plantedcity:

From Greater Greater Washington:

The central fact about cars, from a planner’s perspective, is that they take up space. Lots of space. And this matters because space in cities (a.k.a real estate) is scarce and therefore expensive.

Cars take up space when they’re moving and they take up space when they’re parked, and even though they can’t be simultaneously moving and parked, you have to plan for both states and plan for peak demand; so you have to set aside some multiple of the real estate actually occupied by the car at any given time.

That’s just a practical observation about the spatial geometry of cities that doesn’t bow to my ideology or yours. And it would still remain true even if cars ran on nothing but recycled newspapers and emitted nothing but rainbows and unicorn tears.

In the past, our policy response has been to just set aside more and more space for cars: More freeways, more roads, more lanes on existing roads, more parking garages and surface lots. This approach hasn’t worked, and there are two very practical reasons why:

First, you can never build enough. There’s a phenomenon called “induced demand” that is very well understood by now. A new lane or a new freeway never reduces congestion in the long run: People respond to new capacity by driving more or by living or working in previously remote places, and you’re very quickly back where you started and have to build still more. The same phenomenon applies to increases in the supply of parking. It’s a game you can’t win.

Second, when you do make more space for cars you quickly start to crowd out any other potential mode of transportation, especially walking. All those parking lots and freeways and roads spread everything else out so that the distances become too great for walking. And the more you optimize any given space for cars the more hostile that space is for pedestrians. Very quickly you get to the point where it becomes impossible—or prohibitively depressing—to get things done on foot.

And this last fact has huge quality-of-life implications for human beings—not just because driving to a distant strip mall for a gallon of milk is less pleasant than walking to a corner store, but also because for many people driving simply isn’t an option.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Infographic source: Muenster Planning Office)

Europe is exporting not only transit hardware and management to America but also vaguely utopian concepts, notably that of a bicycle-centric city. Mr. Grescoe toddles around Copenhagen happily on a bicycle, marveling at the bike infrastructure. It gives the lie, he suggests, to the notion that biking won’t work in northern climes. Indeed, American bicyclists may grow wistful reading about red-cheeked Danes braving winter winds to bike a dozen miles to work—Mr. Grescoe notes that Danes plow bike lanes before car lanes after snowstorms. Also, if you maintain a pace of 12 miles per hour—a good pace on a bike—you won’t hit a red light. (They call this “the green wave.”)

wsj book review, 24.08.12.
photo: street art fahrrad ampel in Berlin, 2008.

via citymaus:

Picture 11 miles of smoothly paved bike path meandering through the countryside. Largely uninterrupted by roads or intersections, it passes fields, backyards, chirping birds, a lake, some ducks and, at every mile, an air pump…

The cycle superhighway (5min. video), which opened in April, is the first of 26 routes scheduled to be built to encourage more people to commute to and from Copenhagen by bicycle..

“We are very good, but we want to be better,” said Brian Hansen, the head of Copenhagen’s traffic planning section…

nytimes, 17.07.12.

“When we look at public hospitals, we look very much at how to reduce cost,” said a regional councilor, Lars Gaardhoj, who had just picked up his three small children in a cargo bike decorated with elephants. “It’s a common saying among doctors that the best patient is the patient you never see. Anything we can do to get less pollution and less traffic is going to mean healthier, maybe happier, people.”

via citymaus:

bcycles at bikeshare demo in SF, 12.2012.

…by April for Bike to Work Day, and when that didn’t happen, planners said the network would be set up in time for the America’s Cup World Series events in August. Bike-sharing was touted as a key piece of the “People’s Plan” — a series of transportation improvements for the America’s Cup.

Because of lingering negotiations with Alta Bicycle Share, the vendor that will run the system, the program will not be up and running by the summer, said Ralph Borrmann of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the regional group overseeing the plan.

In 2010, the district was awarded a $4.2 million grant to install 1,000 bikes in the Bay Area, including 500 in San Francisco. Two years later, it has yet to be implemented.

Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, said the stalled progress of the bike-sharing plan has been disheartening.

“It’s just really surprising that a program that is so successful and popular in other cities has taken so long to get implemented in San Francisco,” Shahum said. “Especially considering that we have the money in place.”

Borrmann said the bike-sharing network will definitely be in place in time for the main series of America’s Cup racing events scheduled for the summer of 2013. It is also possible the system will be implemented in time for the second World Series events of the America’s Cup later this fall…

sfexaminer, 08.07.12.

via citymaus:

In the 1960s, cars were threatening to displace bicycles in the main Danish cities. But the oil crisis, the environmental movement and a couple of controversial road projects reversed the trend. This is however just part of the story behind why Danes still cycle so much.

Summer girls riding their bikes in the 1950s Copenhagen

read more: denmark.dk.
via copenhagenize & citymaus