Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (32 page)

Anyone who is really serious about building freedom in their cities eventually makes the pilgrimage to Copenhagen. The Danes have spent forty years tinkering with and refining the systems that people use to get around their capital, transforming experiences that are miserable and dangerous in London or Los Angeles into something truly pleasurable. Their success is a product of two ideas: One is that the city itself is a laboratory that invites and rewards experimentation. The other is that planners must concern themselves with not just the physics but also the psychology of mobility.

I joined Copenhagen rush hour on a September morning with Lasse Lindholm, a fresh-faced employee of the city’s traffic department. The sun was just burning through the autumn haze as we made our way across the Queen Louise’s Bridge, a stately granite span over the shallow, moatlike lake that marks the western edge of the city’s downtown. Vapor rose from the lake, swans drifted and preened, and the bridge seethed with a rush-hour scene like none I have ever witnessed. With each light change, cyclists rolled toward us in the hundreds. They did not look the way cyclists are supposed to look. They did not wear helmets or reflective gear. Some of the men wore pin-striped suits and shiny leather shoes. The women dressed in skirts and power suits, high heels and flowing scarves. Nobody was breaking a sweat. These were not Robert Judge adventurists. This was no race. They were calm and sexy and fit.

Lindholm rolled off a list of statistics that bear repeating: About three in ten commuters arriving in Copenhagen would use a car to get to work or school that morning. The same number would use a bus or train as their main mode. But more people would travel by bicycle than by any other mode: 37 percent. If you didn’t count the suburbs, the percentage of cyclists in Copenhagen hit 55 percent. And eight of every ten of those cyclists would keep riding right through the dark and sleet-strewn Scandinavian winter. It was stunning, when you think about it: a complex, thriving metropolitan region had managed not just to accommodate heteroscedasticity but to nurture the means of travel that most cities have all but extinguished.

Copenhageners aren’t choosing to cycle because of any deep-seated altruism or commitment to the environment, said Lindholm. Nor are they genetically predisposed to cycle any more than Americans are. They are motivated by self-interest. “They just want to get themselves from A to B, and now it happens to be easier and quicker to do it on a bike.”

The mayor, Frank Jensen, biked to work that morning. So did several ministers of the national government. So did just about anyone who considered himself part of the city’s culture of urban hipness. The height of cutting-edge style in Copenhagen is not a sports car, but the three-wheeled front-end cargo bike dubbed “the Copenhagen SUV.” A quarter of families in the city with two children own one of the boxy contraptions.

This behavior is a product of design. People make different choices when they are truly free to choose. Although cycling was hugely popular in Denmark a century ago, Danes gave it up en masse during the first few decades of the auto age.
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But persistent congestion and the energy crisis of the 1970s combined to produce a public backlash against auto-centric road design. Tens of thousands of people joined demonstrations calling for bike space. After the pedestrianization of the Strøget, Copenhageners saw that streets were malleable. They could be experimented with. The city had painted cycle lanes onto streets for years, but in the early 1980s traffic director Jens Kramer Mikkelsen began constructing bike lanes physically separated from auto space by low curbs. It changed the psychology of riding. Suddenly cyclists could travel free from fear. This was infrastructure not just for heroes but for children and seniors and people who wished to ride in safety and comfort—in other words, for everyone. It had a
Field of Dreams
effect. Just as highway building in Atlanta produced new drivers, Copenhagen’s safe bike routes produced new cyclists. As the separated lane network grew, cyclists filled them, and as they did, they demanded more space. The effect has been supercharged in the past decade. As part of its plan to go carbon neutral by 2025, Copenhagen set itself the goal of knocking Amsterdam off its throne as the world’s most bike-friendly city.

Experience Management

To accommodate surging bicycle traffic, engineers have doubled the width of cycle lanes on Copenhagen’s Queen Louise’s Bridge. In other areas, planners hope that double-wide lanes will promote conversation between commuting cyclists.
(Charles Montgomery)

“This means that we must be concerned not just about safety,” traffic director Niels Tørslov told me. “We care about how safe cycling
feels
.”

The city tied together a network of more than two hundred miles of separate bike paths. It installed bike-only traffic lights at congested intersections, giving cyclists a four-second advantage over cars, so they can jump ahead before drivers begin making the right-hand turns that kill cyclists in other cities. Where traffic lights were once synchronized for the convenience of motorists, Copenhagen rejigged the system based on the speed of a brisk bike ride. Now a rush-hour cyclist moving just over twelve miles per hour can surf a wave of green lights through the city without putting a foot down. A cushy network of “green” cycle routes crisscross the city through a necklace of parks, far from the noise and exhaust dust of cars. And the suburbs have not been forgotten. Crews are now constructing a network of wide, separated “bike superhighways” connecting the suburbs to downtown. Oh, and when that Scandinavian snow falls, Copenhagen’s bike lanes get cleared before the rest of the roads.

Copenhagen now has a unique dilemma. When the traffic department surveyed cyclists, it found that they are no longer merely fearful of cars, they are scared of one another. The tracks are getting too crowded. The city has had to revisit the conundrum faced by cities a century ago, when cars first arrived: Who has the right to the finite shared resource of city streets?

Tørslov’s answer is written right here on Nørrebrogade, the road that crosses Queen Louise’s Bridge. Before 2008, Nørrebrogade was clogged beyond capacity with bicycles, buses, cars, and trucks. More than 17,000 cars, 30,000 cyclists, and 26,000 bus passengers rolled down its shop-lined blocks every day. The cars took the most room by far, but cyclists were crowding each other off their path, into traffic, and onto already narrow sidewalks. Buses were waiting behind convoys of commuting motorists. Something had to give.

The solution was to conduct a temporary experiment: redesign the street to be more fair, which meant favoring travelers who use less space. Tørslov’s designers created bus-only lanes and diverted commuting cars to other, wider arteries. They used the extra space to double up bike lanes and build wider sidewalks. The effect was almost immediate. By the time I rode across the Queen Louise’s Bridge in 2009, commuter car traffic had fallen by half. Bus passengers reported shorter trips. Seven thousand new cyclists had joined the daily parade, which had spilled across two full lanes on each side of the bridge. And the restaurants and shops on Nørrebrogade had spilled out onto the generous sidewalks. It was just the beginning of an ambitious plan to transform the entire arterial skeleton of the city by gradually doing for other arteries what had been started on Nørrebrogade, Tørslov told me. The city’s new metric: “conversation cycling infrastructure,” or routes that are wide enough so that two people can bike side by side and chat, making the commute just a little more like a social visit.

All of which raises a curious parallel: just as North American cities created more automobile traffic through decades of road building, Copenhagen has induced demand for other ways of moving, especially cycling, by making streets more complete. Are cities that pursue new means of mobility heading for congestion 2.0?

Well, as Anthony Downs pointed out, congestion is an entirely natural feature of any vibrant city. So we should differentiate between types of congestion. It is not moving vehicles per se that nourish the city, but people and goods. Traffic that delivers the highest volume of people and goods for every square foot of infrastructure is clearly best for the city—and arguably best for travelers themselves.

It is a fact of geometry and physics that roads left to the open market—in other words, dominated by private cars—have a hard time supplying cities with their lifeblood. The problem is that cars are space hogs. Even the smallest of private cars takes up about 150 square feet of road space when standing still. That’s thirty times the space used by a person standing, and 7.5 times the space used by a person on a bicycle or on a bus. The numbers diverge exponentially as we start moving. Someone driving alone in a car moving at thirty miles per hour takes up twenty times as much space as someone riding on a bus at the same speed. To put this into perspective: if you took all the passengers off a full city bus and put them on bikes, you would take up about a block of bike lane. But if you put them in their own cars, you wouldn’t have any street left at all.

Comparing Travel Space Needs per Person

How fair and efficient are our streets? A car moving at typical city speed uses seventy-five times as much space as someone walking.
(Infographic by Matthew Blackett/Spacing.ca, with data from Victoria Transport Policy Institute)

This is why any plan to provide real freedom in the city demands more than shared bicycles and cars, or even more buses. Given open competition for road space, some people will choose to drive just enough to gum up the roads for themselves as well as everyone else. They slow down delivery trucks. They ensnare buses, stealing time and certainty from transit riders. They squeeze bicycles and endanger pedestrians. Cities intent on building more variety, freedom, sharing, and sustainability in mobility have no choice but to confront the privilege of private cars.

Demand, Supply, and Surprise

Some brave cities have tinkered with the economics of demand. In 2003 the London mayor Ken Livingstone adopted the world’s most geographically extensive congestion charge on vehicles entering the heart of the city on weekdays.
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The system uses automatic license plate recognition cameras to identify and charge most private vehicles entering the city core, with exemptions for emergency vehicles, taxis, and residents. The fee started at a hefty £5 but has since been bumped to £10. After three years, the charge had reduced traffic in the core by a quarter and was pulling in £122 million a year. It showed that travel behavior really is elastic: when people start paying the true cost of driving (which, in London’s case, includes pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and the burden imposed on other users by drivers using a disproportionate share of road space), they find other ways of moving.

Demand management is catching on around the world. In Stockholm, the charge for driving into the core climbs as you approach rush hour and falls back to nothing during slack hours. This encourages people to delay their drive until road space is not so scarce. The alternative—public transit—is financed in part by those road and congestion charges. After a brief experiment, in 2006 the citizens of Stockholm voted to make the system permanent because it made their lives easier. Meanwhile, the southern Chinese powerhouse of Guangzhou has introduced an auction and lottery system for license plates that is expected to halve the number of new cars on the road. This represented a real sacrifice, considering the fact that Guangzhou is one of China’s main auto manufacturing hubs, but its problems of pollution and congestion were too great to ignore any longer.

These methods raise an ethical question. Should a public resource like city streets be reserved primarily for people who can afford to pay a premium for it? London’s answer has been to use revenues from the charge to improve local bus service. But such demand management schemes do little to shift the balance of safety and access to city streets. To do that, you have to physically redistribute the supply of this most public resource. This is the lesson of Paris and Copenhagen, and it has finally begun to take hold elsewhere.