Streetsblog New York City

Grosvenor Square, London, the site of Europe's first parking meter, shows how putting a price on parking clears up the street and makes parking available. Image: ITDP.

Flashback to Europe, sixty years ago. Just emerging from the ruin of total war, the continent was in the midst of a nearly unprecedented reconstruction. Over the next decade, industry finally was able to turn toward consumer products, from stockings to refrigerators and, of course, the automobile. Italians owned only 342,000 cars in 1950, but ten years later that number had increased to two million, according to historian Tony Judt. In France, the number of cars tripled over the decade.

With mass car-ownership fundamentally new for Europe, parking policy was practically non-existent. The first parking meter — an American invention — only made it to Europe in 1958, arriving in front of the American embassy in London. In most places, cars could park not only for free but wherever they wanted: on the sidewalk, in a public square.

When they realized that simply giving drivers free rein to park anywhere was untenable, Europeans attempted to build enough parking to meet the population’s galloping demand. Public space, from sidewalks to canals, was turned into parking space. Zoning forced all new development to use money and space for parking. All these concessions, however, only made European cities friendlier to cars and further drove up demand.

Today, however, all that is in the past. As outlined in the new report from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, “Europe’s Parking U-Turn: From Accommodation to Regulation,” the continent is now leading the world when it comes to innovative, intelligent and sustainable parking policy [PDF].

Across Europe, cities have come to understand that oversupply or subsidy of parking leads to too much driving. The effect is considerable. In Vienna, for example, when the city began to charge for on-street parking, the number of vehicle kilometers traveled plummeted from 10 million annually to 3 million. In Munich, the introduction of a new parking management system has resulted in 1,700 fewer automobiles owned in the city center each year since 2000.

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The Naparstek boys riding last year's Summer Streets event... wearing helmets.

A Canadian Broadcasting TV crew doing a documentary on biking is filming me as I take my two sons to school on our Dutch cargo bike today. While the kids always wear helmets, and I do too when I'm commuting or riding longer distances, I often don't bother to wear one when I'm taking the kids to school in the bakfiets (also known around our house as the Cadillac Bikescalade). 

There are a few reasons why I tend to go helmetless. First, I'm a pretty careful, slow-riding cyclist in general, and even more so when I'm carrying kids. The ride to school is a short trip on residential streets marked almost entirely with bike lanes in a neighborhood where motorists are relatively respectful and aware of bikes. Walking across a street at an intersection with two young kids in tow often feels more dangerous.

Second, getting the kids out the door in the morning involves quite a bit of schlepping and hassle as it is. My own helmet sometimes just gets lost in the shuffle (as does my four-year-old's lunch). If the two-year-old is whiny or we're running late I'm not turning back to get the helmet. It's all about momentum.

Finally, I just don't like the way the helmet looks when I'm riding the bakfiets. This is less and issue of fashion (because lord knows I have no fashion sense) and more, I think, an issue of public perception. The bakfiets gets a lot of attention out there. We almost have to build in an extra ten minutes to every trip to account for all the passersby who stop us and ask questions about our unusual bike. Even though I know that I am putting myself slightly more at risk by not wearing a helmet, a part of me likes the idea that I'm showing that it is possible in New York City to walk out your door, hop on a bike and run a neighborhood errand without having to suit up like you're getting ready to play tackle football.

Submitted by Eric Britton:

Here's a thought experiment for you. If you and I hate to see lots of parked cars dumped on city streets for which we have other and a lot better uses, should we love it when we see lots of parked bikes? Or might that be a sign of some kind of deeper systemic inefficiency to which we could usefully give a thought or two?

How do you feel when you see hundreds, or thousands, of bikes parked in one place? As a sustainability and bike person I always in the past found it a combination of wonderful, hopeful, and somehow vaguely scary. (And just about always for the very big lots or structures, extremely ugly.)

But now that I know a bit about shared city bikes, I look at them in an entirely different way. Now, above all, they give me a great feeling of waste. Unnecessary waste.

We're nearly a couple of weeks into baseball season, and fans of the Washington Nationals are enjoying their new transit-, bike- and pedestrian-friendly stadium. The DC complex, with its transit links, shuttle buses and valet bike parking, is so accessible -- and city efforts to encourage fans to get there by alternate means so successful -- that on Opening Day its relatively few parking lots weren't even full, reports Greater Greater Washington:

Good for DC for resisting the warnings from team owners and various commentators that the world would end unless the entire neighborhood were converted to parking as New York did to the South Bronx. Looks like parking demand is elastic, after all.

The Yankees, while we're at it, are in Kansas City tonight; the Mets host the Phillies. 

Photo: ShepDave/Flickr

A Spanish tortilla, unlike the Mexican version, is essentially a potato omelet. You fry some diced-up onions and potatoes in oil, and then pour in some beaten egg. Flip it over, and voila, you have a tasty, round golden thing to cut into slices and eat.

Back when I was living in Spain some 25 years ago, I made them all the time and my American friends and I marveled at what a tasty, nutritious and cheap food it was. We vowed, when we returned to the states, to make them often. When I returned to the states, I made a Spanish tortilla probably once, maybe twice, and then never again.

Why? I still love Spanish tortillas. The ingredients are readily abundant. And I love to cook. But something about the context I’m in, the culture to use the C word, does not induce or encourage me to do so.

I think about Spanish tortillas, and my lack of making them, when I have repeatedly chosen not to do something else these last few months, which is ride my bicycle around in the dead of winter. Somehow mounting my wheeled steed is just too big a hurdle when the air is freezing and the skies often gray. Very quickly over the winter, I stopped even thinking about riding my bicycle to work or to drop my son at daycare or to shop. I began walking and taking the subway more.

But would I make these same choices if my fellow citizens here in New York were making different choices?

The competition is heating up between Eurpoean cities seeking to build the best bicycling infrastructure. As we noted this morning, Amsterdam is mimicking Copenhagen's "green wave" for cyclists. And now Rome is bringing a Paris-style bike sharing project to the Italian capital by 2008.

Modeled after the Parisian Vélib program, users will ride free for the first half hour with costs increasing every half hour after that. The system will be maintained at no cost to the city by Cemusa, the same company that has New York City's street furniture contract. Rome's plan is to have 20,000 bikes in place by the end of 2008 with the first 250 test bikes installed by January.

Meanwhile, here in New York City Mayor Bloomberg seems to feel that bike-sharing won't work because we don't have a safe enough streets for large-scale cycling and he doesn't know how you'd deal with the fact that "we have bicycle laws where people have to wear helmets." This, of course, is completely incorrect. New York City law does not require adult, non-commercial cyclists to wear helmets.

ArchInGeo files this report (in Italian) via Velo Mondial blog.

Photo: nmckay/Flickr

The green wave of Odense, Denmark.

Taking bicycle infrastructure to the next level, Amsterdam traffic engineers have created a "green wave"  along Raadhuisstraat. Cyclists riding at a speed of 9 to 11 miles per hour will never have to stop at a red light. Tests show that the cyclist "green wave" is helping buses move faster and is slowing down car traffic.

This same idea has already been implemented both in Copenhagen and Odense, Denmark. The video above shows how the system works in Odense, where green lights embedded in small bollards along the road alert cyclists to speed up or slow down to avoid the red light. News from Amsterdam reports:

On average, trams become about 1.5 minutes faster and buses moving out of the city centre about three minutes. Cars moving out of the city centre become three quarters of a minute slower. The municipality did not provide data as to the effect on cyclists' speed.

Marjolein de Lange of cyclists' organisation Fietsersbond tested the green wave and found that it works most of the times. However, she points out that most cars drive faster than 18 kmph, which means that they have to wait and then accelerate again at traffic lights, increasing air pollution. She suggests introducing an 18 kmph speed limit for all road users.

A bicyclist in Amsterdam: "Dignified, civilized, unhurried and even elegant..."

The ragged, angry tear on the woman's jeans at ankle level was matched by her angry expression on her face as she looked in vain for some sort of consolation or advice from the bike shop attendant, to whom she explained how the front sprocket on her new bicycle had repeatedly caught and tore her pants leg.

No dice. The attendant at the bike store at 5^th Avenue and St. Johns looked at her as she were complaining about aliens visiting from the moon.

I approached them and offered my perspective that it was absurd that most bikes lacked chain guards, and that one could not even buy a simple chain guard for most bicycles, and thus one was condemned to spoil one's clothes.

"Thank you, thank you," the young woman said to me repeatedly, as if I had actually helped her in some way. She was apparently deeply grateful that someone was taking her complaint seriously. "I saved up money to buy this bicycle, and now I find that it tears my clothes. It has caused me to fall when my pants legs gets tangled. He tells me there is nothing I can do" .

I sympathized. A wise bike shop attendant in Cambridge, Mass once succinctly said to me some years ago that bike design and manufacturing in this country is "overly influenced by the sports market." How right that is. First it was the rage for 10-speed style racing bicycles that shaped casual bicycling; then it was mountain biking. Neither has much to do with simple bicycling for transportation, particularly in towns and cities.

I have a love/hate affair with my own bike, a mountain bike with an absurdly large frame and long seat post to fit my 6'7'' body. The big tires and springy suspension really help riding in the city, particularly one like ours that has standard-grade American-style infrastructure, which means lots of pot holes and dangerous bumps to jump over or roll across.

But I've long loved the ideal of urban cycling being actually urbane, which in my book means dignified, civilized, unhurried and even elegant. One should not appear as if one were either in the Olympics or bouncing down a cliff-face when one is pedaling along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan or Brooklyn. One of my favorite memories of Amsterdam is seeing an older gentleman cycling down the street, wearing not only a suit and hat, but puffing on a pipe as well. He looked like a steamboat gently chugging along the street.

The Department of Transportation revealed plans for New York City's first-ever physically-separated bike lane, or "cycle track," at a Manhattan Community Board 4 meeting last night. The new bike path will run southbound on Ninth Avenue from W. 23rd to W. 16th Street in Manhattan. Unlike the typical Class II on-street bike lane in which cyclists mix with motor vehicle traffic, this new design will create an exclusive path for bicycles between the sidewalk and parked cars.

DOT's plan also includes traffic signals for bicyclists, greenery-filled refuge areas for pedestrians, a new curbside parking plan, and signalized left-turn lanes for motor vehicles. "The left turn lane will be immediately adjacent to the bike lane," DOT Bicycle Program Director Josh Benson explained to CB4 members. "As a cyclist you’ll know that if there’s a car next to you, that car is turning left." Likewise, left-turning drivers' view of cyclists will be completely unobscured. The bike lane is 10-feet wide to accommodate street cleaning and emergency vehicles.

DOT planners consulted with Danish urban designer Jan Gehl on the plan, according to Transportation Alternatives Deputy Director Noah Budnick. "They are drawing from international best-practice and being smart about talking to other engineers and planners who have implemented these types of designs," Budnick said. "They really thought holistically about everything that is going on on the street."

These types of physically-separated on-street bike lanes, increasingly referred to as "cycle tracks," are commonly found in bike-friendly cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam. Livable Streets advocates have long pushed DOT to experiment with this type of bike lane design in New York City. After Benson's presentation, Community Board 4's transportation committee voted to approve the DOT plan which is part of a larger pedestrian safety and public space initiative around the intersection of 9th Avenue and 14th Street.

The new bike lane design is a break from previously stated DOT policy. In March, during discussion of a possible Houston Street bike lane, DOT officials told Manhattan's Community 2 that physically-separated bike lanes should only be installed on streets with a maximum of 8 intersections per mile to ensure fewer conflicts with turning vehicles.

A copy of the presentation DOT made at last night's Community Board meeting can be found here.

Brooklyn photographer Spencer Tunick, known for
photographing thousands of naked people in public settings
worldwide, is at it again, this time in Amsterdam. The Siyney Morning Herald reports:

Dozens of women posed naked on their bicycles on a bridge over
one of Amsterdam's historic canals on Sunday - a unique sight even
in a city famed for its relaxed attitude toward nudity and sex.

They were among 2000 men and women who participated in a series
of four nude group photos in the city in the early hours of the
morning as part of the latest project of US photographer Spencer
Tunick.

The first and largest composition was in a decidedly prosaic
location: a parking garage on the outer ring of the city.