Streetsblog New York City

It's a good day in a city's urbanist evolution when Jan Gehl comes to town, and now San Francisco can add itself to the growing list of cities around the world that have embraced his people-first approach to urban design and planning.

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. 

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This StreetsWiki entry is rounding into encyclopedic form quite nicely. Andy Hamilton, DianaD (who also brought us the VMT entry last week) and Streetsblog's own Aaron Naparstek have been piecing together a detailed look at the history and effectiveness of bike boxes:

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."

April Greene reports on Monday's congestion pricing panel discussion at the New School:

"And now the last of the bald men will speak," said Jeffrey Risom, an urban designer at Gehl Architects of Denmark, as he took the podium at Monday night's congestion pricing panel at the New School. Indeed, all four panelists did possess this common trait, but the diversity of their backgrounds -- in academia, government, non-profits, economics, and private development -- set them well apart despite that shall-we-say glaring similarity.

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.

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Cities won't wait for national governments to solve their pressing problems, argues Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City in this week's Economist:

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.

Alan Durning, executive director of the Seattle-based Sightline Institute has been doing some great writing on Livable Streets and sustainable transport issues over the last year. If you haven't run across his work, he is writing a pair of ongoing series that I think will be of particular interest to Streetsblog readers.

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

The Jan Gehl product roll-out continues apace. Last week, WNYC. This week, New York Magazine. Word has it Gehl's team will be presenting Department of Transportation brass with some pretty big ideas for street space re-allocation. In the meantime, enjoy another interview with everyone's favorite Danish urban designer:

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.

Streetfilms' Clarence Eckerson was at Town Hall on Saturday night for the New Yorker Festival's "How New Yorkers Ride Bikes," hosted by former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. Clarence wasn't allowed to film the event so he published a nice write-up on StreetFilms. Some excerpts:

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.