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Cycling in the United States

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#1 ·
To Ease a City’s Traffic, Shifting From 4 Wheels to 2



Amanda Cruz, on a team from the Department of Transportation that monitors the condition of streets around the
city, inspecting a hole on Court Street in Brooklyn. Team members ride bikes when checking bike routes, and this
hole was not far from one.



By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
September 4, 2007

On many mornings, as commuters pack themselves into subway trains and drivers squeeze onto the streets, Janette Sadik-Khan, the commissioner of the Department of Transportation, rides her bicycle to work.

That the head of an agency long associated with car travel is an avid bicyclist symbolizes what might be a new way of thinking about how New York’s asphalt should be used. In recent months, the city has pledged to add bicycle racks and hundreds of miles of bike lanes on city streets and has been exploring a program similar to one in Paris in which people can use bikes at minimal cost.

The Bloomberg administration says it wants to develop cycling as a viable transportation alternative to ease traffic congestion, reduce carbon emissions and encourage physical activity. But the new attention to cycling has also encountered resistance in some neighborhoods, especially when it threatens to remove traffic lanes for cars and trucks.

Ms. Sadik-Khan said her time on two wheels has become an important part of her work.

“It’s invaluable to get on a bike and see firsthand the conditions that our projects are trying to address,” said Ms. Sadik-Khan, who became the city’s transportation commissioner in the spring. “We are really emphasizing connectivity in the bicycle lane network, because all cyclists, myself included, know that it’s maddening to be coming along a lane and have it simply end and leave you off on your own on a big avenue.”

To that end, the Bloomberg administration has said it will add 200 miles of bike lanes by 2010 — the equivalent of the number added during the last 20 years.

In 2006, for instance, New York — which officials said was the nation’s first city to build a bike path (along Ocean Parkway, in Brooklyn, in the 1890s) — created only two miles of new street bicycle lanes. By the end of the year, it will have added about 50 more.


In its long-term environmental plan released this year, the city said that by 2030 it will have 1,800 miles of bike lanes and paths. There are now 270 miles of bicycle lanes along city streets and 200 miles of bike paths in parks and along greenways.

Because the lack of safe and adequate bicycle parking has become one of the primary concerns of cyclists, the city has said it will also pursue legislation requiring owners of large commercial office buildings to allow a place for bicycles to be parked indoors. Recent zoning changes in Long Island City, Downtown Brooklyn and the West Side of Manhattan have incorporated that requirement.

Also, the city will install 1,200 new bicycle racks by 2009, in addition to the 4,000 existing racks.

To enhance safety, the Transportation Department has begun to color bicycle lanes with bright green paint in neighborhoods where there are frequent complaints about cars and trucks driving or double-parking, forcing bikes into traffic.

Finally, a team of transportation workers is checking the condition of bike lanes in addition to its regular task of monitoring streets. As the workers check bike lanes for potholes and other hazards, they ride bicycles.

“Cycling, until Bloomberg, had been left off the priority list,” said Noah S. Budnick, deputy director of Transportation Alternatives, a nonprofit advocacy group. “But things have really shifted quickly over the past year and a half.”

A number of other large cities, including Berlin, Chicago and Paris, have put bicycling at the center of transportation plans.

In July, for example, Paris made 10,600 bicycles available to the public — and will add 10,000 by the end of the year — for one euro a day, or about $1.40. Riders can get the bikes after swiping their credit cards at bicycle docking stations.

Last year, Chicago officials said their goal was to have 5 percent of all trips carried out by bicycle by 2015. The city is also trying to build enough bike paths so that every resident lives within half a mile of one.

But the attention on bikes usually comes at the expense of cars, and some New Yorkers have not been enthusiastic about the changes.

In Brooklyn, the borough president and some residents have complained about the banning of cars in Prospect Park for most of the day, fearing it will worsen traffic around the park. And residents said that new bike lanes have upset the delicate alternate-side parking routines, as some officers have been quick to ticket anyone double-parking in the lanes.

Bicycling in New York has never been for the timid, with its traffic, potholes, pedestrians, extremes in weather, aggressive drivers and high rate of bike theft.

There is even a cautionary tale among bicycle riders — the veracity of which is unclear — about a young man who had just bought a bicycle and was riding back to his apartment in the East Village, the bike’s price tag still attached to the handlebars.

Two men with knives (sometimes described as two teenagers with guns) steal the bike and ride off. When the man reports the crime, a responding police officer tries to soothe him by saying, “That’s O.K., son, you would’ve killed yourself on that thing anyway.”

Still, Transportation Alternatives estimated that 130,000 people currently ride bicycles in the city every day, up from 90,000 in 1998.

Jason Varone, 31, an artist from Brooklyn who rides 20 miles to and from work each day, said new bike paths have made cycling on city streets less treacherous, but more important, have sent a signal to the rest of the city. “Even if your daily commute is not affected,” he said of cyclists, “there’s a clear message from the government that they’re trying to do something.”

The tolerance for cyclists, however, has apparently not extended to Critical Mass, a loosely knit group of bike riders whose once-a-month mass bicycle rides have been met with squads of officers, summonses, bike confiscations and arrests.

The rides, which a few years ago attracted as many as 2,000 riders, now bring out only about 150, organizers said.

The Police Department, which did not respond to questions about Critical Mass for this article, has said that police enforcement was necessary because the group blocked streets and failed to obey traffic laws.

Bill DiPaola, director of Time’s Up!, an environmental advocacy organization that promotes Critical Mass and other group bicycle rides, said that while the city had improved bike access of late, the gains had not come without constant pressure from bicycle advocates.

“We realized a long time ago that the city is not very friendly to bicycling, so our idea was to create group rides,” Mr. DiPaola said.

“We wanted to overwhelm the city with riders, and we got to the point where we could say: ‘Look, this is the wave of the future. You have to adapt to it.’ ”


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
 
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#97 · (Edited)
#99 ·
The amount of Americans who cycle to work increased by 60% during the last decade, new figures from the Census Bureau reveals. 0.6% of all Americans cycled to work.

Not surprisingly, the rates are the highest in Portland (6.1%) and Minneapolis (4.1%) Most cycling to work is in the west (1.1%) and the least in the south (0.3%).

 
#100 ·
Yet the increase in cycling means nothing compared to the huge decrease in the share of people who walk to work. Fortunately the trend is changing apparently, but America still has a long way to go in transportation. More than half a century of terrible urban planning won't be reverted in a decade. In order to profoundly transform its modal share to a sustainable one, a huge effort must be made in preventing and reversing urban sprawl, raise the density in city centres, eliminate subsidies to parking, reduce the amount of space dedicated to cars, generate acceptable infrastructure for biking and walking and develop a good public transport system.

Considering the low density and the extension of American cities, biking can be most useful for complementing public transport in areas where it might otherwise be impossible to sustain it.
 
#102 ·
Bicyclists feel better

Nevertheless, we find that bicyclists have the most positive affect. Next happiest are car passengers, and then car drivers, though when controlling for the pleasure typically derived from interacting with others drivers are at least as happy as passengers. Bus and train riders experience the most negative emotions.

Our findings suggest that bicycle use may have benefits beyond the typically cited health and transportation ones, and that improving transit riders’ emotional experience may be as important as improving traditional service features such as headways and travel speeds. Our findings are ambiguous as to whether the joy of driving will limit the appeal of autonomous vehicles.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11116-014-9521-x
 
#106 ·
Some photos of the recent bike lanes/improvements recently implemented in Austin, Texas along Rio Grande St. As part of the Green Lane Project the city has implemented bike lanes along other traffic routes as well.







Austin's Cycletrack on Rio Grande
 
#107 ·
Why these normal traffic lights with signs telling it's for cyclists? It's so much easier and clearer if you put a bike symbol on the light. Then you can see at one quick glance that it's for cyclists and saves thinking time and potentially accidents with people who are too lazy to read two text signs on one pole and might think it's a normal traffic light. Same goes for transit signals.
 
#108 ·
Probably has to deal with some legal/bureaucratic requirements by TXDOT or the city of Austin.

Anyways considering that it is a one way street for cars, drivers will be unlikely to be confused by the bike traffic signal as the signal itself is facing the opposing direction for cars.
 
#111 ·
10 years ago next month, this letter to the NYT foresaw New York’s biking triumph

It happened on Oct. 10, 2004, in a letter to the editor from a man named Kenneth Coughlin. It was a response to a personal narrative the previous week from a young Times reporter who had made the daring decision to start riding her bicycle to work. In that article, then-Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall had made the prediction that New York City could one day be "one of the world's great bicycling cities."

It seemed like an obviously ridiculous claim. In a city of 8.2 million, fewer than 20,000 New Yorkers biked to work at the time. There was no Streetsblog, no Summer Streets, certainly no Citi Bike. The Times reporter, Lydia Polgreen (later a decorated Times correspondent in Africa, now the newspaper's deputy international editor), described an incident in which she spent 20 minutes just looking for a place to lock her bike. Still, Polgreen came away from her first summer of bike commuting convinced that New York ("flat and compact ... perfectly suited to biking") had potential.

You can still find Coughlin's 151-word reply to Polgreen on the NYT's website. Here it is:

To the Editor:

Your reporter's positive experiences with cycling in the city (''Spin City,'' Oct. 3) should embolden more New Yorkers to take to the streets on two wheels. But city government could do much more to make cycling safer and more widespread. What's stopping it, in many cases, is its co-dependent relationship with drivers.

Officially, the city laments car use and extols alternatives like cycling. But in practice it is loath to improve conditions for cyclists if it means constricting the flow of cars, such as by removing a car lane to create a physically separated bike lane.

Until the city grasps that it cannot enable the current level of driving and at the same time significantly improve the cycling environment, the transportation commissioner's vision of New York as ''one of the world's great bicycling cities'' will remain just a pleasant fantasy.

Kenneth M. Coughlin
Upper West Side

Coughlin was exactly right. The following year, Danish planner Jan Gehl visited New York and helped persuade city leaders to install the country's first parking-protected bike lane on 9th Avenue in 2007. Just as Coughlin's letter argued would be necessary, adding a protected bike lane required removing one of the four lanes that cars had been driving in.

...
Seven years later, protected bike lanes have spread to 24 states and 53 U.S. cities — almost every single one requiring a little less street space to be devoted to cars. Three out of four people who live near the lanes, whether they use them or not, say they want more, and that's exactly what cities are delivering. As you read this, dozens of protected lane projects are nearing completion around the country, from Los Angeles to Boston to Lincoln, Nebraska.



http://www.peopleforbikes.org/blog/...etter-to-the-nyt-foresaw-new-yorks-biking-tri
 
#116 ·


A 64-Mile Bike 'Superhighway' Will Connect Fort Worth To Dallas

Bicyclists in car country just got some good news: Transportation planners took a $7 million dollar step toward a commuter bike and pedestrian trail reaching from downtown Fort Worth to downtown Dallas.

The money approved Thursday will help build about 10 more miles of connecting trails.

As is stands today, studies rank North Texas at or near the bottom for bicycle commuting -- in one survey of the country’s 70 biggest cities, Fort Worth was at No. 60, Dallas No. 65 and Plano dead last.

Urban planners and city agencies are calling it the “superhighway of bicycles.” Sixty-four miles in all, the trail will run mostly along the Trinity River -- from existing bike paths in downtown Fort Worth through Arlington, then in a loop through Irving and Grand Prairie and finishing off on the new Trinity Skyline Trail in Downtown Dallas.

Cyclists like Chris Curnutt hope this superhighway will one day become a way of life. Curnutt, who lives in North Dallas, bikes three miles to work every day and, like many others, enjoys a more leisurely ride at night.

“I’ll just go by myself, like the kids are in bed, the temperature is good. But it’s just a very peaceful, almost zen-like experience,” he said.
 
#122 ·
Dutch Suburbs Are Like America’s, and Protected Bike Lanes Work Fine There

People the in U.S. street design world — sometimes even people who write for this very website — regularly say that U.S. development patterns mean that Dutch street designs can’t be immediately adopted in the States.

That’s a lot less true than you might think.

Of course some ideas can’t/won’t port over wholesale. But especially by European standards, the Netherlands is actually probably one of the most spatially similar places to much of the U.S. Guess where this is:

 
#124 ·
Some photos of the Indianapolis Cultural Trail which is an urban bike and pedestrian path that connects the city's five downtown Cultural Districts, neighborhoods and entertainment amenities, and serves as the downtown hub for the entire central Indiana greenway system. The trail also includes benches, bike racks, lighting, signage and bike rentals/drop-offs along the way and also features local art work.













http://indyculturaltrail.org/
 
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