City Planning

1050 Bicycle Friendly Businesses

Bicycling is enjoying a renaissance with strong growth worldwide, and certainly notable growth in the US. Things have improved in the 21st century, with more than 1,050 visionary local businesses now included in the “Bicycle Friendly Businesses” program of the League of American Bicyclists. These top bicycle-friendly businesses are located in 47 states and Washington, DC. There are a multitude of reasons for regular …

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Walking = Least Stressful Transportation Option… In Montreal

Walking is apparently the least stressful mode of travel (at least in Montreal, anyway), according to new research from McGill University. The work found that — out of all the various ways that someone can travel — the majority of the 4,000 subjects of the study thought that walking, even during the dead cold of …

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The Fascinating Way Bicycling Brings Us Closer Together

In each society, there are differences in how we treat personal space. Even from one person to the next, there are differences, but for the most part, each society has some norms. Seattle-based landscape architecture student Peter Cromwell, in the fascinating presentation below, shows what distances are normal “public distances,” what are normal “social distances,” what are normal “personal distances,” …

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14 Options For Better Bike Lanes (Infographic)

It’s long been a debate between “hard-core” American bicyclists and European-style American (and European) bicyclists: protected bike lanes (and even bike lanes, in general) vs on-road bicycling mixed with automobile traffic. But the masses clearly prefer protected bike lanes, and plenty of research (including my own) has shown that protected bike lanes are safer and encourage …

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Amsterdam Rocks It So Hard (VIDEOS)

Amsterdam is perhaps the best large city in the world for bicycling and bicyclists. It probably is, but Copenhagen is also always in the running. Furthermore, there are better bicycling cities than Amsterdam in the Netherlands, but they are smaller, so I’m not sure if they are in the same class. Anywho, if you haven’t …

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San Francisco Protected Bicycle Lane Meshes Well With Transit Stop

One of the challenges of adding bike lanes to cities can be the challenge that arises when a bus stop sits where a bike lane should go. But separated, protected bike lanes that step back from the roadway and bus stop work excellently, as can be seen in this video from San Francisco: Appreciations for …

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Will Self-Driving Cars Make Our Cities Better Or Worse?

When you talk about the future of transportation*, some of us think about more bicyclists and bicycling, and a more bicycle-friendly world. However, for the average Joe, I think the main thing that comes to mind these days is self-driving cars. Self-driving cars are actually getting much closer to commercial reality than many of us …

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Bikes vs Cars — New Documentary From Award-Winning Swedish Filmaker Fredrik Gertten

Did you know that General Motors slowly took over mass transit in the LA area and then all but eliminated it? Award-winning Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten informs us in his latest documentary, Bikes vs Cars — We Are Many, about this and much more. He creates a fascinating, educational study revealing more about bicycle culture …

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LA Bike Trains — Transforming The Mean Streets Of LA

LA Bike Trains is changing the personality of LA. LA Bike Trains, a group bubbling up from the profound roots of the city, is looking to make LA a friendlier place, and a nicer place for bicyclists. LA has been named one of the unfriendliest cities in the US. This unfriendly aura is not simply …

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Role of Infrastructure & Transportation in Promoting Physical Activity (Infographic & New Research)

A simple holistic concept is that everything is connected. One’s interrelationship with daily activity, transit, and infrastructure is a key relationship to holistic connectedness. News from the United States Department of [Active] Transportation supports this. Cultivating refreshing spots of activity in the day and night of our lives is a key way to stay in …

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NYC Bike Share Launches — Thoughts From NYC & The Interwebs

New York City (NYC) has finally rolled out the beginnings of its large bicycle-sharing program, Citi Bike, with 6,000 bikes and 330 bike-sharing stations hitting the streets on Monday. The stations are initially located in Manhattan and Brooklyn. It’s far from the largest such project at the moment, but it’s the largest in the US, …

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Where Bike Commuting Grows Fastest (Infographics)

The League of American Bicyclists recently created some cool infographics about bicycle commuter growth across the country. In general, bike commuting has skyrocketed, doubling from 1.7 billion in 2001 to 4 billion in 2009. However, the growth has occurred to a much greater degree in cities and towns that have been designated as Bicycle-Friendly Communities by …

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Better Bicycle Facilities, Off-Road Bike Paths = More Bicycling

More or less, bicycle infrastructure policy and its relationship to riderships was the topic of my 2007 master’s thesis. It’s been obvious to some of us for a long time that bicycle infrastructure policy needs to change in order to give bicycle ridership a big boost, and public health would of course improve from that, …

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How Bicycle Friendly Communities Are Evaluated (Infographic)

Several years ago, I was the director of an organization in the Charlottesville, Virginia region that got Charlottesville designated as a Bicycle Friendly Community (BFA). There were great guiding documents that the League of American Bicyclists supplied as part of the application process, but it certainly would have been nice to have this infographic* below …

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Divvy — Bike-Sharing System Debuting In Chicago In June

In just a month, Chicago will finally have its own large-scale bike-sharing program, providing thousand of bikes to residents via hundreds of solar-powered stations spread throughout the city. The system, dubbed Divvy, will debut in June with a few hundred bikes spread throughout 75 solar-powered docking stations. It is supposed to rapidly expand after that, …

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Super Bike-Friendly Cafe In Zurich

This is certainly the most bike-friendly cafe I’ve ever seen: Using Google Translate, here’s the description under the video (translated from German): The city of Zurich presents the first Velokafi under the program Urban Transport 2025. The bicycle drive-in allows the coffee enjoyment, without getting off the bike. Idea, design, implementation: Serranetga AG Pretty cool. …

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São Paulo — Single Transit Pass For All Public Transit (Including Bike Sharing)

I don’t recall where I first heard the argument that bicycle sharing programs were essentially public transit, just more tailored for individual freedom and need. But I certainly liked the concept. São Paulo is probably not the first, but it’s the first I can think of that takes that concept and runs with it. The Brazilian …

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bike safety lane

Bicycle Road Safety Activist Group Installs Illegal Bike Lane Protectors

A bicycle road safety activist group in Seattle, called the Reasonably Polite Seattleites has struck again. The very polite group has turned the painted Cherry Street bike lane located under I-5 in Seattle into a protected bike lane. The group used around $350 worth of reflective plastic pylons to transform the bike lane in the middle of …

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My Figuero

New Streetscape Project (MyFigueroa) Coming To Downtown L.A.

After several years of planning, the Figueroa Corridor Streetscape project (MyFigueroa) is coming even closer to reality. Soon, the Figueroa Corridor in Downtown and South Los Angeles will accommodate a bus-only lane and cycle tracks, while still maintaining vehicle access. When completed, Figueroa Corridor will provide a safer, sustainable, more comfortable local environment for pedestrians, …

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bike share program

Bay Area Bike Sharing Program Launching This Summer

After overcoming several obstacles, the San Francisco Bay Area will begin a pilot bike sharing program that will be the first regional bike sharing program in the country. The pilot program, which will be run by Alta Bike Share, is set to launch this summer with 70 locations and 700 bikes from San Jose to …

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Appreciating Copenhaganize’s Thoughts On “The Arrogance of Space”

Copenhagenize’s recent article The Arrogance of Space brings to the surface something bicyclists, modern urban planners, and many common people find simmering in their minds all the time. Mikael Colville-Andersen, the Northern European author of this article cuts through the simmer: “I’ve been working a lot in North America the past year, and I’ve become quite obsessed with …

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Bicycle Culture By Design

Mikael Colville-Andersen is a world-leading urban planning / transportation planning consultant. His focus is on human-powered transport, especially the bicycle, and humanizing cities (at least, that’s how I would summarize it). His blog, Copenhagenize, is one of the few urban planning blogs I follow, and I am pretty much always eager to check out his …

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Boston Bike-Sharing Still Rockin’ — To Increase 50%

Last I wrote about Boston’s new bike-sharing program, Hubway, it was about how popular the service was. (Oh yeah, and I shared a test ride blog from someone at Boston University.) Well, the rockin’ and rollin’ on Hubway bicycles has continued. In four months, 140,000 rides were taken via Hubway. Even compared to several other …

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NYC Bike-Sharing Program to Start with 10,000 Bikes!

I have written about New York City’s planned bike-sharing program a couple times here on EcoLocalizer, and have written about bike-sharing programs in Paris, China, Barcelona, London (a couple times), Chicago, D.C. (sister site Ecopreneurist has as well — linking to that piece), Boston, and my current city of Wroclaw (twice). I’m a fan. But I’ve got one problem with many attempts at bike-sharing — the programs start too small. Well, NYC is not disappointing me. It’s starting with 10,000 bikes at 600 stations, comparable to Paris (probably the most successful and certainly the biggest program in the world, which started with 10,000 bikes at 750 stations).

Boston Hubway Test Ride

Following up on my recent post on Boston’s new and highly successful bike-sharing program, Hubway, I thought I’d direct your attention to a great post on Boston University’s news site, BU Today, in which Leslie Friday describes her experience testing out Hubway. Here’s the intro:

Boston Bike-Sharing Program is Rockin’ It

D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare bike-sharing program has been a great success (despite its rather small size). Paris’ Velib bike-sharing program rocked the world with its tremendous, unprecedented success. Barcelona’s Bicing program was much more successful than originally anticipated. And so on and so on. Now, it’s being reported that Boston’s new bike-sharing program is a great success, even much more successful than originally anticipated.

Bike-Sharing Program in Wrocław, Poland — 1st Ride

I wrote a pretty extensive introduction to Wrocław’s new bike-sharing program about a month and a half ago, with 18 photos and 2 videos included. Now, I said that I would write an update once I tried it out and I finally have. Marika (my partner) and I were walking to the store today and decided on the way to try it out if there were any bikes available (every other time we went to try it out there weren’t bikes available or, once, the system was down). It was quite simple to use, the process being…