Bicycle Innovation Lab

If you’re visiting Copenhagen, chances are you can rent a bicycle from your hotel. Or you can head down to the Bicycle Innovation Lab, home to the city’s new “bicycle library.” There, once you have put down a 500-krone ($80) returnable deposit, you can check out any of the bikes on hand and ride around for a few days. (You can also book online.)

As part of its mission to bring bicycles to the people, the library offers a wide variety of models. Some in the collection (like the bright yellow, high-concept covered “Velomobile”) are rare; others, like the Bullitt brand transport bike, are normally too expensive for most people to get their hands on. Other options include folding bikes, electric bikes, old postal service bikes, cargo bikes, custom bikes (built for two people, for example), and recumbent bikes.

The idea behind the library is that if people can test out new bikes to see what really works for them, it may be easier for them to commit to, say, investing in a cargo bike to transport the kids to school.

“I see myself as a bicycle psychologist,” said Lasse Schelde, manager of the Bicycle Innovation Lab. “It’s about exploring the possibilities of bicyclism — it is an ‘ism’ because it’s not just a bicycle but a question of infrastructure, livable cities, health, the relationship between you as a person and society.”



In addition to the bike library, the Bicycle Innovation Lab includes a knowledge center that offers discussions, videos and other information about biking. It covers both big-picture issues like how policy affects ridership and nuts-and-bolts advice like which kind of facilities workplaces need to offer if employees are going to start riding longer distances to work. In addition to showers, cyclists have mentioned that it is nice not to have to bring their own towels to work, Mr. Schelde said.

“That means putting a laundry facility in place,” he said. “And hair dryers for women are important.”

Lastly, the lab has a workshop where people can experiment with building new kinds of bikes.

“In Copenhagen, we have the best test facilities for bicyclism in the world,” said Mr. Schelde, who added that he also applauds the new “cycle superhighways” that I wrote about last week in The Times.

“If you build an infrastructure,” he said, “people will ride.”