Portland rules in Bicycling Magazine's 2012 bike-friendly city rankings. Photo: Cycloculture

Today, Pacific coast sustainability standard bearer Portland topped Midwestern standout Minneapolis in Bicycling Magazine’s bike-friendly city rankings, bi-annual source of bragging rights or shame, depending on your locale.

The top-two results were a reversal of the 2010 rankings. Bicycling Magazine did not explain what boosted Portland but did mention the city’s stature as the only large city to receive the League of American Bicyclists’ “Platinum-Level” Bike Friendly City Award, as well as its tendency to be the earliest of early adopters when it comes to innovations like bike boxes (Portland had the nation’s first).

Meanwhile, Minneapolis recently snagged national bragging rights with its Bike Score — the new bikeability scoring system that the creators of Walk Score unveiled last week.

Overall, big cities enjoy a growing prominence in Bicycling’s top ten, reflecting a trend in bike-friendly political leadership in America’s major metropolises.

While tiny Boulder, Colorado took the bronze, Washington, DC came in an impressive fourth place, boosted by its enviable bike-sharing system.

“There is no clearer evidence of the urban-cycling revolution sweeping the United States than in the nation’s capital,” wrote Bicycling’s Ian Dille, “where ridership jumped 80 percent from 2007 to 2010.”

Also surging ahead was Chicago, taking fifth place. Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan for 100 miles of protected bike lanes was cited as a big factor, along with the popular Bike-the-Drive open streets event.

New York City, which will be launching the nation’s largest bike-share system this summer, ratcheted up one spot to seventh place, on the strength of the bike infrastructure built on the watch of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. San Francisco dropped a few places to eighth. And Seattle rounded out the top ten.

Smaller trailblazers Madison, Wisconsin and Eugene, Oregon slotted into sixth and ninth place, respectively.

Bicycling Magazine’s rankings are based on data from the League of American Bicyclists and the Alliance for Biking and Walking along with input from local advocates. Fifty cities are ranked this year, from De Moines, Iowa to Miami, Florida. To qualify, each city “must possess both a robust cycling infrastructure and a vibrant bike culture,” according to the magazine.

In the increasingly heated competition to see who deserves the title of America’s most bike-friendly city, Minneapolis has plenty going for it. Last year Bicycling magazine anointed the city tops in the nation, knocking Portland off its long-held perch.

The Twin Cities are undergoing a steady transformation into a more bike-oriented region thanks to nearly 100 miles of greenways and off-street paths, giving residents safe and quick travel options. By far the best-known of those paths is the 5.7 mile long Midtown Greenway, which connects cyclists to destinations through the heart of Minneapolis, from east to west. As you’ll see, the path isn’t just giving people a great place to bike, walk, and run — it’s attracting development and new businesses as well.

Thanks to the Bikes Belong Foundation for funding this Streetfilm, our third in a series on innovations in Minneapolis.  Check out the Nice Ride MN and Sabo Bridge Streetfilms if you haven’t already!

The first cable-stayed bridge of any kind in the state, it’s breathtaking, even to the people who have been riding it for years. It provides a safe, continuous crossing and offers up a glorious view of the downtown skyline (especially at sunset!). The sleek Hiawatha light rail line runs beneath it, and there are benches to sit on and take everything in.

Used by an average of 2,500 riders a day, peak use can hit 5,000 to 6,000 per day on some gorgeous summer weekends, according to Shaun Murphy of the Minneapolis Department of Public Works.

The bridge was named in honor of Minneapolis’ Martin Olav Sabo, a former U.S. Representative from the 5th District who helped secure much of the $5 million needed to build it. Thanks to the Bikes Belong Foundation for enabling us to feature this majestic piece of bike architecture and to show that investing is cycling and walking is well worth every penny for our communities.

Nice Ride MN is a hit. The Twin Cities bike share recently celebrated its one year anniversary in June.  And in July they started an expansion by adding more stations and bicycles to the network.

We talked with Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak about the decisions that went into getting Nice Ride MN off the ground:

You gotta go big or go home. You can’t put a few around. You’re hopping on that bike, it’s like a trapeze, you’re not gonna swing on that trapeze unless you know there’s another one to grab. You’re not gonna hop on that bike and cross town, unless you know there’s a place to go.

Thanks to the Bikes Belong Foundation we’re able to provide this short snapshot of the Nice Ride MN system, how it works, and where it’s headed.

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.

Minneapolis-St. Paul is investing in a new system of transitways and priced traffic lanes instead of traditional highway expansion. Planners there say the region will never be able to build its way out of congestion with highways.

Like many communities throughout the country, Minneapolis-St. Paul is moving beyond the decades-old assumption that the only way to eliminate congestion is with more outward-stretching asphalt. This fall, officials in the Twin Cities voted to roll back highway expansions and increase access to transit options instead.

Local planners say it’s time to acknowledge that the region simply can’t afford to accommodate growth by building new highways.

“We couldn’t keep going on acting as if we were going to get money to build our way out of congestion,” said Arlene McCarthy, Director of Metropolitan Transportation Services for the Twin Cities Metro Council, which drafted and approved the new plan. “One county alone could easily consume all the money the region has. That’s the reality.”

With vehicle trips expected to increase 35 percent by 2030, regional planners estimate it would cost approximately $40 billion to even attempt to tackle congestion with traditional road projects. But only about $8 billion is expected to be available to the regional planning agency over the next ten years.

The goal of the Twin Cities 2030 Transportation Plan is to maximize the use of existing freeways by adding bus lanes or priced traffic lanes in shoulders wherever possible. The new framework will require increased emphasis on transit and other non-automotive modes.

Rather than measuring transportation capacity in terms of traffic volumes, planners have focused on moving people. The 2030 plan calls for using congestion pricing to help encourage transit, carpooling, walking and biking. The Twin Cities envision a network of “transitways,” which will serve the region through passenger rail, bus rapid transit or express busways. Compact, transit-oriented development will be built in clusters along these corridors. The plan also calls for clustering jobs near transportation centers and encouraging mixed-use development, McCarthy said.

The overall strategy is to pursue high-benefit, low-cost projects. “We’re asking the question, ‘Can we provide the majority of the benefit at a much lower cost?’” McCarthy said. “We’re finding that we can do that.”

As part of the new framework, 14 previously planned highway expansions totaling $2.3 billion have been tabled. However, six “high-impact, low-cost” highway projects are still slated to move forward. Many of the remaining projects focus on the building of high-occupancy/toll (HOT) lanes, but traditional highway building is included to a limited extent as well.

Local environmental and business groups have been supportive of the proposal. Jim Erkel, director of the land use and transportation program at the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, said it will help ease water and air pollution in the region and prevent sprawl from consuming farmland. The plan, he said, should also help the region stay in compliance with the Clean Air Act.

“We’re going to be looking at less impervious surface,” he said. “Building in already developed areas should mean fewer vehicle miles traveled.”

In addition, Jeremy Estenson of the regional chamber of commerce told the Star Tribune in September that despite some reservations, overall the business group is behind the plan.

This map outlines the downsized number of highway expansions planned for the Twin Cities under the 2030 Plan. Map: Twin Cities Metro Council

Of course, not everyone is thrilled. A group of suburban political leaders raised strong objections, noting that without highway expansion plans in place, the suburban counties would not have been eligible to apply for windfall funds like the federal support that flowed from the 2008 stimulus package.

“Some of us felt that we should have a more aggressive plan,” said Dennis Hegberg, a commissioner with suburban Washington County, which is growing rapidly. “There are a number of state and federal highways that need attention and I feel they’re not being paid attention to.” Still, Hegberg said he and his counterparts have accepted the result of the council’s vote.

One major catalyst for change was the tragedy that took place on August 1, 2007, when the I-35W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis and seven people were killed. The event prompted a tax increase to support bridge maintenance, and more generally, forced political leaders to take their responsibility for infrastructure maintenance seriously.

“After August 1, 2007 the ground shifted tremendously,” said Erkel. “It seemed to take that to make the legislature realize that we had a lot of things to take care of.”

The 2030 Plan, and its emphasis on maintenance, should help ensure the community avoids such tragedies in the future.

The plan puts the Twin Cities ahead of the curve in regional transportation policy from a national standpoint. But Minneapolis still lags behind places like Portland, Oregon; Arlington, Virginia; and Montgomery County, Maryland on issues such as land use and transit, said Myron Orfield, director of the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota and author of American Metropolitics.

Though the traditionally progressive Twin Cities benefit from having very strong land use statutes, they haven’t been aggressive enough in enforcing those standards, he said.

Will Schroeer, policy and research director for Smart Growth America, agreed that the Minneapolis plan has room for improvement. Priced lanes offer some advantages, including the ability to recoup expenses, manage congestion, and create priority space for buses, Schroeer said. But the additional lanes still reinforce auto dependence.

Twin Cities officials acknowledge within the plan that the region already has a greater number of highway miles per capita than many comparable areas. The region built hundreds of miles of new highways in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. While the 2030 plan is a step forward, Minneapolis could have gained more ground on the nation’s best-planned regions by just saying no to any new highway lanes. “It’s new capacity in an area which doesn’t really need new capacity,” said Schroeer. “It’s better than regular capacity but it’s still not great.”

Minneapolis's bike-share system has only had two stolen bikes, and not just because people there are Minnesota nice. Theft and vandalism haven't been a problem for any American bike-sharing system. Photo: Kevin Jack via Flickr.

Even as bike-sharing spreads across the United States, it remains dogged by one persistent doubt. Critics, and even some boosters, fear that the bikes will be routinely stolen and vandalized. It’s time to stop worrying about crime, however. In America’s new bike-sharing systems, there have been essentially no such problems.

Fears that public bikes will be abused can be traced to Paris’s Vélib system, which while wildly popular has struggled with high levels of theft and vandalism. Take Michael Grynbaum’s write-up last week of New York City’s bike-share plans in the Times, where crime is portrayed as the only downside:

In Paris, the pioneer of bike-sharing, the bikes are used up to 150,000 times a day. But there has also been widespread theft and vandalism; bicycles have ended up tossed in the Seine, dangling from lampposts and shipped off to northern Africa for illegal sale.

The scenes of Vélib bike abuse replicate descriptions widely circulated in a 2009 BBC story about the system’s troubles. The problems with Vélib are real, if overhyped by the media. In 2009, JCDecaux, the advertising agency that runs Vélib, estimated that over 8,000 bikes were stolen and another 8,000 rendered unrideable and irreparable. It was a problem that had to be addressed.

Luckily for the rest of the world, it seems to have been an easy fix for other cities. Many now believe that the locking mechanism at Vélib’s stations was poorly designed. Systems that use a different method have successfully controlled theft to the point where the cost is negligible.

Vélib bikes lock on the side of the frame, as seen here. Other operators, including ClearChannel, B-cycle and the Public Bike System, have had dramatically lower rates of theft and use a different locking method, explained Bill Dossett, who runs Minneapolis’s new NiceRide bike-sharing system. “The ClearChannel systems had the locking mechanism built into the headset,” where the handlebars meet the bicycle frame, “and just has never had the same problems,” he said.

For example, Barcelona’s Bicing system, run by ClearChannel, has had about one-fifth the rate of stolen public bikes as Vélib, despite higher theft rates citywide, according to the New York Department of City Planning.

Stateside, the problems with crime have been smaller still.

“Theft and vandalism hasn’t been a big problem with either of our two systems,” said Jim Sebastian, who runs Washington D.C.’s bike and pedestrian programs. Under D.C.’s old SmartBike system, which opened in 2008, only one bike was ever stolen, and that was when a rider left it unsecured. Under the new and larger Capital Bikeshare system, which launched in September with about 1,100 bikes, they’ve lost fewer than five bikes, Sebastian said.

“We did have some vandalism at the beginning,” added Sebastian. “People test the limits at first, basically.” That’s died down now that the program is up and running, he said. “There’s nothing that hampers the operation of the system.”

Sebastian said there’s no trick to keeping the bikes safe. “Just making it difficult to get the bikes out of the rack,” is the key, he said.

In Minneapolis, again, theft and vandalism simply haven’t materialized as problems. The operators expected to lose around ten percent of their bikes to crime in the first year, but so far, that figure has only turned out to be 0.3 percent.

With 700 bikes on the streets since June, said Dossett, only two bikes have disappeared. Vandalism has been minimal: There have been a few bikes that were graffitied, a few tires slashed, and one incident in which a motorist hit a bike-sharing station and shattered some glass. “That’s been $5,000 worth of damage,” he said. “I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any system that operates any equipment in the public sphere with that low a damage rate.”

Dossett agreed that good locking mechanisms are key, and also urged New York to create some community pride in the bike-sharing project. “You want people to see this as a local initiative and as something that’s got everybody’s health in mind,” he said. “Then people won’t want to lash out against it.”

The story’s the same in Denver, where bikes are all equipped with a GPS device that can be used for tracking and security purposes. So far there hasn’t been much need to recover stolen bikes. “We’ve had one bike stolen since we launched on April 22,” said Parry Burnap, executive director of Denver Bike Sharing. “One bike damaged, someone tried to scrape the logos off.”

There was also one incident in which a number of bikes had their tires slashed, as did all the cars in the neighborhood. “And that’s it,” said Burnap. “We’ve made no claims on our insurance policy, so that’s really an indicator of the low level of damage we’ve gotten.”

In a surprising choice, the May edition of Bicycling Magazine named Minneapolis America’s best city for biking. The city still trails Portland, Oregon in the percentage of commuters who bike to work (4.3 percent to 5.9 percent, respectively, according to the most recent American Community Survey), but Minneapolis has been gaining momentum.

Next month, Minneapolis will launch the largest bike-share program in the country, building on a strong foundation of extensive bike trails and a thriving bicycling community. They're also using federal funds to double the mileage of on-street bike lanes, build more road diets, introduce bicycle boulevards, and more. Have a look and see how Minneapolis has shot to the top of America's best bicycling cities.

Goldy Gopher is psyched about Minneapolis's first-place finish in Bicycling's city rankings.

New York was named one of the most improved bicycling cities in the magazine's 2008 listings and got the number 8 spot this year, behind San Francisco and Seattle, ahead of Chicago, and barely edging out Tucson.

The semi-regular rankings, out in the current issue, are based on several factors, with some intangibles mixed in. Portland still has the objective edge in bike commute modeshare (5.9 percent to Minneapolis's 4.3 percent, according to the most recent American Community Survey), but the Bicycling editors say Minneapolis has the momentum. Bike commuting in Minneapolis is on the rise at an impressive rate, and the city is on the verge of launching what will arguably be the nation's most ambitious bike-share program later this spring.

If you'd like to see this nascent intercity rivalry turn into an extended Jay-Z vs. Nas-style beef, that makes two of us. But BikePortland's Jonathan Maus seems to be taking the news in stride, writing that "this is more likely a sign that bike-friendliness is on the rise in cities across the country and Portland simply isn't as far out in front as it once was."

Last week, Comptroller John Liu announced plans to convene a task force to study and issue recommendations about community benefits agreements in New York. While details on the task force are still forthcoming, the renewed public attention on these planning tools provides an opportunity to examine how CBAs have worked in New York and how they are increasingly being used to build livable streets.

Community benefits agreements are private contracts between community organizations and developers, requiring that the developer take additional actions for public benefit. In theory, CBAs allow groups that are shut out of the normal planning process to make their voices heard. The first real CBA was tied to the construction of a basketball arena -- the Staples Center in Los Angeles, where a coalition of religious, social justice, environmental, health, immigrant and tenant organizations capitalized on public concerns over the project to win promises of living-wage jobs, affordable housing, and local hiring.

In some cases, locals have demanded the inclusion of transportation improvements in the benefits agreement. At the Staples Center, the CBA created a residential permit parking program for the arena's neighbors. Here in New York, the CBA Columbia University signed as part of its expansion into West Harlem required it to light the viaduct along Broadway and advocate for improvements to subway and bus stations.

Where the public makes livable streets a priority, CBAs can be useful tools. In Minneapolis, one community group in the Longfellow neighborhood was able to win an impressive list of livable streets features from a developer. In addition to traditional CBA provisions like affordable housing and living wage jobs, the locals negotiated a contract mandating bike parking and paths, parking maximums for cars and car sharing, commercial space that engages the sidewalk, and even a requirement that the architecture "must be urban, not suburban, in feel and function."

Melanie Majors, the executive director of the Longfellow Community Council, explained why her group's CBA focused so heavily on urban design. "CBAs represent what that community has in terms of priorities and in terms of challenges," she said. "In greater Longfellow, our priorities are to have this livable community."

According to Amy Lavine, an expert on CBAs at Albany Law School, we can expect to see more CBAs like Longfellow's. "As the CBA process expands and branches out," said Lavine, "you'll see more different approaches." Indeed, Majors says she received dozens of invitations to present on the Longfellow CBA after it was signed.

In New York, however, the history of community benefits agreements is stained with failures. The CBAs crafted here are often held up as models for what not to do, said Lavine. Millions of dollars that the Yankees promised to local organizations have never been distributed. In Brooklyn, the Atlantic Yards CBA has been criticized as little more than a fig leaf for the developer.

Lavine cited the lack of real community involvement in the negotiations of the Columbia, Atlantic Yards, and Yankee Stadium CBAs as undermining those agreements. "There have also been issues with people taking money from developers," she added. "That's certainly not a best practice."

The potential to fix the well-documented shortcomings of New York's CBAs may be limited. "The idea of a CBA is a private contract between two parties," said Lavine. "You can only regulate that so much."

Even so, livable streets advocates should keep their eyes on Liu's task force. The comptroller's office says that it hasn't yet worked out the details of its proposal, but no matter what, CBAs are here to stay. And as the Longfellow project shows, they can help steer development to meet livable streets goals. 

The first phase of Minneapolis's bike-share system will consist of about 1,000 bikes at 75 kiosks. Image: Nice Ride Minnesota.

The multi-city horse race is fun to track, but Nice Ride director Bill Dossett downplayed the competition. "My view is that if all of us weren't doing this, then none of us would be," he said.

As each of these cities figures out how to make bike-share work, one of the interesting things to watch is how they get people excited about the idea of public bikes. For Nice Ride, the name of the game is public health and economic development. The project has attracted a broad range of support, with major chunks of funding coming courtesy of health insurer BlueCross BlueShield and contributions from local businesses.

A $1.75 million federal grant will cover much of the initial cost, with $1 million from BlueCross providing most of the remainder. "BlueCross BlueShield is all about fighting obesity right now," said Dossett. "They're interested in anything that encourages physical activity."

Small businesses in Minneapolis's downtown retail area are bullish on bike-share, he added, "because it's an economic development tool. It gets people to come out to lunch from office towers a mile away."

Subscriptions ($60 per year, $5 per day) will cover 80 percent of the cost of running Nice Ride, with contributions from local businesses -- who can pay to sponsor individual bike-share kiosks -- taking care of the rest. Other bike-share systems, including Washington's SmartBike and Paris's Velib, rely heavily on contracts with major outdoor advertising firms, which have proven problematic on more than one occasion.

After Nice Ride's first season, which runs through November (the kiosks will be removed during the winter), Dossett hopes to expand beyond the downtown core and the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. "Our plan is to expand into new neighborhoods through partnerships with local businesses," he said. "We hope to be doing those kind of constantly."

Like New York and dozens of other American cities, Minneapolis is facing the prospect of higher transit fares and less service amid the economic downturn. To impress upon state lawmakers that their constituents depend on transit to meet basic needs, the St. Stephen's Human Rights Campaign compiled this video of testimonials from bus riders (hat tip to Twin Cities Streets for People; see all the testimonials here). They asked a simple question: What do you use the bus for?

Watching the answers calls to mind all the reps in Albany who oppose funding transit through bridge tolls and fees on driving by invoking the plight of working-class New Yorkers. As if their transit riding constituents don't need to get to work, make trips to the doctor, or take their kids to school. One wonders whether the Gang of Three would so shamelessly obstruct the rescue of our transit system if New York's local TV crews asked bus and subway riders this question, instead of, say, putting the screws to Lee Sander about his morning routine.

Via Streetsblog Network member Twin Cities Streets for People, this vid depicts a fanciful best-case scenario should stimulus funds get funneled to highway expansion at the expense of transit, bike, and pedestrian infrastructure. Talk about unintended consequences. Excellent job by the filmmakers of putting a closed-off stretch of freeway to good use.