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.

The first time I ever saw a cargo bike in action was on my U.S.-German Marshall fellowship trip to Copenhagen in 2006. In Copenhagen I saw people using cargo bikes to cart their kids all over the place. I rarely saw an adult wearing a helmet. It made an impression on me. This lack of protective headgear -- or any special bike gear, for that matter -- is one of the things that, to my eye, made biking in Copenhagen seem so remarkably convenient, casual, safe and part of regular daily life. It didn't matter what you're wearing. In Copenhagen you just hop on a bike and go.

The sheer sense of normalcy conveyed by streets filled with helmetless, kid-toting Danish cyclists seemed to me to do more to encourage bicycling and promote safety than any personal equipment or piece of infrastructure I'd ever seen back home. And the numbers back that up. Somehow, despite the lack of headgear, Danish, German and Dutch cyclist injury and fatality rates are a fraction of our own.

We know from the work of Peter Jacobsen that one of the most surefire ways to make urban bike transportation safer is to increase the number of cyclists on city streets. There are a lot of proven and effective ways to encourage more people to get on bikes. Compelling everyone to strap a styrofoam shell to their head is not one of them -- at least not in the world cities with the safest streets for cyclists.

Yes, I'm still going to continue to wear a helmet on the vast majority of my bike rides and I'd encourage every New York City cyclist to do the same. While cyclists have achieved a real safety-in-numbers effect in Copenhagen and are beginning to do so here, New York City streets are still mostly dominated by aggressive, unskilled nincompoops in overly large motor vehicles.

Still, I'm leaning toward wearing a dignified hat on this morning's bike ride rather than a helmet.

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.

To help you think this through, click to the wonderful pics that Pascal van den Noort of Vélo Mondial has assembled of one mega bike parking facility in the center of Amsterdam. Luud Schimmelpennink, the father of the free bike movement with his White Bicycles in Amsterdam in the late sixties, tells us that this particular facility was originally built to accommodate a couple of thousand bikes, but today there are going on 4,000 parked there, fully twice planned capacity. Pascal's photos give us a good feel for that. And studies show that barely 1,500 of them actually move on a given day.

Hmm. All those bikes just sitting there on valuable Amsterdam real estate that could be put to far better public uses. That must be costing the city a bundle.

Kind of makes you think that even Amsterdam might find some use in city bikes. And hey, they're working on it.

Eric Britton, an American in Paris, founded the New Mobility Agenda in 1988 and the World City Bike Collaborative in 2005.

Photo by Pascal van den Noort

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?

In December 2004 I spent the holidays in Amsterdam during an unusually cold spell. I marveled at how Amsterdamers of all ages and genders cycled through the streets in the bitter cold. Hands on the handlebars, heads held high, they seemed not only willing to cycle in such weather but enjoying it. Eventually I joined them, and I have a photo of my wife and I on bikes, our faces bright red.

What these actions of mine and others lead me to conclude is that culture matters. I’m not shirking the fact of my own laziness; it’s a real observation about how the world works. If my friends and family members were riding off to work in the cold, I likely would to, without complaint. But alone, when few other people are, it’s easy to decline the invitation my bicycle offers me, or not even see it.

As we head into spring and the warmer months, this point will become moot. I’m sure I will once again start riding regularly. But maybe next winter, or the one after, I may make different choices. Cycling as transportation is increasingly popular in New York, and as this popularity grows, I suspect we will reach a tipping point, to use Malcom Gladwell’s famous phrase. I look forward to a future, perhaps not so long away, when even the fairest-weather riders like me venture out in even the worst of weather, doing so as easily as taking a bite of an easily-made potato omelet.

Photo: Nadya Peek / Flickr 

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

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.

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.

That's what makes the recent trends of young woman riding in dresses and with long hair flowing, often on bikes where they sit upright and with dainty wicker baskets attached, such a good thing. These intrepid females are actually civilizing the street. What driver could be quite as aggressive after passing one of these delicate denizens of the street?

I myself would like to join this trend and trade in my hybridized mountain bike for a true urban bicycle, something gentle and civilized. But I hesitate. For one thing, I now keep my bicycle on the street, which makes hopping on it very convenient. I wouldn't risk doing that with a new bicycle. Still, I would like to encourage the growing trend of bicycles being designed for in-town riding, as opposed to racing or off-road riding. My first choice right now is a "Dynamic Bicycle," which don't even have chains and use a "shaft drive" instead.

But until that day, I rely on my rusty metal pants clip to keep my trousers from being snagged. It doesn't work very well. Most of my pants now sport tears and stains on the lower right leg. It's simply too much to remember and do every time you hop on a bicycle to take on and off this little metal clip, which is also quite uncomfortable as well as dorky looking.

I suspect I will eventually move on to a more civilized bicycle, as will many others. We have nothing to lose but our stained, ripped clothes.

Photo: Amsterdam Bicyclists 

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.

This weekend's Wall Street Journal has an massive, full-page report on bike friendly cities in Europe. Initially the arguments for more biking were mostly about health and congestion, but in the last year concern for the environment has become an important factor compelling people to travel by bicycle:

Flat, compact and temperate, the Netherlands and Denmark have long been havens for bikers. In Amsterdam, 40% of commuters get to work by bike. In Copenhagen, more than a third of workers pedal to their offices. But as concern about global warming intensifies -- the European Union is already under emissions caps and tougher restrictions are expected -- the two cities are leading a fresh assault on car culture. A major thrust is a host of aggressive new measures designed to shift bike commuting into higher gear, including increased prison time for bike thieves and the construction of new parking facilities that can hold up to 10,000 bikes. 

The new measures in Amsterdam and Copenhagen add to an infrastructure that has already made biking an integral part of life. People haul groceries in saddle bags or on handlebars and tote their children in multiple bike seats. Companies have indoor bike parking, changing rooms and on-site bikes for employees to take to meetings. Subways have bike cars and ramps next to the stairs.

The rest of Europe is paying close attention. Officials from London, Munich and Zurich (plus a handful from the U.S.) have visited Amsterdam's transportation department for advice on developing bicycle-friendly infrastructure and policies.

Officials from some American cities have made pilgrimages to Amsterdam. But in the U.S., bike commuters face more challenges, including strong opposition from some small businesses, car owners and parking-garage owners to any proposals to remove parking, shrink driving lanes or reduce speed limits. Some argue that limiting car usage would hurt business. "We haven't made the tough decisions yet," says Sam Adams, city commissioner of Portland, Ore., who visited Amsterdam in 2005. There has been some movement. Last month, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a proposal to add a congestion charge on cars and increase the number of bicycle paths in the city. It would also require commercial buildings to have indoor parking facilities for bikes.

For me, one of the things that makes Amsterdam and Copenhagen so bike-friendly is the fact that people's cars are so much smaller over there. The vehicle above is an extreme example. But you don't see very many SUV's and the gigantic tractor trailers are off-loaded outside the city center. On a Dutch-style upright bicycle, my eye-level was almost always higher than the tops of the cars on the street. That gave me a really strong feeling of safety and control.

This is the bicycle parking garage in front of Amsterdam's Central Train Station. Someone told me that it holds 20,000 bikes but I didn't verify that. Suffice it to say, this thing holds a lot of bikes. Hey, that reminds me, what sort of bike parking facility is planned around the new Lower Manhattan transportation hub? Or would bike parking conflict with Santiago Calatrava's poetic architectural vision of a child setting free a bird?

The tram is the main mode of transport in inner-city Amsterdam. Fast, sleek, non-polluting, and exceptionally quiet, I nearly got myself hit by one of them. Actually, it wasn't that close but they do keep you on your toes, trolley-dodging and all that. It was really nice getting around town on these. Unlike the B63 bus that I rode in Brooklyn this morning, the tram in Amsterdam is rarely stuck in traffic thanks to its dedicated right-of-way and traffic signal priority. George Haikalis and Roxanne Warren of Vision42 think that these would work well on 42nd Street.

The weather in Holland in October is highly unpredictable. It seemed like every time I went outside it started raining. Every time I went inside it got sunny. The rain doesn't seem to stop people from riding their bikes.

Waiting for the rain to subside under the awning of a pub, I found this pleasant neighborhood street scene.