Bicycle Fixation Weblog
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04/13/2008: "Copenhagen's Main Street to Become a Bicycle Boulevard"
From the Copenhagenize blog we hear that the Nørrebrogade, one of Copenhagen's main streets, is to be changed to a bicycle boulevard. To quote:Each day 75,000 people use the street. Of them only 15,000 are motorists, whereas 35,000 are cyclists, making this route one of the busiest in the city for bikes. This being Copenhagen there are bike lanes in both directions, but bicycle congestion makes it tricky riding this route. There is little room for making the bike lanes as wide as on other streets, so removing the motorised traffic is the only way to create safer bike lanes.A most gratifying development! To read the entire entry (and more about this in the rest of the blog) go to Copenhagenize.
There are shouts of protest to be heard, most involving claims that the shops on the street will suffer from lost business. The same shouts were heard back in the 1960's and 1970's when Copenhagen began creating its vast network of pedestrian streets, at the expense of the car. Businesses didn't die. They thrived from the increase of pedestrians and cyclists. As we pointed out in an earlier post, cyclists are better shoppers than motorists, too.
