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An overview of the biking culture in Copenhagen
Are you visiting Copenhagen for the first time? Did you move from another country to the city of Copenhagen?
Then, probably you have been surprised by the way Danes get around: mostly by bike.
Denmark is well known for its biking culture. If you have been walking around the cities and its surroundings, you probably have had the chance to see the big amount of people moving themselves by bike. There are 4,770 km of cycle routes across the country, and 7 out of 10 of all Danes own a bike (Source).
In this article we want to show our analysis of the biking culture in the capital city of Denmark. Our main questions would be:
How many people use the bike in Copenhagen?
When they use it? Daily? Monthly?
How the trend over the years has evoluted?
Where in Copenhagen is there a larger traffic of bikes?
What types of trips do they use it for? Going to work? Leisure? Long or short?
Index
We know that the biking culture in Denmark is very important. But, what do the data say?
According to this paper Cycling for Everyone: Lessons from Europe, Denmark is the second country in Europe in which the percentage of trips by bike compared to the total number of trips is higher.
So, having seen this incredible statistics and this huge biking culture, we thought it would be a great idea to get to the bottom of this data and explain our findins to know a little better the capital of Denmark.
To answer our main questions, we analysed a dataset with bicycle traffic in the years 2005- 2014. Our analysis is based on the count of bikes in the following 13 locations around Copenhagen. The exact points are marked on the map below.
Note: click on the orange dots to know the name of the street.
Biking all year long
Biking all year long
We wanted to investigate how people that are living in Copenhagen change their biking habits over the year. The plot presented below shows an average of daily bike traffic in the years 2005-2014 by month for each location.
As we can observe, in every place there is an upward trend when the summer is approaching (from March to July) and a downward trend when the fall starts and until the whole winter (from September to February). What is suspiciously interesting, is that in the month of July the bike counts drop.
Why July?
This could be due to the fact that Copenhageners use their bikes mostly to go to work, but they are on vacation during that month? This is just an assumption, but, keep reading to find out more.
Does the weather influence biking in Copenhagen?
Does the weather influence biking in Copenhagen?
We wanted to see how bike traffic changes during the year and with different seasons.
To better understand how and why bike traffic changes over the year, we have to compare the weather in different months.
By looking at the temperature and precipitation plots, we can notice that the trends in bike traffic are similar to the ones showing average temperatures. It points to the conclusion, that temperature affects the number of people biking.
When considering the precipitation it doesn't seem to be correlated with cycling patterns. August has the highest value of precipitation, while also having one of the highest bike traffic. This suggests that Copenhageners cycle regardless of rain or snow.
Average temperature and precipitation in Copenhagen in the years 1990-2020
Since we want to get a more detailed insight into how weather affects cycling patterns in Copenhagen, as a first approach we plotted the bike counts during the years from 2005 to 2014, together with the average temperatures of all the days in this period of time.
Time series of bike counts and average temperature for every day in the period from years 2005 to 2014. Note that the data is normalised for a better visualisation of the comparison of the two time series.
As we observe, for the bike counts, we have so low values until the middle of 2006 (probably due to problems collecting the data), so we will not focus on that initial period. However, from 2007 up until 2014, we observe that both time series, bike counts and average temperature, have the same periodical trend. However, the average temperatures have a bigger variance than the bike counts.
Seeing this graph, we could think that the temperature has something to do with Copenhageners deciding whether to take the bike that day or not. But, of course, the smaller variance in bike counts (compared to temperature) could indicate that even when there are cold days, most of them still decide to ride their bikes.
Correlation between bike count and weather conditions
Correlation between bike count and weather conditions
Since the data above strongly suggests that such a correlation exists, we decided to be even more precise and show how the weather affected the bike count for each day in 2007. Here we show the correlation matrix between the number of bicycles, average temperature and average rainfall, and the bubble plot with the same data for Tuborgvej.
As we can see, the temperature variable is positively correlated with the number of bicycle counts in Copenhagen, and precipitation has a value closer to zero. So we now know that Copenhageners don't mind a rainy day when they cycle. They are prepared and used to it anyway!
Bicycle traffic on Tuborgvej also reflects this correlation, as the days with the highest number of bicycles were also the days with the highest average temperatures. Warm weather definitely encourages more people to use their bikes, although, as we expected, it doesn't mean that everyone stops cycling when it gets cold. The number of cyclists on the coldest day was only just over 50% lower than on the hottest day. Although there doesn't seem to be a clear correlation between rainfall and cycling, we can see that the highest levels of precipitation have usually low levels of cycling.
Correlation between temperature, precipitation and bike count in the year 2007 for all of the locations.
More biking curious facts in Copenhagen
More biking curious facts in Copenhagen
Calendar plot in Ellebjergvej
Calendar plot in Ellebjergvej
We could see from the data some more curiosities as the one we present now. Examining the calendar plots of all the data in the different locations, we discovered a fun fact. If you observe closely, you could see that every last Sunday in July there is a particular biking event happening here.
We looked in the internet for some event happening every last Sunday of July in this area. All we found is that there is this Copenhagen Biking Festival that takes places a weekend in the summer. We are not completely sure that this may be the reason, but, for sure it will be worth going to Ellebjergvej on the last Sunday of July to check it out what is happening there...
Purpose of cycling in Copenhagen
Purpose of cycling in Copenhagen
What do Copenhageners use the bike for?
In order to explore Copenhagen's cycling culture in even greater depth, we decided to investigate the purpose of cycling for its citizens. The graph on the right shows the average count differentiated by weekday and weekend in every location.
We observe that residents use their bicycles both on working days and in their free time. This indicates that the Copenhagen lifestyle favours the use of the bicycle as the primary means of transport in the course of daily activities.
However, there is a great difference of bike counts if we compare weekdays and weekends. This fact arises the following question: is it that they use this mean of transport to go and come back to work mainly?
In an attempt to gain a better understanding of why people cycle, we have decided to plot an hourly graph of the number of bicycles on each street, which can be seen below.
Note: click on each label in the legend to choose the visualisation of each of the locations or choose a specific location from the dropdown menu.
It is clear that each of the streets follows a similar pattern, with peaks in the morning between 7 and 9am and in the afternoon between 4pm and 6 pm. From this information, it may be concluded that cycling is a popular mode of transportation for going and coming from work.
But the nighttime traffic is another intriguing finding. Our graph shows that streets outside of the city center, like Tuborgvej, Englandsvej, or Ekkebjergvej, see up to 5 times less bicycle trips at night than streets closer to the center. We could assume from this that Copenhageners also use bicycles to travel to events in bars and clubs, which may be due to the high price of cabs and the lack of Uber-type apps banned by the government.
Examining the map for bicycle traffic, we can also gain information about bike habits of Copenhageners. We now present the Copenhagen interactive map showing how the average intensity of cycling traffic changed in the studied locations of Copenhagen through the years from 2005 to 2014.
From our observation of the data showed in the map, it seems, that the streets closest to the city center are the busiest. Also, when inspecting the trend over the years of all the locations, there are not big or notorious changes over the years included in our dataset.
And now, what do you think?
In conclusion, we have learned a lot about Copenhageners habits when it comes to get around by bike in the city. This is what the data shows, but, from your experience would you agree? Let us know your thoughts about the topic!
This article was written in May 2023 by students of the Technical University of Denmark.
Alejandra Navarro Castillo
Jakub Solís
Zuzanna Rowińska
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