Streetsblog New York City

Here's a neat livable streets success story from Virginia. A short time back a woman named Andrea Garland dropped by the TOPP office in Manhattan. A transportation engineer and native of Colombia, Andrea now lives in Roanoke, where she is active in several cyclist and pedestrian groups. One of those groups, BikeWalk Virginia, is bringing Ciclovia to downtown Roanoke in August.

Downtown Roanoke. Photo: ocracokewaves/Flickr

Watching the Ciclovia video was very inspiring. I don't often think that Colombia could be an example for the world. So I feel proud of Bogotá to have many features to showcase, such as Ciclovia and Transmilenio. I thought the video was worth more than 1,000 words, and it was the easiest way to get people's attention toward having a Ciclovia in Roanoke.

At first I used it to introduce Ciclovia to the people that are currently helping me with the event -- city officials, artists, friends, etc. I broadcast it during an Earth Day festival hoping to get some volunteer interest. Now that I'm actually having the event, I'm using it to get more organizations involved. I'm introducing the event with a brief description and including a link to the video so that they get a better idea. 

I really think that without the video (the short version actually is the one I use the most), it would have been very hard to even get a permit for it, because it is such a new concept for this region.

Check out this livable streets story from Ocean City, New Jersey, where a local arts group, high school art students, and the police department teamed up for a street mural installation. The kicker: the project was inspired by Streetfilms (look for the shout-out at the 4:30 mark).

Ocean City Mayor Sal Perillo says the benefits are threefold: the mural has spurred community involvement, improved neighborhood aesthetics, and will ideally serve as a traffic-calming device along a designated bike route. Depending on community reaction, Perillo says, other intersections could get the same treatment.

This week’s MTA vote won’t just cost New Yorkers 25 percent more per ride, it will also be costly in lost time.

Using the Balanced Transportation Analyzer (BTA), I estimate that the fare hikes and service cuts which begin June 1 will:

• Add an average of 6 percent more waiting and travel time to bus and subway commutes; which will...
• cause 40,000 more autos to pile into the Manhattan Central Business District each day; which will...
• slow traffic by an average of 5 percent in the CBD and 1-2 percent across the City; costing...
• drivers, truckers and bus riders $600 million in lost time annually within the CBD, and probably $1.5 billion or more citywide.

The one-two punch of higher fares and less frequent service can be expected to shrink subway use by around 8 percent and bus ridership by 6 percent. This is a calamity not only to our city's vitality but for the MTA as well, since it cuts deeply into the very revenue these measures were supposed to generate. Indeed, the BTA model projects that the real gain in farebox revenues won't even reach $500 million -- well under half of the projected $1.2 billion deficit.

The key criteria by which New York City transportation policies are judged are driver expenses, rider expenses, driver travel times and rider travel times. The MTA and the legislature have managed to worsen three out of four -- and, for good measure, have aggravated others, such as traffic pollution and mayhem. A stopped clock could hardly have done worse.

Advocates spent four months in feverish but fruitless campaigning for a stopgap solution -- the Ravitch Plan -- that was buoyed more by Dick Ravitch's sterling reputation than by its intrinsic merits. Indeed, the plan was rife with inequities:

In case you're not already tracking enough outcomes this evening, the Overhead Wire will be live-blogging the election with an eye toward a bevy of transit-related ballot initiatives. Here's a sampling (links ours):

• St. Louis - An election is being held to give Metro a half cent more in order to keep up with operating expenses and expand Metrolink, the region's light rail system. It's called Proposition M.
  
• Los Angeles - This would be a half cent sales tax for capital expansion. It's called Measure R.
  
• Oakland/Berkeley - AC Transit is looking to raise the parcel tax $48 annually to pay for operations. This measure is called VV. Update from the comments on a different ballot measure in Berkeley: KK in Berkeley would make it more difficult to build BRT or light rail, by requiring a vote of the people any time a lane is converted from auto to transit use.
  
• Kansas City - A half cent sales tax is on the ballot to build a starter light rail line.

Californians will also be voting on a bond issue for high-speed rail. The long-awaited, hard-fought Proposition 1A would devote $10 billion toward a bullet train line from Northern to Southern California. It has the backing of Governor Schwarzenegger and was polling at close to 50 percent as the vote neared.

With transit agencies straining to keep up with demand as federal support lags, referenda like these could be key to growing and sustaining many local and state systems.

If anyone knows of other big transportation votes happening today, please leave in comments.

Photo via Streetsblog Los Angeles

Via TreeHugger, this YouTube clip features Oakland's Trunk Boiz boasting about their scraper bikes, which sport custom-painted frames and rims to match (more photos here). The video has become an online sensation, drawing more than two million views. Tyrone Stevenson, one of the creators of the scraper bike style, is ready to capitalize, reports NPR:

"Oakland has been taken over by scraper bikes," says Stevenson. "On the Internet, it is worldwide. There's people from literally across the world making these bikes, from Portland, Oregon, to Japan to Australia to Jamaica."

Stevenson says he's already making a living scraperizing bikes, but he's got big plans for the future: trademarks, patents and, someday soon, a scraper bike shop.

Stevenson's rhyme also includes the heavy favorite for Streetsblog's 2008 Lyric of the Year:

I'm movin' on my scraper bike
I'm cruisin' on my scraper bike
My scraper bike go hard
I don't need no car

That's the sound of America's youth culture catching up to the Japanese.

The Times' Lede blog reported yesterday that Tory chief David Cameron had his bike nicked while he ducked in to a store to buy some groceries:

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

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

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

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

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

Photo of David Cameron pre-bike theft: Daily Mirror

Washington D.C.'s Transportation Director Emeka Moneme is resigning, opening up a window of opportunity for that city's active livable streets movement. Greater Greater Washington's David Alpert is pointing Mayor Adrian Fenty to New York City's recent experience in choosing a new DOT Commissioner:

Mayor Bloomberg chose Sadik-Khan, and now we have separated bike lanes, brand-new plazas, a boulevard-like design for Broadway, and more. We need a similarly visionary leader for DDOT.

Perhaps because D.C. is such a wonk-filled town (or maybe because it was one of America's first planned cities), greater Washington boasts a healthy number of really smart, high-quality blogs covering urban planning, transportation policy and livable streets. I'll be looking forward to seeing how these bloggers help shape the public discussion as Fenty goes about choosing his next transportation commissioner. Here's some good D.C. reading...

• The WashCycle
  
• Beyond DC
• Goodspeed Update
• Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space
• Rethink College Park

As if the Los Angeles bike scene weren't intense enough, the L.A. Times reported a gang-related bike-by shooting yesterday.

Time to trade in the 22's and hydraulics for a Schwinn?

The Guardian reports that SNCF, France's national rail company, is taking advantage of a boom in ridership to make aggressive plans for expansion. While SNCF positions itself to help ease the impact of high fuel prices on the French public, what are American leaders preparing to do? Drilling offshore and taking a few hits from the strategic petroleum reserve aren't going to cut it.

Over in France, all the new riders have SNCF chairman Guillaume Pepy thinking big:

The state-owned SNCF delivered a net €1.1bn (£875m) profit last year and first-half figures, due next week, are said to be sparkling. Pepy envisages up to 80m extra passenger trips this year or an increase of around 8%.

"This change will speed up because we are facing a twin energy and environment crisis," he says, pointing to surging fuel costs and growing personal worries about carbon footprints. "People want sustainable mobility and, in France, more trains and more SNCF."

The growing number of passengers is maxing out the current system, which Pepy sees as an opportunity, especially in a time of escalating fuel prices. He wants to double the size of SNCF's high-speed network by 2015, make rail stations into multi-modal hubs, and capture market share from energy-intensive air and road travel.

The Tribune reports that the Chicago Transit Authority is studying Cleveland's new Bus Rapid Transit service, called the Health Line, as it prepares to launch its own BRT lines next year.

Four miles of the Health Line are currently operational along Euclid Avenue, a major downtown thoroughfare that was once packed with streetcars, buses and pedestrians. The route will stretch nearly ten miles when completed this October. With its sleek articulated buses, new stations, and improved trip times, the service aims to woo commuters out of their cars and onto transit:

The transit corridor is geared toward attracting professionals, many of them doctors and other health-care workers who commute to a medical district anchored by the renowned Cleveland Clinic. Medical companies are paying the city's transit authority $12 million for the naming rights.

The challenge facing Cleveland -- and ultimately Chicago -- is how to set the new service apart from the stereotype of bus travel as slow, outdated and used mostly by society's have-nots.

"In Cleveland, suits don't ride buses. We are out to change that," Joseph Calabrese, chief executive officer and general manager of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transportation Authority, said last week.

In addition to being a full-featured service with pre-payment, dedicated lanes, signal prioritization, and yes, enforcement cameras on every bus, what makes the Health Line worth studying is the smart planning behind it. The new bus lanes take advantage of excess capacity on wide streets, and the route not only provides direct connections to an employment center, it is also a critical component of efforts to lure businesses and residents to Cleveland's urban core: