Streetsblog New York City

While polls have shown that upwards of 70 percent of New Yorkers support bike-share and DOT engaged in a multi-year public process for station siting, a vocal minority in Fort Greene is objecting to public bike stations in the landmarked district. At least one extremist has gone so far as to tar newly-installed stations with wheatpaste posters decrying the Citibank-sponsored kiosks. In response to the neighborhood chatter, Council Member Tish James has scheduled a community meeting about bike-share for tonight.

The historic preservation arguments simply fail to hold any water. The Landmarks Preservation Commission has signed off on the stations. Take a stroll in Boston or Washington, and you’ll see that other cities have managed to introduce bike-share stations on historic residential streets without harming their architectural legacy. And a quick glance at historic Fort Greene will reveal that its residential streets and sidewalks already have commercial activity in the form of bus shelter advertisements, newspaper boxes, and ice cream trucks.

One of the arguments against the bike-share stations is that sponsorship from a multi-national corporation like Citi has no place in historic neighborhoods. This, of course, conveniently overlooks the Coca-Cola logo on a Fort Greene storefront or the brightly-colored cars with BMW and Volvo logos parked throughout the neighborhood, which have failed to attract the ire of the anti-bike crowd.

It also doesn’t account for Boston, a city full of historic neighborhoods where the Hubway system is sponsored by footwear manufacturer New Balance, and London, where the bike-share system is named for another financial giant, Barclays Capital.

In fact, some of London’s most historic neighborhoods, including pricey West End districts like Mayfair, Kensington, and Chelsea, have Barclays-sponsored bike-share stations on residential streets. When the stations were first installed in 2010, neighbors raised an array of bizarre objections, from bird droppings to human rights violations — and yes, historic preservation.

But as the system has rolled out and proven to be a big success, the objections have waned. As the later phases of the system have come online, elected officials who had accommodated the initial complaints by slowing implementation have been less likely to give serious attention to the dwindling NIMBYs. “The administration was considerably less sympathetic to concerns that were purely subjective and hampered the roll out in phase one,” London bike blogger Danny Williams told Streetsblog.

Read more…

In the last few weeks, truck drivers have taken the lives of at least two NYC pedestrians: a 6-year-old child and a 60-year-old woman. Though the physics of the crashes were different — one driver was turning, the other accelerating into a crosswalk — in both cases the driver was said to have hit a person he did not know was there.

NYC is not the only world city that suffers truck-involved pedestrian and cyclist fatalities. In London, trucks account for some 5 percent of vehicle traffic, yet their drivers are responsible for approximately half of all cyclist deaths, according to the Guardian. Most of those crashes involve construction trucks, with many resulting from a driver failing to see a cyclist while making a left turn.

At present, half the cycling fatalities in Greater London involve lorries, and about three-quarters of those vehicles are from the construction industry. A large proportion of pedestrian fatalities also involve lorries. Tellingly, the most frequent response from lorry drivers after a fatal collision is to say they didn’t see the victim in the moments leading up to the crash.

The London Cycling Campaign has proposed a new design for the urban truck — one that is lower in height, puts the driver closer to the street, and replaces “blind spots” with windows. The design is based on existing trash trucks, which are built with the safety of refuse collectors in mind.

“Already a common sight in town and city streets, these vehicles have the same low driving position and high-visibility cab seen on our Safer Urban Lorry,” write LCC staffers Charlie Lloyd and Mike Cavenett. “All we’ve done is to marry this type of cab with a lower chassis from a construction lorry.”

Read more…

In some ways, London and New York have each leapfrogged the other when it comes to bike policy in the past few years. London’s bike-share program launched back in 2010, but its bike lanes remain largely sub-standard, with little in the way of physical protection. Here in New York, the bike lanes are gradually forming a safe, useful network, while bike-share is a few years behind London.

If New York’s next mayor doesn’t keep up the pace on bike infrastructure, though, London may soon take the lead on both counts. Yesterday, Mayor Boris Johnson announced an aggressive plan for a comprehensive bike network, including protected bike lanes.

“Cycling will be treated not as niche, marginal, or an afterthought, but as what it is: an integral part of the transport network,” Johnson said. ”I want cycling to be normal, a part of everyday life.”

The plan includes big changes, including new types of bike lanes for the capital:

• The flagship initiative, a 15-mile separated crosstown route connecting western and eastern suburbs via central London and business districts including the West End and Canary Wharf.
• A network of “quietways,” akin to bike boulevards, that will connect suburban and central London neighborhoods.
• Adding physical separation to the existing “cycle superhighways,” which sometimes offer little more than a stripe of paint on some of London’s busiest roads.

Read more…

A Republican member of Congress told me last week that he recently was in London for the first time in a long while. “Traveling was so much better,” he said. “You can actually get around. That traffic-charging system they’ve got seems to be doing a lot of good.”

London’s system — known formally as congestion charging — started up 10 years ago this Sunday, on February 17, 2003. In the decade since then it has been meticulously monitored, analyzed and debated — perhaps more than any traffic-managing scheme since Moses parted the Red Sea. It has also spawned a raft of charging programs elsewhere, most notably in Stockholm, and, starting last month, in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city. Of course, an all-out effort to enact a comparable system here, the proposal to toll motor vehicles entering Manhattan south of 60th Street, died in the state legislature five years ago.

Ten years on is a good time to take stock. Let’s have a look.

What It Is: Cars and trucks pay £10 (roughly $15.60) to drive into or within the charging zone between 7 am and 6 pm on weekdays. The zone is London’s commercial and financial hub and, at 8 square miles, rivals Manhattan’s 8.5-square mile Central Business District. Taxis are exempt, as are qualifying low-emission vehicles. Cars registered to zone residents, who account for 2 percent of Greater London’s 7 million people, pay one-tenth the standard charge.

How Drivers Pay: London’s system deploys 1,360 closed-circuit cameras at 348 sites within the charging zone and on its boundaries to record the license plates of vehicles entering and moving within the zone. The plates are continuously matched against a database of monthly accounts, and “spot” payments are made via Internet or at kiosks, drawing down accounts or billing license-plate holders. This cumbersome system arose not only from the absence in the U.K. of electronic toll collection systems such as E-ZPass when the system was launched a decade ago, but also from the decision to charge for car trips entirely within the zone in addition to vehicle entries. A byproduct is the relatively meager net revenue available for transport improvements.

Traffic Outcomes: In its first few years, the London charging scheme was heralded as a solid traffic-buster, with 15-20 percent boosts in auto and bus speeds and 30 percent reductions in congestion delays. Most of those gains appear to have disappeared in recent years, however. Transport for London (TfL), which combines the functions of our NYCDOT and MTA and which created and operates the charging system, attributes the fallback in speeds to other changes in the streetscape and traffic management:

Read more…

When it comes to urban transportation policy, Americans often look longingly across the Atlantic. Paris pioneered big-city bike-sharing, London showed New York that congestion pricing works, and Sweden set the goal of eliminating traffic deaths. But here’s a case where New York is leading a peer city overseas.

In 2009, London Mayor Boris Johnson unveiled a plan to install 12 “cycle superhighways” criss-crossing the capital. But Londoners found the new bikeways wanting: narrow painted bike lanes on high-traffic streets, without any protection from passing drivers. One of the cycle superhighways runs across a busy roundabout in East London that’s been the site of two cyclist fatalities since the route was installed.

Not surprisingly, the lanes have a poor reputation, and the number of people riding bikes in London last year fell for the first time in a decade.

Transport for London recently announced that it would install a protected bike lane on the East London roundabout approach. Though advocates want additional tweaks, the plan is a shift in policy. “You can expect to see more of these designs across the capital,” explained BBC reporter Tom Edwards, though a TfL official cautioned that the protected lanes will not be everywhere, particularly in central London.

While Dutch and Danish cities are still way ahead of London and NYC, it seems like NYC DOT’s protected bike lane designs are now the object of some international envy. The proposal is “the first time I’ve seen anything even vaguely close to catching up on what’s already common-place in New York,” wrote Danny Williams at Cyclists in the City, a London bike blog.

The protected bike lane proposed in London will include an element we haven’t seen yet in New York: a bikeway that runs between the sidewalk and a “floating” bus stop. On streets with major bus routes and protected bike lanes, NYC DOT has opted to put bikes and transit on opposite sides of the street. First Avenue has this configuration even though it leads to more conflicts between cyclists and turning traffic (there are more drivers turning left, across the bike lane, than turning right). It will be interesting to see how the floating bus stop works out for London, and whether it becomes a treatment in the New York City toolbox too.

For your viewing pleasure this weekend, here’s the animation produced by Transport for London explaining how to use Barclays Cycle Hire — the 570-station bike-share system that launched about two years ago. There’s a lot to cover in a little more than four minutes: when bike-share is useful, how to get a membership, what not to do with your bike, how to handle a bike that needs repair, and so forth.

In New York, we’ve already seen some confusion about what sort of trips bike-share is meant for, and even something as simple as swiping a Metrocard has a learning curve. We could probably use a video like this before Citi Bike launches in July.

We’ll see you back here on Tuesday, Streetsblog readers. In the meantime, feel free to share your storyboard ideas for NYC bike-share how-to videos in the comments.

For the last nine years, private motorists entering central London between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. have paid a fee (currently £10 or US$16.22) to drive on the city’s scarce street space. The revenue from the congestion charge is plowed into the city’s transit system, and as Transport for London has amply documented, many Londoners have changed their commuting habits.

Now a flurry of maps released by ITO World, a British company that specializes in visualizing transport data, shows London’s dramatic shift to more sustainable modes from 2001-2010. (The congestion charge went into effect in February 2003.)

The map above depicts the extraordinary decrease in private motor vehicle traffic, with the bright blue dots showing where driving has gone down more than 30 percent and the bright red dots showing where it’s up more than 30 percent. By the looks of it, the drivable suburbs are still a bastion of private vehicles, but the central city is seeing far less traffic.

Of course, people aren’t just sitting at home. They’ve embraced other ways of getting around. So while there are fewer vehicles in London now than in 2001, one motorized mode has become more ubiquitous: the bus.

Read more…

Top transportation officials from three global cities — London, Singapore and Stockholm — shared their experiences in expanding the use of transit at a panel at the Regional Plan Association’s annual conference last Friday. Eyeing those cities, it’s easy for New Yorkers to get jealous.

“I was, in many ways, salivating,” said MTA chief Joe Lhota.

Singapore is doubling the size of its rail network in the next ten years, according to the Singapore Land Transport Authority’s Lew Yii Der. Using driverless technology, he added, Singapore will soon be running subway trains as little as 90 seconds apart.

London boosted bus ridership by 60 percent in a decade (in contrast, New York’s bus system is seeing fewer passengers year after year) and recently hit an all-time high for Underground use, said Transport for London’s Elaine Seagriff. Projects in the pipeline will add an entire new rail line through the heart of the city and boost capacity in the existing Underground system by 20 percent.

Stockholm plans to spend 8 billion Euros on expansion projects through 2020 for a region of only 2 million people, reported Stockholm Public Transport Managing Director Anders Lindström. In the New York region, per capita spending on that level would come out to $115.5 billion.

In a city where “mega-projects” mean three new stations for the Second Avenue Subway and one on the 7 line — and where it’s possible no system expansions at all will be included in the next five-year capital plan — it’s hard to imagine the cash-strapped MTA ever reaching such lofty levels. How did these other cities do it?

It’s foolish to call anything a silver bullet, but even so, it’s no coincidence that each of these cities do something New York hasn’t done: price the use of scarce road space.

London’s phenomenal growth in bus ridership, for example, can be significantly attributed to the fact that surface transit doesn’t have to sit in gridlocked traffic, thanks to the city’s congestion charge. Analyst Kenneth Small estimates that in the typical American city, bus ridership would jump 31 percent due to the introduction of congestion pricing, without bus service even receiving any of the revenues.

But the money certainly helps. London’s congestion charge generated approximately $240 million in 2009, all dedicated to transportation. Stockholm’s pricing scheme took in about $112 million in a much smaller region.

Read more…

Remember the Times of London’s “Cities Fit for Cycling” campaign? Earlier this year one of the most prominent dailies in the UK pulled out all the stops to make bicycling safer in British cities, promoting a comprehensive policy platform. The campaign is for real: The Times is now getting London mayoral candidates on the record with their bike policy positions.

Here’s how this political slugfest is playing out. Tory Boris Johnson, the mayor who launched the largest bike-share system in the English-speaking world (so far) and built the first corridors in a network of “cycle superhighways,” hasn’t done enough to make cycling accessible and safe, according to his chief rival, Labor candidate Ken Livingstone.

Livingstone, who was ousted from the mayoralty by Johnson in 2008, made his reputation as a transportation reformer in his first stint as mayor. He instituted London’s congestion charge in 2003, completed a range of high-profile pedestrian reclamation projects, and initiated the idea of building high-volume bike routes. Now he’s attacking Johnson’s bike-share initiative for being out of reach to most Londoners, and assailing the cycle superhighways as little more than paint on the street.

A political campaign group called “Londoners on Bikes” is going to deliver a bloc of at least 3,000 votes to the candidate who commits to the strongest platform for bicycling. Here are some highlights from Livingstone and Johnson, according to the Times.

Read more…

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?