot more than that.
That was going to be one of my questions; back home we have something of a Catch-22 where people don’t feel safe enough to ride, and so the rate is very low, in the single digits. But because the rate is low, elected officials are reluctant to pay for additional facilities because they say “Why? There’s not very many people out there.” Do you have any advice for bicycle supporters who want to…
Break the ice?
Exactly.
I think what they’ve done in New York is fantastic. Bloomberg’s cycle tracks all over Manhattan is just fantastic. But nobody uses them because in New York you don’t own a bike, you don’t know how to use it. So I go walking in Manhattan and I see maybe ten bikers in my whole day. And in the same area, the same size, downtown Copenhagen I might see 50,000 cyclists. They did the best they could and made cycle tracks but they still have this break the ice problem, so you make it common to own a bike and use a bike. In think in Copenhagen between 95 and 98% of Copenhageners own a bike and they all know how to use it. 20% of people own a car. So that’s why a bike is the most normal way to get around in Copenhagen, so it’s a very different situation from starting off at zero and…whew! How do you convince people that the bike is a good idea, and especially how do you convince bikers that it will be safe in the future. It’s relatively safe in Copenhagen but you know as a car driver in Copenhagen when you turn right that you have to look back over your shoulder and there will be cyclists. You can be sure there will be cyclists. In your city you might be surprised if you saw a cyclist. So it’s more dangerous, and very few cyclists, and some of those might be hit by cars. It happens in Copenhagen, but compared to the amount of cycle traffic it’s few very.
SuburbsI assume in the suburbs of Copenhagen bicycling is less common, perhaps still quite common. I don’t know where your jurisdiction exactly ends, but are there different strategies that you use in the less dense areas than in the city center?
No, not in Copenhagen, but the neighboring municipalities have the same strategies: bicycling tracks along all major roads. But of course the distances get longer and car ownership might be 50% or 100% higher than we have in the City of Copenhagen, so they have a different modal split, and the further you get out into the finger system you have a modal split more like you have in the other countries. So the parts of this region that are far away from the finger tips you have maybe 80% car modal split and 10% public transport and 10% cycling or something like that. In the city of Copenhagen we have, if you take all trips, including all trips in and out of Copenhagen we have about 50% car traffic and 25% public transport and 25% cycling. But if you look at the trips inside Copenhagen, and how do Copenhageners go to work in Copenhagen, then the cyclists’ share of the transport is 59%, close to 60%, so it’s just so common to do that. And most amazing I think is that half of those who actually own a car—there are only one out of five that own a car—but half of those leave their car and use the bike for their daily transport. The car is for the weekend.
FactorsI was interested to read on your website that the cyclists who were surveyed said that the number one reason they rode was because it’s easy and convenient. I was a little surprised, because I thought that money would have played a bigger role in that choice. Do you think that has to do with [car] parking? I was thinking about that question of convenience and wondering if that’s because parking is scarce.
Well I had a trip… very few times a year I use my car, never for day to day transport. Sunday I had a transport from my daughter’s old apartment to her new apartment within the dense part of the city. One and a half hours it took me by car. On a Sunday! I could have done that in two and a half minutes on a bike.
So it’s traffic?
It’s so much easier, yeah! And there’s a lot of road work…we’re building Metro lines all over. There’s a lot of road works. And then it was impossible to find a parking and so on. But it’s so much more convenient. You like this, you use your body, and it’s the only sport I have, it’s one half hour in the morning and one half hour in the evening.
Of course. Clear your head…
Yes, clear your head. It’s funny. You never have to wait for a parking place or public transport or anything. You just go, you park your bike just outside. You don’t have to look around, you just park.
FundingCopenhagen has some ambitious plans for increasing the mode split and adding facilities. How are these plans to be funded? Are they currently funded and is there any question that they will be?
It’s very different from Mr. Bloomberg’s New York. We have to pay for our cycle lanes by public money, by tax money. Some of the other things we do to lower our car transport is to raise public transport by building Metro lines. We do that in cooperation with the Danish state. It’s also partly financed by the income from the ticket sales. The cycle tracks and things are paid by tax money.
And that’s funded at 100%? The plan you have, it’s a go?
Yeah.
Great. That’s been a problem in Seattle. They have a plan, maybe not as ambitious, but pretty reasonable. But the money isn’t there.
Yeah. But there’s an agreement every year, the last five, six, seven years to raise the amount of money they use for cycle tracks, and it’s huge around town, you can really make a lot of bicycle tracks. It takes a lot of time to plan it because you have to look after the cyclists, the pedestrians, the bus stops, the bus driving, the cars, and so on. It’s not always easy but it’s a go. There’s money for it.
BusesThat's fantastic. You mentioned coordinating with buses, and trucks for instance. What are some challenges you’ve had with those users of the road, and maybe some groups that represent them, and how have you addressed those challenges?
Well I think there might be groups that would like we didn’t have any bicycles at all, and to rebuild all the streets for cars, but they are not very big [inaudible] in Copenhagen. Our main problem with lorries is that they might come from other countries and they do not know that when you turn right it’s dangerous to cyclists or the pedestrians. So I think the former Lord Mayor, who started in 2006, the first year we had three of those accidents. A lorry turned right and killed a child. So we really had to do something to try to find some policies to avoid that. And it’s really hard. Some of our big crossing sections are rebuilt now, so they have a bicycles only phase. So if I just go ahead on a bike I have my own green light. And after that it’ll be the right turning light for the cars. So we separate. Normally situation is you all get green, direction north, so some are going north and others are turning right, to the east. But you can separate that. It reduces capacity to some degree, but it’s more safe. I think that’s the way to do it. Because you’re on the bike lane, which is separated from the car lanes with the curb and a difference of 15 centimeters, you feel safe, and you are pretty safe. But in the crossings, the big signalized crossings, that’s where the accidents happen. And if you have this conflict between turning wheels and bikes, it could be dangerous. It’s also very hard for some places in the city for car drivers to turn right or the bus drivers to turn right, because there are so many bikes, and you have to wait and wait and wait. So again it’s better to separate it, I think, the signals. And reduce capacity a bit. And then we’ve had too much success on this policy so we’ve had to rebuild some of the cycle tracks, for lots of money, 15 or 20 years ago.
To make them wider?
Yes, to make them wider.
What’s the preferred width today?
We started off normally with two and a half meters in each direction. Some narrow streets we reduce it to two meters. It’s terrible, the traffic. We would like some of those to go to three or four meters. And then we’d have to take away the cars. Most of the cars.
SitingHow do you think factors outside of the road itself affect bicycling?
We built cycle lanes in Copenhagen since 1909. More than 100 years. Every year. So it’s not like we suddenly decided to build things like that. Like they did in Bloomberg’s New York. It’s been all the way, through the centuries. But in ’75 we pushed for better cycling politics, we discussed the difference between the Danish and the Swedish way to do it. In Sweden they’ve built cycle lanes totally separated from the big streets, in green areas, though parks, where there’s room for that. So we could have that situation where as a car driver you go directly from your dwelling area to your job on a big street, very fast. And as a cyclist you have to go some routes behind and everything [makes a back-and-forth gesture]. Could be nice, to go some green routes, but it takes time, so we continued the old policy just to build on any street with some car traffic some cycle lanes. Because that’s often the shortest way between A and B. And in these streets often were shopping streets also where you could do your shopping. We took away the parking possibilities in front of the shop and gave them a cycle lane with 10,000 cyclists on it, and they shop. They shouldn’t be so scared about this but they are.
Unless they sell refrigerators.
Even that! I’ve seen that too. We’ve got special bikes for any purpose.
So we added a policy of building green bike routes through the parks, combining parks and nice areas behind the big streets to give a possibility of going through a green, combined with the possibility of talking to your neighbor cyclist because on the big streets with lots of car traffic there’s a lot of noise and it’s hard to have a nice conversation. So we started off building these very expensive special cycle routes, we had a plan for many kilometers of those, and we’ll add some of those, but it’s very expensive. I think the best thing has been added to this cycle policy lately has been that we build bridges over barriers, so making the opposite situation of the one I told you about in Sweden versus Denmark. We have situations now where you have a new developed area on one side of the harbor and a shopping center on the other side of the harbor and there’s a bridge for cyclists and pedestrians. No cars. So the absolute shortest way to get to and from is by bike. So a shortcut where the other ones don’t get this shortcut. That’s number one, that’s a very good idea. We will build, in I think next year four more bridges and in the future even more bridges crossing the harbor. To make it the fastest way to go from A to B.
We measure this sort of thing. Have you seen this? This is the bicycle account, have you seen it?
Yes, I was looking at this earlier. You sent me to the web page…
Yes, so we try to measure that every year or every other year, to ask the bikers and other users: ‘how do you think about it?’ What do you think of Copenhagen as a cycling city, what do you think of the condition of the cycle tracks and so on, do you feel safe, what they like. And then try to get a bit better on each one. I think that’s an important part of the cycle policy. Important to observe whether we are doing better or not. What are the problems. Then there’s a union of cyclists in Denmark and Copenhagen also, so we have conversations with those, like what do you call those automobile associations in USA…?
Triple A.
Yeah, AAA. Yes, we have the same thing for cyclists. They have some ideas, some lists about what should be better. But they are floating in success because everything they point at we just do!
[Laughs]
[Laughs] So it’s a very win-win situation. So just go biking!
I know in the US when planners want to change the width of roadways or affect the turn radii, for instance, often there’s a conflict with emergency vehicles, or the emergency services will say: ‘we need a very wide turn because our trucks need to get in.’ Do you have that issue here? Are emergency services involved in street design?
Oh yes, but I don’t think it’s such a big problem. They can turn around a corner. They operate in old, narrow streets every day; that’s what Copenhagen looks like. But corners are a severe conflict between turning lorries, fire trucks, and buses and so on, and bikes. How to see that, how [inaudible] to see that, a bike on your side. Something that you couldn’t have seen. And that’s quite dangerous. Of course we had to make street design, so every lorry, every bus can turn around the corner and…hopefully he looks in his mirror before he turns.
Does the city have, for the lack of a better word, a cookbook for street designs in different situations? For example, if you know that you have an intersection and you have a certain number of lanes coming in, do you have a design template that you refer to, or is each intersection design…
I guess some of my colleagues in the Center for Traffic and the center for actually building these things, both in the Department of Traffic and the Environment have something like that. I don’t know about it. There might be, I’m sure there are some manuals. But also there is a change in these things all the time. I can imagine that first things in the crossing giving cyclists a special signal. They have their own small red, yellow, green, and the green for cyclists goes two seconds before green for cars. So the cyclist is in the crossing before the car driver starts off. So he can see the cyclist. Next phase was to shorten off the waiting lines for the cars so the last five or ten meters are for cyclists. So a cyclist can go all the way to the light, to the crossing, but cars are going to stop some meters behind him. And then they can see the cyclist. And then third phase you can enlarge the waiting area for cyclists to be the half of the street so that they actually stop in front of the cars. So even the cars heading right away have to wait until the cyclist has left the waiting area in front. So they can be sure they can see the cyclist.
I don’t know that I have seen one of those yet in Copenhagen.
Oh there are many of those.
There are? Okay, maybe I just didn’t notice. Yeah, we call those bike boxes. Is that the same?
SignalsYeah. And then the later thing in the very big, dangerous crossing sections we have a policy of separating the signals, with different phases for right-turning cars and cycling drivers. But we’re still improving it, and finding better and better, and we have a lot better accident situation now than we used to have. When I started it was 120 killed per year in the capital, and now it’s about ten, twelve on the bad years. Maybe five, eight in good years. And they have a mode split like one third cyclists, one third pedestrians, and one third motorbikes. So typically we have three killed as cyclists. That’s three too many, but we have many streets with 20,000 cyclists per day.
If you think about the rate, it’s incredibly low. Seattle gets maybe one cyclist killed per year, but it’s a city about half the size of Copenhagen [ed. This is incorrect. The Copenhagen and Seattle cities proper are about the same size], but we have far fewer riders.
[Chatter]
CurrentDo you have any final advice for me as I prepare to go back to the USA and change the world?
You should show them the film, I think I sent you on the website. It’s a nice film. Of course the film is made by someone who likes to bike, but many, many, many Copenhageners love to bike. It’s fun, it’s healthy, it’s just…try it! You’ll love it! And then work to get better and better conditions to bikers. I don’t think it’s easy. You have some work in front of you. Even my Swedish colleagues in the traffic planning were more used to biking than you might be in the States. [Inaudible] But you don’t mean that people with little children go by bike. Most children families in Copenhagen do not have a car and they have an even more positive attitude to cycling than the average. It’s okay, what’s the problem? Even in the winter, yeah. You just go by bike.
We had two problems, of course not so wonderful. We had more and more car owners—it’s still a low figure, maybe 200 out of 1000 have a car. But some of those car drivers, they go with their kids to the school in the morning, and kiss and ride, and go to their job. That gives some car traffic around the schools that shouldn’t be there. They should go by bike and teach their children to go by bike to the school. And then maybe go back and get their car, I don’t know. You have to really, really make campaigns to teach the parents. You might have a car, you might go by car to job, but you should spend the ten minutes on your bike, with your kids to school. That’s the way to go to school. So when you’re ten years old you should be able to go by bike in Copenhagen.
And the other challenge is that all those people coming from Turkey, or Pakistan, or Afghanistan come from cultures where girls are not allowed to bike. It’s against something in their religion. So these girls don’t bike. So we have to do some special bike schools to teach them how to use a bike. To teach them and their parents that it’s okay for a girl to go biking in Copenhagen, and that it’s important to do so. If you want to be able to use the city you need to have a bike to get around. So women from Third World countries and these parents, that’s a long challenge we have. To make it even better.
