Cities and Countries

For those who are not tuning in to the American Idol season finale tonight (Kris is going to win, watch), here are two shows worth looking out for:

Following up on Sarah's post this morning, here's a Bike to Work Week special from Mikael Colville Andersen, the mastermind behind Copenhagenize and Copenhagen Cycle Chic. Colville Andersen's blogs are like extended odes to urban cycling and bike culture, and in this vid he shows what bicycling looks like when it's seen as a "normal" way to get from here to there.

Reuters just wrapped up a two-day "Infrastructure Summit" and published a great collection of stories about the state of transportation policy in the U.S. I especially like this piece, featuring Robin Holzer of the Houston-based Citizens' Transportation Coalition, who does a great job illustrating some of the major deficiencies that the federal stimulus bill failed to address:

Streetsblog San Francisco's Bryan Goebel attended the NY400 event yesterday, where Dutch Cabinet Minister Frans Timmermans presented Deputy Mayor Robert C. Lieber and NYC & Company CEO George Fertitta with 200 orange commuter bikes as part of a year-long commemoration of "four hundred years of friendship between the Netherlands and the City of New York." To mark the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival, the bikes arrived in Manhattan via a water taxi on the Hudson River.