Transportation Policy

Panelists on suburban sprawl: Eugenie Birch, James Russell, Robert Bruegmann and Alexander Garvin.

Copenhagen, Denmark is not a natural bicycling city. In the early 1960's it was very much of a car town. In 1962 the city created its first pedestrian street, the Stroget, and every year since then Copenhagen has allocated more and more of its public space to bicycles, pedestrians and people who just want to sit and take a load off. The result is a remarkably pleasant city. Danish urban designer Jan Gehl says that the single biggest key to the change has been the development of the city's extensive bicycle network and that the Copenhagen of great public spaces that we see today would not be possible without bicycles.

For the last two years or so Transportation Alternatives' Karla Quintero has been working on a New York City-based update of the famous "Appleyard Study" examining the social costs of traffic. Karla presented the study's preliminary findings last year at a forum I helped organize in Brooklyn and it was really interesting. This event is sure to be a good one. From Transalt:

How do you measure a city's bike-friendliness? Do you count the number of lane miles, daily commuters or annual injuries? Here is one set of metrics that I found in Copenhagen:

In his weekly radio address yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg discussed some steps his administration is taking toward a sustainable future, including the creation of an Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, and a Sustainability Advisory Board, which held its first meeting last week.

If New York or other large cities are looking for a solution to congestion and its negative impact on the economy, Hong Kong offers an excellent strategy and success story. I was there a few weeks back working on waterfront issues (that rival New York City for unrealized opportunities), and was struck by changes that have taken place since my previous visit five years earlier. In 2001, there were few streets or districts that were comfortable to walk in or engage with despite being known as a bustling shopping city. In the intervening time the city has undergone a major transformation led by non other than the city's Transport Department.

Transportation Alternatives has released a study of parking permit abuse among New York City employees (as observed in nine neighborhoods). Their press release notes the study's key findings:

Last week we asked the Department of Transportation why the agency had not followed through on making safety improvements on the Fifth Avenue bike lane in Brooklyn by end-of-summer. DOT responded with a statement saying that "Share the Road" signs had, in fact, been installed and that, as part of the new citywide bike safety initiative announced two weeks ago, the agency was developing a new and improved way of marking "Class III" bike routes.

Of the ten largest cities in the United States, New York has far and away the greatest population density: 26,402.9 people per square mile, more than double the second densest big city, Chicago. The chart at right shows how the largest metropolitan areas stack up in terms of core population, overall population and core population density.  This fact alone should force New York City authorities to think differently than the rest of the country on all sorts of matters of public policy. New York is a quantitatively different animal than the other big American metropolitan regions in terms of percentage of people that live in the core, density and size of the core and size of the metropolitan area.