In the Nordic countries I have been to, the Danes love to move, the Finns love to be quiet, are more prominent. The former releases the passion of life in sports, while the latter tastes the true meaning of life in silence.
No bicycle, no Denmark
Compared to Finland, the Danes “love” and are the kind of people involved.
Everyone knows that China has the title of “Bicycle Kingdom”, but with the continuous increase in per capita income of residents, considering the situation of the actual lane, there are fewer and fewer cyclists on the street.
The title of the “Bicycle Kingdom” in Denmark is much more realistic. List a few data for everyone: Denmark has 12,000 km of specialized bicycle lanes (and Denmark has an area of 43,000 square kilometers); 24% of commuting is done by bicycle; in Copenhagen, 45% of residents ride bicycles, bicycles The road is 454 kilometers, and the total distance of the bicycles per day is 1.34 million kilometers.
Bicycles are everywhere in Copenhagen and throughout Denmark. The number of them can be summarized in 8 words: everywhere, everywhere. While traveling, in order to experience the joy of cycling in Denmark, I borrowed a bicycle from the hotel and prepared to ride on the supermarket.
The hotel’s waiter knew that I was a foreign guest. I didn’t push the car to the front of me. Instead, I pushed the car to accompany me to the store. So I can’t figure it out. I have been riding a car in Shanghai for less than 30 years. Are you still not worried?
But the fact is that the cycling in the two cities is different. I walked outside the door with the waiter. He pointed to the pavement with blue plastic and told me that it was a special bicycle lane, set up independently, and ride at ease, without any interference from motor vehicles and traffic lights. The other bicycle lane is accompanied by the motor vehicle lane, but it is separated from the height from the height and does not affect each other.
When I went to a foreign country to ride a bicycle, I was riding very slowly from a safety point of view. Just riding for a while, I heard the horns coming from behind. What is this sound? It seems that it is not a car horn. Hurry and look back, good guy, only a few elderly people in the grandparents, armed with red or orange helmets, wearing long T-shirts, lower sweatpants, ankle sneakers, and comfortable cycling Row. Behind him is a large group of grandchildren who are equally armed and pedal bicycles. Look at the rider in front of me and beside me, the dress is nothing. The mighty traffic flows into a very spectacular scene.
On the car in Copenhagen, I have been thinking about a problem: Denmark has a small population, every household has a car, but why do people like to ride a bicycle like this? According to Mr. Gu, a Shanghai-based guy who has lived in Denmark for more than a decade, most Danish people chose bicycles at first because of helplessness. Mr. Gu’s friend, Alden, is a scholar who studies urban transportation. He pointed out bluntly that in the 1960s and 1970s, the direct result of Danish economic development led to a surge in the number of cars, which led to urban diseases with global traffic congestion. The most unresolved thing in the Danish city is that the central city is a narrow old street with a long history and cannot be widened, resulting in frequent traffic accidents. To this end, the competent authorities were forced to make big moves to restrict the purchase of cars through taxes. The tax is roughly three times the cost of buying a car.
In addition to the “limits” of taxation, government departments have also used investment and regulatory leverage to support bicycle travel. For example, in the original “blocking city” Copenhagen, the annual direct investment of bicycle facilities in these cities and municipalities averaged $12.5 million per year, and the central government’s special financial support was about $2.5 million per year.
The money is mainly used for the construction and maintenance of bicycle lanes, as well as the huge publicity activities, such as the annual “Bicycle Festival”, “No Motor Vehicle Day” and “Bicycle Work Week”. In addition, the “celebrity effect” is fully utilized, and government officials, royal members, etc. take the lead in cycling and participate in promotional activities. The enacted regulations also give bicycles full priority, such as allowing the bicycle to turn red right (the motor vehicle can’t), allowing partial one-way street retrograde, and allowing bicycles to take buses and subways. The parking spaces for cars in the central city are declining by 2% to 3% per year.
At present, the number of bicycles in Copenhagen is five times that of cars. On the street, are you free to ask the rider to ride a car? Although the answer is varied, it comes down to several key words: convenient, flexible, low-carbon and environmentally friendly, and can also exercise.
Quiet life, Finnish Style
Finland is known as “the quietest country in the world”. Quiet nature is related to people. Perhaps it is because of the sparsely populated land. In the cold winter, the Finns watched the fireplace and drank hot coffee. In the summer, they loved to sit alone on the lake. In public places, you often see that a few Finns sit together and say nothing, look at the newspapers in their hands, or bow their heads to think about their own minds. Occasionally, someone raised his head and said a few words, and then everything returned to calm.
There is such a proverb in Finland: If you don’t have anything important, it is best to close your mouth. The Finns believe that a person who is always talking is always an idiot with a poor brain and no thoughts.
Recalling that when I was traveling in Finland, I took the “Princess” cruise ship just out of the Helsinki International Passenger Terminal. Unexpectedly, the outside of the dock was a large piece of hot construction site.
In my impression, where the construction site is bound to be loud and loud, the noise is harsh. But I know that this site is different. It changed the usual collision operation to the squeeze mode, and the mechanical operation was stable without noise. Upon question, Finland has strict regulations on construction sites. If the total amount of construction noise exceeds the specified range, it is necessary to pass the fine according to the amount of noise.
Going to the streets, the various types of small-displacement cars on the smooth roads are constantly flowing, orderly; at medium speed, never honing. Seeing this scene, I recalled the visit to the Finnish pavilion, which is known as the “curling” in the Shanghai World Expo. The unique animations and images in the pavilion are said to be taken away from the metropolis and enjoy the tranquility of vision and light. Sense and hearing experience. Today, I have experienced a balanced, sustainable and cozy urban life worth pursuing.
Finns love “quietness” and are also reflected in their work biased towards mental work. In Finland, countless outstanding engineers and designers have been born. In 2008, the annual sales volume of Nokia mobile phones during the peak period was 468 million units, with a market share of 39% and a market value of nearly 250 billion US dollars, accounting for 25% of the total exports of Finland. After various reasons, Nokia has gradually fallen behind in the mobile communication market.
But things didn’t end. After the Nokia employees left, the parent company generously produced a lot of products or technologies that were useless to Nokia, allowing employees to take it for free and go out to start a business. These people have formed a number of startups rooted in the mobile Internet, widely distributed in the gaming, clean technology, biology, health and education sectors. Among them, mobile games have become unique and become a new business card in Finland. Among the companies that have been born, the most famous ones are “angry birds”, “tribal conflicts”, Jolla and other mobile Internet “news”, thus revitalizing Finland’s employment and economy.
