Transportation in Copenhagen



The blue marking denotes a conflict area for oncoming
traffic that is accepting a gap in vehicle and bicycle traffic.

There's clearly a commitment to human scale transportation in Copenhagen. There are several tradeoffs between vehicle travel and bike ped facilties shown in these pictures.

The striping of the blue bicycle lane and the crosswalk ladder striping show a commitment to maintenance that we don't make in the U.S. We have used green selectively to identify conflicts at intersections and while an oncoming permitted left turn across this blue is present at this intersection, we wouldn't use green striping here if we had a similar intersection in Portland. There's also not the expense of mast arm signal poles at these locations. They use predominantly post mounted signals at the intersections that require motorists to search for the indication in their field of vision. It is done at the risk of safety (our mindset in the U.S.) which in our practice places the traffic signal heads over each lane of traffic prominently displayed so as not to put any doubt as to who has the right of way. Does doubt and uncertainly result in lower speeds and ultimately a safer multimodal environment?



The signals at this particular location were manufactured by Swarco,
an Austrian firm that we are trying to procure bicycle signals from.