Every day for me is like Christmas

This post comes about as a sort of congratulatory gift to myself. I recently found out that I will be interning at the Community Transportation Association of America this summer, which is REALLY exciting for me. The CTAA is an advocacy/policy organization that tries to connect poor communities to better transportation systems. When I met two of the organization’s members last summer at a Transportation Conference (yeah I know what you’re thinking but whatever I had fun), I was floored to learn that this organization existed, because they do what I’ve spent most of my time in college studying.

And now I get to work for them! What’s even better is that I get to work in their communications department, which means that a good portion of my job is to write articles and press releases and other missives that try to teach people about the importance of transportation access for the poor. That means I’m being hired to do the thing that people usually ask me to stop doing after I’ve been talking to them for about five minutes and they make the mistake of saying “So, what do you study?” Now I get to do it without fear of being hit by a shoe!

So to celebrate, I’m going to write one of the two posts I’ve been dreaming about writing ever since I decided to keep a blog about my time in Denmark. That post is on Denmark’s transportation systems. The other one is about Denmark’s alternative energy, and it will be written after I spend a weekend biking around an island that produces all of its energy with alternative sources and actually produces a SURPLUS of energy. Well I guess I should say that I will write that post provided I don’t die in a biking accident. The odds for that are pretty high.

If you, dear reader, have limited patience for reading about transportation systems (I really can’t imagine anyone would, though), I’ll offer a very brief summary: Danish transportation is amazingly comprehensive, very user-friendly, and AWESOME. There. You can go now.

But I’m going to keep going. Danish transportation is extremely multi-modal, meaning that several different types of transportation are very strongly-supported by the design of the city and even the suburban communities. This means that bikes, trains, buses, cars, and, for a small part of the downtown area (but they’re expanding it!), the Metro system, are all viable ways of getting around. If anything, I think using a car is the hardest method of transportation to use, because the government very consciously creates disincentives for using a car: high taxes for the purchase of a car, high gas taxes, high parking prices, and they may introduce congestion pricing, where they make you pay for driving into the city. I think all of these disincentives are awesome, although I can’t quite say how effective they are given that I do see automobile traffic on the highways leading out of Copenhagen between 4 and 5 pm on weekdays.

Now those who have listened to me talk about transportation policy before (and I owe you an apology) will wonder why I think that discouraging car use is such a good idea, given that I’ve often said that cars are the best ways to connect poor people to jobs.  I usually argue that that’s the case when there isn’t already an effective mass transit system already in place. And while it may be that using cars would be better for inter-suburban transit (I was having a conversation with my host brother about this earlier today), I really can’t say the same for getting in to Copenhagen. As I’ve said before, I live in the VILLAGE of Greve; there is farmland out my window. And yet I am a two-minute walk from a bus stop that is serviced by a bus that, during the rush hours, comes about every ten or twenty minutes, and even in the “off hours” the bus still comes at least once an hour. The buses run almost like clockwork–each bus stop has a full schedule of when the buses are expected to arrive at that particular bus stop, and it’s rare that the bus shows up more than five minutes later than the posted time. Buses in the city are even more reliable. Denmark even offers a cell phone service that enables you to send a text message to a number that informs you of how far away the bus is from your exact stop.

The buses themselves aren’t quite the Bus Rapid Transit systems that I wish they were (I recommend that you look up BRT systems, if I go into them here I’ll get too excited and make this long post even more painful for those polite enough to read through everything), but they’re very nice–the aisles are wide, accommodating strollers and wheelchairs without impeding the flow of traffic to the seats. The buses are very clean and I’ve seen many that run on biofuels (or at least I think that’s what the sign says, I still don’t know enough Danish to ask my host brother to pass me the potatoes, let alone ask “So does this bus run on environmentally-sustainable fuels?” I feel like that’s just not a priority).  The buses are built pretty low to the curb, so that it’s easy for the eldery and those with strollers/in wheelchairs to get on board the buses, and the buses have multiple entry/exit points to speed up boarding/exiting times. I don’t have a sense of the average bus capacity, but I’d say it’s at least fifty people.

And if you think the buses are cool, you should see the trains. My God, the trains. They’re  run off the electric grid, they’re reliable, they’re pretty, they’re CLEAN, which is particularly amazing. I don’t have any statistics on ridership (YET), but each train car holds about thirty or forty people and still the seats somehow remain in better condition than the average chair one would find in a college dorm lounge.  There are two types of trains that I’ve experienced: the S-Tog, comparable to the MBTA commuter rail and run throughout the greater Copenhagen area, and the regional trains, which run throughout Denmark and into Germany. The S-Tog system is incredible–there are eight lines running from Copenhagen into the suburbs, mostly on a North-South scale but covering the whole area, and they run every ten minutes during rush hours and every twenty minutes during non-peak hours. My one complaint is that the trains stop running at around 12:30 at night, but they start up again at 5:30 most days (and in Copenhagen, it’s pleasantly easy to find places that are open between those hours). The exception is on Sunday, when they start up at 6:30 or 7. And let me tell you, that’s been one of the most painful lessons that I’ve learned so far.

In addition to seating large numbers of people, each train car also has a section that accommodates bikes and strollers–the seats in these sections fold up, exposing these strange rubber-coated wire frames that will hold the bike or stroller while you ride. And amazingly, people are polite enough to move if they’re sitting in one of these seats and they see someone board with a bike or a stroller. People are also quiet on the train, which is remarkably different from my experiences on mass transit in the States (and especially when I was riding the Green Line of the T on days when the Red Sox were playing at Fenway). They’re not silent, although there are designated “silent” cars, and boy, the people there won’t hesistate to enforce the rules if you board one in ignorance. Between the quiet of the train’s interior and the smoothness of the ride (now I’m writing copy for a car commercial…), it is very easy for one to fall asleep in perfect comfort. And it’s also very easy for one to fall asleep and sleep through one’s stop and wake up on the other side of Copenhagen, disoriented and panicked. Good times, good times…

Each train car also has a display listing each stop along the train’s route, with colored lights on the display marking the train’s progress. This gives you a pretty accurate idea of how far you are from the next stop, and when the train reaches the stop, the stop’s name is announced over a speaker system. This is how I first learned that Danish is a twisted and perplexing language. For example, “Ny Ellbjerg” is actually pronounced “Nooh Ehl-byah” and I still haven’t figured out this one stop called “Sjælør.” It’s something like “Schilleh” but I don’t even know.

Every train station keeps a running display of how far each train is from the station. And remarkably enough, the display is ACCURATE. The company that operates the train system reports that about 95% of trains run on time. And keep in mind, there are eight different lines with trains running every ten to twenty minutes. That’s a LOT of trains and a LOT of opportunities for delays. Yet somehow, that doesn’t happen. Over the past two weeks or so, I’ve had the great misfortune of showing up at the train station when the display says “E-Train Køge: 0 minutes”. So  I stand there and swear, having chased yet another train out of the trai.n station (it loses its romance after a while, especially when you’re just trying to get home for dinner rather than catch the train to make it to the airport and tell the girl you love that you still love her and that she shouldn’t take that plane to the other side of the world. Yes, I’ve written the scene. It stars Kiera Knightley and Ewan McGregor, but I will graciously step in if Mr. McGregor is busy). But despite my frustration,  I take comfort knowing that the display above my head isn’t lying when it tells me that the next train will be along in nine minutes. And that’s enough time to go get a $4 coffee or something, which is available at the convenience store “Kort & Godt”, found at every S-Tog station. The food is pretty good!

So basically, the S-Tog system is incredibly user-friendly to the point of being intuitive. I’m pretty awful with directions, but within a week of being here in Denmark I felt perfectly comfortable with taking the S-Tog, and most of my friends here feel the same way.

I’ll stop soon, I promise, but first a word about bikes. As I said when I first started this blog (ah, the ignorance of youth!), Denmark’s transportation infrastructure really supports bicycle use. I underestimated how true this statement is. In addition to designated bike lanes on just about every street in Copenhagen, the bike lanes are protected from traffic by an elevated curb, meaning bike-to-car collisions are rare, and bikes usually don’t have to compete with pedestrians for sidewalk space. Bikes also have their own traffic signals, and places to park your bike are FAR more numerous than places to park your car. Bikes are also welcome on trains, to the point that staircases at train stations have a little ramp for the bike to roll up, rather than requiring that  cyclists carry their bikes up the stairs. In the summer, the city of Copenhagen puts these “city bikes” around town that are available for use and essentially free. You deposit a 20-kroner coin in the bike, ride it for however long you need it, and when you return the bike to the bike stand, you receive your kroner back. I’m curious to know how the system works that these bikes aren’t stolen, destroyed, or stripped of their parts, but apparently it either doesn’t happen or else it doesn’t happen to an extent that counteracts the benefits of the program.

Bikes also come in different styles that accommodate different uses. Some bikes, called “Christiania bikes”, have a three-wheeled frame that supports a large box in front. I’ve seen people put groceries, packages, children, and even dogs in these bikes. Small businesses will also use these bikes to transport goods from one location to another. These are more expensive, but they’re also much more flexible. This means that the bike is a much more multi-use form of transportation. I once nearly smacked a person for suggesting bikes as anti-poverty solutions in the US (I get passionate about these things, but I should probably talk to someone about that incident) because bikes in the US can pretty much carry one person. Not the case, here in Denmark.

Okay, so in summary: transportation in Denmark is user-friendly. It is comprehensive, with many different systems supporting each other. It seems to get pretty high ridership (I’m not the only one on it at 5:30 in the morning). It is efficient (I get from Greve to Copenhagen, a distance of about 18 miles, in 24 minutes). It fits well within the infrastructure of the city. It is integrating environmentally-sound policy into its services. I don’t really have a proper sense of where the poorer communities are in Denmark, so I can’t quite say if it’s effective connecting poor people to jobs, so the critical element (for me) is as of now unknown. But damn, I’m impressed. The title of this post sums it up–every day I see something about the transportation system that impresses me.

I wonder if I can take a train home as a souvenir.