I just noticed the date of this post, I suppose there’s a very slight chance it was the same driver. let’s hope he/they’re off the streets.

Here’s a life-enhancing/saving tip: You’re entitled to nothing.

Drivers: Watch the fuck out. You are operating a machine capable of killing just about anybody, keep pthat in mind.

Cyclists: Watch the fuck out. Pad yourself up as much as you like you are still vulnerable. Quit riding around without a care in the world as though everyone will be looking out for you. Be the better person.

Pedestrians: That goes triple for you.

The world owes us nothing, let’s all just do our damndest to keep ourselves nice and alive.

Thanks.

Look, 35 percent of people bike to work in Copenhagen. In Seattle it’s something like 2 percent. Surely there are a few numbers in between that Seattle can strive for. Just because CPH’s circumstances are different (and they are, in even more ways than you pointed out) doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to learn from it. Both Berlin and Paris are huge, it’s worth pointing out, and both have great bike infrastructure. No, they didn’t do it exactly the same as CPH, nor could they. But they took Denmark’s example and applied it to their own context. Even London, for Christ’s sake, is investing in bike infrastructure to an unprecedented degree, and that city has even bigger challenges than Seattle (tiny streets, insane density, huge size).

I’m from Seattle, by the way, and have been living here in Denmark for three years. It’s frustrating to see how little effort it would take on the city’s part to make a huge difference in emissions, health and quality of life, and how there are always naysayers pointing out why it will never work. Why not *try*, man, geez.

You don’t get sprawl until you get a good 5 miles from downtown. Exactly one thing creates sprawl: cars.

It’s amazing to me that anyone thinks for a moment that Americans – much less those in cities – want the same anything….or should be expected to.

Seattle is not Copenhagen – better we recognize that sooner than later. It is not the fault of bicyclists that our urban form is sprawled (blame old streetcars as well as cars). Our trips on bikes are longer, the amount of time we can budget to transportation is finite. If my commute were 2km long instead of 20, I might (MIGHT) be persuaded to travel at the Danish 12kph pace. Unfortunately, that is neither reasonable or practical.

Both the Danes and the Dutch have a couple of things going in their favor for their cycle track systems – mainly, the cities are small, and they are most certainly FLAT. Neither situation exists here.

In my perfect world, we start removing motorized traffic from streets and reclaim that with wider, better connected on-street facilities that don’t threaten pedestrians (and this is a huge issue in both Denmark and the Netherlands)and gets me from A to B at a more reasonable clip. Yes to more density to shorten trips for those who choose that lifestyle, but don’t penalize those who live in rural Fremont (for in beloved Copenhagen, Fremont would be a rural suburb) by making cycling clumsy and inconvenient.

Let’s design for OUR city, not someone else’s.

‘Bikes are annoying!’ is actually a great argument for building bike lanes and giving bikers more assistance, not less. A biker will never cut you off in traffic or be in front of you at a stop light if he has his own ‘road’ next to yours.

It’s amazing that no one in American cities seems to understand that everyone, deep down, wants the same thing.