Picture 11 miles of smoothly paved bike path meandering through the countryside. Largely uninterrupted by roads or intersections, it passes fields, backyards, chirping birds, a lake, some ducks and, at every mile, an air pump…

The cycle superhighway (5min. video), which opened in April, is the first of 26 routes scheduled to be built to encourage more people to commute to and from Copenhagen by bicycle..

“We are very good, but we want to be better,” said Brian Hansen, the head of Copenhagen’s traffic planning section…

nytimes, 17.07.12.

“When we look at public hospitals, we look very much at how to reduce cost,” said a regional councilor, Lars Gaardhoj, who had just picked up his three small children in a cargo bike decorated with elephants. “It’s a common saying among doctors that the best patient is the patient you never see. Anything we can do to get less pollution and less traffic is going to mean healthier, maybe happier, people.”

(Source: climateadaptation)

what idiot planned/designed SAN to be “one of the more difficult airports to land in”?? dense fog last night, flight got diverted to Ontario in freaking RIVERSIDE county, then bussed to San Diego, all after original flight got delayed.

I want to move to Scandinavia already where everything works wonderfully.

**but also, I just got a new apartment in a neighborhood of San Diego that is DIRECTLY under the flight path. 

*sigh* i guess it’s safer to divert planes than have them possibly crashing into houses and apartments..

but ALSO: San Diego airport is like a mile from Downtown, yet public transportation is horrible and everyone still drives to pick up and drop off. 

vs. in Stockholm, for example, the Arlanda airport is a ways out of the city, but there’s a frequent “Arlanda Express” train that gets people to and from the city & airport quickly and smoothly.

I speed up alongside Janez and asked him what the hell we were cycling on. It looked remarkably like a Copenhagen-style cycle track.

Oh yes, he assured me. It was. Then he told me a splendid story. Back in the late 60s/early 70s a team of urban planners travelled from Ljubljana to Copenhagen to study bicycle infrastructure. This was at the height of the Cold War — although the Iron Curtain as far as Slovenia/Yugoslavia was concerned was more of a dangly bead curtain, but hey. They studied infrastructure and went home and just built it. Copy/paste. Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V. They built 45 kilometres of these perfectly separated cycle tracks and THAT is where Ljubljana was launched onto it’s journey as a bicycle-friendly city. 

It boggles the mind that urban planners in other cities and countries don’t do the same. Copy paste best practice from Denmark or the Netherlands. Save time. Save money. Save fixing the mistakes later. Amazingly, cities are still putting in bike lanes painted on the LEFT side of parked cars, instead of along the curb. As Jan Gehl says, the only function they have is protecting… the parked cars. 

mikael/copenhaganize, 27.09.11.

it fucking gives me a mindfuck, in the negative way.

and physically, i’ll probably get hit by a car trying to park or get doored or something. 

gdmit, there seriously needs to be some hard campaigning for physically separated bike lanes / cycle tracks RIGHT NEXT to the sidewalk, and NOT thin white lines between a row of parked cars and cars going 30mph.