Sat, Aug 01, 2009 page9

• ‘Cycle city’ Copenhagen is the future

  An astonishing 89 percent of all people in the city of 1.7 million cycle, old and young, hearty and halt.Every time a new cycle track is established, the result is a 20 percent rise in cyclists and a 10 percent reduction in cars

  • By Euan Ferguson / THE OBSERVER
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  Ilove this country. I would want to move here if it wasn’t so gothically expensive and if I didn’t just know I would be so obviously the ugliest person in the entire Danish peninsula that in order to faithfully portray my place in the pecking order I would, by rights, have to waft dark odors and wear a tolling bell.

  I love it, yes, because of the bikes — but even before I first flexed my buttocks, as it were, I’d become deeply enamored of the national psyche. The simple and so welcomely different getting-it-rightness of it all. It was explained to me, for instance, in a friendly little jazz club, that I could smoke if I wanted to, because the place held fewer than 40 people. In Britain, this was an early argument for banning smoking in smaller pubs — the beautiful Danish logic surmises instead that, with most places non-smoking, if you go into a much smaller place it’ll be because you really want to and know there might be smoking, therefore don’t mind at all. Flawless when you think about it.

  Then there’s the reason I’m here. Copenhagen is the future — Copenhagen is “cycle city” and, gloriously, unlike perhaps everything else called an “urban initiative” since about the dawn of time, from cave boot sales to recycling schemes, this actually works.

  

  Just a couple of years ago, the city decided to go green in a big way and one of the first things it did was get big on cycling. It wasn’t the hardest of calls. Already, there were a lot of bikes and Copenhagen isn’t Lisbon or Rio. It’s absurdly flat, everywhere. However, there was real political commitment, a £15 million (US$25 million) annual budget set up and a seven-strong department created, including a chief of cycling, Andreas Rohl. Now there are 20km of 2m-wide raised cycle tracks and a further 150km of marked cycle lanes on the roads and it has, honestly, worked beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

  Today, 55 percent of those working or studying in Copenhagen now commute by cycle. Add in leisure pursuits and shopping, and the figure rises to an astonishing 89 percent of all people in this city of 1.7 million, old and young, hearty and halt. Every time a new track is established the instant change is a 20 percent rise in cyclists and a 10 percent reduction in cars (and new cars are now taxed at 180 percent).

  Enough with the percents though, it just works, and the more it works, the more it works, if you see what I mean. I realized, perhaps belatedly, while freewheeling happily down the Torvegade Bridge on my way to see the self-proclaimed “free state” of Christiania (don’t bother, it’s just hippies and graffiti and dope, and the only dirty part of the city), that a kind of tipping point or critical mass has been reached, and passed. After a certain mileage of cycle tracks and lanes has been established, there’s really no need to keep going, no need for any more. The number of cars has dwindled to such an extent that they, the honking growling motors, feel like the threatened species. Sat there hot and sweaty and trying to negotiate the one-ways and bollards and canals and bridges filling the touristy center, while the bikes roll airily, sweetly, by and up, and over and around, and across. There were times it was fabulously easy to forget you were in a capital city, after cycling for five minutes without seeing or hearing one car. The average speed across the city by bicycle is 15kph, for motorists 27kph.

  The Copenhagen bike track proper, as opposed to the simple lanes on the increasingly motor-free roads, is a marvel. The raised kerbing means there’s no danger of cars veering across even slightly, or parking, or opening their door on to you. You feel utterly secure. All are marked, like the lanes on the roads proper, cleanly and regularly, big white bicycles painted on the ground, stretching ahead for kilometers. There’s none of the confusion I encountered last time I tried a cycling experiment in London, when what I’d thought was a green cycle track on a pavement near Old Street turned out to be a special raised path for blind people to get to the Moorfields Eye Hospital (and can I just iterate while I have the chance, I’ve said I was sorry and there was really no need for that angry stuff with the sticks). Memories of other, younger, further days, the extraordinary gamble that one took as a teenager on a bike along Edinburgh’s Princes Street, now seem quite laughable, as if dreamed.

  The project has also transformed the look and feel of the city. The bikes have become, far more than in other countries, statements. Not of power or speed, but of style. There are now many bikes with flowers garlanding their front pannier-baskets, ridden gently, sedately, with a flowing dress and flip-flops, and a certain grace. Bikes with mobile coffee stalls. Classic old sit-up-and-beg styles, in beautiful British racing green, immaculately kept, turning heads. Bikes with two wheels at the front carrying a big cargo box, in which sit three children, the smallest holding his own tiny bike. Bikes with baby-bikes being dragged behind, tiny extra wheels and seat where stabilizers used to sit, with a tot pedaling madly on joke baby Noddy-pedals while mum does the real work. Bone-shakers carrying stoic elderly men, dapper in tweeds and hats. Bikes carrying grandmothers in hot black skirts, beatific smiles on apple cheeks and legs like busy hams. Bikes, of course, carrying the many, many young people, who chat and call and laugh to each other, ride along together while leaning across to show pictures from mobile phones. Bikes with a stern briefcase strapped firmly to the rear and an upright civil servant, cycling uprightly.

  Unlike Britain, where still there’s a kind of vague if fading camaraderie among cyclists, with occasional nods of recognition — and certainly many tribal feelings, given that the whole damned thing’s a battle against the car — Copenhagen cyclists no more notice the fact that someone else is on a bike than they notice that someone else is in possession of a head. Absolutely everyone cycles. Which was terribly handy, regarding shaky confidence, for those who, like me, hadn’t been on one for a couple of years. I expected to be overtaken, constantly, cheerfully, by the city’s many long-limbed young things, but nothing gets you over any junction jitters, or gets your own legs working in something approaching an acceptable rhythm, like being passed breezily by an 80-year-old woman carrying the weekly shop on her back while talking on her mobile. Shame is the spur.

  One of the first things I had done, and a bit of a mistake, was take one of the “city bikes.” These have received a good amount of publicity, and are a nice idea — you find one of the public stands for them, whack a 20-kroner coin into the fixture, just like releasing a supermarket trolley, and then ride around all day for nothing, finally finding another public stand, anywhere, and retrieving your coin. Unfortunately, perhaps inevitably, they’re not great bikes. Heavy (quite possibly to deter thieves, as you can’t separately lock them) and gearless, and without handlebar brakes — you have to pedal backwards to stop, I learned that first minute with fortuitous urgency — they are hardly a joy to ride. I spoke to one local, Harry, returning his to the stand beside Central Station and he was disarmingly honest.

  “I’m just using this because my own bike was stolen. The tires have no air. It’s not really a bike. Nice idea but they are ... fucking shit,” he said.

  He smiles.

  They even swear, here, in delightful fashion, all sing-songy and stripped of intent. He makes the phrase sound like something else entirely, perhaps a complicated anchovy dish.

  Also, the stands are hard to find. There are meant to be 120 of them throughout the city, but I only came across about four, most of them emptied this hot day of bikes. Fine, if you must, and a nice idea for tourists, but I went back to the hotel and rented a real bike, about £15 for the day and there was a world of difference.

  Within 20 minutes, I’d traveled kilometers — all the way along Sogade and Gronningen to the Kastellet and, beyond it, the Little Mermaid. Which was thronged with tourists and left me, frankly, a little indifferent.

  Far more impressive, I thought personally, was Suste Bonnen’s Merman and his Seven Sons, an entirely underwater sculpture in the canal near Hojbro Plads. The wake from passing boats stirs the light to make the bronze-green children seem to swim in the depths below.

  Being able, now, to lock the bike, I had to hop off for the first of the day’s 18 delightful coffees. A few, here, still bother with those wriggly centipede locks, and D-locks, and chain their bikes to trees or the plethora of stands (there’s even a stand at the airport, filled with 150 bikes). Far, far more users simply rely on the so-called O-lock, the fixment the size of a small hand which swings down from behind the saddle and slots in half a second between spokes on the rear wheel. Fast and cleanly efficient, and most of those I spoke to said bike thefts had gone down in recent years, partly, they say, because everybody now has one. Even if they were stolen in the first place.

  This overall triumph, this cyclist’s heaven, could only happen to such an extent in perhaps a handful of cities. Copenhagen’s flatness has been crucial and a general friendly tolerance pervades the people, and perhaps that’s much easier to exude when you are all extremely rich and beautiful and well-fed and surrounded by nature and boats and medieval magnificence. The political vision has been forced through with determination to thumpingly obvious success and shows what could be, for some, the future.

  I could have cycled round Copenhagen seven times that day, if it hadn’t been for all the coffees. My legs already feel better and you can see, easily, what it does for the Scandanavians’ toning. I was tempted, the next day, to leave the city and go north. The map told me I could have reached Elsinore. I just couldn’t, for the life of me, make up my mind.
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