Europe's cities could get there soon. The US? Maybe not.
Showing posts with label cycling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cycling. Show all posts
14 December 2020
TechCrunch: How four European cities are embracing micromobility to drive out cars
Every year, around 2,500 people die prematurely because of air pollution in Paris. Like most European cities, the number one cause of pollution is motorized traffic. [...]
There are two reasons why Paris is an interesting city for mobility experiments. First, the Paris area is the 29th metropolitan area in the world by population density. Georges-Eugène Haussmann initiated some radical urbanization changes in the second half of the 19th century leading to the city’s modern layout — mostly seven-story buildings circled by the ring road. [...]
And this is all due to political will. Vélib’ is a subsidized service. But it’s hard to understand the financial impact of Vélib’ as there are fewer cars on the road, which means that it’s less expensive to maintain roads. Additionally, the impact on pollution and physical activity means that people tend to be healthier, which reduces the pressure on the public health system. [...]
Second, the City of Paris wants to reclaim space. Cars in Paris remain parked 95% of the time. That’s why Paris is going to remove 50% of parking spots. Instead, the city of Paris wants to turn some streets into gardens. There are bigger plans for new parks as well in front of the city hall and between the Eiffel Tower and Trocadéro. [...]
The coronavirus pandemic has acted as a small-scale opportunity for accelerating pedestrian-focused urban remodeling — enabling city authorities to expand Barcelona’s network of bike lanes during the relative quiet of lockdowns, and install some emergency pedestrian zones to expand outdoor space as an anti-COVID-19 measure.
Wired: Oslo got pedestrian and cyclist deaths down to zero. Here’s how
Oslo’s achievement means that it is just one step away from “Vision Zero”, an undertaking to eliminate all deaths on public roads. The foundation for reaching Vision Zero is to significantly reduce the number of cars on the road. Oslo officials have removed more than a thousand street-side central parking spots, encouraging people to lean on an affordable and flexible public transport network, and added more bike lanes and footpaths. Significant areas are closed off to cars entirely, including “heart zones” around primary schools. “The wish to pedestrianise the city isn’t a new policy, but it has accelerated now,” Rune Gjøs, a director at Oslo’s Department of Mobility, says. “The car became the owner of our cities, but we’re resetting the order again.”
Despite its success, Oslo’s initiatives have faced opposition from some people who don’t know life without private cars. There’s also a misconception that pedestrianisation hurts local trade, because the data has always been “patchy,” says Harriet Tregoning, director of the New Urban Mobility Alliance, a global group helping cities to integrate more sustainable transportation. But Oslo’s success contributes to a growing body of evidence that pedestrianisation not only saves lives; it’s also good for business. After reducing cars, footfall in the centre increased by ten per cent. [...]
The disruption caused by Covid-19 has catalysed pedestrianisation projects elsewhere. Cologne in Germany and Calgary in Canada are among cities that have closed off large areas to through-traffic to allow more room for pedestrians to social distance. City officials in Bogota, Colombia have extended its car-free Sundays to the whole week, and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has banned private cars from the iconic Rue de Rivoli. Hidalgo has said that returning to a Paris dominated by cars after lockdown ends is “out of the question”. Milan will pedestrianise 35 km of roads indefinitely.
2 February 2020
CityLab: The Spine of San Francisco Is Now Car-Free
But the vehicular frenzy is ending, in part: Starting Wednesday, private vehicles—meaning both passenger automobiles and for-hire ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft—may no longer drive down Market, east of 10th Street. Only buses, streetcars, traditional taxis, ambulances, and freight drop-offs are still allowed. The closure to private vehicle traffic heralds the start of a new era for the city’s central spine, and perhaps for San Francisco at large, as it joins cities around the world that are restricting cars from downtown centers. [...]
After decades of debate, the vision for a car-free Market Street has arrived at a remarkable level of support among activists, politicians, planners, and businesses. (Especially compared to the rancor and legal challenges that greeted New York City’s long-delayed effort to create a car-free busway along 14th Street in Manhattan.) In October, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s board of directors voted unanimously in support of a $600 million “Better Market Street” capital construction plan. Ground is set to break on construction for a protected bikeway, repaved sidewalk, fresh streetscaping, and updated streetcar infrastructure by the start of 2021. [...]
San Francisco’s car-free move is part of a wave of cities around the globe pedestrianizing their downtown cores and corridors, from New York City to Madrid to Birmingham. And there are signs that SF’s effort will not end at Market Street: Local officials in the city are calling to remove cars from other sections of the city.
12 August 2019
CityLab: Berlin Tiptoes Into Europe’s Car-Free Streets Movement
This summer, the German capital has announced plans to pedestrianize some vital central streets starting in October. One experiment will ban cars from the main section of Friedrichstrasse, a long, store-filled thoroughfare that, before World War II, was considered the city’s main shopping street. Another will test daily closures on Tauentzienstrasse, another key retail street, with a view toward going permanently car-free in 2020.
These plans are notably muted compared to, say, the blanket car ban in central Madrid, or London’s new Ultra Low Emissions Zone. But they are nonetheless ground-breaking for Berlin, and could do much to slash the presence of cars in some of its busiest areas. [...]
There are budding efforts to go further in Berlin, as well. There’s talk among the city’s Greens—still too hazy to count as proposals—of banning cars in inner Berlin by 2030, after an interim congestion charge. And this Saturday, a group of activists who favor a city-wide car ban are planning a demonstration intended to temporarily shut down Western Berlin’s Sonnenallee, a long avenue bisecting the fast-gentrifying working-class district of Neukölln. Lined with affordable cafés and restaurants, Sonnenallee also has traffic that can sometimes be deafeningly loud, making what might otherwise be a promenade for strolling into something that sounds and smells like a race track. Piloted by an organization called Autofrei Berlin (“Car-free Berlin”), the demonstration hopes to amp up pressure to free the space from private cars.
23 January 2019
CityLab: The Great Divide in How Americans Commute to Work
Drive alone to work: More than three-quarters (76.4 percent) of commuters drive to work alone. But in the New York metro area, the share is just about half. It’s 57 percent in San Francisco; about two-thirds in Boston, Washington, D.C., and Seattle; and about 70 percent in Chicago and Portland. And, as might be expected, a smaller-than-average share of workers drives to work alone in more compact college towns such as Boulder, Colorado; Corvallis and Eugene, Oregon; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Ames and Iowa City, Iowa.[...]
Bike to work: Just half of a percent of Americans nationwide bike to work. But nearly 7 percent do in Corvallis, Oregon, and more than 4 percent in Boulder; Ames; and Santa Cruz, California. Two or three percent of commuters get to work by bike in other college towns: Gainesville, Florida; State College; Ann Arbor; and Madison, Wisconsin. Among large metros (with more than 1 million people), almost 2 percent of commuters get to work by bike in San Jose and San Francisco. [...]
Education is another piece in the picture of how Americans get to work. People are less likely to drive to work alone and to use alternate modes in metros where more adults are college graduates. The share of adults with college degrees is negatively and significantly (-0.41) associated with driving to work alone, and positively and significantly associated with using transit (0.56), biking (0.62), walking (0.56), and working from home (0.50), although it is not statistically associated with carpooling. [...]
The way we get to work is also related to our political cleavages. On the one hand, commuters in more progressive metros—those where Hillary Clinton got a bigger share of votes in the 2016 election—are more likely to walk (0.44), bike (0.44), or use transit (0.59), and less likely to drive to work alone (-0.36). Commuters in more conservative metros, where a larger share voted for Trump, are more likely to drive to work alone (0.44). This reflects the fact, though, that more liberal metros tend also to be denser, more affluent, and more educated.
22 August 2018
Curbed: 15 cities tackling pollution by curbing cars
As a result, cities like London, Paris, and Seoul are doubling down on car-free policies, aiming to decrease pollutants and make people’s daily lives better. Some regulations call for low-emission zones and the banning of diesel vehicles, since diesel cars are one of the worst sources of urban air pollution. In Germany, where diesel technology was developed, the country’s highest administrative court ruled in February 2018 that banning diesel cars in an effort to improve air quality was legal, opening the floodgates for German cities to go car-free. [...]
Amid all of the restrictions are other urban planning goals: Oslo, Norway; Bogotá, Colombia; and Hamburg, Germany are all betting big on bike lanes, converting boulevards into pedestrian plazas and creating bike “superhighways” that cater to people looking to ditch diesels and get on two wheels. If banning vehicles is one part of the puzzle, creating walkable cities and expanding public transit options are the other pieces to master. [...]
Meanwhile, Los Angeles is reconsidering its transportation future, paving the way for how shared, self-driving vehicles could be used in an urban setting. The city is also using its Great Streets Program to reinvigorate thoroughfares with art, pedestrian walkways, and plazas. And San Francisco has plans to ban cars and add bike lanes on Market Street, one of the city’s busiest streets. Elsewhere, rapidly growing cities like Charlotte and Denver are considering long-term plans that would emphasize pedestrians and multi-modal transportation over cars.
1 June 2018
The Guardian: Why forcing cyclists to wear helmets will not save lives
Bicycle helmets are compulsory in countries such as Australia and Canada, but as the Guardian's Peter Walker explains this does not help save lives. Despite a series of helmet promotion campaigns in the UK, a growing amount of evidence suggests forcing people to wear protective headgear leads to greater risk-taking and can even put people off cycling altogether, exacerbating the crises in obesity and inactive living.
4 May 2018
CityLab: The War on Cars, Norwegian Edition
They’ve got to. Since the mid-2000s, Oslo has grown faster than nearly any other city in Europe, thanks to a rising birth rate, longer life expectancies, and record immigration—Norway has dodged Europe’s larger financial crisis. Cruising near the Oslo harbor, Aas pointed out the telltale signs of this boom: waterfront apartment towers and commercial developments that now loom where industry once stood. “The trams are totally at capacity,” Aas shouted from up ahead, and traffic congestion is worsening year over year. To accommodate the growth, and slash greenhouse gas emissions, the city is shifting ground to make space for bikes. Specifically, it hopes to double the bike’s mode share to at least 16 percent of all trips by 2025.
But there’s a closer goalpost to hit first. In 2015, Oslo made world headlines for being the first European city to declare plans for a comprehensive and permanent ban on cars in its core by 2019. To accomplish that feat, the city plans to replace hundreds of parking spaces by that year, with 60 kilometers of new and improved bike lanes and pocket parks. Entry and parking in and around Oslo’s core have also become much pricier during peak hours, and it seems to be working: commuter traffic has decreased dramatically, and the city’s greenhouse gas emissions are dropping. The changes are designed to result in a truly car-free, people-oriented center city, with bike and walking paths radiating out from a completely pedestrianized core of 1.3 square kilometers. It’s already practically built for it, with narrow cobblestone streets and cheek-by-jowl shops and restaurants. [...]
So city officials have been forced to make accommodations. The car-free zone is now considerably smaller than it was in the original plan, and it will allow delivery trucks and buses. (A proposed 2024 ban on diesel and petrol-powered cars was also recently forced into reverse.) But the higher tolls, eliminated parking spaces, and boosted bike lanes are all still moving forward. Andersen, the deputy mayor, told me he believes that these components will make a huge difference. “It’s been under-communicated how much space cars take up,” he says. “It will be so much more comfortable walking and biking around the area when people get priority rather than cars.”
24 January 2018
CityLab: More Bike Lanes Could Save up to 10,000 Lives a Year in Europe
That’s the finding from a new European Commission-funded study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health that seeks to assess the relationship between cycling’s popularity and death rates. The findings, compiled from 167 cities and published in the journal Preventive Medicine, are striking. If 24.7 percent of all journeys were taken by bike, London could see 1,210 fewer premature deaths annually, Rome could see 433 fewer, and Barcelona could see 248 fewer. Spread across the entire network of cities investigated, that’s a substantial drop in mortality. But how exactly could cycle network expansions make this happen?
Improving bike infrastructure (thus boosting cycling’s modal share) can reduce urban deaths by three key factors: air quality, public health, and collisions. By encouraging more people to switch from other forms of transit (other than walking, whose modal share the study predicts would remain stable), installing more bike lanes increases physical activity and provides health benefits. This modal shift slashes the volume of particulate-emitting vehicles on the road, meaning the air people breathe is less damaging to their health. And finally, as the modal share for motor vehicles drops, the number of people these vehicles kill in collisions drops off. [...]
Thankfully, this money could be more than recouped, the study finds. By reducing premature deaths through improvements in air quality, public fitness, and a drop in fatal road collisions, the benefits of a larger modal share more than outweigh the costs—quite strikingly so, in some cities. If Rome increased its cycling modal share by even 10 percent of its current level—still a major improvement—it could save €70 for every euro spent on bike lanes. Barcelona could save €35 for every euro spent on infrastructure, and London could save the pound equivalent of €8 for every euro spent.
21 January 2018
CityLab: The Automotive Liberation of Paris
Wrap your head around this: in terms of mode share, driving within Paris city limits has dropped about 45 percent since 1990, according to a recent paper in the French journal Les Cahiers Scientifiques du Transport. Meanwhile, the share of cyclists has increased tenfold over the same timeframe. Transit’s mode share has risen by 30 percent.
For comparison’s sake, the share of trips made by car in New York City has shrunk since the 1990s, too. But about twice as many trips still take place inside a car. Check out the graph below, from the New York City Department of Transportation, to see how the cities’ mode share shifts stack up over time. [...]
It’s also worth noting that Paris has also seen a significant decline in traffic fatalities—roughly a 40 percent drop since 2010, according to data provided to CityLab by the Association Prévention Routière. Outside of Paris, the situation is quite different: Like the U.S., France has seen an uptick in traffic fatalities in recent years, thanks to an increase in car travel and distracted driving. The national government recently responded by announcing speed limit reductions on two-way highways.
7 January 2018
CityLab: Madrid Prepares for Its Greenest Year Yet
The first major change actually started last month, albeit more with a whimper than a bang. Just as it did last year, Madrid closed its main drag—the broad, often car-filled avenue Gran Vía—to cars at the beginning of December. By now, this is a well embedded tool for making holiday shopping more pleasant—but this time, it will never quite end. Cars will return on January 7, but the streets won’t be the same for long. Later in the month, Madrid plans to start doubling the street’s sidewalks, taking space from car lanes to give pedestrians an extra 58,000 square feet of space, plus a segregated bike lane down its busiest stretch.
While this will reduce car space on a very busy thoroughfare, Gran Vía will soon be one of the few parts of central Madrid that admits non-local cars at all. In June, Madrid will debut its Zero Emissions Zone, which will only allow local residents, people with limited mobility, or zero-emissions vehicles to drive into most of the old city. Between June and 2020, people who own or rent one of the few central parking spots will also be allowed access, but from 2020 on they will only be allowed to park there if they have a zero-emissions vehicle. [...]
Madrid is clearly hoping that at least some of these drivers will switch to cycling. The city is doubling its number of bikeshare bikes and extending docking stations for the first time beyond the M30 beltway. The beltway itself, meanwhile, will be facing measures to reduce its emissions. Currently, the city introduces a 70 kilometer per hour (43 mph) speed limit during pollution peaks, one of several measures it takes to help clear the dirty air that often sits like a pall over the city during the colder months. By the end of the year, this 70 kph speed limit will be made permanent, significantly reducing the speed—and thus the emissions—of traffic circulating around the city’s edge.
19 December 2017
Political Critique: A Herculean success: Managing the death of coal mining in the Ruhr region
The last remaining working coal mine in the Ruhr region is located in the town of Bottrop, and it is set to close by the end of 2018, when hard coal mining will end altogether in Germany (though lignite mining is likely to continue for another two decades). [...]
At the height of the coal industry in the 1950s, there were half a million mine workers in the Ruhr region. At the turn of the twentieth century, people from Polish lands came to work in the Ruhr mines (in 1907, a third of the population were migrants); in the 1960s, migrants arrived from south-eastern Europe, especially Yugoslavia, and Turkey. [...]
Like in other places in Europe, the first signs of the coal industry’s demise emerged as early as the 1950s with the arrival of cheaper and cleaner oil from abroad, rendering Ruhr coal uncompetitive (later there would also be cheaper coal from abroad). At the time, the main response was to prop up the industry with subsidies. [...]
Massive funds were necessary to ensure the transition of the labour force, a large part of which was forced into early retirement, while others required retraining. If the coal and steel industries created about 720 000 jobs together in 1957, they amounted to just 60 000 in 2005. [...]
The most successful new businesses created in the Ruhr were the ones relying on the expertise found around it or grown from the opportunities provided by the economic transition itself for example, the logistics business was developed on the back of decades of experience with transporting coal and steel, and environmental cleanup and remediation design emerged in response to the need to return the old toxic sites to daily use.
19 October 2017
CityLab: Breaking Down the Many Ways Europe's City-Dwellers Get to Work
Perhaps what’s most striking here is how much higher the levels of public transit commuting are in capital cities than in regional cities. This might seem an obvious phenomenon—generally less populous second-tier cities seem less likely to have the sort of snarled up roads that propel commuters towards public transit. Still, some capitals post a relatively poor showing, with less than 30 percent of commuters using public transit in Lisbon, Dublin, Vilnius, and Riga.
Some outliers suggest that investment, not size, is the key issue. Modestly sized Zurich (whose population is just over 400,000) shows public transit commuting rates of over 60 percent, considerably higher than the 40 to 50 percent share for far larger Rome (population 2.88 million). And the city with the highest rate of public transit commuting—Vienna, at 74 percent of all commuters—isn’t even in Europe’s top 20 metro areas. The map implies, without explicitly confirming, that it is a combination of wealth and closeness to power that gets a city endowed with a public transit system good enough to attract large majorities of workers to use them for their daily commutes. [...]
Amsterdam and Copenhagen have a justified reputation as Europe’s most bike-friendly capitals. As the table above makes clear, they may also be Europe’s only bike-friendly capitals, at least to an extent. According to Eurostat’s figures, only in these two cities does bike commuting exceed 50 percent of modal share—although even this is contradicted by figures from Copenhagen Municipality quoted in Danish newspaper Politiken this week which suggest bike commuting has dropped to 41 percent. [...]
Paris is the only city where a (very narrow) majority walk for at least a portion of their journey to and from their workplace—an impressive number given that public transit commuting is also especially high in the city. At the other end of the scale, the city with the lowest number of walking commuters surveyed is actually Copenhagen. So why are the rates so different?
25 July 2017
4 June 2017
Vox: How bicycles boosted the women's rights movement
Susan B. Anthony said that the bicycle did "more to emancipate women than anything else in the world."
29 May 2017
CityLab: Meet Mexico City's First Bike Mayor
Mexico City falls far short of the cycling infrastructure that bike activists dream of: as many residents say, it’s no Amsterdam. Although only 30 percent of daily trips in the city are made via private car (the other 70 percent are made by public transportation, by bike, or on foot), Mexico City is known for some of the worst traffic in the world and nearly toxic levels of pollution. Since 2006, there have been over 1,600 cyclist deaths. [...]
In the last decade, cycling has become especially relevant to the city’s agenda. In 2007 the city launched Muévete en Bici, a program that blocks cars from several main streets on Sundays so that cyclists can have the streets to themselves. In 2010, Mexico City implemented a bike share program, EcoBici, the first in Latin America. So far, the city’s only got 140 kilometers of the 600 kilometers of bike lanes that bike activists estimate it needs, but when EcoBici started, the city was virtually devoid of biking infrastructure. Ecobici now has around 6,500 bikes and over 240,000 registered users (which, they argue, is the largest in North America). In July 2014, a new mobility law placed cyclists and pedestrians at the top of a mobility hierarchy and introduced cycling language into urban plans for the first time. However, beyond moving into the next phases of EcoBici and implementing sorely needed safety measures, the plans were vague—plus, critics challenge the special hierarchy, noting that if cyclists were truly at the top, government infrastructure spending would reflect that. [...]
From blockades and protests to speeches and reports, Carreón has attempted to influence public opinion and city leadership in every way possible, including the production of the Urban Cyclist Manuel, the first comprehensive guide for cyclists in the city, and the first of its kind in Latin America. "We did workshops, led courses, put on parties, created art pieces and videos for museums. We have 20 years of innovation under our belts. We’ve tried by all possible means to convince, encourage, and promote this idea that we must move by different means,” she says. “But it took 20 years for city authorities to look at cycling as more than just a pastime.”
21 May 2017
Vox: Helsinki’s bicycle highway and other great innovations to build healthier cities
Snaking through the city core, the Baana — or "fast lane" — is a converted railway track. On foot or bicycle, I could safely and easily access many key points in Helsinki without breathing in exhaust from cars or worrying about getting crushed under a truck. And if I so desired, I could even stop for a basketball or table tennis game at designated outdoor courts along the way. [...]
Similarly, in June The Lancet medical journal published a landmark report on why the medical community needs to galvanize against climate change, what it called "the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century." One idea here is that changing our built environment doesn't just reduce greenhouse gas emissions — it can also make us healthier. [...]
The way cities are set up can determine whether we feel compelled to use a car or bus to get to work, instead of our legs or a bike. Opting for the latter, the public health argument goes, is hugely beneficial on a variety of fronts. There's good evidence that cities designed to be walkable and bike-friendly carry both health and environmental benefits. Researchers in Barcelona, for example, recently measured the risks and benefits of the city's bike-sharing scheme, Bicing. They found that it got more people cycling, and reduced carbon dioxide emissions in the city.
13 May 2017
Atlas Obscura: Resurrecting the Forgotten Bike Highways of 1930s Britain
In the 1930s, Britain’s Ministry of Transport built an extensive network of bike highways around the country—at least 280 miles of paved, protected infrastructure dedicated to cyclists alone. For decades, it was entirely forgotten—overgrown and overlooked—so much so that no one seems to remember that these lanes had existed at all. [...]
These bike highways were nine feet wide and surfaced in concrete, and they ran along major roads for miles. According to Reid’s research, the Ministry of Transport was inspired by newspaper reports of similar lanes in the Netherlands and contacted the Rijkswaterstaat, its Dutch counterpart. The head engineer of the Rijkswaterstaat sent the Brits “these incredible exploded diagrams of how they built cycleways next to the road and the railways and how they separated the traffic,” says Reid. “The Brits, in effect, were ‘going Dutch,’” decades before that phrase became a mantra among cycling enthusiasts who long for infrastructure as good as Amsterdam’s. [...]
In the years that followed the construction of the cycleways, though, cars became the predominant form of transportation, and the bike lanes fell out of use. Even the Ministry of Transport forgot that it had built them. “Within 40 years, it had been lost in their own department that they were doing this,” says Reid. He read the ministry’s minutes going through the 1960s and found records of ministers saying that they’d never built anything like a bike highway before.
1 May 2017
The Conversation: The unbearable whiteness of cycling
In London, a city where a third of the population identifies as black, Asian and minority ethnic, 86% of male cyclists and 94% of female cyclists are white – and two thirds of all cyclists are male.
Despite the former Mayor of London, Boris Johnson’s strategy to improve the demographics of cycling, it still maintains a very much white, male, middle class constituency. [...]
The Chigago Tribune newspaper reviewed police statistics on the number of biking tickets issued by the police in the city. And the review showed that more than twice as many tickets are being written in African-American communities than in white or Latino areas. These tickets are often given out for minor offences, such as cycling on the pavements, but in some cases cyclists have ended up being arrested. [...]
The significance of “race” and white privilege is not only an issue for British cycling and its mass participation goals, but also for the international governing body for cycling – the UCI – whose Cycling for All Manifesto has not yet considered these subtle differences in how black riders experience cycling.
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