Thursday already…

Our first meeting of the day was with the Andreas Rohl who is the Bicycle Program Manager for the City of Copenhagen.

I have to give Andreas top marks for the most informative session yet. He gave us a great presentation on the history of the bike culture in Copenhagen with lots of pertinent facts that we Portlanders could relate to and might find helpful in trying to increase our bicycle ridership. Their reasoning for promoting cycling in their beautiful city are almost exactly the same 7 points I listed previously for Amsterdam.

A bike bridge, opening for a ship.

Facts:

- Commuters here are split into three basic groups - auto, transit and bikes - each making up about 33%, but bikes are on the rise!

- After World War II, between 1950 and 1970, a strong car culture developed (just like in the USA), but in the 80’s there were a number of demonstrations from the cycling community advocating for safer places to ride.

- Copenhagen has done a great job of branding itself as the “#1 Cycling City in the World” and it’s paid off for them significantly. (Portland certainly has that reputation for the US).

- Currently 36% bicycle commuters with a city goal of 50% by 2015. They intend to achieve this by limiting auto use through road tolling and increasing parking fees.

- They currently have about 220 miles of “cycle tracks” and are planning 45 more miles in the coming years.

- Bike theft is not nearly as big a problem here as in Amsterdam. They think it’s because there isn’t much of a market for stolen bikes (hey, wouldn’t that be nice in Portland!).

- Bike usage is up 5% in the last 11 years. In general they see a steady increase in bicycle ridership over time.

- The higher the number of riders and the greater the diversity of cyclists, the safer it is for all cyclists. Something we’ve also seen here in Portland. The interesting dilemma they face is even though the statistics show it’s much safer on the roads a lot of riders don’t FEEL safer. Probably just too darn many bikes out there!

At the office of the Danish Cycling Federation.

After lunch we had a good meeting with Jens Loft Rasmussen from the Danish Cycling Federation. They currently have 20,000 members, which is actually down significantly from the high of 40,000, at a time when cyclists were faced with a crisis… a freeway through downtown Copenhagen! The freeway didn’t happen and now a large section of downtown Copenhagen is car-free.

The Cycling Federation has a few great programs, two of which are very similar to Portland’s BTA’s most popular programs:

- Bike to Work Campaign: 94,000 participants paying $7 each (makes our free Bike Commute Challenge seem pretty darn awesome);

- Children’s Bike to School campaign, with no less than 87,000 participating kids.

Jens is a retired banker who took over the Federation just over a year ago. Seems like a sharp guy who will take the Federation to great places. He did comment that Danes are known to be very aggressive drivers and cyclists, though we didn’t see any of that while we were plodding along on our bikes and clogging up their wonderful cycle tracks.

Coming up tomorrow: National Bike Transportation Policy with the Danish Ministry of Transport and a visit to the US Embassy in Copenhagen… oh yeah, and a final bike tour of Copenhagen.