Lance Armstrong and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa at "Hope Rides Again" Cancer Awareness Event in March, 2009. Photo:So Ca. Cycling.com

Bicycling superstar Lance Armstrong and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa have joined forces again.  Their target: Governor Jerry Brown.  Their message: sign S.B. 910, the state’s three foot passing law that would protect cyclists from drivers who pass too close and too fast.

“Gov. Brown can help make our roads safer for everyone by making Senate Bill 910 the law in California,” said Armstrong, seven-time winner of the Tour de France, and the most famous bicyclist in the world.

“I’m thrilled that we have Lance Armstrong’s support on this issue,” added Villaraigosa. “His success is a big reason so many more Californians are interested in bicycling. It’s so important to have experts like him advocating for making California a more bike-friendly place.”

The Senate and Assembly both passed S.B. 910, authored by Long Beach Senator Alan Lowenthal, which would require motorists passing bicyclists to give at least a three foot cushion if the car’s speed is 15 miles per hour. Many Republicans opposed the measure, in large part due to the opposition of speeding traffic advocates, AAA and the California Highway Patrol. Last week, Streetsblog San Francisco reported that those same two groups are lobbying the Governor to veto this traffic safety measure.

Jim Brown, Communications Director for the California Bicycle Coalition, notes that similar, and often times stricter, passing laws in other states have not produced ill effects for drivers or bicyclists as the AAA claimed in their lobbying pieces.

“What Gov. Brown needs to understand is that SB 910 is a reasonable and common-sense measure that’s been road-tested in 20 other states, including Wisconsin, whose 3-foot-passing law was enacted 38 years ago,” Brown explains. “None of these states has experienced unanticipated traffic tie-ups, an increase in collisions or other problems from drivers being unable to give bicyclists enough space. This is a law that simply makes the rules of the road clearer for everyone.”

The California Bicycle Coalition has set up a web page to help supporters contact the Governor’s office. To learn more about their campaign, click here.  Streetsblog will report as soon as we hear word on whether the Governor has signed S.B. 910 into law or vetoed it.

Damien Newton: Los Angeles is changing the way it does parking in its downtown. They’re calling it the ExpressPark system. Let’s start with the basics — what is the program and what are your thoughts?

Donald Shoup: For the first time they’re stating how they’re going to set parking prices. Instead of basing it on council decisions or emotions or people’s feelings, they stated a principal. Parking at a meter will be at the lowest price they can charge and still have one or two open spaces on every block.

If they get that price right, then those spaces will be well used because almost all the spaces will be full. Yet there will be spaces readily available because one or two spaces will be open.

Can it get any better than that as a goal for the parking system?

The key is, can you set the right price without looking at the results even though the results are what’s going to count when setting the price.

DN: This marks a shift in policy for the city that seemed to base parking decisions based on what brings in the most revenue.

DS: It hadn’t been about that even, until quite recently.

You may remember a few years ago they doubled the price of parking everywhere in the city with a minimum price of a dollar an hour. Since most meters were at a quarter an hour, that meant quadrupling the price at most meters. That was the first time meter prices had been changed in eighteen years.

There’s been a lot of neglect of parking meters. Inertia seemed to be the main factor in determining parking prices.

They’re changing that by saying, “Here’s the rule. If half the spaces on a block are empty, we’re going to lower prices. If all the spaces are full we’re going to raise prices.” Since the price change two years ago, I’ve seen entire blocks where there isn’t one car parked. The price is too high.

I think a lot of prices would go down if they extend express park to the whole city. They’re starting in downtown, but I suspect that some prices will go down.

DN: One of the tenets of “The High Cost of Free Parking” is that money collected from meters should be returned to the communities where it was collected. L.A.’s plan returns all metered funds to the general fund. Is that a mistake by the city? Does it give you any misgivings about the plan altogether?

DS: That’s what they’re planning in L.A., they’re not planning on funneling any of the money back to the neighborhood?

That’s a mistake. When you funnel back to the neighborhood you get local buy-in and you get wonderful results.

Pasadena returns all of the metered money back into the neighborhood for decades and they turned the local neighborhood that used to be a commercial skid row into one of the most popular shopping destinations in Southern California. The meters brought in an extra million dollars a year in public services in just that little shopping district. They replaced all the sidewalks, streetlights and street furniture. They cleaned up the allays. They put electric wires underground. This was all paid for by meters.

But that’s a political issue. I think that getting the price right is also very important.

]]> http://la.streetsblog.org/2011/08/24/interview-with-donald-shoup-los-angeles-making-strides-with-expresspark/feed/ 0 http://la.streetsblog.org/2010/10/11/ciclavia-100000-cyclists-0-incidents-millions-of-stories/ http://la.streetsblog.org/2010/10/11/ciclavia-100000-cyclists-0-incidents-millions-of-stories/#comments Mon, 11 Oct 2010 16:14:08 +0000 Damien Newton http://sf.streetsblog.org/?p=256856 [...]]]>

The MidDay Ridazz take over 7th Street. 97 Pictures of the day at the Streetsblog Flickr pool.

The numbers for yesterday’s CicLAvia are impressive. KABC News says that there were 50,000 people riding the streets of Los Angeles along a 7.5 mile stretch of streets that were open to public use, but closed to automobiles. The Los Angeles Times puts that number closer to 100,00 people.

Anecdotally, the Coke truck ran out of free servings after 50,000 drinks. CicLAvia organizers estimated that 60,000 to 100,000 people took part with the number “closer to 100,000.”

That’s a lot of people for a 7.5 mile stretch of the city. But here’s the thing. Their numbers are wrong. All of them.

Yesterday was about a lot more than just counting the bikes that rolled past. CicLAvia touched hundreds of thousands of people, even if measured by the laughter heard on their streets instead of cars honking their horns. How do you count the kids playing ball in the street that scurried out of the way when the bikes rolled past?

Zero. That’s the number of “major incidents” reported along the route. That number includes interactions between the different mode users: bicyclists, pedestrians, skateboarders, rollerbladers, that guy on the surfboard thing with wheels. That number includes the interactions between the attendees of the events and the LAPD. As for Los Angeles’ finest, it was hard to find a sour face amongst the hundreds of police on the streets. Even though they were working, they were as caught up in the wonder of the day as everyone else.

But more impressive than the numbers were the stories and the chance to just be out, in the city, surrounded by hordes of happy people. And why were they happy? Because we were outside, sharing in space and sharing an experience. And we didn’t have to pay a lot of money to get shoved into an arena or stadium to do it.

I think I saw more of my Streetsblog friends yesterday than I do when we host Streetsblog events. It seemed everytime we stopped, there were new friends to greet us. At the feeder ride I got a chance to catch up with Carter Rubin, Kent Strumpell, Rachel Stevenson and the crew from SM Spokes. Here we are in East Hollywood and there’s Deborah Murphy from L.A. Walks, “Park Czar” Alfredo Hernandez…oh, and over there is Ryan Snyder and Eric Garcetti…and….. And it was like this at every stop.

Now on to three favorite stories of mine from yesterday. Please feel free to add your own in the comments:

On the fourth Sunday of every month, cyclists take over the streets of Los Angeles as part of the "Black Kids on Bikes" (BKoB) ride.  BKoB is part of a series of rides called the "Freedom Rides" aimed at getting more black Angelenos to enjoy the unique experience of a group cycle ride.  BKoB aims at providing a safe, fun venue for kids to ride the streets, but despite it's name - the ride is open to riders of all races and skill levels.

The ride is the brainchild of organizer James Spooner who wears many hats.  Some know him as a Bikerowave volunteer, others as a tattoo artist, and still others know him as the ground making film maker responsible for 2003's cult film "Afro-Punk."

Ivy writes:

Spooner, a recent transplant from the rainbow streets of New York City, walks and talks New York, but now calls Cali home.  James was cool enough to sit down with me despite of me, to tell me about how the ride came to be and what he personally gets out of the ride and cycling in general.

The L.A. StreetSummit kicked off last night with a rousing keynote address and slide show by the groundbreaking New York City DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn. Three levels of an Occidental College auditorium were packed with students, bike advocates from around the county, and others interested in Livable Streets to hear Sadik-Kahn talk about the changes that have come to New York City's streets under her and Mayor Michael Bloomberg's leadership in the past three years.

Sadik-Khan's lecture was continually interrupted by cheers and even gasps of astonishment for the "before" and "after" pictures of the now car-free pedestrian plaza in Times Square and Herald Square.

One thing that you could palpably feel from the NYCDOT boss was the sense of pride in how her department has changed the way people think about transportation and even about city government: The speech was peppered with New York City promos, my favorite of which came when she pointed out that "New Yorkers have one-third of the carbon footprint of the average American. If you're really serious about saving the planet, you should move to New York City," she said.

Riding the 28-19th Avenue northbound towards the Richmond on a recent weekday afternoon, Pamela Moye has almost nothing but good things to say about Muni.

Aside from the occasional long wait for an M-Ocean View train, Moye, a schoolteacher, said her experience with Muni has been overwhelmingly positive.

"I love public transportation in San Francisco," said Moye. "It's super easy."

What accounts for Moye's sunny appraisal of Muni, a system that's subject to near-universal griping among San Franciscans? Moye, it turns out, benefits from the perspective of being a former San Francisco resident who now lives in Los Angeles, car-free.

"People think I'm crazy for riding the bus in LA," she said. Though she doesn't agree with that assessment, Moye said she knows far fewer people who ride transit in her new home than in San Francisco.

Moye left San Francisco in 2002 to pursue a teaching job after attending San Francisco State. She was back in town on the day we spoke to complete work on her degree seven years later, and was happy to reminisce about her days living on 5th Avenue and Geary.

"Living in San Francisco turned me into a non-car owner," she said. The cost and hassle of parking, insurance, and gas pushed her towards giving up her vehicle, and she hasn't looked back.

After growing up in Idaho, she found the bus her key to exploring San Francisco. "Riding the bus is a great way to learn a city," said Moye. When she arrived here, she said, if she had a free afternoon, "I would just get on a bus and ride."

Now, when friends and family ask for suggestions on what to do during visits to San Francisco, Moye tells them to take the 38-Geary from one end of the line to the other, from ocean to bay, one of the best ways to see a broad cross-section of the city. (Jane Jacobs wrote about taking a similar approach to learning New York City when she first arrived, randomly choosing subway lines to ride to new neighborhoods every week.)

Moye has continued this practice in Los Angeles, a city (and region) famed for its dependence on the automobile, though it has increasingly focused on expanding transit service.

Los Angeles' bus system seems to produce more unusual tales in general, according to Moye. Citing her favorite strange story, Moye said she "noticed two homeless women chatting away, and I thought, 'it's great that they've befriended each other.'"

"Then one of them moved away when a seat opened up, and I realized they were actually both talking to themselves."

Of course, "strange is relative," said Moye.

LA's network of rapid buses and light rail lines has served her fairly well, she said, but she still misses San Francisco, where the main drawback was the cost of living. And while she's now a dedicated car-free Angeleno, traveling by bicycle in LA is still too intimidating. "San Francisco seems safer for bicycling. It's just not really enjoyable in LA."

As she heads towards her final destination near Clement Street, it's tempting to hear her praise for Muni as the nostalgia of someone seeing through rose-colored glasses. Still, it's good to be reminded that this city can reshape how people think about transportation in a way that lasts long after they leave its dense, 47-square miles.

Dr. Christopher Thompson is taken away in cuffs Monday. Photo: Los Angeles Times

Following
a highly-publicized, intensely-followed trial, Christopher Thompson,
the physician accused of using his car to seriously injure two cyclists
in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, is behind bars.

Thompson was convicted yesterday of six felony counts: two counts each, according to VeloNews, of assault with a deadly weapon, battery with
serious bodily injury, and reckless driving causing specified
injury and mayhem.

On
July 4, 2008, Thompson passed cyclists Ron Peterson and Christian
Stoehr as the pair rode through the emergency room surgeon’s upscale
neighborhood. Angry after a verbal exchange with the men, Thompson slammed on the brakes
of his red Infiniti as Peterson and Stoehr rode behind. Stoehr ended up
in front of the car, wounded with a separated shoulder. Peterson hit
the rear window, suffering severe facial injuries. Thompson told police
on the scene that he was tired of cyclists in his neighborhood and
wanted to "teach them a lesson."

At trial, Thompson denied
making that statement, claiming that he had been attempting to get
photographs of the cyclists, who he said had frightened him. But the
jury didn’t buy it, possibly because of Thompson’s history of hostility
toward people on bikes. He was also convicted Monday of misdemeanor
reckless driving, a charge stemming from a prior encounter with two
other cyclists.

Prosecutor Mary
Stone urged that Thompson be remanded to jail, saying: "In terms of
public safety, there isn’t a cyclist in Los Angeles who would be
comfortable if he were out on the streets." Judge Scott Millington
apparently agreed, ordering Thompson held without bail. Sentencing is
set for December 3. Thompson faces up to 10 years in prison.

Thompson
could very well get off with a light sentence. But to have prosecutors,
a judge and jury members agree on the heinous nature of this crime, and
to deem its non-driving victims worthy of justice, can scarcely be
interpreted as anything other than a positive development — one that
will hopefully be noticed by law enforcement officials nationwide.

Damien Newton at Streetsblog LA has followed this case since Thompson’s arrest last year. You can catch up on the coverage here.

Toronto's Post and Ring solution for bicycle parking on old parking meter poles. Photo: David Baker

"This was the last breath of turning your back on cyclists. It was obscene," said East Bay Bicycle Coalition (EBBC) Executive Director Robert Raburn, who admitted that they weren't prepared for the change and the effect it would have on cyclists, so their advocacy was "reactionary." 

The EBBC lobbied the Oakland City Council to retain what meters they could after the process had started. "What we were asking for was to make sure there was some integration between the installation of parking kiosks and bike parking," said Raburn

Jason Patton, Oakland's Bicycle and Pedestrian Program Manager, said that the initial problem stemmed from the fact that two divisions of two separate agencies within the city weren't on the same page about bicycle parking and so the provisional solution was the best they could do.

"The plan for the new parking stations didn't address bicycle parking. Really the only option we had in working on their timeline was to leave meter heads," said Patton.

Over the complaints of the parking division, the EBBC worked with Oakland's bicycle program to develop an interim policy of preserving a minimum of two meter heads per block space in the areas where kiosks were installed. The bicycle division then spent a good deal of time and money surveying bicycle use on every street where the meters were being replaced to maximize the benefit to cyclists. Parking managers removed the "guts" of the meter heads so that drivers were less confused and affixed small yellow stickers that remind cyclists to park their bicycles parallel to the curb.

Still, all sides agreed bicycle parking at meter poles is not ideal. "The problem with leaving the head on is that it's confusing and unsightly and often times the pole location is not an ideal place to park bikes," said Raburn. Through sales-tax funding, the EBBC and the Oakland Bicycle Program have collaborated to methodically add bicycle racks on sidewalks in front of businesses, parks, and other destinations frequented by bicyclists.

Toronto, Canada

Oakland's story is very similar to many other cities, though unfortunately it seems that few city managers are sharing best practice examples with each other.  Toronto, Canada, was an early adopter of multi-space meters and parking managers there learned quickly how to use the old meter poles for bicycle parking.

Daniel Egan, Manager of Pedestrian and Cycling Infrastructure for the City of Toronto, said the parking managers were on the same page with his division when they began installing multi-space pay stations in early 2001. "Any time they were taking out a parking meter head, we would review them," he said. "Sometimes they were too close to the curb or to other structures, so they were removed."

For every parking meter the parking authority removed it would pay for a retrofit to old posts, what has been dubbed the Post and Ring. The initial metal rings were $40 a piece and were attached to the existing meter pole with large bolts. The complete retrofit cost was about $80 per post if they were keeping the original post, $125 per post if installing a new post. 

Egan admitted that the original ring design was not as secure as it should be, so that crafty thieves had figured out how to break them off and remove the entire ring, which they would presumably cut off the bicycle when not in public.  "We had a problem a couple of years ago with people breaking them off. So now we put in a double ring, which looks good: two 250 lb guys from our staff couldn't break it."

Toronto currently has 16,000 of the Post and Ring bicycle parking poles, of which about were 8,000 paid for by the parking authority. "They basically agreed to put a ring on every post in the city," said Egan. 

Los Angeles has affixed a small, decorative top to old meter poles as it transitions to new mult-space pay statinos like the one at left. Photo:LADOT

Both Chicago and Los Angeles are trying out small pilot programs to convert meter posts to bicycle parking, though neither have developed a comprehensive policy to address every meter pole being removed.

In Chicago, the city is leaving one or two poles per block as conversions occur.  Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) spokesperson Brian Steele said: "Chicago is working with the bike community to identify high-priority parking locations, and continues to explore locations for permanent bike racks--our bike parking program has already installed more than 11,000 racks citywide."

As for meter conversions, he said they started a program this spring to leave one or two meter poles per block face and more in priority locations. When preparing a conversion, CDOT posts information on its Bike Program web site seeking input from the cycling community.  Additionally, they have a full-time student intern who goes to conversion locations to identify which and how many meter poles to retain for future retrofit as bike racks.

The policy was put in place this spring and further elaboration of it is a priority of the Chicago Bike 2015 Plan, according to Steele. "We are exploring equipment to retrofit the poles with an attachment to allow bike parking. We have received samples from at least two manufacturers and are currently testing them."

In Los Angeles, the city installed 285 new meter heads adjacent to multi-space pay stations two weeks ago, what they call the Meter Hitch Bicycle Rack. The new Meter Hitch racks are in eight neighborhoods along commercial corridors and cost the city $50,000 to install, money which came from sales-tax and property tax increments agreed to in voter initiatives. According to LADOT's primer:

The new bicycle racks take advantage of the work of the Smart Meter Parking Pilot Program and re-use existing meter infrastructure to convert old parking meters to new Bicycle Parking Racks. The Bicycle Outreach and Planning staff has worked very closely with the Office of Parking Management and Regulations, the six different city council offices affiliated with the installation areas, business improvement districts, and local businesses to complete the project.

In New York City, former Department of Transportation (DOT) Commissioner Iris Weinshall embraced multi-space meters in the city's Central Business District, but wasn't so hot on bicycle infrastructure. As a result, much of Manhattan's business districts were converted to the multi-space meters without any consideration of bicycle parking.

When asked if NYCDOT has a policy to convert remaining single-space meters in other business districts in the city that still have them, NYCDOT Senior Policy Advisor Jon Orcutt said, "The ship sailed on that one before anyone looked at the policy. There's not much bike parking left to preserve."

Orcutt said the agency's priority now is installing new bicycle racks as quickly as possible throughout the city. In fiscal year 2008, the agency installed 1,377 racks, up from 320 the year before. They've set a goal to add 5,000 new racks over three years in addition to the current 6,100 racks. 

About retrofits, Orcutt admitted the agency didn't do as much as it could have. "We really should have gotten on that five years ago. When we looked at that universe, it didn't make sense to do retrofits. What we need to do is basically catch up with installing new bike racks and we'll try to be sensitive and coordinated with it."

Bicycle advocates are not thrilled with that response, however. "That's one rack for every 31 cyclists. That's completely inadequate," said Caroline Samponaro, Director of Bicycle Advocacy for Transportation Alternatives, who hopes that San Francisco and other cities look at New York to avoid the same issue. "Lack of bicycle parking is one of the biggest deterrents to bicycle riding in this city."

In San Francisco, the MTA is debuting its much heralded SFPark pilot program, which will affect more than 6,000 metered spaces. Though many of those meter poles will lose their heads or be removed completely because the agency doesn't think they are aesthetically pleasing and doesn't want to confuse motorists with pockets full of change, they will keep a number of meter poles for SFPark and simply retrofit the single space meters with radio technology.

MTA spokesperson Judson True said they are committed to providing better bicycle parking than what exists, but that they don't have a policy on meter pole retrofits. "We have all these strategies for bike parking that don't rely on meters. It's not to say we won't have an official policy, but we're not developing one now."

True added that they aren't rushing out to cut off the heads of all the meters. "It's going to be a while before the meters are gone."

True wanted to focus instead on what his agency could do to try more dynamic bicycle parking options, such as converting vehicle parking spaces to bike parking on street, which has been successfully implemented on Grove Street in front of the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library.

Advocates said they have been discussing the issue with the agency for over two years and they've been given assurances that the MTA will not allow a decrease in available bicycle parking citywide. SFBC Executive Director Leah Shahum agreed with True that more innovative parking like bicycle corrals in vehicle spaces is where they would like to focus.

"On-street corrals are the prize," said Shahum, who also noted that cleaning up clutter from sidewalks was important for her group and for pedestrian advocates. "One of the sub goals is to remove clutter from the sidewalk.  There's a goal of having more efficient bicycle parking and better parking management, but in terms of the clutter challenge, I think there's not enough consideration to the ramifications on bike parking in the city."   

She also said businesses were anxious to convert the vehicle parking spaces in front of their stores to bicycle parking to target their bicycle-riding patrons and maximize the number of customers that could park in the space. "Over a dozen businesses have expressed interest in removing the car space and replacing it with bicycle corrals," she said.

I have to admit: The thought of filming a control room designed to move vehicles more efficiently didn't excite me at first. But once I met Senior Transportation Engineer Bill Shao and the friendly staff at Los Angeles' Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control (ATSAC), I was full of curiosity.

Developed to help direct traffic during the 1984 Olympics, ATSAC has grown to monitor and control over 3,000 of L.A.'s 4,100 signalized intersections, some of them incredibly complex. ATSAC is one of the only such systems in the country that is publicly owned, and the technology is so advanced that even on its busiest days the control room only requires a few people to run it.

I'm told there are regular group tours of the facility. Next time you visit LA I recommend checking it out.

A Sunday Stroll on International Boulevard, Flickr photo by madpai

I live on Mission Street, a few blocks south of Cesar Chavez, on the side of the street that the Post Office includes in its Bernal Heights boundary.  If I tell people I live in Bernal Heights, most assume I'm up on Cortland Street in the commercial center of Bernal Heights, a fifteen minute walk.  If I say Mission, they assume the area north of Cesar Chavez between 24th Street and 14th Street, a 10 to 20 minute walk.  No one knows what I mean if I say Precita Valley.  Inevitably, I just say I live across the street from the bar El Rio and most people know exactly where I am.

Berkeley landscape architecture graduate student Robert Lemon was recently awarded the Landscape Architecture Foundation's Dangermond Fellowship to examine questions of neighborhood identity in the Oakland districts of Fruitvale, West Oakland, and Chinatown. He's hoping the information he gathers will inform city planners and politicians not only about how members of a community define themselves, but ways the city can improve the neighborhood according to those geographic and cultural identities.

Mapping Oakland is based on previous experience Lemon had as a planner in Columbus, Ohio, and research he did for a Berkeley class on the relocation of the I-880 in West Oakland after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed a section of it. 

Lemon has completed most of the survey work he intends to collect and is now filtering through the data for patterns, which he expects will vary by demographic and cultural subsets.  Lemon and a Berkeley counterpart will create GIS maps to give a visual representation to the dynamics of those neighborhoods.  He explained that three respondents will have three different perspectives on the boundaries of a neighborhood and, using GIS, he will map the errors of disagreement among all respondents.  If a block within a neighborhood is repeatedly excluded from the boundaries, he wants to know which that is and why it is defined the way it is.

Shopping in Oakland Chinatown, Flickr photo by Old Jingleballicks

"The reason we study what makes humans interesting is because they never think the way you assume they will," he said.

In Fruitvale, for instance, Lemon said that most of his respondents were Mexican immigrants who identify the boundaries of their neighborhood by referring to two streets, Fruitvale Avenue and International Boulevard.  Respondents south of Fruitvale Avenue identify their neighborhood as the area southeast of Fruitvale and International, while respondents north of Fruitvale Avenue said that their neighborhood was to the northeast of both streets.  None of the respondents to his surveys consider BART's Fruitvale transit village to be "Fruitvale" (Lemon did not survey residents of the transit village, who he said might define their neighborhood much differently).

In West Oakland, preliminary data show that many residents of the section of the neighborhood to the west of Mandela Parkway who were previously circumscribed by the elevated freeway still consider their neighborhood to be the "real" West Oakland, despite twenty years without a physical boundary separating them from their neighbors to the east. 

In addition to the maps, Lemon expects to analyze a number of other important signifiers that inform neighborhoods.  As a trained planner and human geographer, he is very interested in how residents in various neighborhoods experience public space, and thus his survey questions seek to discover why, for instance, public parks in West Oakland are not often used as social spaces by residents there (the general feeling is they are unsafe, other meeting places on streets and near businesses), or why Chinatown residents prefer busy sidewalks and socializing on the street over meeting in parks (cultural traditions and nostalgia from busy cities in China, traditional dance and ritual performed on hard, even surfaces, not on grass). 

The results of Lemon's surveys will be compiled this year and presented at a September conference of the American Society of Landscape Architects, though he said he expected a future Berkeley graduate student will perform a similar study in a few years to track changes in the neighborhoods.  The data for the survey is not meant to be prescriptive, though the planner in him had a hard time halting at analysis. 

In Oakland Chinatown, he said that most respondents liked the crowded conditions on the sidewalks, which they said reminded them of home, and didn't think widening the sidewalks was a priority.  Lemon suggested that Oakland could widen the sidewalks, taking up some or all of one of the underutilized vehicle lanes, then design in physical elements to the sidewalk that would re-create a slowing effect.  He suggested that the City of Oakland could grant permits that allow vendors to move their wares further into the widened sidewalks and could create sitting areas and planters that would break up the newly enlarged area to encourage and enrich the social activities that currently occur there.

Businesses and residents of Oakland Chinatown had previously banded together to use federal and state grants to redefine several pedestrian and streetscape features along four blocks there, including stylized crosswalks, signage, and pedestrian wayfinding.  A short history of that project can be found here.

Like efforts in Los Angeles to define and map neighborhoods, Lemon said there is often disagreement over what exactly a neighborhood is.  After City Homestead, a West Oakland blog, wrote about Mapping Oakland and readers began to compare notes online, they discovered there was some disagreement about what constituted West Oakland.  Some were quite upset when their friends and neighbors disagreed with their own neighborhood boundaries. 

"People aren't happy when their neighbors don't agree with the boundaries of the neighborhood," said Lemon.  "It's some psychological issue there; we don't want to be the one that is different." 

Lemon said some of the survey respondents, especially among those were were white and had completed graduate eduction, were concerned that he didn't include maps with the survey questions.  He heard comments such as "I wish it had a map so I could look at my boundaries," or " I had to go get a map" to compete the surveys.  Others added comments like, "I hope I got all the answers right," or "Now you can tell me how wrong my perceptions are."

"There's no right or wrong with people's perceptions," said Lemon.  "But we as policy makers and designers want to understand how people use space."

Though new surveys won't make it into the current study, interested readers can take the survey here for inclusion in later work.

Who would have thought that one of the best Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems in the U.S. would be in its most crowded, congested, sprawling city? Well check this out. It's really fabulous.

In October 2005, the Los Angeles County Metro Authority (or Metro) debuted a new 14-mile BRT system in the San Fernando Valley using a former rail right-of-way. Unlike many "rapid" bus transit systems in the U.S., the Orange Line is true BRT - it features a dedicated roadway that cars may not enter, has a pre-board payment system so buses load quickly and efficiently, and uses handsome, articulated buses to transport passengers fast - sometimes at speeds approaching 55 mph! The roadway is landscaped so ornately you could almost call it a bus greenway.

But that's not all. The corridor also boasts a world class bike and pedestrian path which runs adjacent to the BRT route for nearly its entire length, giving users numerous multi-modal options. Each station has bike amenities, including bike lockers and racks, and all the buses feature racks on the front that accommodate up to three bikes.

Perhaps the biggest problem is its soaring success: ridership numbers have some calling for the BRT to be converted to rail, and Metro is exploring ways to move more passengers, including buying longer buses. Plus: expansion plans are underway. Whatever way you slice it, this is truly a hit with Angelenos. A formerly 81 minute trip now takes 44-52 minutes - over an hour in round-trip savings - making a bona fide impact in the lives of commuters.

In Los Angeles, the bill would have an amazing impact on transportation planning if it were to become law.  Immediately the city would be forced to think of building transit-oriented development without the minimum two car spaces for every residential unit, or setting aside part of its parking fees for bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure. 

However, getting this legislation passed and signed is going to be a heavy lift.  Despite the many positive impacts that parking reform would have for the transportation network and environment by reducing V.M.T., there are bound to be a lot of pro-automobile forces pushing back against the legislation and so far there has been almost sign of a campaign promoting it.  As a matter of fact, the only place I found this legislation mentioned was Infosnack, a blog originating out of Washington, D.C.  In other words, seeing this legislation passed into law may be a heavy lift; but then most things worth doing are.

Highlights of the point system include (and clearly someone has been reading Don Shoup):

• 20 points - Eliminate minimum parking requirements citywide or within the unincorporated county
• 10 points - Eliminate minimum parking requirements for projects in transit intensive areas.
• 10 points - Adopt an ordinance to set on-street parking meter and public parking lot and garage rates to achieve an 85% target occupancy rate during hours when adjacent businesses are open or employ demand-responsive rates that vary throughout the day to achieve an 85% target occupancy rate.
• 10 points - Remove or increase allowable density limits and floor area ratios (FAR), allowing infill development on existing parking lots.
  

These "boneshakers" in 1875 were superceded a decade and a half later by air-filled rubber tubes. With that new technology, bicyclists led the Good Roads Movement in the 1890s, demonstrating in the thousands for asphalt!

By the 1905, patterns of urban traffic were still being developed. Check out this incredible video of a ride down Market Street in 1905 to see how chaotic and multifarious were the uses of the street space. Lanes and signals? I don't think so! The story "progresses" through the 20th century until we have our auto-centric, "level of service"-dominated, highway engineer-shaped street systems. Many of us are urgently trying to reshape and repurpose these remaining urban commons to other ends than merely housing and moving private automobiles. Some of us are cycling, some are gardening, others are thinking artistically about the redesign of intersections, sidewalks and the roads themselves. My previous posts about the new sidewalk gardening efforts in the Mission garnered some sharp criticisms, emphasizing that these gardens should be coming at the expense of the cars and parking rather than the pedestrians, a point with which I totally agree. Still, I'm glad to see neighbors coming together to start the process of reshaping our shared environment.

In my journey to Belem, I was surprised to encounter a street system that is in some ways normal, modern and even superior to ours, and in other ways, demonstrative of a society that has put a lot less effort into maintenance and making everything accessible. You would simply not be able to get around Belem in a wheelchair. There are no curb-cuts at any crosswalk. Instead, you face a moat-like situation. At most intersections where curb meets street, a small canyon has opened up because the endless tropical rains have dug sinkholes. Different kinds of foliage are reclaiming these spots, and often the 2-10 foot depth combined with a 1-3 foot width is quite intimidating to pedestrians, who must find a way to step or leap over the abyss.

A typical street corner in Belem, Brazil, Jan. 2009.

The ubiquitous rains erode the streets along every curb in Belem, Brazil.

The citizens of Belem aren't shy about pushing the city for improvements. Here the neighbors were demanding a new traffic signal:

                      The neighbors want a signal to calm the local traffic in Belem, Brazil.

On the other hand, Belem (a city of 1.5 million) has spent significant resources on a system of dedicated ciclovias, or bikeways, that grace the center of 6-lane boulevards, separted by fences and horticultural medians. The citizens of the area are avid cyclists, and it was due to hundreds of casualties from car-bike accidents that the local government finally ponied up and built this system of bikeways, which are in steady use day and night.

A separated Ciclovia in a 6-lane boulevard in Belem, Brazil.

After a five-legged trip home (Belem-Rio-Sao Paolo-Miami-Denver-SF) I flew to Los Angeles, the land of freeways and endless street grids, rented a car (a Sebring Convertible! were they trying to say I was having a mid-life crisis?) and promptly got stuck in a 2 hour traffic crawl from Santa Monica to Downtown via city streets (the freeways were blocked too, but locals later told me I'd have done better crawling on the freeway than on city streets). After making my way to the Los Angeles EcoVillage, where I was a guest, I had a much better experience, cycling and walking around their mid-town neighborhood. Being a pedestrian in Los Angeles is not easy though. Unlike San Francisco where I feel I can cross any street any time, in Los Angeles the streets really are always full of traffic, and crossing is difficult without the help of signals and crosswalks. Still, I enjoyed walking around and grabbed this shot of a typical neighborhood scene near where I was staying. The famous Hollywood sign is on the hill in the distance.

Los Angeles, once a great place for trains, soon to be again!

I was pretty sure that New York City had San Francisco beat for this year's Park(ing) Day, what, with the children's reading hour and the on-street gymnasium in Brooklyn; Staten Island and Queens getting in on the act; and German tourists frolicking on the sod in front of the MoMA (all captured by StreetFilms, of course). Then I saw photos of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome admiring Rebar Group's Parkcycle -- literally, a pedal-powered park on wheels -- and I realized that we had been foiled again. Back to the drawing board New York City Park(ing) fans. We've got 12 months to come up with something better than this...

Thanks all for reading and commenting on our non-motorized honeymoon travel series (see parts 1, 2, 3 and 4). Below is a table Susan put together to briefly summarize some of our observations on the cities we visited.

For those of you who want some more U.S. transit-oriented travel stories, check out Twin City Sidewalks' visits to Chicago and Washington, Babylon, L.I., Savannah, Ga. and Durham, N.C., and also visit Dave KCMO, who liveblogged his 8,789 miles on Amtrak and VIA Rail Canada.

San Francisco

Fully restored streetcars, cable cars, buses with and without pantographs, submerged and at-grade light rail, a regional subway and two commuter rail lines all make for a dizzying array of often very scenic public transportation. (Although, with a $5 fare, the cable cars seem more like a tourist draw and less like a form of public transit.) But even in a city that like New York derives much of its appeal from having a walkable, pre-automobile environment, we read about how pro-traffic forces are trying to reshape the city to accommodate more cars. There's apparently a big vote coming up in November on whether to continue transit-first policies or build a lot of parking garages (which would seem to counteract the $159 million San Francisco just won for congestion pricing).

Los Angeles

Making fun of Los Angeles car dependency was already a cliche decades ago. We didn't want to fall into that trap. We arrived in L.A. with open minds, hoping that it just might pleasantly surprise us. It did and it didn't.

L.A.'s Amtrak station is spectacular, way better than ours (not that that says anything). High ceilings, wide corridors and open concourses with a warm, inviting feeling and soft armchairs for waiting. (Wikipedia's photo does it justice.) It was also busier than we expected, serving morning commuters when we arrived but still busy in the afternoon. It's Amtrak's fifth busiest station (scroll).

Then we exited the station and found ourselves feeling like second class citizens walking with our luggage along wide, busy boulevards and buildings that were distant from one another. Pedestrians are actually forbidden from crossing the street right in front of the station, so we had to take some kind of circuitous route to get back to the station, crossing extra streets unnecessarily. Because of a little bit of a snafu that I'll describe tomorrow, we spent less time in L.A. than we had planned: just five hours. We spent most of it struggling with a crossword puzzle outside a Starbucks three blocks from Union Station.

New Orleans

New Orleans is recovering from Katrina. We stayed across the street from a monument to General Robert E. Lee in the Central Business District, three blocks from Amtrak. This area, like the French Quarter, was never flooded and the Quarter was bustling as always on the weekend we were there. Most of the many cyclists we saw in New Orleans were riding one-speed coaster bikes, which is a trend we didn't see anywhere else. There was also a fair proportion of trikes used to haul stuff. But the transportation highlight was definitely the streetcars, which have friendly drivers, friendly fellow passengers, and tall, wide windows that allow you to see the great panorama before you. Their grassy right-of-way does its little part at reducing the portion of our country paved with the impervious surfaces like asphalt, which are so harmful to drinking water supplies. The oldest and longest streetcar line in NOLA, along St. Charles Avenue, is now running as a short downtown shuttle until the rest of the line can be put back into service. Because I love them so much: two more photos of New Orleans streetcars below the jump.

A grassy median forms the bed of the New Orleans streetcars' right-of-way in some places.

Canal Street streetcar, at the intersection where Carondelet becomes Bourbon.

My wife and I were married last month in Brooklyn. For our honeymoon, we wanted to see as many great American cities as we could. In 19 days of travel, we visited Chicago, Seattle, Portland (Ore.), San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Orleans (and also stopped briefly in Cleveland, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Houston, Atlanta, Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia).

How could two people as obsessed as we are with minimizing our transportation carbon footprints possibly justify taking so many flights for leisure travel? We didn't take any flights. We also didn't rent any cars or even set foot in a single taxi. We learned that thanks to the magic of transit-oriented hotel development (often inadvertent), it is entirely possible to travel this great country from sea to shining sea without any of those carbon-belching modes of travel -- and still have a fantastic time.

Our intercity travel consisted of 33 miles on Metro-North (because we couldn't allow ourselves to depart for such a historic trip from Penn Station), 48 miles on CalTrain, and 7,840 miles on our underfunded national railroad, Amtrak. To travel about in town, we rented bikes in Portland but mostly used an amazing variety of light rail, bus and subway transportation, including trips on Chicago's El, Portland's TriMet light rail, San Francisco's Muni and BART and New Orleans' streetcars. All of which worked perfectly well for our purposes.

Despite the large number of transit providers, it was Amtrak that did the heavy lifting and made our vacation possible. Amtrak employees are painfully aware of the railroad's reputation as habitually late. They desperately wanted to provide an on-time, high quality service, but were demoralized when the trains ran late and frustrated because it was almost always for reasons beyond their control.

We took six Amtrak trains more or less through the entire length of their routes: The Lake Shore Limited, the Empire Builder, the Cascades, the Coast Starlight, the Sunset Limited and the Crescent. All of these trains left their departure stations on time to the minute. It wasn't until we got moving that delays occured, and these were caused by chronic underinvestment in rail infrastructure that has left many lines with just a single track. The lines are owned by freight railroads, which Amtrak pays for the rights use. The freight railroads are in increasingly intense competition with one another for customers, and have a habit of having passenger trains wait at a siding while freight trains roll through. Despite this, the Empire Builder managed to travel 2,206 miles from Chicago to Seattle and still arrive 38 minutes ahead of schedule. If our national government invested in rail improvements just a fraction of the billions of dollars it spends annually on highway maintenance and widening, Amtrak would run on time and more people would ride it.

As gasoline prices have gone up and congestion at airports has increased, Amtrak has had record ridership for multiple years in a row, despite being starved by the Bush administration, which wanted to disband the railroad, and the Republican-led Congress. Many threats remain. On the day we rode rode the Sunset Limited across Texas, a Republican congressman from Texas introduced legislation that would have eliminated the Sunset Limited. (It was defeated with the help of our region's congressional delegation by a vote of 299-130.)

But the trains are still running and we had the time of our lives on this trip. Even if its running late, and even if they've replaced the chefs in the dining car with microwave ovens, there remains something inherently enjoyable and relaxing about riding on a train across vast distances. You have time to yourself to sit and watch the world roll by, completely stress free, and sleeping in a real honest-to-God bed while rolling along through the undulating darkness is just incomparable to anything else experienced in travel. Now with the addition of laptop computers, you can watch a DVD or play tetris to pass the time, but I prefer to leave the screen off and look out the window.

This is the first part of a five-part series on our travels to run this week. Parts two and three will focus on the cities we visited, with brief updates on their struggles for livable streets. Part four will describe in greater detail the trains we rode and the sights we saw. Part five will compare the cities to one another in terms of livable streets, pedestrian-friendly development and intermodal transportation.

The great American poet Robert Hunter has written that he and the other members of the Grateful Dead had the greatest time of their lives aboard a train across Canada that carried themselves, Janice Joplin, The Band and many other musicians. That's high praise from people who spent their lives rocking out. The trip inspired Hunter to write some lines that became the motto for our honeymoon:

No big hurry
What do you say
Might as well travel
The elegant way

UPDATE: Here are the other entries in this series:

• Part 2: Chicago, Seattle, Portland
• Part 3: San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans
• Part 4: The Trains
• Part 5: Wrap-Up

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece this weekend by Conor Dougherty on the municipal move toward charging more for parking. It's available online to paid subscribers only, but here's a taste:

As anyone who has ever circled the block for a marginally better spot knows, parking is an American obsession. It occasionally boils over into rage, or worse. Since the parking meter was first introduced 70 years ago, in Oklahoma City, the field has been dominated by two simple maxims: Cities can never have too much parking, and it can never be cheap enough.

Now a small but vocal band of economists, city planners and entrepreneurs is shaking that up, promoting ideas like free-market pricing at meters and letting developers, rather than the cities, dictate the supply of off-street parking. Seattle is doing away with free street parking in a neighborhood just north of downtown. London has meters that go as high as $10 an hour, while San Francisco has been trying out a system that monitors usage in real time, allowing the city to price spots to match demand. (A recent tally there showed that one meter near AT&T Park brings in around $4,500 a year, while another meter about a mile away takes in less than $10.) Gainesville, Fla., has capped the number of parking spots that can be added to new buildings; Cambridge, Mass., works with companies to reduce off-street parking.

Economists have long made the case that the solution to the parking crunch many cities face lies not in more free or cheap parking but in higher prices. The idea is that higher prices result in a greater churn -- and get more people on buses and subways -- which leads to more open spaces. But this notion has often run up against city planners and retailers arguing that cheap and plentiful parking results in more commerce and, thus, higher sales taxes and a vibrant economy.

The article goes on to note the influence of UCLA professor Donald Shoup's 2005 book, "The High Cost of Free Parking." Shoup, who will be in New York City meeting with civic leaders in early March at the invitation of Transportation Alternatives, argues that "ubiquitous free parking helps explain why our cities sprawl on a scale fit more for cars than for people, and why American motor vehicles now consume one-eighth of the world's total oil production."

In Los Angeles, where free or cheap parking has been as much a part of the landscape as palm trees, market forces are already pushing parking prices higher, even without the intervention of planners. And some people aren't happy about it.

Nor are they all happy in Seattle, where the WSJ found one woman who sounded unlikely to be forced out of her car at any price:

"It's just frustrating that they keep taking free parking away," says Terry Peterson, a grants and contracts administrator at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Ms. Peterson has a 15-minute commute to her office, where she parks in one of the area's free spots.

In spring, the city plans to put in new meters that will cost around $7 a day on average, the result of a recent study that found that most on-street parking in the neighborhood has an occupancy rate of at least 90%. She says she'll probably end up parking at a private lot, which runs about $1,800 a year.

Whatever the market will bear.

Photo: Yukon White Light on Flickr