Urban Design

Check out my favorite new web site, MyBikeLane, by Greg Whalin.

In the aftermath of September 11th, concrete and steel barriers sprouted like  mushrooms around big buildings in New York City. It almost seemed to me to be a kind of status symbol. You knew you worked in an important building if your landlord had hardened it against truck bombs.

After Copenhagen, I visited Holland for a few days as a part of my German Marshall Fellowship. I will be writing more about some of the people I met and spoke with there, but for now I just wanted to share these photos from Amsterdam:

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:

The Nyhavn or "New Harbor." Twenty years ago Copenhagen's quaint inner harbor was a parking lot. Today it is one of the city's most popular and iconic outdoor destinations.

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.

Yesterday I showed some photos of the "Share the Road" Bike Route signs that were recently installed on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn and that sparked an interesting discussion on different possible ways to design and build on-street bike paths. This summer I was in Berkeley, California for a friend's wedding. NYCSR filmmaker Clarence Eckerson was also in Berkeley recently and we both snapped a bunch of photos of that city's extensive "Bicycle Boulevard" network. For some more ideas of what might be possible in New York City, take a look: