Copenhagenize.com - Bicycle Culture by Design: Copenhagen Cycle Parade


A few days ago I wrote about the C02penhagen festival - world’s first carbon neutral festival and all that. The festival kicked off with a cycle parade from the city centre to Denmark’s Technical University, about 10 km north of the city.

It was cosy affair, with breakfast and speeches before we all set out for a bike ride. A group of cyclists from the UK were on hand. They had just ridden 500 km from England to Copenhagen to take part.

A Biogas bus from the Swedish town of Helsingborg was present and it ferried winners of a radio competition to the festival while a modest group of people on bikes did the human-powered shuffle.The solar powered cargo bike, at top, provided big ass tunes for the ride. Amazing sound system rocked the streets of old Hafnia and tourists stopped to wave.


Our bicycle mayor Klaus Bondam was everpresent, riding along on his custom Biomega bike. Here he is chatting with a guy riding my Yahoo Purple Pedals bike. Which, of course, means you can see loads more photos taken with the onboard camera on this photostream at Flickr.


If the guy on the purple bike was the only one wearing a green suit, he'd be goofy. But when you have a whole army of green-suited people it suddenly becomes quite cool. They are all from Mr. Green, an environmental group that tries to make it all a bit hipper than normal. They found a bike in a cellar, made by someone at some point and capable of carrying eleven cyclists. What a strange and yet rather effective machine. They had a blast.
I rode along for a ways with my daughter in the box of our Bullitt and chatted with people. You can see what it all looked like on this modest little film.

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