How do you build a healthy city? Copenhagen reveals its secrets | Hacker News Reader

How do you build a healthy city? Copenhagen reveals its secrets

theguardian.com

A quick note on the bikes:

1) Copenhagen is really, really flat, which makes it easy to bike for everyone.

2) Cars in Denmark have an environmental/luxury tax of over 100%, on top of the 25% VAT, making cars incredibly expensive to buy.

What if you don’t ride a bike, for either physical or whatever reason? Say butt hurts, wind and rain ruin your hair?

Pretty good public transportation. Metro, busses and trains will bring you most places.

I've lived in Copenhagen for 3 years now and don't own a car. I am not an outlier.

Speaking of the bikes, I'm usually not nationalistic, but the most patriotic thing I ever did as a Dutchman was complain about the bike infrastructure in Copenhagen :P

Obviously, this should be taken about as seriously as trash-talking at a sports game. It was fun to provoke my Danish friends.

Having said that, I sincerely wasn't impressed at the time; it was my first time living abroad, and later I realised that Groningen, with its car-free city centre, is bit exceptional.

However, Copenhagen does annoy me a bit with their PR machine (although not much more than any other European capital city, I suppose).

For example, take this list of "20 most bike friendly cities in the world of 2017" published in the Lonely Planet[0]. I'm still impressed they printed the following paragraphs unironically:

> Unsurprisingly, Copenhagen came out on top as the best city in the world for cycling, while the results also saw a selection of global destinations shifting position. Now in its fourth year, the index was released by urban design consultancy Copenhagenize.

> (skipping Copenhagen on nr 1 and Utrecht on nr 2)

> 3: Amsterdam. The index states that Amsterdam remains the most amazing city in the world for cycling, securing the highest in the baseline score in 2017. However, it came in third position due to the fact that it did not score bonus points that reflect the dynamics in the city moving forward.

So a design consultancy tasked with promoting Copenhagen as a bike-friendly city publishes a list of "most bike friendly cities" in 2017, and then puts Copenhagen on top because it scores bonus points for things that will happen in the future. This is about as unbiased as when the car industry ghost-wrote all those news-articles about jaywalking early last century.

Well, regarding those "dynamics moving forward": there is so much bike traffic in cities in the Netherlands that we're experimenting with funnel-shaped bike crossings that make better use of the swarm -like movements of groups of bicycles[1]. I haven't seen those in Copenhagen when I visited it a few weekends ago. And then it still makes no sense that Amsterdam has "the best baseline score", because if you ask any Dutch person if Amsterdam is the most bike-friendly city in the country and they will laugh at you. This includes people from Amsterdam.

Having said all that, I am glad that the Danes, and cities in the Nordic countries in general, are doing their best to become more bike-friendly. On a more global scale I hope the rise of small electric motors will help with the problem of elevated terrain, which you rightfully point out as a problem anywhere outside of countries like Denmark or the Netherlands.

[0] https://www.lonelyplanet.com/news/2017/08/25/cycling-europe-...

[1] https://vimeo.com/217846328

> there is so much bike traffic in cities in the Netherlands that we're experimenting with funnel-shaped bike crossings

That's a neat solution, but I don't think Copenhagen has the same need. There are places with as many bicycles, but these also have more road space for them. There are similarly narrow roads, but there are other roads and cyclists spread across all of them.

Rotterdam should be more directly comparable with Copenhagen; a harbour but a lot fewer canals within the city.

Anyway, the biggest difference I noticed in the Netherlands is there's more often a kerb between the bike lane and the cars. Also, outside of towns the provision is better; there are more inter-town paths along roads, and paved paths through forests etc where there is no car road.

I have some friends in Stockholm who have bought electric cargo-bikes, and they love them. They're perfect for the "I'm just going to pop down to the store", or "I'm dropping the kids off at daycare" situations.

So one funny offshoot of batteries getting better for electric cars, is that they're now small enough and powerful enough for bikes.

1) A 21-speed makes almost any hill easy.

Nonsense, you must maintain some minimal speed otherwise bike gets unstable.

A well traveled American ex-colleague of mine moved to Copenhagen but left after 6 months. He said he simply couldn't afford to live there on his (Senior) game developer salary and theorized that the reason Danes are so happy is that they have such low expectations.

I really hope that's not true (I'm pretty sure it isn't) as I find the idea of moving and raising my family there very appealing.

Developer salaries are significantly lower in the whole of Europe than the US, but they’re still extremely well paid positions that’ll give you way over what an average person earns.

Describing it as unaffordable sounds a bit off to me when there are people living comfortably on half what he earned (assuming he wasn’t being massively underpaid).

If he wanted a garage full of Tesla’s in his city centre garage, then yeah, it’s unaffordable.

Yep, understood. I don't know how much he was paid but his definition of not-affordable was not being able to afford more than a 1 bedroom apartment for him, his wife and baby as well as only being able to eat out once a month.

Of course, he knew what he was getting paid and it's not difficult these days to get a sense of cost of living for anywhere in world so he must have know what he was getting into.

In that case, I do suspect being a game dev may have led to a lower than average software developer salary.

I got back from Copenhagen recently and while food and drink are both insanely expensive, the rent was considerably less than where I live currently, but the salaries were relatively similar.

Yes, apartment-renting market in cities like Copenhagen, Stockholm or even Berlin is nothing like e.g. NYC. Tenants having much more rights leads to much fewer people willing to let in a tenant.

The fact that Danes are "living comfortably" in light of outrageous taxes and living expenses does nothing to argue against the GP's reasonable claim that perhaps Danes have low expectations.

People "live comfortably" on dirt floors in many parts of the world. That doesn't mean such a restriction on financial freedom is appropriate for everyone.

there seems to be disparity in the definition of comfort.

Your Danish home is going to be smaller, you're not going to drive a giant car, but in return you have excellent access to public transport, years of income guarantee should you lose your job, your kids and you have universal access to healthcare and education regardless where you are on the social strata and so forth. If that's a definition of comfort you like, then Denmark is for you. If you don't, you're better off somewhere else. Rest assured, nobody in Denmark is living in a hut.

This really strikes a chord with me. For as long as I have lived in the US I’ve strived for a bigger, fancier house, better car, more toys etc. and now that I’ve gotten to a comfortable level of all of that, I realize I’d give it all up for the benefits you mention. The grass is always greener as they say but it’s awfully tempting.

Just ask how long are you going to wait until a doctor is available to see you, particularly if it's a specialist. Or how long are you going to wait for a surgery.

Denmark has some of the lowest waiting times among OECD countries

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016885101...

and some of the highest physician density in the developed world. I'm German and have worked in Denmark, and have never experienced waiting times.

The “living comfortably” part is a bit vague, but by any reasonable definition someone who is earning an average salary in a country which frequently appears in the top 5 of the various human development/quality of life indices is very likely to be living a good life. You can’t say the same for someone sleeping on a dirt floor.

yes, the problem here is that upper middle class americans expect to be able to buy and buy whatever they please without ever feeling a pinch

Yes, but also some luxuries are way more expensive in Denmark compared to the US. Big houses and luxury cars for example.

As they should be. Nobody needs a big house or a car (of any type). If they still want to have those, why not give something to the society in the process?

Being an expat myself, I cannot help but notice that it's often more expensive than being a local, especially in the beginning. Less choice in housing, no family support, being unable to claim certain benefits either because not qualifying or simply being unfamiliar with local laws are some of the reasons causing this. If you need a visa/work permit you can also incur siginificant expenses (both time and money) because of that.

I have an above-average income in the UK, and often hear about "people who live on half of what I do" conviniently omitting their reliance on social housing, family help, and state benefits, all of which I lack. While it's possible for a foreigner to acquire those things, it takes a significant amount of time.

> I find the idea of moving and raising my family there very appealing.

Are you prepared for 6 months of cold, rain/snow, wind and short days with dim or no sunlight?

But it's a dry cold :)

I'm okay with that - I miss seasons living in Southern CA - but my wife on the other hand, would not enjoy that.

Devs are not paid as well in Europe, probably a factor.

And then his industry was gamedev...

Games being one of the most exploitative bits of the industry :/

A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’. Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either’ (quoted by Kotkin, 2009).

That's not even true, though. The highest concentration of Scandinavian-Americans is is in North Dakota, where they make up 1/3 of the state's population, and have a poverty rate that is significantly above zero.

Actually they are a lot less of the North Dakota population[1] being 4.7% of the population.

For 2016[2], North Dakota had a poverty rate of 10.7 (10th lowest in the US). Of that 10.7%, 8% were listed as White.

Given this, I don't think a significant amount of Scandinavian-Americans in North Dakota are in poverty. I guess any number is not zero, but North Dakota is probably the wrong state to use for a demonstration.

1) http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/north-dakota-populat...

2) https://talkpoverty.org/state-year-report/north-dakota-2017-... https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/ND/PST045217#vi...

> Actually they are a lot less of the North Dakota population[1] being 4.7% of the population.

Your reference [1] says that 30.8% of the state's population reports Norwegian ancestry, and 4.7% reports Swedish ancestry. Overall that's pretty close to the 1/3 I ballparked for Scandinavian-American.

Opps, I forgot the Norwegian[1]. Well, 30.8% of 8% of 10.7% is a pretty low number and assumes that the 8% is an even distribution over the White poverty rate.

1) I might still hold a grudge over the damn lefse and not being told its was potato before eating it. I was not in good shape 30 minutes later.

I think you are misreading your source. You seem to be interpreting it as saying that 8% of people in poverty are white, but what it actually says is that 8% of white people are in poverty.

Assuming that the poverty rate is evenly distributed over the white population, then the poverty rate for Scandinavians would also be 8%.

I'm not misreading the source, else 100% of the people in North Dakota would be in poverty. The Native Americans are listed as 35% and that is not their percentage of the population.

Then why are you taking 8% of 10.7%? The correct way to interpret the statistics is not "10.7% of people are in poverty and 8% of those are white", it's "8% of white people are in poverty and that 8% overlaps with the 10.7% of all people who are in poverty".

That is an excellent comeback (by Friedman), but maybe it's something that sounds good but is in fact inaccurate.

Obvious counterexample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swede_Hollow,_Saint_Paul

It's easy to jump to conclusions on why you'd post this quote here.. Instead, maybe you could expand on what this quote means to you (in this context)?

Does (s)he have to have a point? It's an interesting anecdote related (even if only tangentially) to the discussion at hand.

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