In Montreal, the Bixi bike-share network is so popular that it's slated to expand ahead of schedule. Photo: Bike-sharing Blog

The Globe reported yesterday that Boston's regional planning agency has awarded a contract to the same company that launched Montreal's Bixi bike-share system earlier this year. Boston planners say the system specs are still getting hashed out along with other contract details. Many questions remain unanswered, but signs are promising so far.

In a report on the Times' Green Inc blog this morning, a spokesperson for Bixi "indicated that the Boston system will initially offer 2,500 bikes at 290 stations in downtown Boston." A system of that size and density would place Boston in the ranks of cities like Barcelona and Paris, where public bikes have become a critical component of the transportation network. Officials hope to expand the Boston system to neighboring Cambridge, Brookline, and Somerville soon after it launches.

It's also worth noting that Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, running for re-election this fall, is not distancing himself from the city's bike-share plan. In fact, he's embracing it. "I think Boston is the perfect venue to roll out a forward-thinking bike share program," he said in a press statement released yesterday. "Boston is a world class city, and over the last two years we have made tremendous strides in turning it into a world class bicycling city."

A big part of Bixi's attraction is that it's solar-powered, requiring no electrical wiring or underground utility work. In addition to Boston, London also announced yesterday that it will use the Bixi system for an ambitious bike-share network: 6,000 bikes at 400 locations.

Stations that can be installed without a jackhammer are probably a prerequisite for bike-share operations in New York, where streetwork can turn into an expensive, bureaucratic tangle. DOT released a request for expressions of interest from potential bike-share operators last fall, and a study published by the Department of City Planning this spring recommended that New York start its network with 10,000 bikes.

That's Boston Mayor Thomas Menino in the blue track suit. Photo: Boston Globe.

The city has put out a request for proposals to create a bike share program. The proposal envisions a network of 150 stations scattered across the city with 1,500 bicycles available to students, commuters and visitors with the swipe of a card.

Officials eventually hope to expand the network to 600 stations in the greater metropolitan area with 6,000 bikes.

Talk about a turnaround. Boston streets didn't even have any bike lanes until last year. But Mayor Thomas Menino has become an avid cyclist himself, and the city's first bicycle coordinator, Nicole Freedman, is not short on ideas. Good thing they're not afraid to succeed. The Boston announcement stands in marked contrast to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's plan for a pilot bike-share with -- count 'em -- 50 bikes.

For Boston (population ~ 600,000), a system with 1,500 bikes would merit comparison to the flagship bike-share systems in Europe. Barcelona's Bicing, for instance, launched with 3,000 bikes and about 200 stations for a city with more than twice the residents and a land area about 25 percent bigger than Boston. Bike-share is more ubiquitous in Paris, where Vélib supplies about 20,000 bicycles to a city of just over two million inhabitants. (Matthew Roth at Streetsblog SF has a great post about ideal bike-share specs, and promo site B-Cycle provides a slick way to see the optimum numbers for your hometown.)

Elsewhere in the U.S., Minneapolis plans to launch a 1,000-bike system later this year, and Denver has a 500-bike system in the works. In New York, DOT signaled its interest in launching a bike-share system last year, but nothing so specific as Boston's RFP has been released.

When Boston livable streets advocates invited Enrique Peñalosa to town recently, Streetfilms' Robin Urban Smith made the trip north to hear what the Colombian urbanist had to say to residents of "The Walking City." Watch here as Peñalosa speaks to a packed house at the Boston Public Library, and see what Bostonians think of their town's past, present and future transportation systems.

In the greater Boston area, a secure bike parking facility has been erected at the end of the T's Red Line in Cambridge. It boasts one incredible amenity: it's completely free!

Alewife Station, perfectly situated at the edge of the burbs, serves as an inter-modal link for cyclists on The Minuteman Bikeway, one of the most popular rail trails in the US. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) fast-tracked the two unmanned bike cages, which hold hundreds of bicycles in a secure, covered area, protected by high-tech surveillance. From the crowded weekday parking action we saw -- with hundreds of bikes parked outside the cage on supplemental racks -- it looks like a hit.

Also see lots of our other bike parking goodies from Berkeley's Bikestation, BikeLink in the Bay Area, and Portland's on-street bike parking choices.

Last month, Boston moved toward shedding its rep as one of the country's least cycling-friendly cities by installing its first-ever bike lanes on city-controlled streets. According to the Boston Globe, the lanes -- on Commonwealth Avenue and American Legion Highway -- will be accompanied by some 250 bike racks around the city, and represent the first phase of what Mayor Thomas M. Menino sees as an eventual citywide bike network (though specifics remain unclear).

If these photos, sent to us by Boston University grad student Aaron Manders, are an indication, traffic enforcement and driver education are lagging behind the new physical infrastructure. Writes Manders:

Everyone was happy that Boston government is finally "embracing" bike culture, but there is still so much room for improvement.

Unfortunately, the first/only bike lanes in Boston are constantly blocked by idling and parked cars. There are two sections (one on the inbound, one on the outbound sides of Commonwealth Avenue) of the bike lane that hug the curb. The inbound portion is right next to Warren Towers, which are the largest dorms at Boston University. The outbound section of the lane where it hugs the curb is in front of BU's George Sherman Union. Since school started I have not ridden past either section of bike lane without at least one car or delivery truck blocking the way. Usually multiple cars block the lane ... even though there are clearly visible "No Parking Anytime" signs.

I guess it's tough for the police to do anything when they ride around campus on standup gas- or electric-powered tricycles.

Reporter Billy Baker captures the tension between making pedestrians conform to current street designs and adapting streets to put walking and other modes on more equal footing with driving. Here's how the situation looks to Boston transportation commish Thomas Tinlin:

The transportation department has a secure room inside City Hall known as the Traffic Management Center. It looks a bit like the war room in a Hollywood movie. Eight large screens and several smaller ones show real-time video of different intersections, and computer screens display the city's signal maps. A technician sits at a desk monitoring the ant farm, ready to make traffic-light adjustments. But fixing one intersection could create gridlock in the next. Everything they do, Tinlin says, is a trade-off . "Transportation commissioners of the past have always been about 'move the car, move the car.' The world is so different now. It's cars and bikes and wheelchairs."

The new reality, however, is still playing out inside an old reality. Greater Boston is artery-heavy; its main pedestrian streets are often choked with vehicles. Shared Space, Tinlin's engineers point out, is not designed for heavily trafficked streets. And tearing up and rebuilding the city is not realistic. Instead, there are many retrofits that are coming into vogue and appearing in a few nearby cities and towns to calm traffic and make the pedestrian safer.

A big one is to install things like bump-outs, bulb-outs, and curb extensions... They bring the sidewalk out past the parked cars, closer to the edge of the travel lane, put the pedestrian into the sightlines of drivers, and shorten the distance the pedestrian has to cross to the other side of the street. These extended sidewalks can also improve bus stops. Because the curb comes out to the travel lane, it eliminates the need for a 90-foot bus stop (which can actually add a parking space or two), makes the on/off safer and easier, and keeps the bus from having to fight its way back onto the street -- improving service and reliability and, advocates believe, encouraging more people to use mass transit, which they view as a huge component for making the entire system better. Of course, moving out bus stops means cars have less chance to pass a slower-moving bus, but advocates say you need to consider the fact that there could be more people on that bus than in the cars behind it, and the best way to balance the system is to consider how many people you move, not how many vehicles.

Another retrofit in wide use is the raised crosswalk, which brings the crosswalk level with the sidewalk and forces the car to have to come up onto the pedestrian's space, instead of the pedestrian having to step down onto the vehicle's territory (it also functions as a speed bump).

The full story is well worth the read, and another recent Globe article, on Boston's first bike lanes, makes for a good companion piece.

Photo: NYCviaRachel/Flickr

The good old New York City Bike Map is about to face some stiff competition. On Sunday, three enterprising cyclists launched "Ride the City," a web site that finds the safest and most efficient routes for those on two wheels. Here's how it works:

The concept is pretty simple. Just like MapQuest, Google, Microsoft, and other mapping programs, Ride the City finds the shortest distance between two points. But there are two major differences. First, RTC excludes roads that aren't meant for biking, like the BQE and the Queens Midtown tunnel. Second, RTC tries to locate routes that maximize the use of bike lanes and greenways.

Once your route is determined, the mapping software provides directions and displays bike shops along the way. Though perfectly functional, Ride the City is still in the testing phase. Its creators are looking for feedback to help improve route selection, and plan to add functionality, like locating bike parking facilities, in the future. We're no programming experts, but it seems like Ride the City could also help track the routes cyclists are riding, like Boston is doing with Google Maps.

Well, you know what they say about necessity. Freedman invented a rather ingenious method of planning a bike network. Her team created a modified Google Map that enables cyclists to log on and trace the routes they ride every day. Watch the data pile up, and voila -- sensible bike routes. "We found out where the actual desire lines are," she said. "Using existing technology was great."

In addition to figuring out where to stripe lanes, Freedman is using Google Maps to rate streets on bike-friendliness. "Anyone can go onto Google and rate a road," she said. "Is it good for beginners or just for experts?" The results will be reflected in Boston's first official bike map, which Freedman touted as an example of the city's strategy to personalize bike education and training. (Did I mention they're starting from scratch?)

Total cost? Next to nothing. "Basically the public is creating the map, and the sponsor will print," she said.

Update: While trying to track down the Google Map, which reader Eric Fischer links to in the comments, I found this explanation of how riders use it from Boston blogger Velo Fellow. 

Photo: Active Living Network

The Boston Globe ran a front-page story yesterday about confrontations among users of the super-popular tree-lined Minuteman Bikeway in Boston. Police have already filed more reports of clashes between users of the bikeway this year than the previous two combined. As the Arlington Police Chief noted, "We have road rage, and now we have bikeway rage."

"It's a good thing that it's used so much," said David Watson, executive director of the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition. "But in some ways I guess you can call it a victim of its own success."

There are cyclists in full-body spandex suits, aerodynamic helmets, and titanium bikes that go fast enough to leave roadkill in their wake. There are roller bladers, swaying back and forth to music playing on headphones. There are dog-walkers, stroller-pushers, and frequent choruses of "On your left!" screamed by cyclists as they whiz by pedestrians.

On weekdays, some subway commuters take the trail to Alewife Station in Cambridge. Pedestrians can be seen reading books as they walk, and a few cyclists chat on cellphones, one hand on the phone and another gripping the handlebars.

This type of "modal conflict" is familiar to users of the West Side bike path and the Central Park loop. And as the New York Times reports in an article this weekend about clashes between dog owners and cyclists, there can be conflict between species as well:

The city Parks Department does not keep statistics on collisions between bikes and dogs. But almost every cyclist and every dog owner seems to have a story about a collision, and there is no lack of finger-pointing as to who is to blame.

"It's the owner's fault," said Alex Rodriguez, race director for the Road Club Association, which has been holding races in the park since the 1920s.

Nancy Kramer, a 59-year-old interior designer who lives on the Upper East Side, says most of the people she sees on her park walks are collegial. "Except for the bikers."

In this month's issue of the Boston Phoenix, a 20 page supplement called the Bicycle Bible offers advice on bicycle safety and how to stay alive on the streets of Boston. Although there is a nice piece on Boston's Livable Streets Alliance, the paper may have done more harm than good. With subtitles like "Urban Bikers Need to be Careful, Prepared, and Paranoid" and "Biking on the Defensive," bike commuting is presented as a fringe activity for people with an urban death wish.

There is no shortage of hazards for urban bikers, and any one of them can send you flying. Mike Budka, who has been biking in Boston for about two decades, told his oldest son, "Just behave as if everyone is trying to kill you, and you'll be fine."

Actually, that might not be such bad advice. And, given what happened to a cyclist in clean and peaceful Toronto the other day -- he was beaten by an off duty cop for slowing down at a yellow light -- there might be something to the "Biking on the Defensive" angle. But, hey, what about the Joy of Cycling, Boston Phoenix? It's not all bad out there.