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.

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.

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.”

The new plan for the Seine's left bank will transform space for highways and parking into space for people. The area outside the Musee D'Orsay will host outdoor film screenings. Image: City of Paris.

A few weeks ago, Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë announced a plan to transform his city's waterfront, closing 1.2 miles of expressway on the left bank of the Seine and slowing the highway along the right bank to the speed of a city boulevard. For an added bit of historical irony, the city's waterfront expressway is named for Georges Pompidou, the president responsible for scarring the nation's cities with highways -- the French Robert Moses, if you will.

Delanoë's plan is the latest development in an incremental transformation that's been years in the making. Soon after he became mayor in 2002, he instituted Paris Plage -- a month-long transformation of the Pompidou into a riverfront beach, complete with sand and swimming -- as a way of bringing summertime recreation to those not able to leave the city for vacation. Paris Plage was itself an expansion of the practice of giving the highway to pedestrians and cyclists for a few hours on summer Sundays. In 2006, it became "Paris Plages," as the popular beaches multiplied along the Seine.

Even this permanent highway closing isn't the final word in Paris's rediscovery of its river. "This is only a step," Denis Baupin, Paris's deputy mayor for the environment, told Time Magazine. 

The politics of reclaiming so much space from the automobile -- "reconquering the Seine," in Delanoë's words -- were a lot easier thanks to the massive investment in walking, bicycling, busways, and commuter rail that Paris has made over the last decade. The Paris city council votes on the proposal in July. 

More pictures below the fold: 

Parisians will have a new vantage point from which to take in the Pont Alexandre III, architectural highlight of the 1900 World's Fair. Image: City of Paris

Much of the reclaimed space would be converted to parkland, consistent with Mayor Delanoë's emphasis on bringing fresh air to Paris. Image: City of Paris

The highway along the Right Bank would be reimagined as an urban boulevard. Image: City of Paris

“Our bikes are very robust and Montrealers have a great respect for the Bixi program,” said Michel Philibert, a spokesperson for Stationnement de Montréal, which oversees the bike rental program. “Montreal is not Paris. The theft of bikes here is not a major challenge.”

JCDecaux touted Vélib on the cover of its 2007 annual report [PDF].

So is Vélib destined to burn brightly only to flare out after a short time? Hardly. Vélib is here to stay, according to officials and transportation experts familiar with the details of its operations. The BBC's portrayal of a mortal threat, they say, is best understood as a negotiating ploy on the part of JCDecaux. (Note that the JCDecaux representative is the only source quoted in that story.)

"Decaux is using media sensationalism in order to obtain more money from the city of Paris," said Denis Baupin, who as Deputy Mayor for Transportation oversaw the Vélib launch in the summer of 2007.

The basic structure of the Vélib contract works like this. JCDecaux runs the whole system in exchange for the rights to 1,600 outdoor displays, turning its profit from selling that ad space. The city of Paris keeps the revenue from Vélib user fees, so it can claim to provide the service at no taxpayer expense. Now, with the full Paris network of 20,600 bicycles and 1,451 stations completed, penalties for inadequate maintenance are in the process of taking effect. Hence the hue and cry from JCDecaux.

"It's in large part a PR issue," says Luc Nadal of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. Some aspects of the Vélib contract are still in flux, and the sky-is-falling press coverage gives JCDecaux a stronger hand in those negotiations. "Their bargaining position depends on the public's perception."

Not that bicycle abuse is a phantom problem. It exacts a real toll, but much of that cost has been anticipated and accounted for. Last July, the city of Paris agreed to pay JCDecaux 400 euros for every bike stolen in excess of four percent of the total fleet each year. Given the enormous popularity of Vélib -- users have taken 42 million rides since its debut -- the cost of those payments is minimal. Using the BBC's figure of 7,800 missing bikes, the pricetag for the city comes to less than 2 million euros annually, out of 20 million euros in user fees.

"It averages out to about 15 stolen per day, out of 80,000 daily users," says Eric Britton, founder of the Paris-based New Mobility Agenda. Hardly a fatal blow. "It's like skinning a knee."

Not only does the city already pick up a big part of the tab, but JCDecaux reportedly hauls in about 80 million euros per year from its outdoor displays, according to estimates cited by Britton. It's difficult to know the exact figure -- and how much is profit -- because JCDecaux guards the data like a nuclear secret. Even the precise cost of replacing one Vélib bicycle remains unknown to the public. Inquiries we sent to JCDecaux's headquarters in Paris have not been returned.

Public support for Vélib remains unflagging. "Vélib has been totally embraced by Mayor Bertrand Delanoe himself," said Nadal. What politician wouldn't jump at the chance to be identified with a program that enjoys 94 percent satisfaction among constituents?

This is largely a testament to JCDecaux's success in operating the system. According to Baupin's office, however, Vélib maintenance workers report that management has let upkeep slide in order to amplify the perception of vandalism.

JCDecaux's media gamesmanship "is short-sighted," said Baupin, in a statement translated from the French. "One should not lose sight of the remarkable success of this transportation mode due to a slightly underestimated rate of vandalism." 

Then there's the matter of JCDecaux's own self-interest, and whether the rumors and exaggerations will hurt the company's attempts to secure bike-share contracts in other cities. Said Britton: "Why would they run away from a golden goose?"

For the third installment in her series of Paris, France Streetfilms, Elizabeth Press checks out Le Mobilien, the Parisian version of Bus Rapid Transit. Le Mobilien features curbside and onboard bus arrival info, mid-street boarding kiosks, a MetroCard-esque payment system, and -- perhaps most crucial to its success -- lanes that are physically separated from car traffic.

All that dedicated space means Le Mobilien faces remarkably few impediments compared to New York's fledgling Select Bus Service, which, while a marked improvement by local standards, is struggling to establish itself atop the street-level vehicular hierarchy. Remarkable what a little curbing can do.

The City's official Summer Streets web site and press release hit our inbox this morning. Jay-Z is joining Mayor Bloomberg and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan in inviting New Yorkers to hit seven miles worth of car-free streets in Manhattan this Saturday from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. Bringing it back full circle to Bogotá's Ciclovia, Juan Valdez 100% Colombian coffee is going in as a sponsor.

As in Bogotá and Paris, it looks like the City is making a serious effort to program the event. Organized activities will include bike classes for kids and adults, aikido, salsa dancing, tai-chi, running, rollerblading and hopscotch. Bloomberg is pitching the event as a test run. "We're going to embark on a grand experiment that could dramatically alter the way we use and look at the streets of New York," Bloomberg said in the City's press release. "If the program works, we'll strongly consider doing it again; maybe we'll try it in other parts of the city. If it doesn't work, we won't, but we can't be afraid to find out."

And on that note, let the bitching and moaning about imaginary traffic tie-ups, lack of community input, hidden real estate developer agendas and hippy/yuppie cyclists commence!

There are lots more details, including locations of rest stops, events and free bike helmet give-aways in the City's presser...

MAYOR BLOOMBERG, DOT COMMISSIONER SADIK-KHAN AND JAY-Z INVITE NEW YORKERS TO TAKE TO THE STREETS FOR SUMMER STREETS

Starting Saturday, Activities From Dance to Hopscotch Available from Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Department of Transportation (DOT) Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, and Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter today invited New Yorkers from across the five boroughs to take their fun to the streets on three Saturdays this month during Summer Streets. For the next three Saturdays, August 9th, 16th and 23rd, from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., vehicle traffic will be replaced along seven miles of City streets by New Yorkers and visitors taking leisurely strolls, going for a bike ride or taking part in organized activities such as aikido, salsa dancing, tai-chi, running, rollerblading and hopscotch. Summer Streets will be open from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park along Lafayette Street, 4th Avenue, Park Avenue and 72nd Street.

"We're going to embark on a grand experiment that could dramatically alter the way we use and look at the streets of New York," said Mayor Bloomberg. "Streets that are normally tied up with cars and trucks will be turned over to the public - so that we can experience this city as never before. If the program works, we'll strongly consider doing it again; maybe we'll try it in other parts of the city. If it doesn't work, we won't, but we can't be afraid to find out."

"We're inviting New Yorkers and visitors to come out and enjoy the City by foot or by bike, and for a few hours, allow people to enjoy it free of vehicles," said Commissioner Sadik-Khan. "Come out and move around, people watch, or just enjoy your morning coffee without the stress of noise and traffic. Enjoy the streets you've been up and down 100 times before, in a whole new way."

Organized activities and other attractions will take place throughout the route. DOT will provide free bike helmets at 24th Street for adults and children from 9 a.m. to noon, as supplies last. New York Road Runners will be leading running groups for all ages and ability levels, and Bike New York will be holding bike riding classes for children and adults. Three rest stops will be located along the route in addition to a main stage at 24th Street, which will feature music performances and other programs. The rest stops, located at Spring, 24th and 51st streets, will also feature art, fitness, dance and cultural activities. These activities can be enjoyed by New Yorkers of all ages, fitness and skill levels. In addition to planned activities, all of the rest stops will have water stations, bike maps and first aid stations. Participants are encouraged to bring their own fitness mats and water bottles, which can be refilled at the water stations. Additional activities will also be held close to the rest stops and emergency services will be present along the length of the route.

Activities are diverse and each rest stop includes a full schedule. For instance, the downtown rest stop at Spring Street will include an aikido class beginning at 10 a.m. while the uptown rest stop will feature a cha-cha class in that time slot. Program schedules will run from 8:30 a.m. until 12:30 p.m.

There will be opportunities to rent or test ride bikes along the route. And for people who come with bikes there will be bike repair provided at each rest stop to ensure everyone can keep rolling along smoothly. Bicycle Habitat will be providing bike repair along the route, and bike sharing will be provided by Bike and Roll. Bike New York and the 5 Boro Bike Club will be leading classes and sharing tips about how to ride safely in New York City.

The City has developed a plan to redirect traffic while ensuring that traffic will flow on nearby streets and emergency vehicles will have unfettered access to the Summer Streets. Residents on streets adjoining the route will have local access and be able to receive deliveries during Summer Streets hours. Working with the Mayor's Community Assistance Unit, DOT has conducted an extensive community outreach operation to inform and educate the public, and address any potential concerns.

Summer Streets has been made possible with the help of sponsors including Crunch, Juan Valdez/100% Colombian Coffee, RCN, Bicycle Habitat and media partners that include Metro, WCBS TV and WABC radio. More information on Summer Streets, including a full list of activities is available at www.nyc.gov.

Here's another transportation policy success story from France. The Vélib bike-sharing system celebrates its one-year anniversary today. In April, Streetfilms' Elizabeth Press was in Paris to learn more about it. Here is her video and report:

On July 15, 2007 Paris debuted the world's largest self-service "bicycle transit system" called Vélib outdoing previously designed bike share programs. Vélib is a balance of scale and functionality, clocking in with more than 20,000 bikes, and 1,451 docking stations, which are never more than 1,000 feet apart. As a result, Vélib is effectively a new form of public transportation that has generated more than 25 million new bicycle trips in its first year, 10% of which substitute former car trips.

Today the program celebrates its first anniversary. And, throughout the year cities across the globe have kept a close eye on the progress of this environmentally-friendly public transportation mode. Overall, bike-share programs have proven to increase public transportation options at a relatively low cost to the city. Any registered user can "borrow" a bike from a station for a nominal fee and return it to any other station in the system. In Paris, Vélib has saved the city 10 million km in car trips, roughly equal to $10 million in savings. With 200,000 Parisians paying the city $50 each for an annual Velib pass, this has yielded an additional $10 million in revenues. Beyond economics, Paris has seen tremendous traffic calming and air quality benefits from this public bicycle system.

Here in the States, a bike share program is about to kick off in Washington D.C., and Chicago and San Francisco are in the process of implementation as well. Last week the New York City Department of Transportation announced its plans to examine the possibility of creating a bike share program.

Streetsblog contributor Ethan Kent sends along this item from CoolTown Studios, profiling what it calls "the contemporary urban delivery vehicle":

So what's the delivery truck equivalent of the bicycle? Look no further than Paris, the home of 20,000 shared bikes, and there you'll find La Petite Reine, a delivery company that utilizes a fleet of 60 Cargocycles.

With a delivery capacity of 400 lbs. and 50 cubic feet within an 18-mile delivery radius, La Petite Reine completes 2500 deliveries every day for larger corporate partners like DHL that can't access the more intimate street networks of more pedestrian-oriented downtowns.

'La Petite Reine' translates to 'Queen of the Road', the name given by the French to the bicycle. Founded in 2001, the company now serves Bordeaux, Rouen and Dijon.

What's that? Great, but it could never work in New York?

Think again.

The latest figures from the Paris Vélib bike sharing program are in. User stats and survey results are posted on the official web site, but for those who don't parlez Français, here's a summary:

• Rides to date: 20 million
  
• Average trips/day: 70,000
  
• Average trip time: 18 minutes
  
• 190,000 annual pass holders
  
• 42% of users are females
  
• 1/3 of users come from outside the central city
  
• 17% of users are more than 46 years old
  
• 94% of users like it (of which 20% like it a lot)
  
• 46% are satisfied with stations (available bikes, parking slots)

Vélib-style bike rentals come to the U.S. this month in Washington, D.C.

After the jump, for you French speakers, Parisians talk about the program -- one of many ways the city is beating traffic. 

Streetfilms' Elizabeth Press kicks off a series of videos about livable streets in Paris with this look at the city's two weekly romps on skates -- roller-versions of Critical Mass that attract up to 15,000 participants. Notice that the police are an essential part of the proceedings (and they seem to have fun doing it -- check out the cops on blades at the 1:35 mark).

Says Elizabeth:

Every Friday night and Sunday afternoon Parisians can take the streets and see their city on skates. And they do, by the thousands! Both mass rides, which are sponsored by different associations, started small and now are institutions of public street life in Paris.

In this video you hear from both Tanao Terra, VP of Pari Roller, organizers of the Friday night skate and Philippe Moulié, President of Rollers & Coquillages, sponsors of the Sunday afternoon Skate.

A little history: The Friday night skates were started by a small group of friends. After the transit strikes in 1995, which forced Parisians to find a new way to get around town, thousands of people began to show up on Friday evenings just to practice moving through the city on roller blades. The numbers inspired Pari Roller to form an official association working with Paris’, and the world’s, first roller blade national police unit.

The mayor of a global metropolis, elected to his first term in 2001, set out to reduce driving and promote greener modes of transportation in his city. Congestion pricing turned out to be unfeasible, because influential political forces in the suburbs believed, rightly or wrongly, that charging people to drive into the urban core was regressive. Undaunted, the mayor found other means to achieve his transportation agenda.

The mayor is Bertrand Delanoë, and the city is Paris, where private auto use has dropped 20 percent in a few short years.

As Mayor Bloomberg and the team at DOT chart a way forward without London-style congestion charging, it's worth noting that for all the differences between New York and Paris, Delanoë also confronted a vocal car culture while winning huge victories for pedestrians, bikes, and transit. To get a better sense of how New York can apply the lessons of Paris, Streetsblog spoke to Luc Nadal and Aimée Gauthier of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy about the hurdles faced by Delanoë and his deputy mayor for transportation, Denis Baupin.

To begin with, congestion pricing was considered completely untenable from a political point of view. Paris proper is not much larger than the proposed congestion zone in New York, and like Manhattan it is increasingly seen as the domain of the prosperous. Levying a fee perceived mainly to affect the working-class suburbs "would be very difficult to sell politically," said Nadal. "Mayor Delanoë put that solution aside from the beginning."

Delanoë and Baupin decided instead to rethink how the public right-of-way was divvied up on Paris streets. In 2002, they launched Quartiers Verts ("Green Neighborhoods"), an initiative to improve pedestrian space and reduce traffic in residential areas. The administration anticipated especially strong opposition to the parking policies in the plan -- higher rates, a reduction in the amount of on-street parking, and the elimination of free parking altogether. To counteract the expected outcry, the city tied those reforms to the introduction of residential parking permits, which are now available for a nominal yearly fee. With RPP still fresh in New Yorkers' minds following the congestion pricing debate, could permits be an effective carrot in a similar overhaul of parking policy here?

Delanoë's next major initiative -- Espaces Civilisés ("Civilized Spaces") -- took aim at Paris's most car-friendly boulevards. The first such project, on Boulevard de Magenta, trimmed a six-lane road down to two traffic lanes and two bus lanes, with the remainder going to sidewalks and street trees. This substantial redistribution of space did not happen overnight. Launched in 2002, Espaces Civilisés yielded its first finished boulevard in 2005. About half a dozen such transformations have been completed so far, with plans for another on the way.

Separate bus and bike lanes on Boulevard Rochechouart, one of Paris's new "civilized spaces."

As DOT embarks on a roughly similar project for 34th Street, Paris offers some insight about what to expect from the public and the press. "There’s been widespread satisfaction on the part of the public at large, and the local communities," said Nadal. "However, there’s been a lot of media activity around the congestion that some of these projects have caused during construction and after." The media fixation on slower traffic flows was picked up by Delanoë's political opposition, though Nadal notes it didn't find much traction. "They tried to use it as best they could," he said, but Delanoë was re-elected to a second six-year term last fall, garnering 58 percent of the vote.

The construction of physically separated lanes for buses and bikes also set off concerns about business deliveries. The great majority of new bus lanes are curbside, so the city identified places to reserve for delivery parking, Nadal said. A new type of permit was issued for store owners, contractors, and other businesses who need short-term parking for trucks and vans. Vehicles with the delivery permit can park in the special slots for up to 30 minutes at no charge.

A delivery zone set off from a separated bus lane. At four meters wide, the lanes are designed to allow buses to pass bicycles and half-parked delivery vehicles (photo: Luc Nadal).

The Quartiers Verts and Espaces Civilisés initiatives helped generate a 50 percent increase in bicycle modeshare, but the boost wasn't visible enough to justify the expense of the bike infrastructure. Then came Vélib, the city's ambitious bikeshare system. Part of the motivation behind Vélib, said Gauthier, was to make better use of existing bikeways. Providing public access to more than 10,000 bikes that anyone can ride for a pittance has doubled the number of bike trips made on Paris streets. Bicycle modeshare now stands at about three percent.

This transformative leap has come at a minimal perceived cost to the city, thanks to a deal with JCDecaux, the outdoor advertising giant. "The Vélib program was a really innovative way of packaging a deal so it didn't cost a lot of money," said Gauthier. "They worked with Decaux to implement the whole system. Total investment and operation costs are covered by Decaux. In return they get the right to do public advertising. That way it doesn't feel like it's taxpayer expense." While Decaux retains the revenue from billboards, bus shelters, and other advertising in public spaces, the city pockets the fares paid by Vélib customers, estimated to exceed 30 million euros per year (even though the first 30 minutes of bike rental are free). For more details on the Vélib contract, fee structure, and other aspects of the Paris mobility plan, see the 2007 edition [PDF] of ITDP's magazine, Sustainable Transport.

The Vélib station on Rue Louis Blanc. Most stations have replaced on-street parking spaces, adding up to thousands of fewer spaces for cars by the time of full implementation.

"Vélib has been a smashing success politically and in the media," said Nadal. After seeing Vélib in action, Paris's inner-ring suburbs -- the rough equivalent of New York's outer boroughs -- clamored for their own piece of it. Already, a few municipalities have partially implemented some form of bikeshare. The Paris experience suggests that, in New York, launching an intensive pilot program with stations clustered in a dense network in one part of the city -- the band between 14th and Houston, say -- could set the stage for an incremental but steady buy-in from other neighborhoods.

The expansion of Vélib has not come without challenges. For one, Paris's suburbs have their own contracts with outdoor advertising firms. To integrate with the Paris system, each would have to reach an agreement with JCDecaux, raising legal questions of unfair competition. Putting aside the vagaries of French anti-trust law, the pertinent issue for New York is that Paris and its metro region must also cope with problems of disjointed jurisdiction and bureaucratic silos. Nowhere is this more instructive than in the case of the Mobilien, the BRT-esque system launched by Delanoë and Baupin.

Paris has built dedicated busways for the Mobilien. Expanding enhanced bus service region-wide will require complex negotiations between the regional transportation authority and different municipalities.

Featuring dedicated bus corridors, signal priority, and raised stations, the Mobilien required the city to make significant changes to the infrastructure of Paris streets, including the conversion of on-street parking to bus right-of-way. At first, of course, there was an outcry. In the neighborhood of Montparnasse on the Left Bank, the locals held a funeral procession for the neighborhood and flew flags that read, "Le Mort de Montparnasse" ("The Death of Montparnasse"). The owner of the famous Café Select worried that the loss of parking space would kill his business. Now most of his employees have a reliable bus to get them to work, and it's nicer to sit at a sidewalk café on a street that isn't choked with traffic. "We've come to love it," he said.

Taking the Mobilien across city limits, however, is proving trickier than winning over public opinion. The bus network is planned by a regional authority that negotiates routes with each municipality. "Decisionmaking can be protracted and political," said Nadal, especially since some suburbs are much more car-oriented than Paris. In last year's local elections, candidates debated whether to streamline this process by creating a new municipal jurisdiction that would include the first ring of suburbs. By comparison, some of the inter-agency cooperation that would most benefit New York -- like having the MTA agree to let DOT's BRT routes cross East River bridges -- looks like a walk in the park.

Along with expanding Vélib, the Mobilien, and a new network of tramways ringing the city, Delanoë plans to use his second term to launch a system of car-sharing, or, to use the French term, "autopartage." Renting a public car will cost significantly more than a Vélib bike, though regular use would add up to much less, of course, than maintaining a car of one's own. While the network of car-sharing stations -- located mostly in existing garages -- is intended to actually reduce car ownership, the administration has cannily pitched it as proof that Delanoë is not out to get motorists. "He can say that he is not anti-car, but for a rational use of cars when there's really a need," said Nadal.

Appeasing and outfoxing the auto lobby in one fell swoop -- that's the kind of deft maneuver Delanoë has relied on more than any innate Parisian antipathy to the car. Something to keep in mind the next time someone says they can do it Paris but never in New York.

Photos: Top two - Ben Fried; Delivery space - Luc Nadal; Vélib station - xtof/Flickr; Mobilien - Aaron Naparstek.

When Transportation Alternatives, Project for Public Spaces and the Open Planning Project started the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign nearly three years ago, the plan was to build a movement that would work block-by-block and neighborhood-by-neighborhood to reclaim the city's streets from the automobile on behalf of pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders. With congestion pricing knocked off of the civic agenda, in a funny way, we're back to the original plan: Reclaim the streets.

If London was the model for congestion pricing then Paris is, probably, the best big city example of the kind of street space reclamation that now needs to happen in New York City. Here is a short piece I wrote on the topic for this week's New York Magazine:

With the death of Mayor Bloomberg’s London-style congestion-pricing proposal, New York's transportation advocates have turned to Paris for inspiration. Bertrand Delanoë was elected mayor of the French capital in 2001 on a platform of creating more "civilized space" and a promise to "fight with all the means at my disposal against the harmful, ever-increasing, and unacceptable hegemony of the automobile."

Shortly after taking office, he dumped 2,000 tons of sand on the Pompidou Expressway, which runs along the rive droite, and called it Paris Plage. Complete with volleyball nets, dance classes, a climbing wall, and a floating pool, the beach attracts 4 million visitors each summer and is paid for almost entirely by sponsors. Elsewhere, Delanoë eliminated on-street parking to create lanes for Le Mobilien, a citywide bus network with real-time electronic scheduling information at the stops, physically separated to keep cars out of the way. Bikes got their own protected lanes, too, and he doubled the size of the path network. His pièce de résistance? Last summer, Paris launched Vélib, the municipal bike-sharing system.

And while congestion opponents don’t understand the Francophilia -- "New York City is unique, and I don’t think such a plan would work here," says Brooklyn councilman Lew Fidler -- advocates see it as a road map. "Now, it’s all about taking pavement away from automobiles and reallocating it to more efficient modes," says Transportation Alternatives’ Paul Steely White.

Similar ideas are already in the works as part of city transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan’s implementation of Bloomberg's PlaNYC. Last summer, the city opened a separated bike lane on a nine-block stretch of Ninth Avenue. Another, on Williamsburg's Kent Street, got the nod last week. There are more to come, along with cordoned-off bus lanes (the rendering above shows a future Amsterdam Avenue). Also last week, work began on a new public plaza where Gansevoort Street, Ninth Avenue, and Little West 12th Street intersect; Sadik-Kahn promises more such projects, none of which requires Albany’s approval. There are no plans to turn the FDR into a beach, but the city is floating the idea of making some streets car-free this summer. The first attempt at car-free Sundays on Soho’s Prince Street died when neighbors feared it would make it too "mall-like." Alors!

 
RPA senior planner and Paris native Juliette Michaelson provided Streetsblog with a loose translation of Baupin's description:

It’s the neighborhood association that undertook this effort. They asked us to do it with them, and help them with logistics. They rolled out a large square of green carpet -- 25 meters by 25 meters -- on which they painted lane markings. They rolled it out for a short time, took a few pictures, and then returned the road to its "temporary" use – well, its temporary use for the next decade. […] The whole operation was on for about 15 minutes, it didn’t disturb very many people, but it gives you a sense of perspective. […] It’s actually an Anglo-Saxon tradition -- “Reclaiming the Street,” it’s called.

I'm not sure any Anglo-Saxon has gone this far, but Baupin knows a thing or two about reclaiming the street. He's been the driving force behind Mayor Bertrand Delanoë's sweeping transportation reforms, including the Vélib bikeshare system and a far-ranging campaign to convert parking space into more room for buses and bikes. All accomplished without London-style congestion pricing.

Along with this video, Baupin has posted two others about Carré Vert on his website. In the third clip, he describes his eventual plans for the Périphérique:

We are demonstrating that the Périphérique doesn’t have to be -- that we can change how we think about it. We can imagine what it could become in the future, when we’ve been able to put together such a strong public transportation system that we can be less dependent on cars. At that point we could transform this awful highway into an urban boulevard with transit, cars, pedestrians and trees. So where today there is desolation, a terrible and ugly scar that cuts the city in half, we can create a city that we can all enjoy. Operation ‘Carré Vert’ is all about imagining how we can transform our city in the next 25 years.

As attention turns to the next federal transportation bill, and livable streets fans scan the platforms of presidential candidates for glimpses of what to expect from Washington over the next four years, Alex Steffen, editor and CEO of the blog WorldChanging, has posted an essay-in-progress called "My Other Car is a Bright Green City." Steffen says that reining in fuel standards and auto emissions, for instance, is not nearly as important to present and future generations as developing communities that behave more like cities, which are, by environmental measures, much cleaner than commute-intensive suburbs and exurbs. Here are some excerpts.

Our vehicle emissions are a major climate change contributor, but what comes out of the tailpipe is only a fraction of the total climate impact of driving a car, and the climate impact is in turn only a part of the environmental and social damage cars cause. Improving mileage will not fix these problems.

We can't see most of the ecological and social impacts of our auto-dependence in our daily lives. And those impacts are so massive that arguing about fuel efficiency standards (especially in terms of gradual increases) fails to acknowledge what we're up against with this crisis.

All that driving takes some pretty big social tolls, too, of course. Car accidents are a leading cause of death and disabling injury in the U.S. Auto-dependence is a major contributor to obesity and other chronic illness. In addition, more and more people are finding themselves driving longer commutes: more than 3.5 million Americans now drive more than three hours a day to get to and from work, spending a month of their lives on the road each year. Meanwhile, people who live in the newer fringe-burbs are reportedly the least happiest of Americans, and the long commutes they endure are a major reason why.

We know that density reduces driving. We know that we're capable of building really dense new neighborhoods and even of using good design, infill development and infrastructure investments to transform existing medium-low density neighborhoods into walkable compact communities. It is within our power to build whole metropolitan regions where the vast majority of residents live in communities that eliminate the need for daily driving, and make it possible for many people to live without private cars altogether.

The personal happiness index is not lost on those in Paris and Bogotá, where reclaiming public space from the automobile has worked wonders, as enRoute reports:

The charge is being led by some of the world's toughest towns, places like Bogotá, where happiness theory led one mayor to transform roads into parks and pedestrian "freeways," and Mexico City, whose mayor is investing in urban beaches and bikeways in order to change the citizens' gloomy outlook. Now the movement is spilling over to wealthier cities too. Seoul has ripped out a downtown freeway to make room for parks and streams. London has put the squeeze on cars with its now famous congestion charge.

These measures are often sold as emergency actions to tackle global warming. In fact, changing the way we design and use public space can change the way we move, the way we treat other people and ultimately the way we feel. Now you might think that Paris had long ago figured out the art of urban joy. But in recent years, residents have become so sick of noise, pollution and congestion that they have thrown their support behind a radical plan by Mayor Bertrand Delanoë to reclaim their streets. By 2012, suburban cars will be banned entirely from the city's core.

So when can Americans expect Congressional happiness hearings?

Image: enRoute

The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy has chosen Paris for its 2008 Sustainable Transportation Award. In a letter from the ITDP Board of Directors to Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, the Institute praises the French capitol's recent transportation policies, most notably the Vélib project:

Under your leadership, Paris has implemented a range of innovative mobility solutions with vision, commitment and vigor. Vélib, the boldest bicycle share program to date, makes the city a leader in the implementation of a new form of individual mass transit. Programs such as Quartier verts, Espace civilisés, 'Réseau vert' shared streets, and the growing network of quality cycling facilities have made strides in reclaiming street space for people. The new 'Mobilien' Bus Rapid Transit, and 'Traverses' Microbus neighborhood loops have increased transportation service and scope. All these achievements stand as new symbols of the priority of walking, cycling, and riding public transportation over private cars in urban space.

It is because of these innovative efforts that we wish to award Paris the 2008 Sustainable Transport Award. London will also be receiving the Award in recognition of its expanded congestion charging zone, implementing a low emissions zone, and t2025, the city's 20 year transport plan.

Photo: Pascal Lemoine/Flickr

If it turns out that New Yorkers are not yet prepared to embrace congestion pricing, and if Albany remains its intransigent self, Mr. Bloomberg should get over his fascination with London — and look instead at what’s happening in Paris.

Last week, Bertrand Delanoë, Paris’s maverick and popular mayor, introduced the world’s largest and most ambitious bike-share program: 10,600 bikes (scaling up to 20,600 by the end of the year) available at 750 “docking stations” situated every 1,000 feet. With a swipe of a credit card and a modest fee, Parisians (and tourists) can now pick up or drop off a bike in any neighborhood in the city. Riders no longer need to worry about storing their bikes in tiny apartments. The program’s high-tech stations make theft virtually impossible. And with about twice as many bike stations as Métro stops, a free bike is pretty much always within reach.

New York’s subways and buses are already at capacity, and as we prepare to add one million new residents by 2030, our existing mass transit will require improvements that will take years (if not generations) to put in place. Mr. Bloomberg has fewer than 1,000 days left as mayor. His best chance at securing an environmentalist legacy is to embrace bike-sharing.

Vélib is the brainchild of Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, a Socialist and longtime green campaigner who has set a target for the city to reduce car traffic by 40 percent by 2020. Since he took office in 2001, his administration has added about 125 miles of bicycle paths, at the expense of lanes for cars, prompting accusations from drivers that it has aggravated congestion in the city.

Still, only about 40,000 of the 2.5 million Parisians say they use their bicycles regularly. Mr. Delanoë would like to raise that number to 250,000 by the end of the year.

City Hall is hoping to draw on the experience of smaller-scale rental programs in other cities like Berlin and Stockholm to address concerns about theft and financial viability that ended an experimental program in Amsterdam in the 1960s.

The key, Mr. Aidenbaum said, is to make it easy. "What this initiative does is to take away some of the inconveniences of owning a bike in Paris," he said, "the lack of storage space in Paris buildings, the issue of theft and the hassle of maintenance."

First indications are positive. Even before the docking stations opened, 13,000 people had bought annual subscriptions online. On Sunday, some docking stations were so popular that they temporarily ran out of bikes.

Denis Bocquet, 37, an urban planner who divides his time between Paris and Berlin, had to wait in line before renting a bike with his partner, Nora Lafi. From now on, he said, he would use the Vélib to go to work during his stints in Paris.

"It used to be stressful and dangerous to cycle in Paris, but the city has changed, and this could change it even more," Mr. Bocquet said.

Photo: Alastair Miller/Bloomberg News