Cities and Countries

In the last few weeks, truck drivers have taken the lives of at least two NYC pedestrians: a 6-year-old child and a 60-year-old woman. Though the physics of the crashes were different -- one driver was turning, the other accelerating into a crosswalk -- in both cases the driver was said to have hit a person he did not know was there.

Beacon Street in Somerville, just outside Boston, is perhaps the most biked route in the state of Massachusetts. It also has a terrible safety record. There have been 154 collisions involving cyclists on the corridor between 2002 and 2010, according to the state Department of Transportation [PDF].

In some ways, London and New York have each leapfrogged the other when it comes to bike policy in the past few years. London's bike-share program launched back in 2010, but its bike lanes remain largely sub-standard, with little in the way of physical protection. Here in New York, the bike lanes are gradually forming a safe, useful network, while bike-share is a few years behind London.

A representative of the American Automobile Association was a keynote speaker at this week's National Bike Summit in Washington, D.C., the annual gathering of bicycle advocates. There the organization debuted a heartwarming new video reminding drivers to share the road with cyclists.

A hit-and-run truck driver has escaped prosecution for killing a cyclist in Massachusetts after a grand jury failed to indict on vehicular homicide charges. Alexander Motsenigos, 41, was killed last August while riding his bike along a suburban road in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where he lived with his wife and six-year-old son. The driver never stopped.

Chicago just got a step closer to first-class bus rapid transit. Today the CTA and the Chicago Department of Transportation released proposed lane configurations for the Central Loop East-West Transit Corridor, a downtown circulator route connecting Union Station with Navy Pier, as well as renderings for a new transit center next to the train station. The corridor would include bus-priority lanes on two miles of streets: Canal, Washington, Madison and Clinton. This downtown BRT service is slated to launch next year.

Via the Kansas Cyclist, here's a campaign ad from St. Louis mayoral hopeful Lewis Reed that would seem strangely inconceivable in NYC's current political climate.

An interesting example of state DOT interference in local street safety policy, from our team in Chicago...