NYC Let Your Voice Be Heard-Help Improve the New Bike-Share Program

You can see a timeline of workshops here. There's one tomorrow, January 31st, for Hell’s Kitchen, Chelsea and Clinton. The next one is on February 6th for the West Village, Tribeca and and SoHo, and so on. If you are in NYC, I encourage you to attend. This is what democracy is all about, and it'll make for a better and more successful bike-share program!

10,000 new bikes will appear in New York City next summer when the new bike-sharing program is launched. The bikes will be located in 600 stations sprinkled around Manhattan and Brooklyn, but the exact location of each station still needs to be determined. That's where citizens of NYC come in! The NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) will be holding community planning workshops in various areas of the city to allow local citizens to help determine what the best spots are for stations, and what the "hell no" locations are.

Via NYC DOT, Streetsblog

Where People are Biking and Walking in the US in 2012

The Alliance for Biking and Walking just released its biannual benchmark report, and the results may surprise you. The state with the greatest percentage of cyclists and walkers? Alaska. Among cities, Boston takes the crown.

If those results seem a little bit off—Isn’t Portland the country’s biking mecca? Or, if you trust Bicycling Magazine, Minneapolis?—consider another figure from the Alliance’s report: Americans choose to walk for 10.5 percent of all their trips, and bike just 1 percent of the time. While Bostonians aren’t known for their bike culture, 13.9 percent of the city’s commuters walk to work.
“All those cities we have at the top of the list, they were all cities that were built around human beings first,” says Alliance president Jeffrey Miller. These cities have grids, or in the case of Boston, a web of streets designed for pedestrians that tend to make drivers crazy. “It’s easier to walk and bike in parts of these cities than to drive,” Miller says.

And Alaska? “We know that people will vote with their wallet,” he says. “Gasoline is like $10 a gallon there. It's expensive to drive.”

The Alliance’s benchmark report does confirm deeply held notions about America’s bike revolution. Of the country’s 50 largest cities (plus New Orleans), Portland is home to the greatest percentage of people commuting to work by bike. It’s also the only city listed in which more commuters choose to bike than choose to walk. But the report also shows that while bike culture might be booming, most people who choose to get around without cars still hoof it. Given the importance of walking to car-free living, the cities that best represent an alternative vision of the country’s transportation future may not be Portland or Boston, but Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Seattle—all of which rank highly for both biking and walking and which hold the number two, three, and four slots on the combined list.

There are several similarities that make those three cities successful: All three have "complete streets" policies; D.C.'s took effect in the past couple of years. They all fine drivers for not yielding to bikes and have bike-parking requirements in new buildings. D.C. and San Francisco also require bike parking in buildings or garages, while San Francisco requires it at public events. San Francisco has more miles of bike lanes, multi-use paths and signed bike routes per square mile than any other city in the country; Seattle and San Francisco have innovative bike infrastructure, like shared lane markings, home zones, colored bike lanes, bike boxes, contra flow bike lanes, and bike traffic lights. D.C. has some, but not all, of those features, plus cycle tracks, which are physically separated from car traffic but still on the road.

“What it seems we need is for communities to engage as many options as they can to encourage biking and walking,” Miller says.



Cities and states are doing something right: the Alliance found that Americans make 12 percent of all trips by foot or bike despite the fact that these transportation modes receive just 1.6 percent of federal transportation dollars. And cities across the country are moving toward ever-bigger infrastructure projects, particularly for biking: The list of planned bike facilities shows that Nashville will have more than 850 additional miles of bike infrastructure by 2027; Los Angeles will have added more than 1,600 miles by 2041; by 2032, New Orleans will have an additional 1,002 miles of bike facilities and New York an additional 1,800 miles.

State of the Union for Bikes?

Beyond bikes, music, and home brewing, politics is my other big hobby. So like most political junkies, I was glued to my TV last night to see the President's State of the Union. When the president of the executive branch of the U.S. government talks about something, it gets on a lot of people's radar. It doesn't mean that things will immediately start happening, but it does give legitimacy to any issue. That's why my biggest wish for this speech was for bikes and bike infrastructure to be mentioned.

Not surprisingly, it didn't happen. But I believe it deserved a mention, if only to increase visibility for the issue. Politicians always talk about how the roads are crumbling, bridges are almost falling down and rail needs big bucks, but in many places, bike lanes don't even get to be in disrepair because they don't exist yet. That seems like the lowest-hanging fruit out there. I think it would show great vision for the president to link bike infrastructure with other things like rail, bridges, roads, etc, and mention them together in the future.
I understand that protected bike lanes, bike boulevards, bike parkings, etc, are more of a city issue. But the federal government can still play a big role (Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has taken many steps in the right direction), both in setting a national agenda and by creating broad incentives that will encourage cities and states to do more and do it faster.
So how about it, Mr. President? Are you looking for a relatively cheap way to improve the U.S. infrastructure base? To improve public health, quality of life in cities, reduce air pollution and oil imports? Save money by reducing wear & tear on roads and reducing lost productivity due to congestion?

Sounds like a good deal to me.

You can read the text of the SOTU speech here.

Shit Cyclists Say

On-Street Bike Parking is a Win-Win

Making Streets Safer With On-Street Bike Parking from Streetfilms on Vimeo.
The number of cyclists is growing rapidly in many cities - NYC's bike count is up 289% since 2001, for example - but in many places, including NYC, the number of accessible bike parkings is not keeping up. If this problem is not solved, it could slow down bike ridership rates. But how should the problem be solved? Should we just add a bunch of bike racks all over sidewalks? There might be a better way: on-street bike parking near intersections provide more parking spaces for cyclists, they don't clutter up the sidewalks, and they improves visibility for drivers, making everybody safer. The video above by Streetfilms shows exactly how they work and why they are so good.

Richmond Gets 80 Miles of Sharrows

In mid November, the city of Richmond, VA began installing the first of approximately 80 lane miles of bike sharrows that will be placed along specific corridors in the city. The pilot corridors where the sharrows are being installed include Meadow Street from Broad Street to Cary Street and Harrison Street from Broad Street to Idlewood, representing about three lanes miles of bike sharrows thus far.

Sharrows consist of a large chevron and bicycle symbol. From start to finish the project will cost about $775,000, with most of the funds coming from the Federal Government grant for “congestion mitigation air quality” projects.

Shared lane pavement markings (or “sharrows”) are bicycle symbols carefully placed to guide bicyclists to the best place to ride on the road, avoid car doors and remind drivers to share the road with cyclists. Unlike bicycle lanes, sharrows do not designate a particular part of the street for the exclusive use of bicyclists.

They are simply a marking to guide bicyclists to the best place to ride and help motorists expect to see and share the lane with bicyclists.

Motorists: Expect to see bicyclists on the street. Remember to give bicyclists three feet of space when passing  Follow the rules of the road as if there were no sharrows.

Bicyclists: Use the sharrow to guide where you ride within the lane. Remember not to ride too close to parked cars. Follow the rules of the road as if there were no sharrows.

Purpose of sharrows:

• To indicate a cyclist’s right to the lane. (It does not confer the right, it just informs road users to it.)
• Reduce bicycling on sidewalks
• Assist bicyclists with lateral positioning in a shared lane with on-street parallel parking in order to reduce the chance of a bicyclist’s impacting the open door of a parked vehicle
• Encourage safe passing of bicyclists by motorists
• Reduce the incidence of wrong-way bicycling

Bike Sharing is Becoming a gateway Drug to Urban Cycling

Washington D.C.'s Capitol Bikeshare started small in 2010, and with little fanfare. It wasn't as large as Paris' Vélib bike share system, or as immediately popular as Barcelona's Bici. It didn't have especially bells-and-whistles bikes like Denver's B-cycle program, nor was it as comprehensive as the Chinese city of Hangzhou's bike sharing scheme.

Never mind. Capital Bikeshare has become copy editor Bill Walsh's (and a lot of other DC commuters') gateway cycling drug of choice anyway. Walsh, who lives and works in the nation's capitol, has over the last eight months become a dedicated cycle commuter, using Capitol Bikeshare for more than 90% of his commutes - causing him to christen the service a "gateway" transportation drug. In other words, once you use it, you are hooked on city cycling.

And that's good for cities. Bike sharing systems are an investment, and frequently one that is hard to find the money for in cash-strapped cities (such as Portland, Oregon), but bike sharing is far cheaper than building subways, paving new freeways, or adding bus services, and it pays off not only in reducing car traffic but also in making citizens just a bit more conditioned.

The next wave in bike sharing is to make systems friendlier - making it easier for users (tourists and city dwellers) to get on other forms of public transport when they are done cycling. In Berlin and Paris, passes can be used for different transport, and in the case of Berlin, for car parking and taxis, too. In another experiment in Munich, Mo! combines car sharing and bike sharing in a single system.

In Denver, B-Cycle is making its system accessible to members of Boulder's B-Cycle and vice versa.
And Wuhan, China (with the largest bike sharing system in the world, according to the Bike Sharing Blog), plans to open its system to users of the Haikou city system hundreds of miles south.

Over 450 bike sharing systems exist or in the planning stages around the world, clustered most intensively in southern Asia, Europe, and the United States. Wouldn't it be nice if one card and one membership would give you access to any city around the globe? Now that would boost the concept of a global community of city cyclists tremendously.