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Bicycling

Sound Familiar?

11:40 AM EDT on September 8, 2006

With nothing much happening in the American League East this Fall, we've been turning our attention to Boston's burgeoning Livable Street movement instead. Last year a fellow named Jeff Rosenblum founded an organization called the Livable Streets Alliance that is setting out to do work similar to that of New York City's Transportation Alternatives. Jeff's group appears to be doing a good job of moving the issues up on Boston's civic agenda. Last week's Boston Globe ran a story on a City Counci member's efforts to transform a congested street in Little Italy into a pedestrian piazza and an op/ed arguing:

BOSTON SHOULD be one of the best cities in the United States in which to ride a bike. It's beautiful, it's largely flat, and it has wide avenues that could easily accommodate cars and bikes together. It also boasts the Emerald Necklace, the Paul Dudley White Memorial Bicycle Path, and the upcoming South Bay Harbor Trail, some of the country's most scenic and useful bike paths.

Change the name of these "scenic and useful bike paths" to "Hudson River Greenway" and you may as well be describing New York City. Of course, as in baseball and most other things, it sounds like in New York City is still way ahead of Boston when it comes to bike-friendliness and Livable Streets.

Aaron Naparstek
AARON NAPARSTEK is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparstek’s journalism, advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bicycle network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. Naparstek is the author of "Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage" (Villard, 2003), a book of humorous haiku poetry inspired by the endless motorist sociopathy observed from his apartment window. Prior to launching Streetsblog, Naparstek worked as an interactive media producer, pioneering some of the Web's first music web sites, online communities, live webcasts and social networking services. Naparstek is currently in Cambridge with his wife and two young sons where he is enjoying a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He has a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Naparstek is a co-founder of the Park Slope Neighbors community group and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. You can find more of his work here: http://www.naparstek.com.

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