Streetsblog New York City

The Green Lane Project will provide financial and technical assistance for cities to develop physically protected cycling infrastructure. The six to-be-determined cities will then serve as models for other American cities looking to incorporate street designs that make cycling appealing to residents of all ages.

A few major cities including New York and Washington DC have implemented protected bike lanes, but the designs are still “When a city is out on the front like this and they have a problem, it’s not always clear where they go. We’re trying to help those cities figure it out,” said Green Lane Project Director Martha Roskowski. “So they don’t have to go to Copenhagen to see how these things work.”

Bikes Belong is looking for cities that have political support for creating world-class bike infrastructure, as well as a plan in place. The organization also wants to include three “emerging cities” outside the superstars like New York and Portland, Roskowski said.

“We’re looking for six cities where they have elected officials that are on board with this,” said said. “They’ve gone through some type of a planning process. They get it. They want to do these things.”

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One of 45 new bike racks installed in the Hudson Square area at the request of the local BID. Photo: Hudson Square Connection

Workers in the Hudson Square area are demanding bike infrastructure and employers are helping them get it.

The Department of Transportation has installed 45 new bike racks in response to requests from the local business improvement district, the Hudson Square Connection, which covers Manhattan’s west side between Canal and Houston Streets. The 45 new bike racks are located in a roughly 20 block area, a significant expansion of bicycle parking.

In a press release, Hudson Square Connection President Ellen Baer tied the request for bike racks not only to a desire to make the neighborhood more environmentally friendly, but to demands from area employees. “We are seeing an increasing volume of people biking to work and building owners are receiving a growing number of requests to provide amenities for cyclists,” she said.

The new racks come at a what might be an especially opportune time. The local community board has requested that the city upgrade the Hudson Street bike lane, which cuts right through the area, into a parking-protected lane, a change that if implemented would make cycling a more attractive way to get around the neighborhood.

Here’s what’s happening around the Network today:

This intersection, Chicago's North Avenue at Kedzie Avenue, would be eligible for automated speeding enforcement under new legislation in Illinois. Between 2005 and 2010, 22 pedestrians and cyclists were injured by auto collisions at this intersection. Photo: Grid Chicago

Speeding Cameras Coming to Chicago: New legislation has cleared the way for automated speeding enforcement — speeding cameras — in Chicago. The cameras will be used only in “safety zones,” or areas around schools and parks. Fines will be $50 – $100 depending on the magnitude of the violation.

Steven Vance at Network blog Grid Chicago is dispelling some common misconceptions about speed cameras, pointing out that they will save lives. “Speed correlates with the survival rate of a pedestrian involved in an automobile crash. If a pedestrian is hit by a person driving a car at 30 MPH, there is an 80% survival rate. If a pedestrian is hit by a person driving a car at 40 MPH, there is a 30% survival rate.”

Will the cameras be effective? Vance summarizes three studies that looked at the efficacy of speeding cameras in preventing traffic collisions. The studies found that speeding cameras were indeed useful in motivating drivers to reduce their speed, improving safety. “There have been reductions in the number of people speeding, and the number of injuries and fatalities, in locations where speed cameras are installed and operated,” Vance writes. “In my assessment of multiple studies, it seems that speed cameras are a main cause of these reductions.”

Why Subway Construction Has Gotten to Be So Expensive: Building new subway lines is more expensive than ever — even when adjusted for inflation. Yesterday Benjamin Kabak at Second Avenue Sagas reviewed a recent Salon article by Will Doig, who identified seven issues that contribute to skyrocketing costs and ballooning construction time tables. Some of the culprits: the slow wheels of bureaucracy, the difficulty of assembling funding for large transit projects in an environment that marginalizes public transportation in favor of auto travel, and NIMBYism. Salon also identifies some progressive reforms, including environmental impact statements, ADA compliance and union rules, as hurdles that aren’t impeding China’s ability to lay down tracks for metros seemingly overnight.

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Gary Toth is director of transportation initiatives at Project for Public Spaces. This post first appeared on PPS’s Placemaking Blog.

Would you use a rototiller to get rid of weeds in a flowerbed? Of course not. You might solve your immediate goal of uprooting the weeds — but oh, my, the collateral damage that you would do.

Yet when we try to eliminate congestion from our urban areas by using decades-old traffic engineering measures and models, we are essentially using a rototiller in a flowerbed. And it’s time to acknowledge that the collateral damage has been too great.

Image: Andy Singer

Image: Andy Singer

First, an explanation of what I call the “deadly duo”: travel projection models and Levels of Service (LOS) performance metrics.Travel projection models are computer programs that use assumptions about future growth in population, employment, and recreation to estimate how many new cars will be on roads 20 or 30 years into the future.

Models range from quite simplistic to incredibly complex and expensive. Simple models deal primarily with coarse movements of vehicles between cities, while complex models deal with the intricacies of what happens on the fine grid of urban areas. To be truly accurate, growth projection modeling can be expensive. Therefore, absent compelling reason to do otherwise, most growth projections tend to be done using less expensive techniques, which usually lead to overestimates.

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Andrew Cuomo's big infrastructure push, the New York Works Fund, won't include transit projects. Why? Photo via Wikimedia.

Despite the fact that over one quarter of the state’s population takes transit to work, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s marquee infrastructure program won’t invest in public transportation. With so much still unknown about the governor’s “New York Works Fund” — including very basic information about how it will be structured — the reason why Cuomo is excluding transit remains elusive.

State DOT Commissioner Joan McDonald confirmed that transit won’t be included in the fund at a legislative hearing two weeks ago. According to the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, Manhattan State Senator Liz Krueger asked McDonald whether any transit projects would be eligible for the fund. “McDonald answered in the negative,” reported Tri-State’s Nadine Lemmon.

“The senator thinks it would be tragic if the state did not prioritize significant investment in both upstate and downstate mass transportation maintenance, modernization and expansion,” said a spokesperson for Krueger, who confirmed Tri-State’s account.

While the fund won’t include transit, it will provide funding for highways, bridges, municipal water systems, dams, and even state parks and historic sites. In his State of the State address this January, Cuomo said the fund would “master plan, coordinate, leverage, and accelerate capital investment,” and “leverage state investment by a multiple of 20-to-1.”

Exactly what the fund is, however, isn’t at all clear. “There’s no legislation or language,” explained Tammy Gamerman, a senior research associate with the Citizens Budget Commission who’s been following the New York Works Fund. Right now, she explained, the “New York Works Fund” label doesn’t refer to an actual fund so much as a way of conceptually packaging infrastructure spending. “It’s a way of thinking about different infrastructure investments together, rather than as separate.”

The governor’s office has not responded to Streetsblog requests for an explanation of how the New York Works Fund is set up. “The governor hasn’t revealed exactly what will be done or and how much of it was scheduled to be done anyway by repackaging of existing aid to minimize new spending,” reported the Associated Press last month.

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Next Wednesday, February 15, is the date for Council Member Peter Vallone’s hearing on traffic safety.

Peter Vallone (l) and James Vacca

Responding to some 2,500 letters collected by Transportation Alternatives following the hit-and-run death of Brooklyn cyclist Mathieu Lefevre, Vallone announced that his public safety committee would address NYPD traffic enforcement. The hearing will be co-chaired by transportation committee chair James Vacca.

“It’s encouraging that the two chairs are treating this as a public safety concern, and are taking a long look and showing leadership,” says Juan Martinez, general counsel for TA.

In addition to crash prevention, Vallone and Vacca are expected to delve into how NYPD conducts crash investigations, an issue that is making headlines thanks to the Lefevre family’s pursuit of information from the department about the crash that killed their son. Says Martinez, “They have serious questions about the line — that in New York if you want to kill, do it with a car — whether that’s actually true.”

Anyone who wants to testify at next week’s hearing may send an e-mail to Martinez by the evening of Monday the 13th, with the subject line “Feb. 15.”

One of these bike-share workshop participants is the star of this classic Streetfilm.

It was another evening of hands-on bike-share station planning at Manhattan Community Board 2 last night, as New Yorkers hunched over maps of SoHo and Greenwich Village, marking the best places to site bike-share kiosks.

If you live or work in the bike-share service area, you really ought to mark your calendar for the station planning meeting in your neck of the woods. There’s something very gratifying about the process that NYC DOT and Alta Bikeshare have put together for people to rate different sites. Each time you put a sticker on the map, you’re shaping the bike-share system in a small but tangible way.

The other thing is that you never know who else will show up. Last night, former Talking Heads frontman and one-time Summer Streets spokesperson David Byrne was in the house, marking up a map. If the pattern holds, it looks like Jay-Z will be on hand for the Manhattan CB 6 workshop later this month, and John Franco and John Starks might turn up at Brooklyn CB 2.

Happy news out of Denver. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was in town yesterday for a tour of the under-construction West Rail Transit line, part of 122 miles of passenger rail the region is planning as part of its FasTracks program.

Denver's plan to add 122 miles of passenger rail is boosting the local economy. Photo: The Fast Lane

The secretary’s blog, The Fast Lane, discusses how this project promises to be, on many levels, a winner for the Mile-High City:

The enthusiasm in yesterday’s crowd was electric. It’s not hard to see why. The West Rail Line is 85% complete, and the mock-ups and progress to date indicate a beautiful, state-of-the-art transit system. The new line will allow tourists and commuters to spend less time in traffic and less money on gas. That’s something everyone can appreciate.

Not only will the FasTracks program provide an efficient and cost-effective way to get to and from work, school or the airport; but it is also creating jobs right now. There are more than 500 men and women working on the West Rail Line alone. FasTracks estimates that its plan will eventually provide work for 4,200 others.

But we can’t be content to see this progress in just one city. All across America, there is work to be done on projects like the West Rail Line. More and more Americans are looking for greater choices in transportation today, and it’s important we provide the funding to ensure transit remains one of the available choices. Now is the time to connect people who need work with the work we need to do improving our nation’s transit centers, highways, railways, airports and ports.

This is exactly the type of investment in the future that other cities would miss out under the House GOP proposal to strip transit projects of dedicated federal funding stream.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Mobilizing the Region reports that political leaders in the New York-New Jersey region are united in their opposition to the House transit proposal. Streets.mn asks if traffic engineers’ roadway classification system is an outdated way of understanding transportation dynamics. And Suburban Assault introduces Dallas’s first bike café.