A challenge to app developers aims to help this Boston bike-sharer plan his route, especially if it's lunch time. Photo: The Fosbury Flop

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has partnered with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation in issuing a challenge to software developers: Create three new programs that combine real-time transit, bike-sharing, and even food truck data, in order to demonstrate how transit and bike-sharing complement each other.

Boston rolled out their new 60-station, 600-cycle bike-sharing system, called Hubway and sponsored by shoe maker New Balance, last July. It has been so successful — logging 140,000 trips in just four months — that Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council is overseeing its expansion to 90 stations and 900 bikes starting next year. But in addition to upping the number of bikes, Boston hopes to make Hubway more useful to its customers in other ways.

The MBTA/MassDOT challenge is really three separate challenges:

• A software application that combines transit schedules and real-time Hubway bike availability to display possible connections between the two modes;
• A visualization of “A day in the Life” of Boston’s transit and bike-sharing systems, possibly along the lines of what Oliver O’Brien has done for London; and, as a bonus,
• The BLT (Bikes, Lunch, & T) Challenge, with the goal of helping “residents and visitors learn about and get to Boston’s food trucks.”

The winners of the first two challenges will each receive a year-long transit pass and a year-long membership to Hubway; all three challenge winners will receive a free pass to area food truck festivals.

Other cities are seizing on the wealth of travel data generated by bike-sharing systems. Washington, DC’s Capital Bikeshare (CaBi) has kept its promise to post individual trip data, opening the door for similar visualizations. New York City’s Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan looks forward to the robust and precise route data her city’s bike-sharing system will yield when it begins operating this year.

Read the full description of Boston’s challenge – and download the applicable data – here.

We will be off for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day next week. Have a safe weekend, and we will see you back here on Tuesday.

Boston's Hubway bike sharing system will follow its successful first season with a major expansion. Photo: The Boston Globe

When it returns in the spring, Hubway will be expanding, adding stations in Cambridge, Somerville and Brookline. In total, the four-month-old bike sharing system will add 30 stations and roughly 300 bicycles — a 50 percent increase, according to The Boston Globe.

Hubway has come out of the gate roaring, surpassing early ridership figures from some of the country’s most well known bike sharing systems, the paper reports:

Its first 2 ½ months, Hubway recorded 100,000 station-to-station rides, significantly eclipsing the pace of similar systems in Minneapolis (where Nice Ride needed six months to reach that mark) and Denver (where B-cycle needed 7 ½ months).

And it seems Boston’s neighboring cities and towns were feeling left out of the bike sharing excitement. Jeff Levine, director of planning and community development in Brookline, told the Globe that the “number one question” he gets is, “When is Hubway coming to Brookline?”

Local news site BostInno credited the system with helping to make Boston more bike-friendly overall. According to writer Lisa DeCanio, despite some lingering ambivalence about biking in Boston, growing enthusiasm cleared the way for the removal of 71 parking spots on Massachusetts Avenue to make way for a bike lane. She called Hubway a “shining success,” noting that even the defending NHL champion Bruins have gotten on board, “with players riding to and from practice.”

Hearing the news, Network blog Boston Biker was cheerfully smug.

Woo! And this after everyone thought the streets would run red with the blood of a thousand dead Hubway cyclists … seems that Boston city streets are not [as] rough and tumble for cyclists as they used to be.

Hubway was funded in part with a $3 million grant from the Federal Transit Administration. The Boston region’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council is overseeing the expansion.

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney had a mixed record on transit and smart growth. Photo: Daily Caller

According to the most recent polling data, Obama trounces Gov. Perry. He makes mincemeat of Bachmann and Gingrich. Only one poll shows a winning Republican candidate, and that’s Romney, with a two percent edge over the president in a recent USA Today poll.

We took a hard look at Rick Perry’s approach to transportation last fall, when he was running for re-election. As Texas governor, Perry championed a mega-highway plan that would make the Road Gang blush. He blocked metrorail extensions and vulnerable users legislation.

But what about Romney? His record as a red governor of the blue state of Massachusetts is a little more complex, and worth exploring.

In a recent Boston Globe story comparing current Democratic Governor Deval Patrick with his predecessor, Romney emerges as the more inspired candidate when it comes to smart growth. (It doesn’t help that Patrick was caught driving around in an SUV last week while telling his constituents to observe car-free week.)

According to the Globe, Patrick has done away with a program originated under Romney to encourage “mixed-use, walkable, downtown-centered, transit-oriented growth” and counter sprawl.

Under the Romney program, communities got credit for green building, saving energy, preserving open space, and zoning reform, among many other categories. Those that scored highest went to the front of the line to receive about $500 million per year in grants and revolving loan funds for infrastructure including water and sewer projects. The idea was to put state funding to municipalities through a filter, and reward innovation in sustainability at the local level; previously the money was just doled out.

Romney also pioneered an interagency partnership in Massachusetts not unlike the Obama administration initiative that brought together HUD, USDOT and EPA. Romney’s Office for Commonwealth Development brought together state agencies on transportation, environment, housing, and energy — a collaboration which has served as a model for other states. To head it, he hired Doug Foy, the head of the Conservation Law Foundation and “arguably New England’s most important environmentalist,” according to ModeShift.

Romney’s administration encouraged brownfield, instead of greenfield, development and created a bond program to encourage transit-oriented development. And ModeShift says he was “for RGGI (the Northeast regional greenhouse gas emissions compact) before he was against it.”

That highlights one fundamental truth about Mitt Romney, which is that it’s sometimes hard to know what is the fundamental truth about Mitt Romney. The man who brought health care reform to Massachusetts is not the same animal currently fighting for the right-wing-extremist vote in the Republican primary.

Romney is “neutral” on the idea that human pollution is a significant cause of global warming and opposes international climate treaties like the Kyoto Protocol. He’s pro-nuclear and pro-drilling (including in protected areas in Alaska). And as governor, Romney “used approximately $45,000 in the state’s parks and conservation money to stage a pre-Super Bowl send-off rally for the New England Patriots football team on January 30,” according to the Boston Globe.

Indeed, according to a story printed by the Massachusetts Audubon Society, Romney “viewed land protection as a barrier to his top campaign pledge to double housing production.” Romney shelved the Statewide Open Space Plan soon after entering office, according to the story.

Gov. Romney also gets a lot of blame for reneging on promises made by his predecessors to build transit to offset some of the environmental damage done by the Big Dig road project. According to an editorial in the Harvard Crimson:

As part of the 1990 legal agreement to begin the Big Dig highway project, Massachusetts promised to fund a number of desperately needed public transportation projects in order to ameliorate the increased pollution and traffic that the new highway would generate. But the Romney administration has consistently downsized, delayed, or outright terminated most of the projects that were included in the 1990 agreement, choosing instead to divert transportation funds to other expensive highway projects and mass transit extensions that would primarily benefit the Commonwealth’s more affluent residents.

Many of the transit projects, like a green line extension to Somerville and Medford, and orange line service in Jamaica Plain, are still in limbo.

But given that Boston has the oldest transit system in the country, with badly deteriorating infrastructure, the restraint when it comes to new construction may not be a bad thing.

“I think it’s admirable that these guys [Patrick and Romney] have taken safety and maintenance as their prime goals, and capital projects have to take a back seat,” said Ted Brown, a former city transportation official and writer of the Boston-based Radials blog. “I think that’s a pretty good judge of what people want.”

Romney did have a significant hand in improving the transportation bureaucracy in his state. There was no Massachusetts Department of Transportation until two years ago. Seven different entities had some hand in transportation planning and building, according to Brown, with the Turnpike Authority being the biggest and most powerful. The authority was independent until this year. Romney got the ball rolling on unification of the transportation work in the state and the creation of the department.

Meanwhile, the commuter rail system was privatized under Romney, but perhaps not of his own choosing: After a series of disagreements with the T, Amtrak declined to bid on the commuter rail service contract in 2003. The Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad Company (MBCR) now runs the rail system, and according to Brown, privatization was “not the worst thing in the world.”

Romney invested in the improvement of certain lines as part of the privatization process. Some saw the improvements, performed before handing over operations, as a donation of sorts to a private company, but Brown said it had the important effect of improving the stations and making commuter rail a more viable service. Besides, he said, for riders, “it’s the same deal.” He said the switch was seamless, and few noticed a change.

Soon after the 2008 election was sewn up, Romney came out opposing the auto bailout, saying it would encourage Detroit automakers to “stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses.”

His opposition certainly had nothing to do with a principled stand against car subsidies or promotion of clean-fuel vehicles. Indeed, during the 2008 campaign, he told a Michigan audience that he would help “build a brighter, prosperous future” by championing the auto industry, and he attacked opponent John McCain for backing fuel economy standards, calling them “anvils around the neck of the domestic auto manufacturers.”

We’ll take a look at other candidates’ transportation records as the primary season unfolds.

The city of Philadelphia recently released a draft of its new comprehensive plan, Philadelphia2035 [PDF]. The plan’s release makes New York the last city in the four largest Northeastern metro areas that hasn’t so much as stated a commitment to cutting back on off-street parking.

Philadelphia2035 calls for controlling congestion by adding parking maximums into the zoning code and pricing on-street parking high enough so that 15 percent of spaces are always free. Here in New York, we still pretend that adding off-street parking reduces traffic congestion.

At the same time, Philadelphia is moving forward with a brand new zoning code. According to an article by PlanPhilly’s Nick Gilewitz, the new code will eliminate parking minimums downtown and in the city’s many rowhouse neighborhoods. While Gilewitz notes that parking minimums will still require significant amounts of new parking in some relatively dense neighborhoods, he concludes that the end to many parking minimums “is a huge step forward in recognizing that Philadelphia has incredible public transit resources that can, and perhaps should, shape development.”

New York’s other Northeastern competitors, too, are trying to halt the overproduction of off-street parking and the subsidization of on-street parking. Boston’s equivalent of PlaNYC, for example, calls for raising meter rates and eliminating most free on-street parking by putting a price on residential parking permits. It also calls for expanding the area where new off-street parking is banned and cracking down on exemptions to the ban where it’s already in place.

In practice, as the city rezones, Boston is switching parking minimums in many neighborhoods to parking maximums, according to the editor of CommonWealth Magazine [PDF]. When directly involved in the development of large projects, Boston is pushing developers to turn entire floors of parking into housing.

Washington, D.C., meanwhile, is working its way through a citywide rezoning. According to Greater Greater Washington, “parking minimums would disappear in most cases,” with only the least transit-served neighborhoods keeping them. The Office of Planning’s draft language [PDF] includes city-wide parking maximums to “prevent an over-supply of off-street parking that would contribute to traffic congestion and the inefficient use of land.”

D.C.’s draft language also allows the city to grant exemptions from any remaining parking requirements if it can be shown that parking demand will be below the minimum, if the developer creates a plan to reduce driving to work, or if a project is near transit.

While it follows that the city with the best transit system and lowest car-ownership rate in the country would lead on parking policy, New York is instead falling further behind.

A proposal to build new office and residential space near the end of Boston’s Green Line will also triple the amount of parking at the station. Photo: HelveticaFanatic/Flickr

Another city, another would-be transit-oriented development undermined by a glut of parking. This time it’s Newton, Massachusetts, where plans are underway to build 420,000 square feet of office space, 60,000 square feet of retail, and 190 units of housing at the Riverside terminus of Boston’s Green Line, the highest-ridership light rail line in the country.

The station already has a sea of 960 parking spots surrounding it, functioning as a park-and-ride. According to member blog Newton Streets and Sidewalks, the current plan for development calls for tripling that number, to 2,720 spots. When all is said and done, parking will eat up 748,000 square feet of the project, far more than will be used as commercial space. 

So how will all that parking affect how people get to this supposedly "transit-oriented" development? Well, we can safely say it will generate more car traffic, but the developers haven’t bothered to look at whether they should pursue a less car-centric approach. Writes Nathan Phillips:

In the world of simulation modeling, analysts routinely conduct what is called a sensitivity analysis. For a variable of interest (say vehicle trips in a traffic study), modelers tweak the value of an independent variable (say # of parking spaces) – increasing/decreasing it by some fraction, and evaluate how sensitively the output variable (traffic) responds.

The "Traffic Impact and Access Study" prepared by Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, Inc. for the developers of Riverside, has a glaring, fundamental flaw: it does not study the impact of number of parking spaces on traffic. This should be one of the FIRST things produced by a traffic study for a proposed development.

Without that information, there’s no way to know how this development can maximize transit use and minimize driving trips. Continues Phillips:

At a minimum, this study should be extended to evaluate how the number of daily vehicle trips would change if the number of parking spaces were decreased by, say 1/3rd or 1/2, or increased by those fractions.

Going one step further, involving a glimmer of enlightened thinking about "transit oriented development", the analysis could then estimate how restricted parking would drive more use of the D line, the Commuter Rail from the western suburbs, and buses…

Riverside neighbors need to understand that parking is the key
lever on traffic. This is a far more effective focus than to focus on
complicated freeway ramps and yet more pavement. More parking does not
alleviate the traffic problem; it exacerbates it. The current plan
allocates the most space to parking (748,000 sq ft), more than the
office space and retail space combined. For "transit oriented
development" this makes no sense.

More from around the network: Human Transit explains that transit shouldn’t be sold as a fix for traffic congestion. Utility Cycling shares the informational video for DecoBike, Miami Beach’s 1,000-bike bike-sharing program set to open in September. And Twin Cities Streets for People prepares to celebrate the 20th anniversary of an oft-unheralded victory for pedestrians: the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Boston metro area has always had plenty of cyclists. But other than a few fantastic greenways like the Minuteman Trail and some forward-thinking bike lanes in Cambridge, they haven't had many good places to ride. In fact, until recently it wasn't uncommon to hear murmurs that Boston was the worst biking city in the country.

But that's all starting to change. In 2007, Mayor Thomas Menino hired Nicole Freedman -- a former Olympic cyclist -- as his "bike czar" to head up an initiative called Boston Bikes. Though the city still has quite a ways to go, Boston is shaking off decades of bike rust, and officials are advancing plans to become more bike-friendly. This April, Menino told a gathering of cyclists at the city's first Bicycling Safety Summit that "the car is no longer king in Boston."

Streetfilms was recently in town, and we got to spend a few minutes with Nicole in between her busy schedule to file this report.

An illustration of how Boston will make its transportation system greener. Image: City of Boston

"Folks, you ain't seen nothing yet," Mayor Bloomberg told an Earth Day crowd yesterday. "The best and greenest days are yet to come." The PlaNYC update coming in 2011, he implied, would have a slew of new initiatives to make our city more sustainable, and he's taking suggestions. 

He could get some good ones from Boston Mayor Thomas Menino. Released on Earth Day, "Sparking Boston's Climate Revolution" [PDF], is that city's answer to the greenhouse gas reduction targets in PlaNYC. Many of the ideas -- green buildings, new bike infrastructure -- will look familiar to New Yorkers. But on one crucial green measure, Boston could be poised to leap ahead of New York: using parking policy to reduce driving. 

Boston's plan calls for charging more for on-street parking. In commercial areas, meters would charge higher rates and stay in effect longer. In residential neighborhoods, Boston intends to start charging for residential parking permits for the first time. Over just the last two years, the city distributed 100,000 permits for free. The Boston plan also calls for charging much higher rates for every additional permit given to each household. So owning a second car will come at a higher price.

The higher meter rates and permit fees would not just disincentivize driving, but also raise revenue that Boston intends to use to fund pedestrian and bike improvements.

For years, Boston has had a freeze on building off-street parking in three neighborhoods, similar to Manhattan's Clean Air Act-driven zone below 60th Street. As in Manhattan, however, developers can obtain permits to skirt the restrictions. The Earth Day report calls for cracking down on those permits and looking into the possibility of expanding the parking freeze in new neighborhoods.  

In contrast, PlaNYC contains almost nothing about parking policy: just a promise to increase the use of muni-meters and reduce the impact of surface lots on water quality. While DOT's pilot ParkSmart program has experimented with pricing on-street parking more efficiently in a handful of neighborhoods, the planning department and NYCEDC promote driving through zoning rules and RFPs that demand large amounts of off-street parking. Rather than try to expand the zones where parking restrictions are strongest, New York has fought in court to evade its existing regulations. (To be fair, Bloomberg would need Albany to pass legislation in order to enact a residential parking permit program like they have in Boston.)

In the race to have the "greenest, greatest" city, Menino is making Boston a contender.

The state and city spend about 58 times more per student on yellow school buses than what's on the table for student MetroCards. Image: manyhighways via Flickr.

A new round of MTA Board hearings gets started this week, and the biggest flashpoint is sure to be the student MetroCard program. New York City school children depend on free and reduced fares, especially since education reforms have led more students to attend schools farther from home. Yet the state has withdrawn funding for the program and the city has allowed its contribution to remain flat since 1995.

Predictably, when the MTA said it could no longer afford to provide student transport at a big discount, legislators like Westchester's Richard Brodsky were quick to deflect blame. Maybe they've never considered just how big a bargain they get by funding student fares.

Because the truth is, public spending on yellow school buses dwarfs what the state and city contribute to student MetroCards. School bus transportation is run by the city's Department of Education, which gets about 30 percent of its funding from the state. With a budget of a little more than $1 billion, the DOE's Office of Pupil Transportation moves around 140,000 students, according to a department rep. On average, that's more than $7,000 per student.

Then there's the MTA, which transports about 585,000 students through its free and discounted fare program. With City Hall's contribution to student MetroCards holding steady at $45 million and Albany offering to put in only $25 million, the city and state are collectively willing to spend less than $120 per student on transit to school.

The comparison is not quite apples-to-apples, since the two modes serve different populations of students. In particular, 40 percent of school bus transport serves special education students who receive door-to-door service. Even so, the disparity is enormous. The state and city spend 58 times more per pupil on yellow buses than they would spend under the current proposal to fund student MetroCards. Perhaps those politicians who consistently preface "MTA" with "wasteful and bloated" ought to find a new target.

Now contrast our current policy on student transport to Boston's. The Boston public school system pays $3.2 million out of the city budget for the 13,000 high schoolers who take transit to school. That comes to $250 per student, more than twice what New York City students receive from the state and city.

It's also a huge bargain compared to yellow buses. Boston pays $2,300 a head to transport kids on school buses. (About $74 million for 32,000 students, according to a BPS spokesperson.) Again, while it's not a perfect comparison, the difference is a factor of 10.

Where possible, it seems, a transit pass is far and away the best bang for your student transportation buck. So while the MTA likes to claim that it is New York's yellow school bus, that's only half true. The MTA is the yellow school bus that New York can afford. 

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.