Notes on visiting Copenhagen

I got a reduced-cost trip to Stockholm, Copenhagen, and London, thanks to my wife and her work/book-publicity tour.  The longest stop was in Copenhagen, about a week.  I only biked one day, because we were staying a nice 10-minute walk from my employer’s Copenhagen office, and because the bicycle rental that I could find (DonkeyBike) seemed to have a 24-hour rate, not a single-trip rate; i.e., not worth it for a simple to/from work, plus the walk was a shorter distance (bicycles discouraged on pedestrian mall) and quite nice.

But one day I had to do laundry, and the nearest place (The Laundromat Cafe, very nice) was a bit far to walk carrying a bag of laundry.  And I had to bike at least once, so I rented a DonkeyBike.

All the other people on bikes were very skilled, more so I think that the norm among Boston-area commuters.  They rode quite close to each other and quite close to the curb (something I was aware of riding a new-to-me rental bike with a load of laundry on the front end).  By US standards I think I am pretty skilled, and most people in Copenhagen seemed at least as skilled as me.

Donkey Bike rental was pretty good.  It’s dockless-but-has-geofenced drop-off, and the rental is per-day, rather than per-trip.  It may be that doing a timed rental helps them avoid the problem of your (intermediate) destination(s) not being within a geofenced; while you’re renting, it’s “your bike” (you can even add theft insurance to the rental, I did, not wanting to deal with complications and not knowing the local theft rates).  I didn’t see any signs of rebalancing the whole week that we were there, and my walk to work and to the subway station took me past several drop-off zones.

In Copenhagen, they have a sort of two-cycle left turn where you ride straight across to the corner, wait (and turn 90 degrees) and then continue on your way.  There’s a built-in next-cycle delay, except that if the ordinary cycle is straight-then-left, then you have no actual delay.  This works, we might want to do that here, though it does interfere with cross traffic doing right-turn-on-reds, but those are not such a good idea anyhow for cars.  Locally, there’s a similar intersection in Arlington at the intersection of Mass Ave and Pleasant Street, except there I think the left-turn is leading (not sure now, it used to work that way before the redesign) which gives a people on bikes a chance to game the lights, not sure that is the best plan but that’s no surprise here.

There’s huge volumes of bicycles; it helps to count how many go by in N seconds, and then realize that in a lane of cars, one every two seconds is best case.  Parked, the numbers are scarcely believable; they’re everywhere (before you get all fired up about bicycle clutter, they take far less space than is devoted to cars here in the US, and even in Copenhagen, probably still less space than cars.  We’re used to cars, we don’t even notice the space they take.)  People ride in terrible weather, too, like 40F and raining (speaking from experience, that is much worse than 20F and clear; sooner or later, water gets into things).

Two donkey bikes, in their natural habitat, one with rack, the other without:

A Dane, on a bike, in the cold rain, with a cello(?) on his back (through a Cafe window):

A little bike parking and a no-cars gate: