Copenhagen: the city of bikes... and a brand new metro!

Copenhagen was definitely one of the highlights of my holiday. The city is amazing and offers a bit of everything; I could talk for hours about the food, the culture, and the beer (just to be clear, I'm talking about the likes of Mikkeller... not Carlsberg or Tuborg!). And of course there is a certain unique, self proclaimed independent community of Christania... but again, this is a transport blog, so I'm going to try and stick to transport topics.

I recently bought a new bicycle. My first bike in at least 20 years. And no, not because I had the same bike for 20 years... I just fell in a bit of a trap; growing up in Ireland, then living in the UK, where the go to mode of transport is the car. So for years, I would simply drive everywhere, even for short journeys. I no longer own a car, and for the first time since I was a teenager, I now use a bike regularly, in conjunction with public transport. It's a folding bike that I can take on the train, but it's also perfectly good as a stand alone bike to use every day, and I love it. It allows me to get around London without a car, is helping me to start to get fit and healthy again, and is saving me money.

Given Copenhagen's reputation as a cycle friendly city I was very keen to try out the cycle infrastructure there. One of the first activities I booked when planning this holiday was a cycling tour of Copenhagen. There are plenty of tours available and to be honest I can't recommend the tour I took over any of the others, but it was very good. The pace is easy going, you don't need to be an expert cyclist or to cycle every day, but if you're not comfortable on a bike I would advise against it, if for no other reason than as a courtesy to the other participants. It's definitely a great way to see Copenhagen though, particularly if you are short on time.

So what was my impression of the cycling infrastructure? Well, it was great; but the infrastructure itself didn't really stand out; other than a few unique items, such as a new cycle only bridge. It ticked all the boxes such as properly segregated paths, bike only traffic lights, but all in all it was quite subtle - there's no garish blue paint on the cycle lanes to distinguish them, it's all designed to blend in subtly to the pedestrian and road infrastructure, but crucially cyclists, and the cycle paths are respected by pedestrians and road users alike.

It is a two way street, and what impressed me most was the respect that cyclists gave in turn to pedestrians. The bus stop outside my hotel for example, was on quite a busy road, with a cycle track between the footpath and roadway, like on the photo here.

The common problem with this design is that when a bus stops at a bus stop, the cycle track passes in between the footpath and the bus. Where space allows, the ideal solution is for the cycle track to duck inwards, and create an island between the road and cycle track where bus passengers wait and board the bus without disrupting the path for cyclists, and without the danger of cyclists crashing in to passengers trying to get on the bus.

I was slightly shocked, and pleasantly surprised when a bus pulled up to this stop in Copenhagen... Instead of what I expected, which was to have to wait anxiously behind the cycle track, keeping an eye out for passing cyclists, as soon as the bus stopped, all the cyclists immediately stopped behind the bus and waited patiently for people to board. It's a mutual level of respect between pedestrians and cyclists that a city like London can only dream of, and I think can only come about through a true normalisation of cycling; these people were not cyclists. They were just people who were traveling by bike on that occasion. Everyone in cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam cycles, it's just a way of life, and something that is considered mundane and normal. The people that stopped that day to let me on to the bus were probably regular bus users themselves, and that's the key difference.

But to get to a level of bike usage where cycling is that normalised takes time, it takes effort to build the infrastructure, yet more effort to encourage it's use, and it takes time to transition. My home cities of London and Dublin are moving in the right direction, but no matter how many good cycle tracks are built, no matter how many new 'cyclists' we get, it's going to take a long time before cycling is just a way of life for almost everyone, where the people using the cycle lanes are not cyclists, but just people using a bike to get to work, and where the outside of our main train stations look like this...

Perhaps the best example of this cycling culture is the Danish attitude to locking their bikes. Now most Dane's don't ride particularly expensive bikes, and those that do possibly do lock their bikes more securely, but the vast majority of bikes in Copenhagen are not chained up, or secured to anything in fact, but just locked using a simple lock that locks the wheel. There's nothing actually to stop a thief from picking up a bike off the street and walking away with it. But bikes are simply so common that there's no motivation to rob one. Bike theft happens, but you'd be very unlucky to be a victim of it.

And then there's the other part of the cycling infrastructure - the bike parking, the free air pumps, and the absolute ease at which you can take your bike on a train! For someone like me, who struggles day in day out with my folding bike on London transport... Well you can imagine how jealous I was when I got on this Danish 'S-Tog'.

The S-Tog network, like a Danish version of a German S-Bahn, is the extensive commuter rail network of Copenhagen, that for decades has formed the backbone of public transport from the city's suburbs into the city, but public transport in and around the city itself had remained surprisingly underdeveloped until quite recently. The Copenhagen Metro, a driverless light rail system only opened in 2002. So it was no surprise to find an immaculately clean and modern system.

But this was something else. It was brand new... literally. A little surprisingly, I didn't realise just how new the line I was traveling on actually was. As my tour guide later explained to me, the latest section of the Metro, the M3 'city circle line' was, at the time of my visit, less than 2 weeks old!

It's beautiful. But also functional, efficient, and fun! Driverless light rail vehicles, driving around in a circle... what's not to love? It's like the DLR but completely underground, brand new, you can stay on as long as you like. With Danish design.

The simple, clean and elegant design of the stations will hopefully prove to be it's saving grace, as otherwise I fear it would not age well. Particularly as every station feels exactly the same. As beautiful and modern as they all are, there is no individuality to the stations, they are all almost identical, albeit with a slightly different colour scheme and different names. If they had been designed with less elegance, simplicity and Danish design the whole network would not age well. But I think in this case the uniformity and simplicity of the whole network works. It'll never compete with the flair and individuality of the Stockholm metro (stay tuned...!) but it never could. Instead, the Danes have created something simple and efficient, and beautiful in a very different way.

Oh and they've also created possibly the cutest escalator outside of Newcastle upon tyne (if you know ,you know).

Copenhagen... you did not dissapoint! I will be back for sure, and I can't wait!