Copenhagen is good place to meet to talk about climate change. It is a city full of healthy stylish looking people riding around on bikes ... or rather blogs like Copenhagen Cycle Chic and Copenhagenize would have you believe that is the case.
Denmark has been the place cycle campigners in the UK have looked to for inspiration for in recent decades. When Sustrans started with the safe routes to schools project it was inspired by the Danish government's 1970s response to a poor child road safety record. (For more see Cadence's case study for the National School of Government innovation on this topic.)
Recently things have not been looking quite so impressive in Denmark. Cycling is booming in the cities, but the number of children cycling to school is reported to be decreasing away from the big urban areas. The Copenhagenize site reported recently that:
- According to a recent survey every fourth parent in the country doesn't feel it safe enough to send their children to school alone on foot or on bike.
- In Denmark we cycle 30% less than we did in 1990. This is a national figure - things are quite different in cities like Copenhagen and Odense where cycle traffic, for example, has boomed in that period. Since the early 1990's, the Road Safety Council's scare tactics are directly responsible for the sad fact that the number of children driven to school has risen 200%.
- "There are far too many parents who drive their children to school and who are so busy in the morning that they just speed up to the school to drop their kids off. That's not the way to train children to take safe routes to school", says Anders Rosbo from the Road Safety Council. He says that it's the parents themselves that create dangerous traffic situations with the armada of cars outside schools in the morning.
While Cadence are interested in the safety element, it is the other differences between places where there is street activity or not that intrigue us. Hoodie, goodie, buddy looks partly at whether there is a link between overall trust between residents and transport mode choice.
Hopefully the world leaders in Copenhagen will get a glimpse of the city's bike culture and reflect that low carbon does not necessarily mean lower quality of life.
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