Streetsblog New York City

Guadalajara, Mexico is showing how amazingly transformative a ciclovia-style road closure can be for its citizens. In seven years, their inaugural Sunday event Via RecreActiva has grown from just seven miles with 35,000 participants to 41 miles with 400,000 users every Sunday. It goes from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., and covers six municipalities.

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The corner of Smith Street and Sackett Street in Brooklyn had a problem. Drivers approaching the intersection from Sackett couldn’t get a clear view of Smith because of the parked cars blocking their line of sight. Crashes kept happening and local residents started pushing for safety improvements. After experimenting with a few options, NYC DOT arrived at this innovative response: New York’s first on-street bike parking facility.

By installing eight bike racks, DOT created a “daylighting” effect, improving visibility at the intersection. The bike parking is much less intrusive than parked cars and helps everyone at the intersection see everyone else. Oh yeah, and now there are a dozen new places to park bikes without taking away any space from Smith Street’s busy sidewalks.

For another look at on-street bike parking, check out Streetfilms’ 2008 tour of Portland, Oregon’s bike corrals.

Cycling in New York City endured an unprecedented media bombardment in 2011. But New Yorkers kept on riding and the public opinion polls kept on showing that despite the political and press attacks, bike lanes enjoy broad support. To celebrate a year of resilience, we figured we’d show a montage of New Yorkers out on their bikes, Streetfilms style.

In his campaign for mayor, Rahm Emanuel pledged to make Chicago a more bike-friendly city. And in office, he set his sights high, aiming to construct 100 miles of protected bike lanes in his first term.

His team wasted no time. Chicago DOT installed the city’s first protected bike lane on Kinzie Street before Emanuel’s first 30 days in office were over. Leading Emanuel’s DOT is former Washington, DC DOT Commissioner Gabe Klein, who clearly understands the connection between safe streets and the health of a city.

Last month Streetfilms traveled to Chicago to speak with the commissioner, ride on Kinzie Street, and bask in the city’s cycling excitement.

And one piece of local trivia. The Blommer Chocolate Store is right on the Kinzie Street protected bike lane and boy does it smell good. It figured prominently in my all-time favorite response to an interview question about biking.

Walking and bicycling in Guadalajara, Mexico can be dangerous in many parts of the city, but there’s a movement afoot among many citizens to change that. GDL en Bici is a group of local advocates who have been organizing regular bike rides for years, and nothing is more impressive than their ride on the first Thursday of the month – the Paseo de Todos – which regularly draws up to 5,000 riders to celebrate and demand safer cycling conditions.

People just have a lot of fun. You’ll see families, students, and older residents throughout the crowd. Drivers who usually fill the city’s congested roads mostly seem to tolerate the inconvenience. The police largely ignore the whole thing. An added twist is that each of the rides has a theme. One month it might be to celebrate Mexico’s Independence. Another it could be comic books. Luckily we got to ride along in October, when it’s all about celebrating the Day of the Dead.

Streetfilms would like to thank Guadalajara 2020, for sponsoring the film and enabling Streetfilms to make the journey to document this wonderful event, and Gil Penalosa, Executive Director of 8-80 Cites, for organizing the details.

We are back with another installment of our hit series, “My NYC Biking Story.” Recently Streetfilms spent the afternoon with Dr. Janice Turner in the South Bronx, and we toured some of her favorite waterfront trails. As a recreational cyclist for forty-plus years and a board member of Sustainable South Bronx, Dr. Turner believes that biking can be part of active lifestyles and reduce rates of asthma, diabetes, and obesity.

In the Dutch city of Utrecht, kids start learning about traffic safety long before they prepare for a driver’s license. And they pick up a lot more than just “look both ways before you cross the street.”

The school curriculum includes regular field trips to the local “traffic garden.” The City of Utrecht has used this facility, a streetscape in miniature, to teach kids the rules of the road since the 1950s. Students take turns as cyclists, pedestrians and car drivers, learning how to take other types of street users into consideration. The hands-on experience navigating the traffic garden gives kids the skills and confidence to get around the city under their own power as soon as their early teens.

Wednesday was International Walk to School Day. Among the 3,784 U.S. schools participating this year was P.S. 197 in East Harlem, where kids were joined on their regular commute by Grover of “Sesame Street” fame, along with other guests. Robin Urban Smith of Streetfilms was there.

Check out the vid for improvements near P.S. 197 that make crossing the street safer, and read about this year’s “We’re Walking Here” program from DOT, which offers schools a $1,000 prize for designing their own pedestrian safety campaign materials.

We’ve got a late addition to the calendar for our Boston-area readers. Streetsblog founding editor Aaron Naparstek, currently a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, will re-unite with Clarence Eckerson tonight for an evening of Streetfilms screenings and discussion. An hour of Streetfilms will be followed by a Q&A with Clarence and Aaron led by GSD Professor of Urban Planning Michael Hooper.

I’m not sure exactly what’s on Clarence’s set list, but hopefully he’ll follow through on the promo and screen some classics from the traffic-calming Sasquatch era.

The details, in case the graphic is giving you trouble:

Streetfilms Movie Night:
Documenting the Livable Street Movement. Moving Beyond the Automobile.

Monday, September 19, 6:30 to 8:00pm.

Piper Auditorium
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
48 Quincy Street, Cambridge

If you couldn’t be at Madison Square yesterday, not to worry — Robin Urban Smith brings us the video highlights from the big bike-share press conference with Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, NYC business leaders, and progressive politicos.