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.

Following up on Sarah's post this morning, here's a Bike to Work Week special from Mikael Colville Andersen, the mastermind behind Copenhagenize and Copenhagen Cycle Chic. Colville Andersen's blogs are like extended odes to urban cycling and bike culture, and in this vid he shows what bicycling looks like when it's seen as a "normal" way to get from here to there.

Half a million Copenhageners bike each day, says Andersen. It took forty years of incremental improvements for the city to attain that level of bike ridership. According to Jan Gehl, the Danish urban consultant and NYCDOT advisor, New York City can get there in ten.

Hoping to keep pace with the progress in New York City over the past two years, the San Francisco Planning Department has commissioned Gehl Architects to transform several prominent streets and public spaces in the city, starting with one of the busiest tourist attractions in the U.S., Fisherman's Wharf. 

On Tuesday night, in front of a standing-room audience of special guests at Pier One's Bayside Room, Gehl presented his general vision for improving San Francisco's public realm. The event, sponsored by Mayor Gavin Newsom, San Francisco Planning and Urban Research (SPUR), the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, Livable City, and Walk SF, was the first in the new Great Streets Campaign Speakers Series, which will bring some of the world's most remarkable urban visionaries to the Bay Area in the coming months to share their successes and offer San Francisco models for instituting its own vision for a sustainable and healthy city. 

Gehl is in town for a week of presentations to the public, to city agencies, and to merchants' associations. On Wednesday, he will present the results of his firm's Fisherman's Wharf study to the public for the first time. The Planning Department is hopeful that his work will stimulate a larger discussion of the quality of public space among the stakeholders in the area.

John Rahaim, director of the Planning Department, noted that Gehl's work around the world brings a cachet to San Francisco and helps "set the stage to implement pedestrian improvements and demonstration projects on our streets." Rahaim is optimistic that Gehl's work will "start a process to implement the principles of [San Francisco's] Better Streets Plan," the comprehensive new pedestrian and public space plan that is awaiting completion of environmental review.

Gehl was cagey when asked about what San Francisco should do to be more like Copenhagen or Paris, arguing that the study his firm has completed for the Fisherman's Wharf project is only a preliminary analysis and not a proposal. Nevertheless, he argued that if San Francisco wants to be a "lively, attractive, safe and sustainable city [it must] be sweet to its pedestrians, sweet to its cyclists."

Photo of Jan Gehl and SPUR Executive Director Gabriel Metcalf by Matthew Roth

With nearly 40% of daily commuter trips taken by bike, Copenhagen, Denmark is generally considered the world's most bicycle-friendly city. Having been working with bike boxes for nearly 20 years, studies by Danish road engineers and transportation planners have found that bike boxes significantly reduce the number of crashes between right-turning motorists and bicyclists going straight through the intersection. The City of Copenhagen has concluded that bike boxes are most effective when combined with a brightly colored lane continuing straight through the intersection to help alert right-turning motorists to the fact that bicycle riders may be traveling straight through the intersection along their right side[9].

You don't have to be editor-in-chief of Streetsblog to contribute to StreetsWiki. Any member of the Livable Streets Network can jump in and edit an entry or add a new one.

Why have Danes again been named the happiest people on the planet? Early this year ABC News cited bikes as "perhaps ... the best symbol of Danish happiness," and in this clip from "Contested Streets" it isn't hard to see why. Here, livable streets guru Jan Gehl and others explain the many ways an increase in bike traffic (now one-third of all commutes) has improved life in the capital city of Copenhagen.

But it didn't happen overnight. Rather, it took four decades of gradual change to make Copenhagen the place it is today. As for replicating that success elsewhere, says Gehl: "if you don't have enough nice spaces, you can see these [become] overcrowded spaces. Then you should just make more spaces."

Leading off from the event's title, Jean-Christophe Agnew, a professor of American Studies at Yale, spoke about congestion pricing's roots in bridge-crossing and stall-renting tolls in early modern Europe. Jeffrey Zupan of the Regional Plan Association fast-forwarded to 20th century New York when Columbia professor and Nobel prize winner William Vickery and Mayors Lindsay, Dinkins, and Koch, as well as the RPA itself, all proposed different modes of congestion pricing (none of which came to pass). Zupan also highlighted some points in New York's troubled transit history, among them the fact that, despite population growth in the millions during the last century, the extent of NYC's subway system peaked in 1937.

Environmental economist and "re-founder" of Transportation Alternatives Charles Komanoff jumped in next with some of the theories behind the plans. Quoting pedicab luminary George Bliss, Komanoff pointed out that mobility and community should not be in conflict, "they should enhance and serve each other." Jeffrey Risom followed with examples of Copenhagen's effective methods for reducing traffic congestion while bolstering quality of life: many use incentives for biking and walking rather than "punishments" for driving.

When the floor opened for questions, many in the full-house crowd of about 80 asked about the fairness of congestion pricing -- wouldn't it run poor drivers off the road while providing a smoother commute for the rich? Komanoff asserted that, for one, most people driving into Manhattan's CBD have higher annual incomes than those who take public transit, so most people paying congestion fees wouldn't be those who could least afford it. He also said that in existing congestion pricing systems, such as California's State Route 91, it has been shown that most drivers choose to pay the fee for situational, not habitual, reasons (for example, taking a sick child to the hospital rather than just wanting to get to work faster every day). This tendency leads to less essential car trips as a group, rather than less wealthy drivers as a group, being cut from the equation.

Also discussed was the notion of reforming the car from its growing status as entitled emotional limb back to simply a method of transport. The panel agreed that the proclivity of old habits to die hard is one of congestion pricing's toughest foes. Zupan iterated that the process will take patience and that people do grow to like new and better systems, but only when they can see them in action.

Talk shifted from the historical and theoretical to the immediate and practical: the what's and how's of congestion pricing for New York City. When asked how taking one in ten cars off the road would make any real difference to gridlock, Zupan responded that the relationship between the number of cars on the road and the amount of congestion is not necessarily linear. For example, he said, when there is a 10% reduction in volume of traffic, there can be up to a 30% gain in space for the remaining cars.

Other points raised included the fact that New York, unlike London, already has a way to track almost three-quarters of its drivers -- through their E-Z Passes -- and that adding a tracking element to the existing technology wouldn't incur nearly the cost that creating and installing all-new tracking systems in the UK has. Therefore, New York City's congestion pricing system might not have to start as high or be raised as much as London's to make equivalent capital gains.

Komanoff outlined his four stopgap measures for the time between the implementation of congestion pricing (and the subsequent swell in numbers of transit riders that might result) and the completion of the Second Avenue subway and East Side Access: 1) drivers can stagger their trips to spread out rush hours, 2) while many subways are currently operating at capacity, MetroNorth and the LIRR are not; they could take more intra-city riders and help relieve subways, 3) there is unused subway track on many lines and being able to use it depends not on politics but on raising money, 4) potential for biking in the city is largely untapped; thinning car traffic would provide a great incentive for more to ride.

Reported by April Greene

In developing the climate-change strategies that underpin PlanNYC, we drew on the experiences of Berlin for our renewable-energy and green-roof policies; Hong Kong, Shanghai and Delhi for our innovative transit improvements; Copenhagen for our pedestrian and cycling upgrades; Chicago and Los Angeles for our plan to plant 1m more trees; Amsterdam and Tokyo for our transit-oriented development policies; and Bogotá for our plans for Bus Rapid Transit.

On Friday, Durning published a piece in Grist about his experiment with a plug-in hybrid-electric car as a part of his Year of Living Carlessly series.

Given that most New York City residents have neither a car nor a reliable parking spot close enough to their house to run an extension cord, Durning's other series will be of more interest. His Bicycle Neglect series examines why most Pacific Northwest cities "don't treat bicycles as transportation, which communities are doing the best job, and what's at stake," issues that are equally relevant outside the Cascadia region.

In a recent blog post, Durning points us to an outstanding report by University of Washington planner Alyse Nelson who spent much of last year in Copenhagen learning how that city has transformed itself into a sustainable transport mecca. Urban planners, prepare to geek out on the full range of Copenhagen street and intersection typologies:

She assembled her conclusions in an elegantly illustrated report (pdf) – a picture book on how to build a cycling city. The gritty particulars of street designs and diagrams of parking placement will fascinate specialists, but I think the main lesson of Alyse’s booklet is visible simply by looking at the pictures. Copenhagen treats bicycles with as much care and attention as it treats cars. Consequently, cycling in Copenhagen is commonplace: normal, mundane, unremarkable. Sort of like driving in Cascadia.

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

Can New York really be tamed?
I don’t have any vision of taming New York, and I don’t think it should be. I do think there’s an imbalance between the various uses of the street that can be adjusted.

You still bike daily. Do you bike when you’re here?
Once it’s reasonably safe, you can ask the senior citizens to bike. I shall be happy to be the first. My younger colleagues bike a lot here to find out how it is. It’s a matter of age and daring, and a few other things.

Like being crazy?
That’s your words.

Is London’s congestion-pricing plan working?
Traffic has dropped there by 18 percent. And when London was given the 2012 Olympics, suddenly everybody was eager to improve the city very fast. If you can only get an Olympics, everything will be fine.

How can we reduce traffic in midtown?
There’s a number of ways, but congestion pricing may be the easiest and most-proven means of doing it quickly.

So you think it’s necessary?
Did I say that? I didn’t say that.

With all the bike theft here, could a Copenhagen- or Paris-style bike-sharing system work?
I certainly think so. These bikes would look different and be geared so that they’d be a little bit awkward to bike long distances on. At first in Copenhagen people collected them, but after a few years, that was not so interesting anymore.

What do you think of the new bike lane on Ninth Avenue?
It’s grossly overdone. You can make the whole thing one third the width.

Have you told the city this?
Not yet. I will next week.

Mr. Byrne, dressed in black and sporting his cool taxi-yellow bike helmet (see our previous StreetFilm here) then rode onto the stage and locked up. Moments later Hal Ruzal, NYC bicycling icon and mechanic at Bicycle Habitat, emerged from behind a curtain to pick his lock with a variety of tools. Mr. Ruzal's advice on not getting your bike stolen? "Have a bicycle lock that is real expensive, and a bicycle that's really cheap."

Danish urban designer Jan Gehl extolled the many benefits of biking in Copenhagen, where 38% of commuters ride: "This is important because if you see a pretty girl, you can easily jump off the bike and start kissing."

Mr. Byrne then introduced Jonathan Wood, the hilariously dry Deputy Chairman of the U.K.'s Warrington Cycle Campaign, who burned down the house with his "Bicycle Facility of the Month" slide show.

Here is a "Facility of the Month" example from the Warrington web site:

Keeping cycle lanes clear of parked cars is a problem the world over. This design from Mulhouse in France provides a self enforcing solution; yellow bollards have proved to be much more effective than yellow lines at deterring illegal parking.

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.

Jan Gehl, the famed Danish urbanist, is in New York City this week where, sources say, he has been hired as a consultant for Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC program.

At a presentation to the board of the Regional Plan Association on Wednesday at the offices of PriceWaterhouseCoopers at 41st and Madison, Gehl said the city must tame the automobile if it is going to become a truly great city for pedestrians and for public life.

Asked during questions what he would do specifically for the city, Gehl said he would make pedestrians more comfortable in the city by adding street furniture, widening sidewalks and creating "oasises" for them. In addition, he would put immediate emphasis on better conditions for cyclists. And finally, he said attention should be paid to the mass transit system. Good mass transit and good pedestrian environments, he said, "are brothers and sisters," each depending on the other.

In his lecture and slide show, Gehl talked of how in Copenhagen they had added bike lanes and additional sidewalk space by converting most four-lane streets to two lanes. Looking back over the last few decades, Gehl showed how big urban cities like Barcelona, Melbourne, Copenhagen and others are "reclaiming" their public spaces and streets for pedestrians by putting less emphasis on accommodating cars. He mentioned how in 1962, all of Copenhagen's principal squares, 18 of them, were being used for parking lots. Now all are used for public life. Gehl said that he sees enormous potential for similar improvements in New York City.

The Dept. of Transportation's press office declined to comment on Gehl's work at this time. In an interview with Streetsblog in June, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said she was "hoping to bring Gehl over at the end of next month to help us work on a pedestrian and public space strategy much like what he did for London."

Photo: Aaron Naparstek

Janette Sadik-Khan: Four days.

Streetsblog: Left in the legislative session?

JSK: Yeah, well, maybe four days left, maybe more days. August in Albany. What can be better?

SB: (Laughing) So, let's start with something other than congestion pricing. How was your trip to Copenhagen to meet with Jan Gehl? Had you ever been before?

JSK: Never been.

SB: What did you think?

JSK: I thought it was spectacular. The experience of riding a bicycle in a city in which the car is not the priority was really inspiring. One piece that was a bit of a surprise was how well behaved people were in Copenhagen. I didn't see a single person break a single traffic law while I was there which is certainly a little different than the experience that we have here.

SB: I noticed the same thing when I was there last fall but every Copenhagener I asked insisted they were just as rude and unruly as New Yorkers.

JSK: Gehl went through the historic trajectory of how they've reclaimed public space bit by bit, one street at a time. Today, they've reached a tipping point where 36 percent of the people commuting to work are on bike and they're looking to get that mode share up to 40 percent.

The other thing that amazed me is that there are all of these bikes parked all over the place and it appears that none of them are locked. They all have these small black handcuffs on the rear wheel. You turn the key and this steel rod comes through and locks it up. How long do you think that would last on the streets of New York City? Ten minutes?

So, there are definite cultural elements that make Copenhagen Copenhagen and need to be adapted to work in New York. But the design of the streets and their approach to the streets are really interesting and I'm hoping to bring Gehl over at the end of next month to help us work on a pedestrian and public space strategy much like what he did for London.

SB: Would you have him work in a specific location or citywide?

JSK: We need to be able to show what can be done in all five boroughs with a variety of different techniques. But not everything needs to be a massive capital project. I'm looking to see what we can do on a shorter term basis to have some immediate impact in reclaiming streets and coming up with different designs for roadways and sidewalks.

SB: Are you looking at reclaiming on-street parking space for other uses?

JSK: That is something we're looking at. In fact, we're talking about removing a lane of parking on Broadway next to City Hall. Deputy Commissioner Michael Primeggia has been really great about looking for ways to reclaim street space. He's been helping me identify where these different places can be. The other question is once we reclaim it what do we do with it? You have to do it in a way that leaves a meaningful public space.

SB: So, let's talk about congestion pricing. There are a lot of negative signals coming out of Albany and Sheldon Silver. What's the status?

JSK: We're very hopeful. It's a heavy lift, certainly. The Mayor's working very hard and all of us are working very hard to see the legislation and authorization come through by Thursday, which is when the session ends. The Senate has been terrific. Bruno's been really good. The Assembly is open and we continue to do briefings. The governor has been very supportive, so that's a big help. We'll see what happens when the chips fall on Thursday.

SB: If congestion pricing doesn't pass do you have a Plan B? Are there traffic reduction measures that the city can implement if this plan falls through?

JSK: Everyone is shooting for Thursday but the promise of a special legislative session later this summer is still out there. So, Plan B is the special session. We are not giving up hope at all. We are fully committed. We need to get this legislation passed. It needs to pass now. It would be ridiculous to throw away hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds. That's our plan and when the plan passes we're looking to institute a series of immediate short term improvements before the switch is flipped on congestion pricing, including increased express bus service, ferry service and a variety of other initiatives. So, our emphasis is on making sure this congestion pricing program passes. On the transportation side, we don't think there's anything more important for the future of New York than getting this plan through.

SB: Is it a given at this point that no new "SMART" authority will be created and the MTA will administer the congestion pricing program?

JSK: That is still in negotiation. On the governance side I think that they are looking at a model that includes both the city and the state much along the lines of the Capital Program Review Board which handles the MTA's money. There are four votes on the CPRB: the City, the State, the Assembly and the Senate. Four people in a room. It takes a unanimous vote of the CPRB to pass the MTA's capital program. So, I think people are moving towards that kind of a governance model. But the negotiations continue.

SB: The City's proposed Bus Rapid Transit system will be dependent on camera-based enforcement of the bus lanes. Is the legislature going to give us the cameras? Is that sort of issue even on the radar in Albany right now?

JSK: It's definitely on the radar. It's part of our plan. We're hoping it is also addressed in the next four days. Keep those phone calls going to your legislators.

SB: The Hudson Yards rezoning on the west side of Manhattan requires developers to include over 20,000 new parking spaces. We recently did a story about this on the blog that generated a lot of response. People don't understand how these parking requirements fit with the Mayor's long-term sustainability and traffic reduction goals of PlaNYC.

JSK: In Copenhagen I was joined by City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden. We spent a lot of time talking about the success of cities like Portland and Chicago that have revised their zoning codes with lower parking ratios and how that has led, in a lot of instances, to a renaissance for pedestrian space and transit without any apparent downside.

SB: Towards the end of his private consulting career, your new Deputy Commissioner Bruce Schaller put forward a study suggesting that pedestrianizing Prince Street in SoHo, say, on weekends, might be doable and even desirable. Can we expect to see you move on this type of project?

JSK: We're looking at all sorts of treatments to improve the streets of New York. Bruce being here is going to help us. A lot of people have interesting ideas. It will be exciting to have Jan Gehl here because he will help us identify some of the places where we can do urban acupuncture and specific interventions, much as he's done in other cities.

As important as it is to do these interventions, it is also important to ensure that we have policies and programs in place that will set the direction for the agency for years to come.

As first reported by the Daily News' Elizabeth Benjamin, DOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan just returned from a quick trip to Copenhagen, Denmark, the world city that is really setting the standard for urban bike infrastructure and public space design (36% of commuters travel by bike.) There she met with Jan Gehl, one of the world's foremost experts on progressive urban design. Deputy Commissioner for Traffic Operations Michael Primeggia joined her as well as Planning commissioner and William Holly Whyte acolyte, Amanda Burden.

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.

GOOD Magazine profiles five innovations in urban transportation that you don't find in America, yet. Josh Jackson reports:

Cities around the world are leaps and bounds ahead of America when it comes to issues of urban transit. Though this country is woefully lagging, it's a rare example of when falling behind actually works in your favor: as U.S. cities work to update their transportation systems for the 21st century, they don't have to reinvent the wheel. The solutions are already out there.

In the States, cycling is still for the most part recreational. In Copenhagen, though, perhaps the world's most bicycle-friendly city, 36 percent of commuters rode to work in 2003, 33 percent used public transit, and 27 percent drove. But Copenhagen's streets haven't always been so balanced: In the 1970s, when bike riding was at an all-time low, the city's traffic-congested downtown resembled American cities of the same era. Yet unlike their American counterparts, who tried to solve congestion by building more roads, Danish planners took an alternative approach: they tried to reduce the number of cars.

At the big Houston Street bike lane meeting a couple of weeks ago, DOT's Ryan Russo and Josh Benson told Manhattan's Community Board 2 that physically-separated bike lanes should only be installed on streets with a maximum of 8 intersections per mile. Houston Street has 18 intersections per mile which, they believe, makes it not a good spot for a Class I bike lane.

Ninth Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn has exactly 8 intersections per mile. It therefore meets DOT's own standards for when a physically-separated, on-street bike lane is warranted! On top of that, neighborhood people are upset about the idea of a bike lane preventing them from occassionally double-parking to load and unload their cars. A physically-separated bike lane might be an answer to those concerns and a real win-win.

The lanes could be put between the sidewalk and parked cars as is done in so many great biking cities around the world. Here is an example from Copenhagen, Denmark:

Another possibility would be to run both lanes between the sidewalk and parked cars along the southern side of 9th Street, away from the double-parking commotion in front of the grocery store, post office and car service station. Here is a two-way bike lane I saw in Paris, France recently (no one is riding because it is in the middle of a hail storm):

It's just Thermoplast. Can't we experiment in New York City?

Planning a city around transit doesn't mean you have to cluster everything inside the core business district. Copenhagen, whose thoughtful bike network we've explored elsewhere, recently commissioned Chelsea-based architect Steven Holl to design T-Husene, a place for living and working outside the core city. The architect's renderings, released November 2, fit into a town that fits into a local rail line and a regional rail network extending as far as Sweden.

It's an inspiring blend of striking architecture and compact planning. Imagine: roughly 54,000 square feet of apartments on top of 37,500 square feet of retail, with a large allotment of open space. Holl's design shows how tall structures, plenty of natural light and strategic use of grass can deliver a sense of exploration without sprawl. Says Holl: "It is a sharp contrast to the American urban sprawl which is characterised by highways and endless seas of houses."

It also takes the wind out of the argument that only car-centric urban design can satisfy a yearning for individual expression. This is no Soviet-style block. Again, the architect: "We wanted to create a sense of autonomy, individuation, and particularity for each apartment and tower. One of the failures of modern housing comes from the lack of individualization." Ditto for one of the failures of modern sprawl.

Here are some images:

The Copenhagen government chose a strategic site for the project. It sits on a site with a ten-minute rail link to downtown Copenhagen and a direct rail connection to Malmo, a Swedish city. It's tempting to imagine such lovely forms in the South Bronx, eastern Queens or even New Jersey, with links to airports and office-park suburbs, but it's hard to move this image beyond fantasy until the city gets serious about concentrating new development near transit hubs in under-built areas.

That won't be easy. The MTA controls most of the transit infrastructure and other entities own most of the land. But there's a new team in Albany and a new drumbeat for walkable neighborhoods inside and around New York City. Such developments can't be generic. But as these images show, they can be intriguing -- and beautiful.

Indeed, there are bikes everywhere. Thirty-six percent of Copenhageners commute by bicycle. It's an astonishing number considering that this isn't exactly Miami Beach. It is cold and rainy for much of the year. The city is, however, extraordinarily flat.

Again and again I saw bicycles in the space that, in New York City, we would give to parking. This really seems to be where the ultimate choice lies when it comes to building a strong urban bicycle infrastructure. Do we want a city with abundant curbside parking that invites people to drive their cars into the city, or do we want a city where people can get around by bicycle? Forty-five years ago the City of Copenhagen made their choice. Slowly but surely, every year since then, the amount of land dedicated to parking space in the city center has been reduced, 2 or 3 percent annually, according to Gehl. The changes have continued because people continue to enjoy the results. Are the residents and merchants of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens ready to give up some of their on-street parking for better bike (and bus and ped) facilities? I wonder.

There is great creativity and flexibility in the way the city carves out space for cyclists and helps different modes of transport interact with each other. Sometimes you're biking on the sidewalk, sometimes on the street, sometimes in the same lane as traffic, sometimes on the inside of the parked cars, sometimes on the outside. Mostly, though, bike lanes are positioned between the parked cars and the sidewalk. To me, that arrangement felt a whole lot safer than the lanes that we have in New York City between the more frequently opened drivers'-side door and traffic.

Copenhagen's city government, along with Jan Gehl's public space research institute, is constantly measuring and analyzing street usage. After finding that the majority of the city's bike casualties (note they don't call them "accidents") were taking place at busy intersections they began striping them in blue. They are now studying whether these blue paths are doing anything to reduce casualties. As in New York City, the city is finding that there is "safety in numbers" for cyclists. As they number of cyclists increases, the casualty rate decreases.

People really follow and respect the rules of the road here. The vast majority of Copenhageners will get off their bicycles and walk when they come to a pedestrianized street like the Stroget. People stop at traffic signals. They stay in their lanes. I asked a number of Danish planners and transportation experts whether this was a cultural thing, whether, for some reason, the Danish are just better behaved and more orderly than Americans. Everyone I spoke with rejected that assumption. Their general feeling was that cyclists follow the rules of the road because they are a legitimate mode of transportation and they have their own infrastructure. I still think there's a cultural thing going on here but I agree with the alternative explanation completely.

There is loads of bicycle parking provided both by public and private entities.

For the most part the bicycle parking is pretty orderly.

But not always. Every once in a while you'll see an entire row of bikes toppled, domino-style, one on top of the other.

All of the train stations and transit hubs have serious bicycle parking facilities built in as a matter of course. There is even a motor vehicle parking lot on the outskirts of town that is providing people with "Park 'n Pedal" services so that they can park their car and finish the last leg of their daily commute on a bike. For about $20/month you get a bicycle along with your parking spot. You ride the bike into town and you get to keep it all day and then drop it off at the parking lot when you pick up your car. Park 'n Pedal is a creative response to the lack of parking in Copenhagen's inner city. It is proving to be popular according to the local, English-language newspaper.

Sometimes sidewalks are blocked and public squares are clogged by all the bikes. It seems to be the Copenhagen equivalent of New York City government employees parking their cars on the sidewalk. I'd rather have bikes blocking my way than civil servants' automobiles.

Danish cyclists somehow manage to arrive at their destinations less sweaty than me. Perhaps it is my professional bloggers' cardiovascular system. I don't know, but I seem to be the only guy who arrived to the meeting looking like he just came from the gym.