Skip to main content

Copenhagen ‘a haven for cyclists’

According to citymetric.com, Copenhagen is a haven for cyclists. They have a special orange cycling bridge over the harbour and everything from mail to Christmas trees is delivered by cycle. In the city there are more cycles than people, while a traffic system encourages the residents to cycle, with the promise of a stop-free ride into the city. It's all thanks to a traffic management system known as the Green Wave, which operates at peak times. Traffic signage is timed such that, if a cyclist travels at
January 9, 2015 Read time: 2 mins
According to citymetric.com, Copenhagen is a haven for cyclists. They have a special orange cycling bridge over the harbour and everything from mail to Christmas trees is delivered by cycle. In the city there are more cycles than people, while a traffic system encourages the residents to cycle, with the promise of a stop-free ride into the city.

It's all thanks to a traffic management system known as the Green Wave, which operates at peak times. Traffic signage is timed such that, if a cyclist travels at a steady 20km per hour, they should be able to travel all the way into town without hitting a red light. This has the added benefit of ensuring that cyclists move at about the same pace, thereby creating safer cycle lanes. In the evenings, the system is reversed, so cyclists leaving the city can travel home uninterrupted.

The Green Wave was first launched in 2007 on Nørrebrogade, a main street in the city centre. By 2012, the number of cyclists on the street had risen by 20 per cent, so the system has since been rolled out to other streets around the city.

The one downside, of course, is for cyclists who live centrally but cycle out of the city in the mornings. These, though, are in the minority, so there are far fewer cycles on these routes, and fewer safety issues to contend with.

Now, the city is introducing another, similar system, which detects cyclists approaching an intersection: if enough cyclists are moving together, the light will stay green until they pass.

Related Content

  • January 24, 2012
    Improve and increase mass transit systems to minimise congestion
    Rather looking to solve congestion by spreading the load, perhaps we need to look at concentrating it. Michael L. Sena writes. We humans were made to walk and run at embarrassingly slow speeds by comparison with other, more fleet-footed organisms. The sea is not our natural habitat and we were definitely not designed to fly unaided. Nevertheless, humankind has evolved a method of living during the past century that is dependent on transporting its members over very long distances during relatively short per
  • June 1, 2016
    Traffic management turns to machine vision
    Traffic engineers can use the latest advances in vision technology to streamline and enhance traffic management. The idea of using one camera to perform all functions at an intersection is attractive to authorities for many reasons and camera supplier Gridsmart says it can make this happen. Its Bell Camera offers a horizon to horizon view that includes the centre of the intersection where vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians cross paths and it can be used for traffic light actuation, traffic data collection a
  • March 2, 2012
    Reversible express lanes and open road tolling combat congestion
    Teri England, Diamond Consulting Services, details the construction of construction of a world first - reversible express lanes with cashless multi-lane ORT - on the Tampa Hillsborough Expressway
  • October 26, 2016
    Building the case for photo enforcement
    As red light enforcement is returning to some intersections and being shut down at others, new evidence has been released backing the safety campaigners, reports Jon Masters. In 2014, 709 Americans were killed in red-light-running crashes and an estimated 126,000 were injured according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).