Bicycling

Video: Copenhagen’s All-Weather Bike Infrastructure

In case you missed it in Friday's headlines, here's a video from Copenhagenize with some inspiration for this cold spell we've been having. The video shows Copenhageners -- lots of 'em -- making their way through the January snow.

By Noah Kazis

5:17 PM EST on January 11, 2010

In case you missed it in Friday’s headlines, here’s a video from Copenhagenize with some inspiration for this cold spell we’ve been having. The video shows Copenhageners — lots of ’em — making their way through the January snow.

It’s an instant retort to the old claim that “no one uses bike lanes in the winter.” Of course, in Copenhagen they come prepared. Check out the bike-lane-specific plows used to keep the city clear for cyclists even in a snowstorm.

In fact, if your city has good bike infrastructure and maintains it well, cold-weather biking can become the norm too. According to Mikael Colville Andersen, 80 percent of Copenhageners who bike keep cycling all through the winter. And many of the top cycling cities in the developed world are in Denmark and Sweden, neither of which is famous for balmy climes.

Noah Kazis

Noah joined Streetsblog as a New York City reporter at the start of 2010. When he was a kid, he collected subway paraphernalia in a Vignelli-map shoebox. Before coming to Streetsblog, he blogged at TheCityFix DC and worked as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in Toledo, Ohio. Noah graduated from Yale University, where he wrote his senior thesis on the class politics of transportation reform in New York City. He lives in Morningside Heights.