Building the Bicycle Snake

UPDATE: A year back we blogged about the Bicycle Snake - Cykelslangen - being built to both help connect the popular Vesterbro and Islands Brygge neighbourhoods of Copenhagen, and to create a simpler more direct route around Copenhagen's unfortunately quintessential American-style shopping mall for the 9000 cyclists that transit that area every day. We've been talking about it, waiting for it, and with it's elegant Danish design - really been looking forward to it.

Which is why I was so pleasantly surprised when to discover yesterday that construction has started. A year behind schedule, but hey it's on its way.

As I wiggled down a little ramp on a cargo bike, bumped over cobblestones, and squeezed past delivery trucks (the maze the Bicycle Snake will relieve us from), these are the developments made thus far:

Ok, so it's not much, but in the lower left corner you can see where construction has begun. You can also see a cyclist riding off the sidewalk/current bike lane onto cobblestones where he then dismounts his bicycle and carries it up two flights of stairs. In a few months, he should be sans cobblestones, dismounts, stairs, and riding (10 metres) high. For a brief reminder, taken from approximately the same angle, here's what it will look like:

photo of Cykelslangen from architect Dissing + Weitling

Until then, we've got the City's standard friendly post reminding us that, roughly translated, they're building better connections for pedestrians and cyclists and until it's finished this summer they hope we can bare with them and have a bit of extra consideration and respect for each other in the construction zone.

I think we can.