Bicycle Infrastructure

There's a lot of protected bike infrastructure in various stages of completion right now, and I had the chance to take some pictures on the way to the office today. Above is a trench for part of the Sands Street bike path, the long-awaited Manhattan Bridge approach in Brooklyn that was originally slated to start construction in 2006. The middle of the road has been dug up from Gold Street to Navy Street. Someone on the crew said it will be a while before the project gets finished.

Just after the long-awaited off-road link from Inwood to Battery Park was completed, Streetsblog got word of a pending Hudson River Greenway detour due to planned work by the Port Authority on the Manhattan tower of the George Washington Bridge.

Thanks to commenter Stephen for prodding us to post on the new report from the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, "Active Transportation for America" (download the PDF here).

We received two reports last night that the West Harlem Piers bike path -- a critical link in the Hudson River Greenway -- is finally open after several months of puzzling delay. (NYCEDC informed Streetsblog last week that the hold up was indeed due to problems securing materials for a safety rail.) Now the construction fence is down, and, as you can see in these photos from reader Paula Froke, cyclists are enjoying the unbroken stretch of greenway.

How effective are bike lanes at enticing people to ride? Portland State University professor Jennifer Dill has been looking into that question for more than a year, and her research is starting to get some attention. Using GPS trackers to map more than 1,700 bike trips, Dill found that about half of all bike travel occurs on dedicated infrastructure like bike lanes or bike boulevards, even though such routes comprise only eight percent of Portland's street network.

It's a good day in a city's urbanist evolution when Jan Gehl comes to town, and now San Francisco can add itself to the growing list of cities around the world that have embraced his people-first approach to urban design and planning.

The Sands Street bike path, a physically protected approach to the Manhattan Bridge, has languished behind schedule for years, held up in the city's construction bureaucracy. The project serves as a prime illustration that livable streets hinge not just on DOT, but on other, more obscure city agencies as well.

Transportation Alternatives' Noah Budnick will be on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" this afternoon at 3 p.m. EST. He'll be debating Rob Anderson, the one-man wrecking crew who filed the 2006 environmental impact law suit that stopped San Francisco from building out its citywide bicycle network.

A recent poll conducted by AARP finds that Americans over the age of 50 are cutting down on car trips due to rising gas prices, but are finding public infrastructure, or lack thereof, to be an obstacle.