Bike Riding in Copenhagen

Riding the bike in København feels about the same as in Amsterdam. There are ample bike paths but a high density of cyclists. Adding to that is riding a foreign bike which I feel less confident about than my own. There are no left turns for cyclists, one has to cross the intersection and then wait to go left. This is the cost of having a separate bike infrastructure in the right side of the roads. At this point I was unsure whether I liked this.

Another thing that people do is raise their hand when they want to stop, except at obvious places like a red traffic light. This is awesome as randomly decelerating cyclists are one of my grievances in Bonn. Together with the two step left turns out plays out nicely and you can easily pass the people intending to make a left turn.

There are some special left turns for cyclists, but they are rare and clearly marked:

The hostel city bike rides rather strangely as I am used to my premium trekking bike with 6 bar tire pressure without a squishy suspension under the saddle. On cobblestone the bike is quite pleasant to ride and Chris's longboard becomes unrideable. There were quite strong winds, and the three gear shift on the bike was not fine grained enough to find a good gear. Having been used to 30 gears I could perhaps do eight gears, but three is too few for me.

Using the "Happy Cow" app that a vegan colleague showed me in Dublin we found a vegan burger bar and had some burger with fries. Even though Chris is not a vegetarian he liked the taste of the burger. The patty was made from mushroom they told us, I guess something like Quorn.

Chris and I arranged to meet at noon at his girlfriend's apartment. On the way there I took one of the commuting routes that are easily found with the Open Cycle Map. There are a bunch of them, just like in the larger Dutch cities.

Occasionally I found cars and trucks parking on the cycle lane. This was as annoying as in Bonn. Actually it was worse as most cycle paths are separated. This means that you have to either squeeze through the width that remains or stop the bike, carefully descend onto the street level and then stop again and lift the bike back on the sidewalk-style elevated cycle path. In Bonn there is mostly no dedicated cycle infrastructure, so you just pass the illegally parking vehicles on the left.

This really shows that dedicated infrastructure has drawbacks as well. There are vocal proponents of the "vehicular cycling" approach like Berlin Cyclist. The idea is that you ride your bike in the same lanes as you would a car. No dedicated infrastructure is needed or even wanted.

As the cycle paths are usually rather wide a single parked car does not block traffic completely on most streets:

This does not mean that it is okay to park there, but the infrastructure is robust enough to cope even with lazy entitled car drivers.

Another drawback of dedicated infrastructure is that passing slower cyclists is impossible on some stretches where the cycle path is narrow. Luckily they are two to three cyclists wide, passing did not pose a general problem on the commuting routes in København.

After lunch Chris and I went for a ride around a nearby park. On asphalt roads the electric longboard had a clear advantage as he can go around 40 km/h without him breaking a sweat. As we got into the park and roads started to become a little worse, the rising comfort went down. The city bike still handles rather well.

With all the wind the rising was more exhausting than with a proper bike, but at least I did not have the range anxiety he had with the longboard. Riding against the wind took its toll from the battery pack and he was down to 65 % after just 7 km. We finished a smaller round and returned to get the charger.

For the second round we rode towards the sport fields and planned on going around a lake. One road was gravel and had a sign with a tiny sign prohibiting cycling. The other way around was with asphalt but with the same sign. As we walked along, we was a lot of cyclists on the right side of the road.

It turned out that the older part of the road was an exclusive pedestrian path and that the road had been paved wider for cyclists. Even though there were no signs, cyclists took the right side and pedestrians the left one. In Germany you had to paint a solid line in between, post signs and people would then just choose to ignore them.

Chris left for training, I continued on my own. So I followed the cycling routes and hit another such sign that prohibits cycling:

This was on a route marked as cycling route on my map, so this was odd. I asked a pedestrian and she told me that she rides her bike there every day. Also the sign is so small that it does not mean anything. There was an email address started on the sign, so I wrote an email to the administration. A couple minutes into that path there was an underpass with clearly marked cycle lanes. So just as the other path this clearly is a commuting route. Perhaps the sign was about the lawn or something? A day later I got a delivery failure for the email, presumably the address just does not work any more. The sign itself was dated at October 2009, so perhaps the sign really is outdated.

The commuting routes are very nice to ride on. One of them was just redone with new asphalt, so I had to ride on the sidewalk for a bit.

This means that they continually invest in the bike infrastructure! Bonn has not build a single meter of bike lanes in 2017 and 2018, but I am sure that they will make it for their "Bike Capital 2020" target ...

By accident I ended up on a road that was not finished yet, but felt very nice up to this point:

In retrospect there was a somewhat vague construction signaling blocking the entrance to this road a bit. It made me a bit cautious, but it was not clear enough.

Another interesting detail are the rails on front of traffic signs. There you can hold onto when stopping at a red light. Judging by the labeling they are part of the commuting routes. They also have a footrest.

Often traffic signs are repeated multiple times and also on the other side of the intersection. This is not done in Germany as it is feared to confuse people. Here I find it pretty convenient.

Near the hostel there is a cycle lane that ends target abruptly. Every time I have passed it there were cars parking even over the bicycle pictograms. So this can happen also in one of the leading bike cities.

Most intersections have dedicated traffic lights for cyclists, some even have special phases for bike traffic:

This means that turning cars will never run over a cyclist going straight.

At one of the metro stations there were at least five of these bike parking lots:

Compare that to Bonn where there are few to no official bike parking spots near the stations and the main station has a lousy capacity of just a handful of bikes in the new bike station.

Parking cars are usually separated from the cyclists such that opening doors are not as dangerous as in Bonn. Also the parking is usually on the left of the bike lane such that car drivers do not have to cross it and open their door into the "real traffic".

You know that a city is bike dominated if store owners are getting annoyed of parked bikes:

How I would love to see such a sign in Bonn!

During the more frequented times of day you would have a dense queue of cars in the two lanes and smooth flow in the parallel bike lane. One can see the efficiency of biking right there.