“The NACTO Guide is a really important step for cities to say it is okay to be different than a rural area. We are not better… we are just different and we would like to apply these different principles,” says Chicago Commissioner of Transportation Gabe Klein.

Streetfilms brings you these highlights of the Chicago stop on the tour, where representatives from the transportation departments of NYC, Portland and San Francisco shared lessons from developing bike infrastructure in their hometowns.

By installing eight bike racks, DOT created a “daylighting” effect, improving visibility at the intersection. The bike parking is much less intrusive than parked cars and helps everyone at the intersection see everyone else. Oh yeah, and now there are a dozen new places to park bikes without taking away any space from Smith Street’s busy sidewalks.

For another look at on-street bike parking, check out Streetfilms’ 2008 tour of Portland, Oregon’s bike corrals.

In his campaign for mayor, Rahm Emanuel pledged to make Chicago a more bike-friendly city. And in office, he set his sights high, aiming to construct 100 miles of protected bike lanes in his first term.

His team wasted no time. Chicago DOT installed the city’s first protected bike lane on Kinzie Street before Emanuel’s first 30 days in office were over. Leading Emanuel’s DOT is former Washington, DC DOT Commissioner Gabe Klein, who clearly understands the connection between safe streets and the health of a city.

Last month Streetfilms traveled to Chicago to speak with the commissioner, ride on Kinzie Street, and bask in the city’s cycling excitement.

And one piece of local trivia. The Blommer Chocolate Store is right on the Kinzie Street protected bike lane and boy does it smell good. It figured prominently in my all-time favorite response to an interview question about biking.

In the Dutch city of Utrecht, kids start learning about traffic safety long before they prepare for a driver’s license. And they pick up a lot more than just “look both ways before you cross the street.”

The school curriculum includes regular field trips to the local “traffic garden.” The City of Utrecht has used this facility, a streetscape in miniature, to teach kids the rules of the road since the 1950s. Students take turns as cyclists, pedestrians and car drivers, learning how to take other types of street users into consideration. The hands-on experience navigating the traffic garden gives kids the skills and confidence to get around the city under their own power as soon as their early teens.

At this intersection on the main ring road around Groningen, cyclists get their own green phase. When the bike signal says go, cyclists at any point in the junction can travel in any direction. Engineer Hillie Talens explains how it works in this short video, which kicks off a series of Streetfilms we made on a trip to the Netherlands with a delegation from Bikes Belong.

Three years ago Streetfilms brought you a comprehensive look at Bogotá, Colombia’s TransMilenio, the world’s most advanced Bus Rapid Transit system. TransMilenio changed the way Bogotá residents think about public transportation, becoming indispensable to the 1.7 million people who use the system daily. If anything, the bus network became a victim of its own success, handling more passengers and crowding than its planners anticipated. Today, ten years after TransMilenio launched, we revisit this groundbreaking transit system and examine how it must improve as it matures.

“When we build very high quality bicycle infrastructure, besides protecting cyclists, it shows that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally as important to one in a $30,000 car,” said Peñalosa. And as mayor, he walked the walk, extending the network of protected bikeways to every community.

Now the investment in cycling infrastructure is paying off. After starting off with hardly any bike commuters, Bogota is pushing a five percent bike commute mode-share.

This spring, Transportation Alternatives launched a program to promote safe cycling throughout the five boroughs. Bin Feng Zheng, 23, works for this program as an NYC Bicycle Ambassador. Bin started riding a bike just two years ago, so he knows all about the challenges of learning to ride. He’s also tri-lingual — speaking Chinese and Spanish — which helps him promote responsible riding and the benefits of bicycling in the diverse neighborhoods where he grew up. He says one of his big motivations is to bring biking to Chinatown and the Lower East Side, “because in the end it’s not just about biking, it’s about having a more vibrant community, it’s about having safer streets.”

If you follow the Twitter hashtag #bikenyc, you’ve probably noticed more than a few tweets from New York City Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson, a.k.a. @howiewolf. In this episode of My NYC Biking Story, we’d like to introduce you to the man who’s been tweeting out a flurry of facts, figures, and poll numbers related to NYC bike policy.

Wolfson is one of New York City’s new bike commuters. He bought a bike in May and started commuting on National Bike to Work Day later that month. Streetfilms had the opportunity to join him on his six-mile morning trip from the Upper West Side to City Hall.

Anyone who claims that bike-sharing is a European-style transportation innovation has clearly never set foot in Hangzhou, China. The 50,000-bike system in this southern China city of almost 7 million people (about 1.5 million people fewer than New York City) blows all other bike-shares off the map. As Bradley Schroeder of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy said, “I don’t think there is anywhere you can stand in Hangzhou for more than a minute or two where you wouldn’t have a Hangzhou Public Bike go past you.”

Hangzhou’s 2,050 bike-share stations are spaced less than a thousand feet from each other in the city center, and on an average day riders make 240,000 trips using the system. Its popularity and success have set a new standard for bike-sharing in Asia. And the city is far from finished. The Hangzhou Bicycle Company plans to expand the bike-share system to 175,000 bikes by 2020.

Friday is National Bike to Work Day, and if you’re looking for a little motivation to get on your bicycle, meet Lucette Gilbert. Lucette says she is in her “very late 70s” and biking since she was 7 years old. So, by my calculations, she has been riding a bike for some 70 years! She became a bike commuter in New York City during the 1980 transit strike and currently rides everywhere, including her daily trip to work from the Upper East Side to Union Square. Lucette’s take on the state of bicycling in NYC: “People are not used to bicycles, but it’s so heartwarming to see how many people are biking now.”

Streetfilms would like to thank Recycle-A-Bicycle for sponsoring this chapter of the “My NYC Biking Story” series.

To kick off Bike Month, Streetfilms is launching a new series today. “My NYC Biking Stories” will bring you short vignettes about people who ride in New York City. The subject of our first profile is Sarinya Srisakul, the city’s first female Asian-American firefighter. Sarinya is one of 31 women among FDNY’s 11,000 uniformed officers and firefighters (comprising the largest fire department in the nation). She loves commuting on her bike from Elmhurst, Queens to work at Engine 5 in the East Village. Spend 90 seconds with her in our first bike month profile.

In the tenth and final video in Streetfilms’ “Moving Beyond the Automobile” series, we are talking about parking reform. From doing away with mandatory parking minimums, to charging the right price for curbside parking, to converting on-street parking spots into parklets and bike corrals, cities are latching on to exciting new ideas to make more room for people and repurpose the valuable public space that lines our streets.

]]> http://www.streetfilms.org/mba-parking-reform/feed/ 0 http://www.streetfilms.org/mba-the-right-price-for-parking/ http://www.streetfilms.org/mba-the-right-price-for-parking/#comments Tue, 19 Apr 2011 17:23:24 +0000 Elizabeth Press http://www.streetsblog.org/?p=259572 [...]]]>

You might be shocked at how much traffic consists of drivers who have already arrived at their destination but find themselves cruising the streets, searching for an open parking spot. In some city neighborhoods, cruising makes up as much as 40 percent of all traffic. All this unnecessary traffic slows down buses, endangers cyclists and pedestrians, delays other motorists, and produces harmful emissions. The key to eliminating it is to get the price of parking right.

So what’s the right price for curbside parking? According to UCLA professor Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, “the right price is the lowest price you can charge and still have one or two spaces available on each block.” Depending on the demand for parking at a given location, the right price could be higher or lower than the static prices you see at traditional meters. You need a dynamic system that adjusts the price based on demand.

The city of San Francisco has been putting Shoup’s ideas into practice on an unprecedented scale with its SFpark program, which will fully launch later this week. In addition to strategically adjusting curbside meter rates, SFpark sets prices in city garages to make them an attractive alternative to on-street spots, and distributes real-time information about parking availability to help drivers find open spaces. It is the most ambitious project in the United States to cut traffic and improve quality of life by getting the price of parking right.

Guangzhou is one of the fastest growing cities in the world. The economic hub of China’s southern coast, it has undergone three decades of rapid modernization, and until recently the city’s streets were on a trajectory to get completely overrun by traffic congestion and pollution. But Guangzhou has started to change course. Last year the city made major strides to cut carbon emissions and reclaim space for people, launching new bus rapid transit and public bike sharing systems.

The Guangzhou BRT system opened in February 2010. It now carries 800,000 passengers a day, seamlessly connecting riders to both the metro system and the city’s new bike-share network. For these innovations, Guangzhou won the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy’s 2011 Sustainable Transport Award. Watch this Streetfilm and see how one of the world’s most dynamic cities is, to borrow a phrase from President Obama, “winning the future” on its streets.

In this week’s episode of “Moving Beyond the Automobile,” Streetfilms takes you on a guided tour of past, present and future highway removal projects with John Norquist of the Congress for the New Urbanism.

Some of the most well-known highway removals in America — like New York City’s West Side Highway and San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway — have actually been unpredictable highway collapses brought on by structural deficiencies or natural disasters. It turns out there are good reasons for not rebuilding these urban highways once they become rubble: They drain the life from the neighborhoods around them, they suck wealth and value out of the city, and they don’t even move traffic that well during rush hour.

Now several cities are pursuing highway removals more intentionally, as a way to reclaim city space for housing, parks, and economic development. CNU has designated ten “Freeways Without Futures” here in North America, and in this video, you’ll hear about the benefits of tearing down the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle, the Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx, the Skyway and Route 5 in Buffalo, and the Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans.

Streetfilms would like to thank The Fund for the Environment & Urban Life for making this series possible.

On Sunday, the NYC Street Memorial Project held the 6th Annual Memorial Ride and Walk. According to the New York City Department of Transportation, 151 pedestrians and 18 bicyclists were killed on the streets of New York City in 2010. Participants called for stronger measures to reduce traffic fatalities. The ride culminated by installing a “Ghost Bike” in front of Brooklyn Borough Hall for the unnamed pedestrians and cyclists killed in 2010.?

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) provides faster and more efficient service than an ordinary bus system. While a proper BRT route operates like a surface subway, the cost is much lower. In the latest installment of “Moving Beyond the Automobile,” Streetfilms explains the key features of bus rapid transit around the world and how BRT helps shift people out of cars and taxis and onto buses.

In the second chapter of Streetfilms’ Moving Beyond the Automobile series, we’re taking a look at bicycling.

The benefits of cycling are simple: It helps reduce congestion, meet sustainability goals, and improve public health. With Portland leading the way, many American cities have seen the share of people biking to work rise substantially in recent years [PDF]. For this video we spent some time with leading thinkers in New York, San Francisco and Portland to discuss how safer cycling infrastructure is helping more people make the choice to bike.

This series is made possible by funding from The Oram Foundation’s Fund for The Environment & Urban Life.