Londoners are asking their mayoral candidates to expand 20 mph speed limits from neighborhood zones and onto streets citywide. Photo: Stephen Kelly/PA via Guardian.

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?

Bike-sharing users might be safer because they take fewer risks while riding. These two women trying out Boulder's new bike-sharing system don't look like daredevils. Photo: dgrinbergs via Flickr

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.

Chris Holben, the project manager for Washington D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare system, told the Boston Globe in May that bike-sharing users had a much safer rate of crashes than bike owners. He told Streetsblog that his observation was merely anecdotal, but it turns out that his instincts are likely correct.

In its first seven months of operation, Capital Bikeshare users made 330,000 trips. In that time, seven crashes of any kind were reported, and none involved serious injuries. In comparison, there were 338 cyclist injuries and fatalities overall in 2010, according to the District Department of Transportation, with an estimated 28,400 trips per weekday, 5,000 of which take place on a Capital Bikeshare bikes.

So while only seven bike-sharing riders were injured in 330,000 trips, on average, 13 people riding personal bikes are injured over the same number of trips. And bike-sharing riders suffered no serious injuries, while riders using their own bikes suffered injuries that were sometimes serious or even fatal.

In other systems, apples-to-apples comparisons with personal bike riders are impossible, but extremely low injury rates among bike-sharing riders still stand out.

In Mexico City, for example, only three ECOBICI riders have required a trip to the hospital after a traffic crash in the 1.6 million trips taken so far. That’s an impressive safety record in a city known for its dangerous traffic. Mexico City does not, however, compile the necessary data to accurately compare the ECOBICI safety rate with that of other cyclists, said a representative of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, which provided technical assistance on the city’s bike-sharing program.

Similarly, Minneapolis’s NiceRide system reported “no significant accidents or major injuries” in its first year of operation. In that time, Minnesotans took 37,000 NiceRide trips.

This is encouraging news for cities like New York that are eyeing bike-sharing systems of their own. Some have worried that bike-sharing would bring a flood of inexperienced new cyclists onto roads that are too dangerous, but if New York’s experience is anything like that of its peers, cycling will be safer overall once shared bikes are added to the mix.

Bike-sharing users are struck and injured less often than people on their personal bikes. One theory is that they're more likely to stick to safe routes like this one in London. Photo: d1v1d via Flickr

For now, we can only speculate as to the reasons for this phenomenon. Streetsblog spoke with two experts on road safety, Professors Norman Garrick of the University of Connecticut and Ian Walker of the University of Bath. Each offered a number of possible explanations for the discrepancy in safety numbers.

“It’s shorter trips, maybe,” proposed Garrick. If bike-sharing users are generally taking trips of less than thirty minutes so as to avoid additional fees, each trip might be fewer miles, leading to a lower crash rate per trip.

Walker hypothesized that bike-sharing users might be less experienced riders than those who own their own bike. “They therefore avoid mixing with traffic as much as regular riders, and ride slower, and so have fewer serious collisions,” he theorized. That might be easier to achieve if bike-sharing stations are sited near bike lanes, added Garrick.

Garrick said that even apart from experience in cycling, people who have avoided cycling until bike-sharing presents them with the option might be, by their nature, less tolerant of risk and stick to safer cycling behavior. “It could be that they’re more cautious people.”

Or the other case may be true, said Walker — bike-share users could be more dedicated cyclists with an above-average skill level. “Most people don’t hire bikes from such a scheme, suggesting that the people who do hire from them might be those with a greater than average interest in cycling.” That could be especially true of the tourists taking them out, who might not have brought their own bike along with them.

The physical qualities of the shared bikes themselves might be responsible for their increased safety. “They are slower and they are very visible,” said Garrick.

That visibility might help motorists not only notice the bike-sharing user, but respect her as well, said Walker. “I suspect they are also, in most people’s minds, a sign of a novice or occasional cyclist. As such, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if drivers took more care around people using them than they do around ‘professional’ looking cyclists.” Walker’s own research has shown that drivers passed cyclists more closely if they were wearing helmets or appeared to be male.

Significantly more research will be needed to determine which combination of these factors actually explains the better safety record of bike-sharing users. But in the meantime, cities with bike-sharing systems on the horizon should be pleased to hear that the program will likely be a boon for street safety.

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.

Grosvenor Square, London, the site of Europe's first parking meter, shows how putting a price on parking clears up the street and makes parking available. Image: ITDP.

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.

Zurich has emerged as a world leader on parking policy. Here, on-street parking was replaced with pedestrian space, likely to compensate for new off-street spaces. Image: ITDP.

Looking across the Atlantic offers a wide array of strategies to manage parking more effectively.

• Free daytime parking was eliminated completely in Munich. 95 percent of Paris’ roughly 50,000 free parking spaces were converted to paid spaces.
• Too often, the decision of how much parking to provide is disconnected from any other city goals. Not in Zurich. Under the terms of the city’s “Historischer Parkplatz Kompromiss,” each development is assigned a cap on the number of trips that can be made by car, which is controlled by the amount of parking provided onsite. The cap is determined by looking at the congestion and air quality in the immediate area.
• Parking maximums have replaced parking minimums in cities such as Zurich, Amsterdam and Strasbourg. The Swiss, Italian and British governments all recommend that local governments use maximums, in the words of the British government, to “promote sustainable transport choices, reduce the land-take of development, enable schemes to fit into central urban sites, promote linked-trips and access to development for those without use of a car, and to tackle congestion.”
• The idea behind parking minimums for commercial space is to ensure that employees of a new development don’t fill up all an area’s parking spaces. Logically, therefore, Hamburg decided that if enough employees at a company had a transit pass, that company should have to reduce the amount of parking it provides.
• Hard caps on the amount of parking downtown are in place in Hamburg, Zurich, and Budapest. No one can build a new off-street space unless the city agrees to take away an on-street space. Despite rising prosperity and car ownership, the number of parking spaces in the center of Hamburg has remained at 30,000 since 1976.
• Regulating parking only works if those regulations are enforced, a job that Europeans have made easier through new technology. Across France, magnetic sensors are employed to determine when cars overstay time limits. Amsterdam uses a fleet of vans with license plate-reading cameras to track violations.
• On-street parking rates better reflect market demand. In London, rates go up to £4.40 an hour ($7.04), and in Amsterdam up to €5 ($6.75). In New York City, by comparison, rates only go up to $3.75.
• Parking management has been closely tied to Europe’s largest bike-sharing systems. In Paris and Barcelona, bike-sharing stations replaced thousands of on-street spaces, and in Barcelona, all parking revenue goes directly to supporting bike-sharing.

Across Europe, there appears to be a much heavier emphasis on providing residential parking permits, public-private partnerships to operate the parking system, and technological conveniences like pay-by-phone parking.

Cities like London and Paris are New York City’s competitors. While they move forward with these innovative programs, New York still forces its drivers and bus riders to sit behind a line of traffic cruising for a rare open space or holding out for one of the city’s many free on-street spaces. New York tacks the cost of unwanted parking onto every new office and residence. In commercial zones, meanwhile, parking spaces are commandeered for hours, reducing turnover and making deliveries a hassle. Not to mention the environmental and safety disasters of encouraging all those extra car trips.

The Mayor’s Office is thinking about tackling parking policy in this spring’s update of PlaNYC, and hopefully they’ll use this ITDP report to adapt some of Europe’s best ideas. Then again, they just bowed to motorist influence in the City Council over raising meter rates by just a quarter. Giving New York City’s parking policy the same U-turn that Europe took will apparently be quite the political lift.

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.

Congestion charging has already greatly improved bus service. Will Londoners vote to use congestion fees to reduce fares, too? Photo: Wikimedia

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?

Whereas the original congestion charging zone, which encompassed the economic and cultural heart of the city, has enjoyed wide public and political support, the more residential western extension has always been more controversial. In particular, there have been concerns about the impact on small businesses and residents living just outside the zone who are not eligible for the 90 percent discount for residents. Johnson used the idea of eliminating the western extension during the 2008 mayoral campaign as a way of differentiating himself from the policies and management style of the incumbent, Ken Livingstone.

In online surveys, highly motivated residents have clamored for the western extension to be removed. Surveys of Londoners as a whole, however, show a more balanced view. It is expected that removing the western extension will result in small increases in congestion, CO2 and air pollutant emissions.

Johnson's final decision is expected in the fall, with removal penciled in for December 24 this year. A series of mitigation measures have been proposed if removal goes ahead.

Even if the western extension is removed, that may not be the end of the story. Both of the Labour Party's candidates for mayor, Livingstone and Oona King, a former member of Parliament, are expected to re-introduce the western extension if elected in 2012.

At the launch of King's transport platform earlier this week, she even suggested that the revenues from the re-instated western extension (approximately $75 million a year) could be used to reduce bus fares. “Half of all Londoners' journeys on public transport are by bus and it's time we used money raised from elsewhere to start reducing fares for everyone," King told the London Evening Standard, "especially the least wealthy who rely on this essential service to get around the capital.”

In London, travel survey data shows that buses are more likely to be used by people with lower incomes. Those who drive, meanwhile, tend to have higher incomes and are better able to absorb additional costs.

With New York's MTA still facing a $400 million deficit, which could result in more fare hikes and further service reductions, the need to properly fund the city's transit system is as strong as ever. The official proposals for road pricing here -- congestion pricing and the Ravitch Commission's bridge toll plan -- haven't been linked explicitly to holding down transit fares (although the backers of the Kheel Plan did make that connection). New York and other cities considering congestion pricing will want to keep tabs on the political fate of such a proposal in London.

"Trixi" mirrors help drivers of large vehicles see cyclists at intersections. Physical infrastructure is only one component in London's "cycle superhighways" initiative. Photo: I Bike London

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.

With businesses, TfL has shared expertise to help develop workplace travel plans which encourage staff to use more sustainable forms of transport, including cycling. A lack of workplace amenities for cyclists has been identified as a major barrier to people commuting by bike, so grants have been given to provide additional workplace bike parking and changing facilities such as showers and lockers. Businesses have also been encouraged to join "Dr. Bike" programs, where companies hire mechanics to help their employees maintain and repair their bikes.

For many potential cyclists, safety is the biggest barrier, so TfL has provided additional funding for cycling education and training for households near the superhighway routes. To encourage novice cyclists who might not be used to riding on busy roads, group rides led by experienced cyclists have been organized along the superhighways.

This approach builds on Transport for London's existing "smarter travel program," which has been very successful in promoting more sustainable transportation through extensive use of personalized travel planning. In a three-year pilot in the London Borough of Sutton, these kinds of initiatives have supported a six percent mode shift away from cars, increasing cycling by 75 percent and bus use by 16 percent [PDF].

It will be interesting to see how much of an impact these softer measures have and what other cities can learn from them. Transport for London is closely monitoring the impact of the cycle superhighways on bicycling rates and will report back when the initial findings are released. 

Jacob Dunbar is a London-based transportation planner living in New York.

One of London's 20 mph zones, with physical traffic calming measures and the speed limit prominently displayed. Image: ITDP-Europe via Flickr.

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.

A 2008 map of London's 20mph zones. Image: London Assembly.

Across the UK, the last few years have seen a shift away from engineering-intensive 20 mph zones and toward blanket 20 mph speed limits. Nationally, two million people now live on streets with 20 mph speed limits.

The impetus for this strategy came from Europe, said Rod King, the director of the national 20's Plenty For Us campaign. While visiting a German town famous for its large population of cyclists, King was surprised to see that the town's bike infrastructure wasn't particularly developed. Instead, he said, "In the early 90s, they reduced the speed limit on all residential roads to 30 kilometers per hour," or 18.6 mph.

Inspired, King helped bring the idea back to the UK. After starting within the bike advocate community, the push to slow down cars quickly expanded. Advocates for pedestrian safety, public health, and even some safety-minded driving groups quickly banded together behind the idea. "It's been accelerating dramatically in the last two years," said John Whitelegg, a professor of sustainable transport and a local councillor in Lancaster.

One benefit of changing an entire city or neighborhood to 20 mph speed limits is the cost, which King says may average 50 times less than London-style 20 mph zones. Another plus is that a uniform speed limit reduces confusion over constantly changing rules.

Campaigning for slower streets in the town of Harestock, UK. Photo: Martin Tod/Flickr

Today, 20 mph streets enjoy widespread popular support. The London Assembly noted that three-quarters of UK residents favor the use of 20 mph zones, though the country strongly prefers enforcement cameras to physical calming measures.

Despite their current popularity, it wasn't easy to make 20 mph roads a reality. After a 1996 report by the national Department for Transport showed how much safer slower streets would be, it took another three years for the national government to allow local governments to reduce speed limits without explicit approval. Political opposition was often intense. Many conservatives "take the point of view that the correct approach to road safety is just for parents to teach their children correctly," said Whitelegg.

Over the last few years, however, 20 mph speed limits have been sweeping across the UK. Portsmouth recently became the first British city where every residential street has a 20 mph speed limit, and nine others have already committed themselves to doing the same, according to Whitelegg. Eight of London's 32 boroughs are moving towards a blanket 20 mph speed limit. The national Department of Transport is recommending 20 mph limits for all urban residential streets. 

Over a relatively short time, a broad swath of British cities and towns accustomed to 30 mph speeds have embraced the safety and quality of life that slow streets have brought. If any big city in America is ready to follow suit, it should be New York, where more people live without cars than in London.

There's only one Concrete, WA, but concrete and asphalt are the welcome mats for towns across America. Image: Gord McKenna/Flickr.

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.

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.

In 2002, then-mayor of London Ken Livingstone launched the 100 Public Spaces Programme, a campaign to better realize the potential of the city's public realm. With guidance from Jan Gehl, the initiative emphasized reclaiming space for pedestrians and enhancing street life.

Soon after Boris Johnson defeated Livingstone in last year's election, the new mayor shook up the city's public space plans, drawing fire from his predecessor. Some projects, like the pedestrianization of Parliament Square, got the ax, while others moved ahead. Last month, Johnson announced a re-vamped public space campaign, which he's calling "Great Spaces."

In her Streetfilms debut, Alice Shay speaks to Paul Harper, a head urban designer at Design for London who managed the 100 Public Spaces Programme. Here he discusses the origins of the program and guides us through projects currently underway in East London's Aldgate neighborhood, including a one-way to two-way conversion and the creation of a new public park.

There's no place quite like Times Square, and no exact precedent for the reclamation of street space along Broadway that Mayor Bloomberg and NYCDOT unveiled last week. But London's pedestrian improvements to Trafalgar Square certainly invite comparison. DianaD describes those changes in this week's StreetsWiki entry:

Because it formed the intersection of some of London’s busiest roads (junction of Whitehall, The Mall, The Strand and Charing Cross roads), Trafalgar Square had become an "undignified traffic roundabout." Visitors had to cross several lanes of traffic, which carried 1500 cars per hour, to reach the central monuments.

The redesign, completed in 2003, transformed the space in front of the National Gallery from this:

To this:

Someone swiped the bike of the British opposition leader, David Cameron, who happens to be a national advocate for parking that gas-guzzling automobile and pedaling instead. Mr. Cameron, the Conservative party chief, regularly commutes to work at the House of Commons by bicycle.

As the story filled with humble details goes, he stopped at a supermarket on his way home, to pick up some items for dinner, and left his mountain bike locked to a bollard, a short and stout barrier whose main purpose is to block vehicle traffic while letting pedestrians pass. Mr. Cameron would regret the decision minutes later.

Sloppy locking technique aside, what's news to me is that the leader of the UK's right-wing party is a bike commuter and advocate for switching modes. This is the first I'd heard that Cameron is cut from the same cloth as London Mayor Boris Johnson, another Tory and avid city cyclist. Turns out several Tory MPs like to ride to work too. In America, this would be like Bloomberg biking to work every day, Republican congressmen joining Earl Blumenauer on his commute to the Capitol, and John McCain championing cycling as transportation.

Of course, associating bikes with one side of the political spectrum or the other may be missing the point, as one MP told the BBC: 

"I have to say it is not an ideological crusade as far as I'm concerned. It is just a convenient way of getting about."

Photo of David Cameron pre-bike theft: Daily Mirror

Johnson's director of transport, Kulveer Ranger, told the Times that Johnson is looking to the proposed Manchester pricing model, which charges for fewer hours per day.

Mr Ranger said: "Flexibility around hours of operation, flexibility around how it is charged; all of those things are options we're looking to consider.

"The mayor has been absolutely clear that he wants to make it fairer for people, not so much as a blunt tool, but something that's a bit more well managed and gives people a bit more flexibility in terms of how it's operated."

The Times, which opposes pricing, relies exclusively on sources from "motoring groups" -- who also speak of "making the system fairer," etc. -- to fill out the story. But in the comments, reader "Barry" recalls how candidate Johnson professed an interest in improving conditions for those who don't or can't drive.

We certainly need more sophisticated road charging, where payment is related to time of day and distance travelled. But to rule out extending the scheme shows that Boris's pre-election claim to support cyclists, pedestrians and bus users over the selfish minority of self-drivers was a sham.

Photo: Guardian Unlimited

Here's an interview from last year with London Mayor Boris Johnson, who ousted Ken Livingstone last week. It's pretty remarkable in that Johnson spends the first eight minutes talking about buses and bikes.

• 1:54: Johnson says the first thing he would do as mayor is commission a study for a new bus design. The current articulated buses ("bendies") are dangerous and inaccessible to disabled riders, he says.
  
• 4:27: "By the way, speaking as a cyclist, I want to be absolutely vehement in my defense of cyclists and in campaigning for people to cycle in this town. I think that bendies are lethal ... They push you out into the traffic ..."
• 5:00: Johnson, who says he has cycled to work every day for eight years, encourages the interviewer to get on a bike.
• 5:40: Johnson to interviewer: "It's very very sad that people like you are so anxious about cycling, and I would like people to feel more encouraged to do it. That's a psychological barrier that we've got to overcome." Johnson then expounds on police failure to deter bike theft.
• 18:10: Johnson says he will abolish the congestion charge "As such time as I have a better replacement." Though he says he wants to be "the greenest mayor this country [has] had," Johnson says pricing in London has failed to reduce traffic and pollution. Despite these statements, Johnson has more recently pledged to reduce the congestion zone to its original size, but has no known plans to repeal the charge.

UPDATE: From Sunday's Daily Mail:

Without giving full details of his intentions, Mr Johnson said he would "reform and improve" the congestion charge on drivers entering central London, including by making it possible for motorists to pay their charge on account at the end of the month.

While foes of the congestion charge are already gloating over the prospect of a Livingstone defeat, the pricing mechanism is not in danger of being revoked. Should he gain the mayoralty, Johnson has pledged to shrink the congestion zone back to its initial, pre-2005 area -- before a western expansion that some transportation experts concede was poorly thought out. Livingstone's plan to increase the charge for the most polluting vehicles would also be off the table. However, the charge itself is there to stay no matter who emerges as the victor. It should also be noted that Livingstone successfully ran for re-election in 2004, after the charge took effect.

For those holding out hope that Livingstone will prevail despite the early returns, the BBC is running regular updates on the status of the vote count.

Update: The BBC reports that Johnson has indeed won the election, garnering 1,168,738 votes to Livingstone's 1,028,966.

Have you done it yet? You'll spend the first minute or so having absolutely no idea what any of it has to do with traffic safety or cycling. But stick with it. It's worth it. 

Rhys Thom at The City Fix points out the web-savvy sophistication of TfL's effort:

Not only does this ad make the point in a very sticky way but they gave it the means to “go viral” by including links for viewers to spread it to their social network of choice.

First the trends: oil costs are surpassing $100 a barrel, global warming alarm calls are mounting, polluting autos and trucks increasingly clog city streets, and health concerns about a sedentary and fattening society are mounting.

And now the developments: Handy bike-for-hire stations are proving instant hits in Paris and other European cities and seem poised to invade urban America. Moves to add painted bike lanes along city roadways are being eclipsed by proposals for entire networks of "bike boulevards" -- roadways altered radically to accommodate cyclists and pedestrians. And a companion "Complete Streets" movement -- making roadway space for cyclists and pedestrians, not just cars and trucks -- is gaining traction nationwide.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), founder of the Congressional Bike caucus (now 160-bipartisan members strong), claims a new pro-bike politics is forming, that it can mobilize a 1-million-plus national constituency and force clear recognition of the role of bicycles in the next (2009) federal transportation bill. He and the Bike Summit will be pushing a sense of Congress resolution recognizing the potential of bikes to undergird a greener, healthier and more efficient national future.

Cycling, nationwide, still counts for tiny portions of commuting and shopping trips. But Portland's experience shows the potential, Blumenauer insists: since that city's bike program began in the 1990s, the "modal split" for bikes has quadrupled and a $100 million bike industry of bike shops, bike sales, a start of manufacturing and bike tourism, accounting for 1,000 jobs, has emerged.

Paris' "velib" bike rental program -- the name combines "velo" (bicycle) and "liberte (freedom) -- opened last July and registered an astounding 2 million trips in its first 40 days. Almost identical systems are sprouting up across Europe -- in Lyons, Rennes, Barcelona, Oslo, Stockholm, Seville, Brussels, Vienna. Many others are soon to come including London and Rome. There's also reported interest in Moscow and Beijing.

This April the first serious U.S. fast bike-rental system is due to open in Washington, D.C., followed shortly by San Francisco. Considering the idea or in active negotiations are Houston, Tucson, San Antonio, Portland, Cambridge and Boulder. Among possible U.S. cities is Chicago -- Mayor Richard Daley tested a Velib bike in Paris last summer and came back a fan. 

A preliminary version of the 2008 Mayor's Management Report was released last week [PDF], and the Department of Transportation section is déja vu all over again. Ten months after the end of the Iris Weinshall regime, DOT is still grading itself almost entirely according to how well it manages traffic flow, keeps highways looking tidy, and other car-oriented metrics.

Even the few new livable streets metrics in this year's MMR, like the number of speed humps installed near schools, fail to provide meaningful information. The MMR is legally mandated by the City Charter to serve as "a public report card on City services affecting the lives of New Yorkers." Yet, it tells us nothing about how the 101 new speed humps installed in 2007 have affected speeding and pedestrian injuries around schools or if more kids are walking and biking to school because of them. Rather, the report depicts a city agency that is more concerned with its own, internal bureaucratic activity than the outcomes of its policies.

The contrast with London couldn't be sharper. That city's transportation agency, Transport for London, sets targets and measures public policy outcomes, like reductions in carbon emissions, noise, particulate matter pollution, and traffic congestion -- as seen in it's detailed, 279-page, annual monitoring report on congestion pricing [PDF]. The report even goes so far as to gauge the effect of pricing on London's employment growth and economic trends, sector by sector, beginning on page 74. TfL's report does exactly what the MMR is supposed to do: It provides a treasure trove of data on how city transportation policies are affecting the lives of Londoners.

Graphs from TfL's Fifth Annual Report on congestion pricing.

Next to TfL's rigorous measurements and focus on actual policy outcomes, New York City's Mayor's Management Report looks laughably inadequate.

"There's nothing there on mode shift, nothing on reduction of VMT," says Paul Steely White of Transportation Alternatives. "The other thing that's missing is traffic fatalities -- there's no target there. There's still a reluctance to really lead on that, and that's unacceptable."

Instead of setting a goal for reducing traffic fatalities, the MMR measures differences year-to-year. True, this is the first year the MMR has tracked pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities separately from motorist fatalities, but compare that small step to TfL's safety goals, spelled out in its Five-Year Investment Programme (page 37 of this PDF):

• A reduction of 40 per cent in numbers Killed and Seriously Injured (KSI) by 2010 compared with 1994-1998 overall
• Separately for pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists, a reduction of 40 per cent in killed and seriously injured by 2010
• A 50 per cent reduction in the number of children killed or seriously injured
• A reduction of 10 per cent in the slight casualty rate per 100 million vehicle kilometres

London is not the only city to set such targets. Ottawa, Ontario, for instance, has adopted the goal of reducing VMT per capita. But in New York, even though PlaNYC has funneled more money to bike infrastructure and pedestrian improvements, the gears of city government apparently grind too slowly for the MMR to reflect new priorities at DOT.

The situation could have improved last year, with the passage of Intro 199. That was the bill City Council Member Gale Brewer proposed in April 2006, which would have given DOT a mandate to reduce traffic and to measure, among other things, how many people switch from driving to biking and transit. Instead, then-commissioner Weinshall helped torpedo the bill right before leaving DOT.

Better performance measures still could have been introduced after the bill failed, without legislation. "Traditionally, the way these targets have been changed is the Mayor sitting down with the agency," says White.

Now, Brewer is in talks with DOT to bring a successor to Intro 199 before the City Council later this year. "Ideally what's happening is that the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability is working with Council Member Brewer to codify PlaNYC in the MMR," says White. That needs to happen if New York intends to narrow the transportation accountability gap with London.