5 Minute Urbanism - Copenhagen - with Mikael from The Life-Sized City 

I am a reformed "traffic" engineer that spent the later half of his career designing multi-modal facilities (pedestrian, bicycle, ferry, bus, rail, air, etc.), but also a cyclists for 40 years as an adult. As you insinuate, an immutable law of design for humans is you must conform to their behavior, not the other way around. Too often, traffic engineers, urban designers and architects assume they can violate user expectancies and induce street or path users to be "obedient" - that never works.

glad to see you re-inked your printer

It is always the same: What Non-Cyclists (and Planners) have in Mind: "Hey Cyclists want to see this and that little street and detours, because they ride for recreation." What Cyclists think: "No, Stupid, we want to go from A2B as effortlessly as possible, take our needs of Transportation serious!"

Thank you 🙏 Mikael. I live at Havnevigen and I really hope they are listening to your wise words. Wholeheartedly agree!! Can’t believe how many strange urban planning decisions Copenhagen has made over the last few years.

Thank you for the warning, I once tried to pronounce the name of a Finnish town. Took me 2 weeks to recover from the muscle strain.

I would love to see your take on the Mini Holland cycling scheme in the London Borough of Waltham Forest.

Amazing body of work. I like your videos, especially when kids have solutions grownups are not grasping yet.

Great channel! thanks for sharing! hope we can collaborate one day ! ;)

Thanks for your videos. I live in Manchester where the routes into the city are slowly being built up and this is great information to arm myself with. The city seem to be open to listening to cyclists, recently changing some crossing so they are automatic and prioritise cyclists. The feeling of power when you approach and the road lights turn red is amazing haha

I love this man so much

Ha! I just found there is Polish translation of your book and I ordered one just a second ago :-) Great. A juz zeby informacja byla zupelna tlumaczenie to "Być jak Kopenhaga".

great content!

Kunne du fristes til at dele links til lokalplaner og lign?

Hey, I thanks for posting videos about these topics! I love to learn more about good urban design in general, and about cyclist friendly cities in particular. I've often thought about visiting Kopenhagen, mainly to check out how they're doing cycling traffic. However, I feel like in this video the solution seems too simple. I suppose you're right with what you say, but the trade-offs a city planner needs to do would also be really interesting to hear about! Or is it really true that mistakes are usually made just because the right knowledge wasn't there? I'd expect that more often, other interests conflict with e.g. the optimal cyclist route. Anyways, your content is great and I think it might help to get a much more informed view when I eventually manage to visit Kopenhagen for a few weeks. Are there other cities (or countries) in Europe that are easily explorable with the bike? I've heard about the Netherlands being awesome in that regard.

Great video! In the Netherlands, if cyclist and pedestrians are creating "so-called" elephant paths (olifantenpaadjes) if city designers try to force us to take detours. This photographer made a compilation of these olifantenpaadjes. Some are very funny, some are quite dangerous. For the six minute video, cross sections just after a bridge are also very very annoying.

Hi , I`m an architecture student from Saudi Arabia , and working on urban design project ... will a bicycle infrastructure work in a hot - humid climate ?

The cover of your book reminded me of something that is rarely considered in the portrayal and promotion of cycling in art and photography - always so few people wearing helmets! I realize that it is uncommon for adults to wear helmets, but I recall distinctly a cycling lifestyle exhibition at the Danish embassy in Washington, D.C. in 2012 with huge printouts of cyclists - both kids and adults - where only very few were wearing helmets. Thankfully kids are required to wear helmets, but responsible parenting isn’t what most Danes are known for to be honest... so often kids are not wearing helmets. As a Dane who’s had my fair share of close calls and seen horrendous accidents involving cyclists... I would really wish that helmets were promoted even more. And also that cyclists would stay behind the stop line on the bicycle path before the traffic light, and not cycle down narrow one-way roads against the directionality of it. That last one is how I ended up crashing my bike on wet cobble stones and shattering some teeth - an idiot deciding to cycle in the dark without lights against the legal direction of a narrow cobble road in the rain, going very fast. I was making a turn down that road and had to evade them - sadly, my bike slipped and I crashed anyway. Thankfully I was wearing a helmet, so had no head injuries. The worst part is that they ran off so my dental bill was all mine to pay. The broken finger was free to fix - I’m proud of being a tax-paying Dane!!

It's kind of sad but I wish we had such problems in Wroclaw ( in Poland ) :(

why not have both?

Hej Michael. Alle broer er, sidst jeg blev informeret, skrinlagt indtil der findes en fælles løsning. De små veje er pt. "blinde" og for smalle til dobbelt cykelsti, udover det er beboerne ikke glade for den nye trafik der ville opstå

No brainer

You're the Anthony Bourdain of urban planning.

You have no trees on street everything was harvested for concrete roads it is really bad solution. I prefer way we do this in Poland where we plant new trees. So we have more sustainable streets

Wouldn't a better name for guide to bicycle urbanism be 'Amsterdamize'?

You sound like Lars Ulrich Also Copenhagen is far from the ideal bicycle city. Any urban centre in the Netherlands is vastly superior. But Copenhagen is winning the branding game, deserved or not