Streetsblog New York City

Across London, 20 mph zones combine a lower speed limit with physical street engineering and camera enforcement to create pockets of safety across the city. According to the British Medical Journal, serious traffic injuries and fatalities have fallen by 46 percent within the zones; 27 fewer Londoners are killed or seriously injured each year because of the zones. Now, street safety advocates are looking to join those neighborhood-sized zones with signage-only 20 mph speed limits on connecting streets.

While the physically calmed zones can be installed by neighborhood-level officials, the new push requires mayoral support. With London holding an election for mayor in May, 2012, street safety activists are hoping to make lower speeds limits a campaign issue. A coalition of public health, environmental, and transportation advocates have launched a letter-writing campaign to each of the mayoral candidates, asking them to commit to instituting a 20 mph speed limit. Though the major-party candidates have not yet signed on, Green Party candidate Jenny Jones, whose party won about three percent of the vote in 2008, has promised to institute 20 mph speed limits if elected.

Here in New York City, our next mayoral elections will take place a year after London’s. The race is already well underway, though. With a crowded field for the Democratic primary, candidates are jostling for support wherever they can find it. So what’s one thing would you ask the New York City mayoral candidates to commit to?

People riding shared public bicycles appear to be involved in fewer traffic crashes and receive fewer injuries than people riding their personal bicycles. In cities from Paris and London to Washington, D.C. and Mexico City, something about riding a shared bicycle appears to make cycling safer.

Paris’s Vélib’ is perhaps the most iconic bike-sharing system in the world. Launched in 2007 with 20,000 bikes, its widespread popularity not only transformed how Parisians traveled across their city but set off an explosion of new bike-sharing systems worldwide. With a few years of practice at this point, the Parisian experience is particularly telling.

“The accident rate is lower on a Vélib’ than on ‘normal’ bikes,” a spokesperson for the office of Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë told Streetsblog. In 2009, the most recent year for which data is available, Vélib’ riders were responsible for one-third of all bike trips in Paris but were involved in only one-fourth of all traffic crashes involving a bicycle.

The numbers are if anything more striking in London, where the Barclays Cycle Hire system — or “Boris Bikes,” to borrow the phrase locals have adopted in honor of their mayor, Boris Johnson — opened at the end of last July. Though the London government didn’t track the relevant safety stats of bike-share users compared to other cyclists, they provided us with the data to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations.

So far, after 4.5 million trips, no bike-sharing user in London has been seriously injured or killed in a traffic crash, according to Transport for London. Only 10 bike-sharing users were injured at all in the first 1.6 million trips on the system, a statistic that was compiled earlier. A spokesperson also told Streetsblog that they estimate that half a million bike trips take place across London each day, 20,000 of which are on Boris Bikes. Finally, during 2010, 10 people were killed, 457 seriously injured and 3,540 non-seriously injured while cycling in London.

Crunching those numbers, no people were seriously injured or killed on the first 4.5 million trips on Boris Bikes, while about 12 people are injured for every 4.5 million trips on personal bikes. And over 1.6 million trips, ten bike-sharing users received non-serious injuries, compared to an average of 35 such injuries for the same number of trips on personal bikes.

Stateside, transportation officials are seeing the same effect.

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Dr. Martin Austwick created this animation of bike-share usage in London on October 4, 2010, when transit workers were on strike. It’s totally spellbinding.

Bonus game for the geeks in the house — before you hit play, leave your best guess in the comments about the time of day when the system hits peak usage.

Hat tip to David Alpert at Greater Greater Washington for the video.

Flashback to Europe, sixty years ago. Just emerging from the ruin of total war, the continent was in the midst of a nearly unprecedented reconstruction. Over the next decade, industry finally was able to turn toward consumer products, from stockings to refrigerators and, of course, the automobile. Italians owned only 342,000 cars in 1950, but ten years later that number had increased to two million, according to historian Tony Judt. In France, the number of cars tripled over the decade.

With mass car-ownership fundamentally new for Europe, parking policy was practically non-existent. The first parking meter — an American invention — only made it to Europe in 1958, arriving in front of the American embassy in London. In most places, cars could park not only for free but wherever they wanted: on the sidewalk, in a public square.

When they realized that simply giving drivers free rein to park anywhere was untenable, Europeans attempted to build enough parking to meet the population’s galloping demand. Public space, from sidewalks to canals, was turned into parking space. Zoning forced all new development to use money and space for parking. All these concessions, however, only made European cities friendlier to cars and further drove up demand.

Today, however, all that is in the past. As outlined in the new report from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, “Europe’s Parking U-Turn: From Accommodation to Regulation,” the continent is now leading the world when it comes to innovative, intelligent and sustainable parking policy [PDF].

Across Europe, cities have come to understand that oversupply or subsidy of parking leads to too much driving. The effect is considerable. In Vienna, for example, when the city began to charge for on-street parking, the number of vehicle kilometers traveled plummeted from 10 million annually to 3 million. In Munich, the introduction of a new parking management system has resulted in 1,700 fewer automobiles owned in the city center each year since 2000.

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Judging by recent comments from some local pols, you’d think the addition of pedestrian spaces and bikeways in New York City has somehow thrown our streets out of whack. But what would our streets look like if we really did balance everyone’s needs and made them safe and functional for pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists?

In this Streetfilm, you’ll see some of the new street designs in London shopping districts and residential neighborhoods. In many cases, these traffic calming treatments — including raised crosswalks, traffic diverters, and chicanes — go further than what we’ve seen in New York City so far. The attention to detail has created a truly balanced street environment, enhancing safety for pedestrians and cyclists while maintaining access for the trucks and cars that need to use the road.

In the UK, the non-profit Sustrans is pioneering a community-based method to reclaim streets from high-speed traffic and make neighborhoods safer and more sociable places. Called "DIY Streets," the program brings neighbors together to help them redesign their streets in a way that puts people, safety, and streetlife first.

So far, individual streets have benefited from DIY redesigns in 11 communities in England and Wales. Recently Streetfilms got a walk through of one successful DIY project -- on Clapton Terrace in London. With the people who made it happen as our guides, we saw how planners and neighbors collaborated to transform a place where speeding used to rule into a local street with calm traffic and safe space to socialize.

Can the DIY model work on a bigger scale than an individual street? We're about to find out: Residents of the London Borough of Haringey will soon be working with Sustrans on the first neighborhood-wide DIY project.

With Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith hinting cryptically at future plans for congestion pricing in New York, and with public discussion of congestion pricing percolating in San Francisco, it may be timely to check back in with London's congestion pricing system.

Introduced in central London in 2003 and then extended westward in 2007, the congestion charge has curbed traffic, reduced the number of car crashes, cut emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants, raised nearly a billion dollars to invest in public transport, and encouraged people to travel in more sustainable ways, with increased bus ridership and cycling rates.

So the congestion charge is a fixture in the British capital. The debates today center over what shape the congestion zone should take, and what to do with the revenue. While the current mayor, Boris Johnson, is intent on shrinking the zone, one of his potential successors has raised the prospect of maintaining the current cordon and using congestion fees to reduce bus fares. 

Johnson has backed the removal of the western extension, which mainly covers the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and is approximately half of the current zone, since he was a candidate. Why would the mayor want to remove such an apparently successful measure?

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Earlier this week, London launched its first two "cycle superhighways" to decidedly mixed reviews. First announced by then-mayor Ken Livingstone in 2008, the cycle superhighways haven't quite lived up to the expectations for safe and fast bike travel implied by their name, as you can see in this BBC News video.

The superhighways are quite vulnerable to intrusion from motorists and they look like pretty standard bike lanes -- albeit with improvements at intersections, enhanced way-finding and some nifty new safety features like "trixi" mirrors at traffic signals, which improve cyclist visibility for the operators of bigger vehicles like trucks. They're also a very bright blue, which at the very least will raise awareness about cycling.

The current mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has a lot riding on the cycle superhighways. He's declared 2010 the "Year of the Bicycle," and the new bikeways will be paired this summer with an ambitious bike-share system -- 6,000 bicycles at 400 stations. Together, these two projects are expected to result in an extra 62,000 bike trips per day in London, making a big contribution toward the mayor's target of a 400 percent increase in cycling by 2026. But the question remains whether the superhighways will justify the hype and the investment. The first two superhighways cost about $35 million to implement.

If you only look at the bright blue bike lanes, though, you're only getting half the picture. The real innovation behind the cycle superhighways may not lie in the improved physical infrastructure but in the supporting "softer measures" to promote their use. Transport for London (TfL), the mayor's transportation agency, has been working closely with businesses, schools and households along the route of the superhighways to encourage people to cycle.

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When Mayor Bloomberg announced that the new pedestrian spaces in Midtown are here to stay, he made special note of the safety improvements on Broadway, which he called "reason enough to make this permanent." And after the mayor told reporters that the city was getting lots of requests for similar livable streets treatments, the speculation started: What's next?

To replicate the Midtown street safety benefits throughout the five boroughs, New York could look to the example of the UK, where 20 mph zones have reduced automobile speeds across the country. The global city that perhaps most closely resembles NYC -- London -- has been installing 20 mph zones for the last decade, and they are saving lives. Already, 27 fewer Londoners are killed or seriously injured each year because of them.  

The standard speed limit in London, as in New York, is 30 mph. Since 2001, however, London has built more than four hundred 20 mph zones, as described in a 2009 report by the London Assembly [PDF]. The zones are located in residential neighborhoods or near areas of high pedestrian activity, like schools. As of last year, they covered 11 percent of the total road length of the city.

The safety effects of the 20 mph zones have been enormous for pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers alike. In London, serious traffic injuries and fatalities have fallen by 46 percent within the zones, according to the prestigious British Medical Journal. Deaths and serious injuries sustained by children have dropped 50 percent. There's even a small spillover effect, with areas immediately adjacent to 20 mph zones seeing an eight percent reduction in total injuries and deaths. The science is so clear that in 2004 the World Health Organization endorsed 20 mph speeds as an essential strategy to save lives. 

These 20 mph zones do much more than change a digit on speed limit signs. London's zones include a host of traffic calming measures to make the speed limit self-enforcing: road humps, raised junctions, chicanes, and raised crosswalks are the most common. Increasingly, speed cameras are used to enforce lower speeds.

When paired with hard hitting public service announcements like these, London is addressing each of the three E's of traffic safety: engineering, enforcement, and education. As a result, the 20 mph zones really work, silencing skeptics who claimed that Londoners would just keep driving as they always had. As implemented, overall speeds in London's 20 mph zones have decreased by nine miles per hour, according to the London Assembly report. Transport for London recently recommended 880 more sites for the traffic-slowing treatment.

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American advocates for livable streets know that our addiction to the automobile is almost without peer. We know that we've given our land to driving lanes and parking lots and our air to exhaust fumes. Nevertheless, it can be hard to step outside of the car culture we've spent our lives marinating in and see the country with a new perspective.

That's why this letter we received from two British tourists is so refreshing. It's both a stark admonishment of how much we've given up for the car, sometimes barely noticing it, and a heartening reminder that what often seems normal to us need not be: 

We are visitors to the States from England. Our main reason for coming was to visit friends, however upon researching into transport options we were horrified to discover that the only viable option to get from NY to LA via many small towns was by car. Many of our friends have tried to justify this saying that 'America is simply too big to have public transport'. To us, this is purely INSANE. Surely a huge country should offer the best public transport in the world! Bullet trains could cover the driving distances in no time.

We are feeling quite ashamed of ourselves as we write this but inevitably we did end up driving across America. We have found the American people to be welcoming and friendly and the landscape beautiful but we have not yet seen a single 'town' in the US that we, as Europeans would class as a town. I would class them more as motorway service stations. Buildings designed for cars. People waiting in line for a drive through. People competing for car parking spaces at gyms! These are not communities as we would recognise - market squares, parks, rivers, cafes, stations, public art, gardens etc. 'Towns' are simply not towns! We feel saddened that many Americans are not afforded the community lifestyle that we enjoy in Europe.

Our purpose of writing is not to attack your country and we do apologise if we have offended. I am writing to urge you, beg with you, plead with you to keep up the fantastic work that you are doing. Despite the wonderful time that we have had in the US I simply cannot wait to get home in order to walk from my flat and pick up a newspaper and a pint of milk, on my journey I shall say hello to everyone I meet, take note of the weather and breathe some fresh air.