Urban Cycling Developments

[Muji]

Of course bike advocates need to fight against the association of bike lanes with wealthy newcomers, but the question is how to do it successfully. I imagine that a good way to go about it is for bike organizations to be actively involved with neighborhood councils and community groups, but I'd be interested to see some studies about what works best.

They've got their work cut out for them, thanks to unfortunate incidents like this one in Los Angeles' Boyle Heights.

Gentri-flyer Sets Off Social Media Storm in Boyle Heights
Sahra Sulaiman for Streetsblog LA
May 28, 2014



[...]

Touting Boyle Heights as a “charming, historic, walkable, and bikeable neighborhood” where you could put down “as little as $40K with decent credit,” it invited Arts District neighbors to join in on a (free!) hour bike tour followed by a discussion and artisanal snacks.

No one who knew anything about Boyle Heights — a predominantly Mexican-American working-class community with a long history of political and social activism — could possibly think this was a good idea, right?

[...]

[bobdreamz]

Citi Bike, the rebranded DecoBike system, will finally launch (after multiple delays, but hey, it happens) its big Miami mainland expansion this Saturday with a shindig at Bayfront Park. The event will have performances and art and food, and the system will go live. According to Citi Bike's people, the first batch of bikes will hit the streets on Saturday, and they'll "go from there." Or, of course, you can just ride one over from South beach.



Coconut Grove:



Brickell district:



West Brickell:





http://miami.curbed.com/archives/201...ike-launch.php

[M II A II R II K]

10 Points of a Bicycling Architecture

Read More: http://www.archdaily.com/576098/10-p...-architecture/

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1. Make bicycles handy things to use within buildings

- So much bike theft could be prevented if only we realised that bikes aren’t caked in manure. They may have been in the days of the horse, but these days wheelchairs and children’s strollers go from the street into buildings and nobody minds. So why don’t we take our bikes inside too?

- Imagine the advantages to a parent. He or she would be able to ride from inside their apartment directly to the cold food aisle at the back of the supermarket. With a cargo bike they could take their sleeping baby along for the ride and use their bike as a trolley.

- Or what if an office worker’s bike accompanied them like a briefcase? They could dock their bike at their office desk, then their home office desk, then the table at the café where they like to check emails. Their pannier bag could open out like part of a portable office.

2. Let the bike be the quickest way to leave home.

- In apartment buildings that have aerial streets that slope to the ground (like BIG‘s 8-House in Copenhagen) or where a sloping site rises to intersect the planes of access galleries (as happens at Park Hill flats in Sheffield) the quickest way to the ground from a high level apartment can be on a bike.

- My next book, Velotopia, will have ideas for apartment block types that push this idea even harder. Residential areas are conceived as bike reservoirs, discharging maximum numbers of people to the street with their bikes.

3. Weather protection

- Despite what a few apologists for bike transport might say, rain deters a lot of people from cycling to work or to school. Anyone who says commuting by bike ought to be different from driving or taking the bus, by not having a roof, has enjoyed way too much praise for riding to work in all weather.

- Naturally they resist design comforts that would get the lily-livered cycling as well. Ignore their petty agenda! As architects we need to be focused on protecting citizen cyclists from the wind, harsh sun and the rain thus putting cycling on an equal footing with other all-weather modes.

4. Sculpt the terrain to control cyclists’ speed

- At any place where bikes should slow down, like a cross-road or activity node, riders can be saved the hassle of braking if, as designers, we raise the ground at those points by one or two meters. People on bikes will slow as they rise, then regain their speed as they dip away.

5. Make peace between bikes and pedestrians

- Cars can be banned from our cities, or at least from broad tracts throughout them, but people on bikes and people on foot need to make peace. Consider this then: that cobbles are fine under foot but are awful to ride on, while an off-camber roadbed is no trouble to ride on but would cause a pedestrian’s ankles to roll. Now you join the dots. Also, carrying on from point 4, elevated shared zones can be linked with bridges, leaving low level, gravity-forced zones, for faster cycling.

6. Appreciate cyclists’ cognitive maps of their cities

- Many drivers know what it is like to arrive at destinations through basement car parks connected by cross-city tunnels, while more than one subway user has caught two trains to go between points they later found were a short walk apart. Those of us who are habituated to bicycle transport have yet another image of our city, often dominated by waterfront and rail corridor trails, and linear parks. Architects need to take bicycling communities’ cognitive maps of their cities into consideration when analyzing sites, planning through-site links, and determining where to place entries.

7. Cycling Dissolves the mobility/access dichotomy

- Once we accept that the tool for transporting people across cities in record time, can be pushed or even ridden inside, the dichotomy we see in a car city between mobility and access no longer applies. Arterial bike routes can double as platforms for commerce.

8. Dispersal of shops

- People stroll at 3-5 kilometers per hour and bike at 15-25 kilometers per hour. This means that in a bicycle-oriented district shops can be five times further apart spatially, but no further apart if we measure in seconds. Rather than concentrating activity along avenues, which always leaves side streets with no passive surveillance, shop fronts can be dispersed.

9. The mogul-field concept

- Some of the earlier principles I have mentioned—dispersing shops, elevating shared spaces to help cyclists slow down and discarding old distinctions between access and mobility routes—give rise to an alternative to the traditional street as the basis of city planning. The ground plane can become a field of broad moguls.

- The ramped access galleries of helical apartment blocks overhead, and the entries to solitary shops that have been evenly dispersed across a wide district, would be found on the crests. Pedestrians could move between crests via bridges and people on bikes could use the gravity-forced zone lower down. Cycle tracks at those lower levels can pass beneath blocks overhead, letting cyclists make beelines between any two points in the city.

10. Provoke with proposals

- What is the real lesson to be learned from provocative visions like Le Corbusier’s Voisin Plan, or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City? If we think it is that provocations are dangerous, we miss the real lesson of history, which is that provocations bring change. That was a bad thing in the ’50s when the new vision was to fill cities with cars. The situation is different now that cities need fixing. Chances are, a vision of a bicycling city, if it captured the public imagination, would be a force for positive change.

- The car-city paradigm was introduced to New Yorkers in an exhibition called Futurama at their 1939 World’s Fair. The idea was to make buildings tall and thin so that, down at ground level, there would be space for much wider roads—mobility for mobility’s sake. All that resulted were towers in a car park and residents with farther to walk.

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[M II A II R II K]

AMERICA’S 10 BEST NEW BIKE LANES OF 2014

Read More: http://www.peopleforbikes.org/blog/e...-lanes-of-2014

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1) Polk Street, San Francisco:

- The biggest obstacle to better biking in the United States is that most Americans simply haven't gotten a taste of what "great" feels like. Polk Street is barely a third of a mile long, but no one who rides it will ever fail to realize how nice a bike lane can get — and thanks to its location one block from City Hall, that group now includes most of San Francisco's supervisors.






2) 2nd Avenue, Seattle

- It was 2010 when Seattle news site PubliCola called 2nd Avenue's old stripe of door-zone white paint "The Worst Bike Lane in the City." So many rejoiced when Mayor Ed Murray announced in May that 2nd would be the site of downtown's first protected bike lane, and that it'd be finished in just four months.






3) Riverside Drive, Memphis

- In bike planning, Memphis is the anti-San Francisco. The city reasons that there's no better way to make its planning process public than to rapidly get a project on the ground, listen to the ways people react to it, and adjust as needed. "Ready, fire, aim," Memphis planner Kyle Wagenschutz says. Riverside Drive is a perfect example of that agile approach. Instead of reopening all four lanes to auto traffic after Riverside's annual closure for the Memphis in May festival, the city restriped half the street to create two lanes of car traffic, a bidirectional median-protected bike lane and a walkway. Soon, this route will be the best link between downtown Memphis and the new Harahan Bridge crossing to Arkansas.






4) Rosemead Boulevard, Temple City

- Protected bike lanes passed a milestone in 2014: they made it to the burbs. In Virginia's Arlington County, Maryland's North Bethesda and here northeast of Los Angeles, street designers proved that protected lanes can be even more important in sprawling areas than they are in urban ones — especially when they're as straight and as visible as Rosemead's. No wonder this project, which opened in May, is already inspiring nearby Pasadena. If outer Los Angeles can build bike lanes this nice, anyone can.






5) Furness Drive, Austin

- Austinites spent 17 years arguing about whether a $1.2 million bridge should cross a creek that separates a relatively poor neighborhood from its local elementary school. When bridge proponents won, it might have been the end of the story — if city planners hadn't asked whether, after all that, it might be a good idea to also think about the street between the bridge and the school. Eight months and $20,000 later, the city had used posts and paint along one side of an intersection-free road to create a safe and direct route to the school's door.






6) Broadway, Seattle

- Seattle Bike Blog calls them "Smurf turds," but we'll just call them clever. The water-filled plastic loops combine with curbs, posts and parked cars to create a comfortable bikeway through the middle of one of the city's densest commercial areas. Though we're always wary to endorse a two-way protected lane on a two-way street, Broadway uses signal phasing and lots of green paint to keep bikes both separated and visible. Quality bike access to this major commercial street wouldn't have happened any other way.






7) SW Multnomah Boulevard, Portland

- The country's bikingest metro area has been moving slower lately with bikweway upgrades, but it's still thinking six moves ahead. When storm drainage plans required rain gardens along this key route through a bike-unfriendly neighborhood, the city threw in another $2 million to build a few blocks of elevated bike lane, too. The result, which separates bikes and auto traffic by its curb and a parking lane, is an oasis of bike-friendliness in Southwest Portland — but if nearby Barbur Boulevard gets a mass transit line and protected bike lanes of its own as proposed, Multnomah will suddenly become an essential link to the rest of the city. This project deserves its slot for vision alone.






8) Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh

- If Pittsburgh sticks with its plans, this rapidly executed project — announced in July, built by September — will become the spinal cord of a new on-street biking network that'll link the city's excellent riverside paths to commercial and cultural destinations downtown. Downtown business leaders lined up behind this project and Allegheny County followed too, promising connecting protected lanes on two nearby bridges. Though Penn's not perfect, neither was the status quo — and hey, neither were you when you were four months old. Pittsburgh has always been a city of action, and that's its style with bike lanes too.






9) King Street, Honolulu

- When this lane opened two weeks ago, the country quietly crossed a different milestone: Hawaii became the 26th U.S. state to get a protected bike lane. Temperate, flat and sunny, Honolulu could easily add "biking paradise" to its list of assets, and Mayor Kirk Caldwell seems dedicated to doing so. The bidirectional lane on King caught our eye for its length — two miles! — and its use of parking stops to create a nice temporary curb.






10) Broadway, Chicago

- After Mayor Rahm Emanuel took office in 2011, his transportation team whirled into action, laying down 12 miles of protected bike lanes almost immediately. Three years later, Chicago is ... still building protected lanes faster than almost any city in the country. Emanuel's team added 3.25 miles in 2014, and a quarter-mile stretch of Broadway that offers one of the city's few protected lanes through commercial districts is arguably the most useful of those. If the country's embrace of bike transportation keeps accelerating, it'll be because cities like Chicago turn solid projects like these into standard operating procedure.



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[fflint]

I suspect the reason they chose Polk Street for the top spot is because of how it functions within San Francisco's larger bicycle network, which they didn't really explain.

Polk Street is the city's primary north-south bicycling route, because it has the least elevation gain between Market Street and the northern waterfront. Yet it is a one-way traffic sewer where it meets the city's primary east-west bicycling route, Market Street.

Prior to the new bike lane, cyclists trying to get onto Polk from Market either had to take a ridiculously long detour on wide, fast-moving streets without bike lanes, or ride the wrong way on the sidewalk for three blocks.

The introduction of the protected counter-flow bike lane on Polk Street solved that problem, safely connecting the city's primary north-south and east-west bike routes.

[skyfan]

Top 5 Detroit bike and trail projects for 2015


Link Detroit

This multi-faceted $20 million non-motorized project will be completed by the summer. Yes, it was supposed to be completed by last November but construction was delayed with unexpected utility issues and a polar vortex.

What does this project involve?

Extending the Dequindre Cut from Gratiot to Mack Avenue with a additional connecting trail into Eastern Market along the north side of Wilkins.
Adding bike lanes from the end of the Cut to Hamtramck, mostly along St. Aubin. These are done.
Replacing three bridges over the Dequindre Cut. If you’ve ridden the pothole-ridden Wilkins bridge before then you know this is good news for bicyclists.
Improving Russell Street. This mostly focuses on pedestrian improvements, but it also include some very nice bike parking stations.
Adding bike lanes and a Midtown Loop path connection from Eastern Market to Midtown.
Inner Circle Greenway

Inner Circle Greenway

Detroit city staff refer to this as the “mother of all non-motorized projects.” If you’ve not heard about it before, the Inner Circle Greenway is a 26-mile pathway that encircles the city of Detroit while passing through Hamtramck, Highland Park, and a little bit of Dearborn. It makes use of existing trails such as the Southwest Detroit Greenlink, RiverWalk, and Dequindre Cut, so roughly half of the pathway is complete. For all these reasons and more, it is a very high-priority project for our Coalition.

http://detroitgreenways.org/top-5-de...ects-for-2015/

[Bikemike]

Hello all,

After lurking for some time now I decided to finally register an account. I'm a bike advocate and really want to promote the growth of our nascent bike culture. As the saying goes, as California goes so goes the nation. Well, there a new bike law being proposed by CA senator Carol Liu, SB192, that threatens to mandate helmets and bright reflective vests for all bike riders regardless of age. Currently only riders under the age of 18 are required to use helmets, and no-one is required to wear vests at night. I'm worried firstly about this law's effect on the momentum of cycling's growth in CA, but secondly that it sets precedent for other states to take up similar bills.

As a member of the California Bike Coalition, I want to give everyone the chance to send Senator Liu a petition letting her know how wrongheaded this is. Mandatory helmet laws have been shown to substantially reduce bicycling where enforced. And bicycling is already among the safest means of transportation available, without helmets. Studies show bicycling safety increases as the numbers of cyclists increase. Places like the Netherlands or Denmark have enviable fatality rates, and even Portland and Davis have fatality rates far below the national average. This law threatens to reduce cycling substantially. Efforts should be spent on providing improved grade-separated bike infrastructure and improved signage instead of putting all the burden of responsibility on cyclists alone.

Here's a link if you're interested. Please spread the word through social media.

https://calbike.org/stopsb192/?page=...ion/sign&sid=3

P.S. I am not an employee of the bike coalition. Just a passionate cyclist who doesn't want to see California's leadership in bicycling turn to dust! And sorry for the repeated postings!

[M II A II R II K]

Long battle results in protected bicycle lanes for Polk Street

Read More: http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancis...nt?oid=2922313

With the unanimous approval of protected bicycle lanes along Polk Street by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency board of directors Tuesday, cycling advocates and area business owners claimed a share of the victory. Debate over the embattled pedestrian- and bike-safety project, which drew criticism from businesses and cyclists alike, had stretched over 2½ years. In the end, neither side got everything it wanted.

- The approved plan will result in a raised, protected bike lane on northbound Polk Street from McAllister to Pine streets, a morning commute-only bike lane from Pine to Broadway, high visibility crosswalks, sidewalk bulbouts, bus stop consolidation and more, at a cost of $8 million. The SFMTA board of directors meeting was packed with advocates for pedestrian safety and neighborhood business interests. --- Some business owners had argued that a proposed loss of 140 parking spaces in the area would lead to financial losses, and they had pushed hard for studies on possible economic impacts in order to pause construction of the bike lane.

- And car-use habits may soon change as technology changes, some argued. --- "In a few decades, needing on-street parking may be as antiquated as needing water for your horse," Luke Schwartz, a Polk neighborhood resident, said during public comment. Bike advocates say Polk is one of the busiest north-south routes for cyclists in The City, but also among the most dangerous. From 2006-11 there were 122 collisions on the small stretch of Polk alone, equating to two collisions per month, advocates say.

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[M II A II R II K]

Atlanta plans to launch its new bike share program in 2015

Read More: http://clatl.com/freshloaf/archives/...rogram-in-2015

Atlanta residents and visitors will soon be able to rent a bike, ride across town, and drop off their two-wheeler close to their destination. After years of planning and negotiations, city officials have signed contracts companies to launch the Atlanta Bike Share later this year.

Mayor Kasim Reed today inked an agreement with several different companies that will help launch and operate the city's new bike share program. Five hundred bicycles will be available for short-term rentals and can be picked up and dropped up at 50 different rental stations.

“Over the past three years we have achieved several major milestones for citizens to enjoy bicycle riding along city streets, paths and trails,” Reed said in the statement. “With the signing of the contract today, we’re able to accomplish another major step forward to become a top U.S. city for bicycling.”

Cycle Hop LLC, the city's lead bike share operator after winning the bidding process early in 2014, manages two-wheel programs in Phoenix, Tampa, and Orlando. The Chicago-based company will work with bike technology company Social Bicycles, local transportation planning firm Center Forward, and local brand design firm Iconologic.

The city's planning department is currently determining where to install the bike share stations. The bike share operation will use Social Bicycles' smart-bike system to equip each bike with a GPS-enabled locking device. That system will allow a rider to park the bike at any public bike rack or rental station. Officials also plan to set up a website and mobile app to allow riders to find and rent available bicycles.

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[M II A II R II K]

The Complete Business Case for Converting Street Parking Into Bike Lanes

Read More: http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/201...-lanes/387595/

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It's perhaps natural for a shop owner to fear that losing a parking space means losing revenue. Drivers tend to be wealthier than alternative transport users, and cars have big trunks to hold lots of stuff. Cities can add a bike lane and still keep street parking by bumping out spots from the curb (a common practice in New York), but generally speaking more road space for cyclists means less for cars.

- But here's the thing about the "studies on possible economic impacts" requested by retailers on Polk Street, or really wherever bike-lane plans emerge—they've been done. And done. And done again. And they all reach a similar conclusion: replacing on-street parking with a bike lane has little to no impact on local business, and in some cases might even increase business. While cyclists tend to spend less per shopping trip than drivers, they also tend to make more trips, pumping more total money into the local economy over time.

- An analysis of 78 businesses in metropolitan Portland found that non-drivers, including cyclists, are "competitive consumers, spending similar amounts or more, on average, than their counterparts using automobiles." So over the course of a given month, cyclists spent less than drivers on grocery trips, but more at restaurants, bars, and convenience stores. The common theme emerged: cyclists spend less per trip, but they make more trips.

- A neighborhood survey of 420 people on First and Second avenues in Manhattan's East Village, home to protected bike lanes, found that aggregate spending by non-drivers accounted for 95 percent of all retail spending in the area. That's not too surprising in New York, given the great transit infrastructure, but the figures remain impressive. Cyclists spent about $163 per week on average, compared to $143 among drivers.

- A survey of 1,744 shoppers and 144 retailers in nine shopping areas in these three New Zealand cities found that drivers did spend more money per trip than non-drivers, $47 to $34. But in central city locations, the gap between drivers and cyclists was only $4 per trip ($47 to $43, respectively). And non-drivers also spent more time in the shopping areas, suggesting that "the longer-term spending by sustainable users is likely to be higher than that of private vehicle users."

- Consumer behavior was studied along two shopping avenues in Dublin: Grafton Street and Henry Street. Merchants overestimated how many of the their customers arrived by car—they guessed 13 percent on Grafton (it was actually 10 percent) and 19 percent on Henry (it was actually 9 percent)—and underestimated bicycle patrons. On Grafton Street, with better bike infrastructure, monthly cyclist spending was nearly even with driver spending: 228 to 237 euros.

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Portland






Manhattan's East Village






Dublin






York Avenue in Los Angeles






Bloor Street in Toronto






65th Street in Seattle.






Melbourne

[mrnyc]

the segregation of the street: are bikes lanes making our streets better?

http://www.anarchitectsperspective.c...-of-the-street

[M II A II R II K]

US Cities Should Follow Paris’ $160M Plan to Boost Cycling

Read More: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/us-citi...boost-cycling/

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This week, the City of Lights unveiled a bold, $164 million plan to make itself “the cycling capital of the world” by 2020. The goal of the plan, which goes to the city council for approval April 13, is to triple the share of all trips made by bike from 5 to 15 percent. To get there, in the next five years, it wants to double its network of bike lanes to 870 miles (partly by making many lanes two-way) and drop speed limits on many streets to 18 mph. It would create 10,000 secure bike parking spaces and offer financial incentives for those buying electric and conventional bikes.

- Becoming the cycling capital of the world may be out of reach—cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen are well ahead of Paris when it comes to share of trips made by bike—but the plan deserves credit for both for its scale and its scope. And there’s plenty American cities can learn from it, says Evan Corey, a senior associate at transportation planning firm Nelson\Nygaard. --- “It’s ambitious,” Corey says, which isn’t surprising for this city. Paris has one of the world’s largest bike share systems, and it’s been rolling out extensive pro-pedestrian initiatives in recent years. This new plan looks to improve just about every aspect of the cycling experience, and backs it up with the necessary cash.

- Providing a good cyclist experience—so pedaling around the city feels safe and comfortable—is key, says Geoff Anderson, president and CEO of Smart Growth America, a coalition that works against sprawl. More bike lanes should do that, especially the five proposed “highways” that will be almost entirely protected from car traffic, on some of the city’s biggest corridors, including the Champs-Elysées. --- It’s also key to build a real transportation network, Anderson says. “Way too many places are just thinking about cycling in terms of individual facilities, rather than as integrated systems” that actually take you from one place to another.

- Paris seems to get that as well: Along with all the extra lanes, the plan calls for making biking into and out of Paris safer, with traffic calming measures at the busy intersections around the city’s edge. That makes cycling more practical for inhabitants of the largely impoverished suburbs. The 10,000 new parking stations would make the end of any trip easy instead of a pain. The financial incentives to buy bikes are especially helpful, Corey says, because promoting cycling is all about eliminating reasons not to get on two wheels.

- It’s easy to forget or overlook, but the money it takes to get a bike in the first place is one of those disincentives. (Paris’ Velib bike share system also helps on that point, but while it’s affordable at $32 per year, it’s not free.) --- In the US, “if you look at any transportation survey, people don’t think that the answer to congestion is building more roads,” Anderson says. “They think of it as more transit, more biking, more walking, more choices.” --- That’s especially true among the young, affluent people cities want to lure into their tax bases.

- So what’s the takeaway for US cities that want to encourage cycling? It should not be that it takes more than a hundred million dollars to make it safe and practical. First of all, that’s not really an option. “Our funding context is quite different from what’s being done in Europe,” Corey says, and it’s unrealistic to think an American city would be willing or able to drop that kind of cash in just five years. --- The good news is that investments into things like encouraging walking and biking “are often really, really, cheap” Anderson says, especially compared to building infrastructure for cars. “You can actually make significant impacts on transportation behavior with relatively small amounts of money.”

- What’s important is to make sure that whatever money is spent goes to attacking barriers to cycling in a thoughtful way. That’s what the Paris plan does best: The ideas presented aren’t new, but they consider each step of the process, from buying a bike to parking it. And it thinks about different use cases, including tourists and commuters, those in the city center and those in the suburbs. Any plan that matches its scope, whatever the scale, will help encourage cycling. You might not get “Paris-level results,” or the world’s best city for biking, Corey says, “but you can still get a lot of bang out of your buck by spending more on bicycles, transit and walking.”

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[M II A II R II K]

City of L.A.’s First Parking-Protected Bike Lanes: Reseda Boulevard

Read More: http://la.streetsblog.org/2015/04/03...eda-boulevard/

Yesterday, the city of Los Angeles installed its first ever parking-protected bike lanes. They’re on Reseda Boulevard in Northridge, part of the mayor’s Great Streets Initiative.

As of this morning, the project is roughly one-quarter complete. The new protected lanes, also known as cycletracks, are mostly complete on the west side of Reseda Blvd from Plummer Street to Prairie Street. The full one-mile protected lanes will go from Plummer to Parthenia Street. The project is expected to be completed by mid-April.

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[M II A II R II K]

FROM PARKING SPACES TO BIKE LANES: 10 WAYS CITIES CAN WIN THE FIGHT

Read More: http://www.peopleforbikes.org/blog/e...-to-bike-lanes

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For cities around the country and the world, converting on-street parking spaces into anything else is one of the greatest challenges in urban planning. But, though it's probably never been done without a fight, many cities have succeeded. Here are the best approaches we've seen from North America and beyond:

1) Chicago: Recruit allies in advance

- When business opposition is likely, a few friends are inevitable. When Chicago wanted to remove parking to create a crucial protected bike lane on Milwaukee Avenue, advocacy group Active Trans identified a retail owner who supported better bike access to his businesses. He found two like-minded peers and the three stood up publicly for their point of view, countering the stereotype that "business" opposed bike lanes across the board.

- "By framing the issue in terms of cyclists vs. anti-cyclists, your coverage overlooks the fact that most city dwellers (and business owners) don’t fit into exclusive categories when it comes to how we get around," the trio wrote in a letter to the Sun-Times.

2) Montreal: Talk walking distances, not block faces

- When people think about removing parking from (for example) one side of a street, the first number that comes to mind is usually "half." As in "you're removing half the parking from Main Street, are you completely insane." --- But cities should never talk about parking removal this way — it's inaccurate. What actually matters to a neighborhood is the number of available spaces within a reasonable walking distance in all directions from a destination.

- In 2005, when Montreal was considering removal of 300 parking spaces for one of its first protected bike lanes, planners conducted a survey of every parking space within 200 meters. There turned out to be 11,000. The bike lane moved forward; today it's the city's signature bikeway.

3) St. Paul: Put the 'parking shortage' in overhead context

- In many cities, there's nothing like a little aerial photography to get people thinking about whether they're dealing with an actual lack of space to park in or just a failure to use the space efficiently.

4) Portland: Demonstrate what else is possible

- For years, one of the top tourist attractions in Portland, Oregon, has been a 24-hour doughnut shop with a line that wraps onto the sidewalk in front of a disintegrating porn theater. The street is wide there — wide enough for three one-way mixed traffic lanes, angle parking on one side and a loading zone on the other.

- But in 2014 a group of local businesses and streets advocates realized that traffic was so low there that only a single lane of auto traffic was needed. So for three days that fall, they got the city's permission to temporarily replace all the parking and two general travel lanes with a protected bike lane and a massive new plaza filled with hay-bale seating — and, during the day, ping-pong tables.

- Hundreds of people showed up to enjoy it. Traffic on the block flowed smoothly. Businesses flooded with customers. The Oregonian newspaper called the event "the future of Portland." A few months later, businesses scored a grant to create a permanent plaza in the space and are working on long-term plans to permanently redesign the street.

5) Seattle: Gird your loins with data

- Seattle has removed a few dozen of its hundreds of thousands of auto parking spaces this year for the sake of protected bike lanes and bus improvements. That's coincided with a new demand-sensitive parking reform that helped generate enviably hard numbers about the ways people use (or don't use) car parking. This detail from a poster by city transportation planner Jonathan Williams is a nice example of data gathered and chosen to defuse common concerns.

6) Frankfurt: Charge for curbside spaces what they're worth

- A reasonable response, embraced by Frankfurt in 2013, among other cities: Price on-street parking like the premium product that it is, raising the price until people choose the unused, affordable off-street spaces instead. If that leaves empty spaces on the street, well, we bet there's a way to put them to public use.

7) Utrecht: Make garages easy

- The Netherlands didn't become the world's best country to bike in by making itself a terrible place to drive. Its national freeway system is also among the world's finest. But when freeways approach cities, they pull out every stop to help people find their way to garages that let them ditch their cars and enjoy Dutch cities the easy way: by transit, bike and foot.

- "When you take the A to get into downtown Utrecht, while you're still on the freeway there are signs telling you 'here are the parking garages and here are the spaces that you have available,' said Zach Vanderkooy, who leads tours of Dutch bike infrastructure for PeopleForBikes. "They definitely provide a lot of car parking, but they go to great expense to keep people from needing to struggle to find it."

8) San Francisco: Ask all residents what they think

- Most municipal public outreach is inherently unrepresentative. If tenants, low-income residents and non-English speakers aren't showing up to public meetings in accurate proportion, a city shouldn't pretend their interests are actually being heard. So what's a city to do? In one poor San Francisco neighborhood, the city supervisor worked with a group that specializes in organizing low-income residents to conduct direct surveys of what they wanted on their street. Probably because car parking spaces are useless to most low-income San Franciscans, the neighborhood consensus was clear: more than two-thirds said that transit, walking and biking were higher priorities than auto parking.

9) Mexico City: Show the big picture

- The case for adding auto parking to a city makes perfect sense until approximately two minutes after you start thinking about it. Two weeks ago in Mexico City, research group ITDP Mexico released a wonderful video (complete with English subtitles) that walks its viewers through those two minutes of critical thinking and toward the suggestion that what we really want is menos cajones, más ciudad — less parking, more city.

10) Vancouver: Grit your teeth and wait

- In 2013, Vancouver, B.C., proposed adding protected bike lanes to a single block of Union Street, a crucial connection between two of the city's most important bikeways: the Adanac bike boulevard and the Dunsmuir viaduct into downtown's protected bike lane grid. But adding bike lanes there would require moving several dozen street parking spaces onto nearby Main Street — so the city faced a firestorm from retailers and residents.

- "To slash and burn like this is not going to work," Steve Da Cruz, owner of an upscale restaurant in the middle of the affected block, told the Vancouver Courier. In the end, the city removed about 20 spaces from Union in order to create a parking-protected bike lane in the westbound direction only. And in the three months that followed, Da Cruz's fears came true: his sales dropped 30 percent, he said.

- Then something happened that he didn't expect: business rebounded. With the upgraded bike lane, more people were streaming past his storefront than ever. One year after installation, Da Cruz told Business in Vancouver that his restaurant was doing better than ever.

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Video Link

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Regina to end bicycle licensing

Read More: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskat...sing-1.3025350

The City of Regina is preparing to scrap its bicycle licensing program, saying it isn't working and hardly anybody is buying them, anyway. Under the city's Traffic Bylaw, it's mandatory for citizens to buy licences for their bikes. Furthermore, it's illegal to ride a bike on public property without a licence.

- One of supposed benefits is that they help people recover their lost or stolen bikes. However, a review of the program has determined that of the approximately 150 bikes recovered by the police every year, only five or so get back to their owners thanks to licensing. --- "A three per cent return rate does not indicate a successful program," the report to the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee says.

- The proposed change would simply strike the section on bike licensing from the Traffic Bylaw. If the committee gives the plan the green light, it will go to City Council on April 27 for a final decision. No matter what happens, the city says police will maintain their records of existing licences.

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A decade of growth in LA's bike infrastructure

http://www.scpr.org/news/2015/04/10/...-infrastructu/

[photoLith]

Here in Pittsburgh people are still completely confounded by protected bike lanes. Downtown theres a semi new "protected" bike lane but I see idiot motorists turn down the bike lane and actually drive down it, how they even do this is beyond me because there are barriers in place. I saw three cars about 2 weeks ago driving down the bike lane.

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Bike paths in abandoned tube tunnels: is the London Underline serious?

Read More: http://www.theguardian.com/cities/20...ndon-underline

Could the answer to London’s congestion be a network of subterranean cycleways? A new project from design firm Gensler suggests that maybe – just maybe – it might. Dubbed the London Underline, the project would turn London’s abandoned tube tunnels into living streets beneath the city.

- While there’s still a speculative, utopian look to the proposals – renderings showing the tunnels packed with youthful Londoners resemble an updated version of Logan’s Run – the London Underline is being taken seriously enough in some quarters. Earlier this week, it won the Best Conceptual Project gong at the London Planning awards. The project would use dual tunnels in the Underground’s defunct stretches to create parallel pedestrian paths and cycle ways, also lined with cafes and click-and-collect points for online shopping.

- To help make the tunnels more financially viable, each path could be surfaced with kinetic paving, which uses footfall and the friction created by bike tyres to generate electricity. The tunnels would not need to be connected directly to ground level. They would be accessed via tube stations, while Boris bikes for hire would lurk at the mouth of each stretch.

- The first response to all this is probably surprise. Not many people were aware that London had a vast network of unused tunnels slithering beneath its surface. The truth is that it doesn’t really – but there are some interesting subterranean stretches here and there that are currently lying dark and sullen. Perhaps the key unused tunnel is the defunct branch of the Piccadilly Line that runs beneath Kingsway, from Holborn to long abandoned Aldwych station. There’s an even longer artery from Green Park to Charing Cross, along what was the final leg of the Jubilee Line before its eastern extension opened in 1999.

- The idea of an Emirates Underline or an O2 Underground snaking beneath London might not be everyone’s dream of London’s bright future, but if the project created some quirky new spaces that generate revenue for TfL, who’s to complain if somebody wants to at least think the concept through? --- The snag is that Gensler is also presenting the plan as a sober response to London’s congestion. On their hypothetical maps, they’ve suggested ways the Underline could connect up to other car-free routes. They’ve linked it, for example, to surface pedestrian walkways crossing the Thames, one at Jubilee Bridge and the other across the Garden Bridge … across which it will be forbidden to cycle.

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• Video Link

[sentinel]

Suprised this wasn't posted before, but Divvy in Chicago keeps expanding (in the next few months and with more to come next year).

Divvy Launches Big Expansion, But Some Parts of City Still Not Served
By Ted Cox



'CITY HALL — With a long-planned spring expansion underway, Divvy is covering more of the city, which means in some ways it is passing the Citi — New York City's bike-sharing system.

A map of the additional 176 Divvy stations planned for this spring shows the bike-share system extending to Touhy Avenue on the north, 75th Street on the south and Pulaski Road on the west.

Mike Claffey, spokesman for the Department of Transportation, which oversees Divvy, said the most recent expansion, which started rolling out last week, significantly increases the percentage of the city served by bike sharing.

"The expansion roughly doubles the area Divvy serves in Chicago, from 44.1 square miles, or 19 percent of the city’s geographic area, to 86.7 square miles, or 38 percent of the area," Claffey said. "It means that Divvy now serves 33 out of the city’s 50 aldermanic wards, up from 19 before the expansion."'

https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/2015...ill-not-served



The following is regarding the planned expansion into Oak Park, Evanston and other parts of Chicago, which looks like it will occur next year:

'However, Austin and other parts of the West Side will be getting stations next spring as Divvy expands into Oak Park and Evanston, two suburbs that are providing funding for their own stations, Wiedel said. Last September, ex-Governor Pat Quinn announced a $3 million state grant that would pay for an additional 75 stations: 12 in Oak Park, eight in Evanston, and 55 in Chicago. After a delay, the state grant agreement was just signed this morning, Wiedel said.

There’s a five-month turnaround time for equipment from PBSC, so, rather than install the 75 stations in the late fall, Divvy will wait until spring, when warmer weather will help ensure a successful launch. Since incumbent 29th Ward alderman Deborah Graham will be in office until May 18, CDOT hasn’t yet informed Taliaferro about the plan. “After that date, we’ll be working with the new alderman and sharing this good news,” Wiedel said.'

http://chi.streetsblog.org/2015/04/2...quity-efforts/

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San Francisco Wants to Lower Bike Injuries by Raising Bike Lanes

Read More: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/...-lanes/392492/

This fall, San Francisco will become one of the elite few cities in the United States to build a raised bike lane. The city's Municipal Transportation Agency will oversee the construction of an elevated pathway on Valencia Street in the southern Mission District.

The curb-hugging lane will be raised about 2 inches above the road surface, and will measure 6-feet wide with an additional 5-foot "buffer zone." The city will follow up with a handful of other raised lanes next year, all planned for areas with high rates of bicycle injuries. --- As a showcase project, the Valencia path will stretch for only a block. But cycling activists sound pumped, nonetheless. "We're really excited about bringing [the lanes] to San Francisco," says Tyler Frisbee, policy director at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. "Like all protective bike lanes, they help people feel safe on the road, create more predictable traffic patterns, and encourage people who otherwise might be nervous to ride on busy streets."

Raised lanes are a relatively new concept in the United States, though they've been around for a while in Europe. The idea is that by jacking up the path a bit, motorists will be less likely to stray into cyclist space. Cyclists, meanwhile, won't feel as compelled to ride on the sidewalk in heavy-traffic corridors. It's a minimalist form of what's known as a protected bike lane, and one that's not as in-your-face as, say, defensive lines of bollards or planters. "Unlike a protected lane with a physical barrier, these require a little less space to obtain the same safety results," says Frisbee.

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