Cities and Countries

Earth Day is coming around the bend, and cities are timing their new green initiatives to coincide with the public's heightened eco-consciousness. Here's one we're partial to: In Denver, Mayor John Hickenlooper and city leaders are using the occasion to launch their 500-bicycle, 50-station bike-share system. It will be the largest bike-share system in the U.S. until Minneapolis and Boston roll theirs out later this spring.

Denver bike-share firm B-cycle has set up a demo station at Pier 84 on the Hudson River Greenway. Reps should be there until around 5:00 today.

Long Beach, Los Angeles’s neighbor to the south, has started to put some serious effort into making cycling an attractive and safe mode of transportation, and it’s already paying dividends. Bicycling Magazine’s 2010 rankings for bike-friendly cities ranked Long Beach a respectable 23rd. But the city has more ambitious goals, aiming to ultimately become the … Continued

The House transportation committee is holding a hearing today on "innovative financing" for infrastructure projects -- a topic near and dear to lawmakers who continue to hunt for a politically feasible, sustainable strategy for funding a new six-year federal transport bill.

Washington, D.C.'s Bikestation is one of the sleeker and more fully-featured bike parking facilities that Streetfilms has ever seen. Located at Union Station, the Bikestation provides secure parking for more than a hundred bicycles, offers repair, rentals, lockers, and a changing room. Members get 24/7 access.

Via Matt Yglesias, DCist reports that next week Washington area motorists will be able to pay for on-street parking by calling a phone number:

Butler may have come up short against Duke last night, but there's a Cinderella story sending ripples through the livable streets blogosphere today.

"The Wiggle" is one of San Francisco's most beloved bike routes, guiding riders between two nasty hills. It even has its own Wikipedia entry.

Editor's note: We linked to this story out of San Francisco in the headline stack this morning, and it's worth a very close look. Experts counsel that the first step in reforming parking policies that promote driving is to measure the parking supply. The number one recommendation in "Suburbanizing the City" [PDF], the 2008 report on New York City's traffic-inducing parking policies, is to "create a complete, public inventory of existing, permitted and planned off-street parking." In San Francisco, they're methodically assessing the parking supply so that planners can make more informed decisions. In New York, the Department of City Planning is still groping around in the dark.