In Copenhagen, Bike Commuting Gets a Little Less Popular

Copenhagen may have a justified reputation as a cyclists’ paradise, but over the past three years, something shocking has happened: The proportion of bike commuters on the city’s roads has been going down. Since 2014, the share of commuter trips made by bike has dropped by 4 percentage points, from 45 percent in 2014 to 41 percent now. The modal share for bikes for all journeys, meanwhile, has stagnated. Currently 24 percent of all trips in the Danish Capital Region take place by bike, a rise of just 0.2 percent since 2012.

Most cities would kill for those statistics, of course, and they come against a longer-term backdrop of significant increases—look back ten years and bike commuting has still grown overall. The city’s rapid bike growth nonetheless seems to have crashed, putting a hitch in Copenhagen’s ambitions for half of all journeys to be carried out by bike by 2025. So what’s stalling in a city that prides itself on bike progress? And why is it commuting that has particularly felt the pinch?