Streetfilms teamed up with the Public Policy Institute at AARP to bring you a look at how Arlington, Virginia plans for its senior population using transit-oriented development (TOD).  Arlington has been practicing TOD since the late 1970s, when Washington’s Metrorail first began service there, and it’s proved very effective in accommodating the population growth of this inner suburb.

TOD helps older adults maintain their independence by providing good pedestrian access to a variety of public transit options, entertainment and recreation, and basic services such as shopping and health care.  As Rodney Harrell, senior strategic policy advisor at AARP’s Public Policy Institute points out, “When you plan for older adults, you plan for the entire community.”

Learn more about the Public Policy Institute’s Livable Communities initiatives.

Over the last decade, Medellín has worked hard to change its image. The local government is investing in education and social programs, and the city recognizes the importance of providing an integrated public transportation system as the backbone of these projects.

The most recent transportation bill, passed in 2005 by a Republican Congress and Republican president, continued to invest in safer biking and walking. As negotiations over a new bill grind on, however, these programs are in jeopardy. The Senate has passed a bill that by and large preserves the status quo, but the House of Representatives has tried to eliminate bike and pedestrian programs.

Last week more than 800 people from all over the country came to Washington for the National Bike Summit. On the Hill, they urged the House to follow the lead of Wisconsin Republican Tom Petri, who introduced an amendment to restore dedicated funding for bike and pedestrian programs. We caught up with Petri and Bike Summit participants to hear how bike/ped programs have made a difference in their hometowns. Here’s what they told us.

The Netherlands is widely recognized for having the highest cycling rates in the world. What’s not so well known is that the Dutch don’t bike so much because cycling is in their DNA. They do it because after the country started down the path toward car dependence, they made a conscious decision to change course. After many decades of deliberate policy to invest in cycling as a mode of transportation, the Netherlands has the most advanced bike infrastructure you’ll ever see.

Recenty Streetfilms joined a group of city leaders from Chicago, Washington, DC and Miami on a study tour of the Netherlands, through the Bikes Belong Foundation’s Bicycling Design Best Practices Program. The program shows American transportation professionals and policy makers real life examples of what it looks like to invest in cost-effective bicycle facilities. This video takes you on a tour of the incredibly well thought out street designs in the Netherlands. You’ll see the infrastructure, hear from the experts on the ground, and watch the tour participants react and imagine how they might implement similar designs in American cities.

After sponsoring two Streetfilms of the first two CicLAvias, Los Angeles’ version of the open streets festival based on Bogota’s Ciclovia, Los Angeles Streetsblog faced a dilemma: How can we continue to cover the event that draws over a hundred thousand Angelenos to the streets?  The Answer: Make a Streetfilm that was accessible to Southern California’s large Spanish-speaking population.

¡Viva CicLAvia! consists of two parts.  First, narrator Mara Corina Arellano Colin explains the history and concept of Los Angeles’ amazing open streets party, including footage and photos from similar festivals in Bogota, Guadalajara, Mexico City, Brussels and Miami.  While the narration is a great explanation of the benefits and culture of CicLAvia, the soul of Social Impact Consulting’s efforts are the interviews with participants.

The next five minutes is a parade of Spanish speakers professing their love of CicLAvia.  Whether it’s the team from South Central’s Mendez Bike Shop, the traffic officer spreading his arms while explaining Viva CicLAvia, or Hollywood’s City Councilman Eric Garcetti; the broad smiles in the Southern California sun give a message in any language.  Giving people more chances to play in the sun is good for Los Angeles.

This Streetfilm marked another first for Streetfilms, a directly reader supported video.  L.A. Streetsblog asked its readers if they wanted a Spanish language film on CicLAvia, and when they said yes, the readers were challenged through a Kick Starter campaign to fund the film.  Needless to say, the readers came through.

“Cities for Cycling” is a project of the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) to document, promote and implement the world’s best bicycle transportation practices in American cities. As part of the Cities for Cycling program, bikeway design experts take their show on the road, using the streets of different U.S. cities as their classroom and the new NACTO bikeway design book as their guide.

“The NACTO Guide is a really important step for cities to say it is okay to be different than a rural area. We are not better… we are just different and we would like to apply these different principles,” says Chicago Commissioner of Transportation Gabe Klein.

Streetfilms brings you these highlights of the Chicago stop on the tour, where representatives from the transportation departments of NYC, Portland and San Francisco shared lessons from developing bike infrastructure in their hometowns.

Guadalajara, Mexico is showing how amazingly transformative a ciclovia-style road closure can be for its citizens. In seven years, their inaugural Sunday event Via RecreActiva has grown from just seven miles with 35,000 participants to 41 miles with 400,000 users every Sunday. It goes from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., and covers six municipalities.

The diversity of activities features traditional ciclovia staples like aerobic classes and music, but also some new wrinkles including free haircuts for children and a city that clearly knows how to hula hoop!

Another unique aspect of this story is that one of the forces behind the success of the Via RecreActiva is a civil association called Guadalajara 2020, a group of primarily made of  business owners, real estate people and entrepreneurs who envision Guadalajara to be a healthier, greener and more humane city.

That mission includes bringing better transit to the city, making it safer to walk & bike and create equality and empowerment among its people. Perhaps it is best put by Guadalajara 2020′s President, José Palacios Jiménez, who told us:

“…we would like to be able to remove the cars from the entire city. Because with all the information we manage to get, we are able to understand that the biggest problem of humanity are the cars.”

Guadalajara does feature  public spaces on par with the greatest in the world, but also faces many extraordinary challenges with horrible traffic and unsafe pedestrian environments on nearly every street.  It’s refreshing to see business folks not only speaking out and understanding the real solutions, but investing their funds to create an organization like Guadalajara 2020.

The corner of Smith Street and Sackett Street in Brooklyn had a problem. Drivers approaching the intersection from Sackett couldn’t get a clear view of Smith because of the parked cars blocking their line of sight. Crashes kept happening and local residents started pushing for safety improvements. After experimenting with a few options, NYC DOT arrived at this innovative response: New York’s first on-street bike parking facility.

By installing eight bike racks, DOT created a “daylighting” effect, improving visibility at the intersection. The bike parking is much less intrusive than parked cars and helps everyone at the intersection see everyone else. Oh yeah, and now there are a dozen new places to park bikes without taking away any space from Smith Street’s busy sidewalks.

For another look at on-street bike parking, check out Streetfilms’ 2008 tour of Portland, Oregon’s bike corrals.

In his campaign for mayor, Rahm Emanuel pledged to make Chicago a more bike-friendly city. And in office, he set his sights high, aiming to construct 100 miles of protected bike lanes in his first term.

His team wasted no time. Chicago DOT installed the city’s first protected bike lane on Kinzie Street before Emanuel’s first 30 days in office were over. Leading Emanuel’s DOT is former Washington, DC DOT Commissioner Gabe Klein, who clearly understands the connection between safe streets and the health of a city.

Last month Streetfilms traveled to Chicago to speak with the commissioner, ride on Kinzie Street, and bask in the city’s cycling excitement.

And one piece of local trivia. The Blommer Chocolate Store is right on the Kinzie Street protected bike lane and boy does it smell good. It figured prominently in my all-time favorite response to an interview question about biking.

Walking and bicycling in Guadalajara can be dangerous in many parts of the city, but there’s a big movement among many citizens to alter that. GDL en Bici is a group of wonderful citizens and bicycle advocates who have been organizing multiple weekly bike rides for years, and nothing is more impressive then their first Thursday of the month ride – the Paseo de Todos - which regularly churns out up to 5,000 riders to celebrate and demand safer cycling conditions.

People just have a lot of fun. You’ll see families, students, and older citizens heavily sprinkled throughout the critical mass. Drivers who usually rule the congested roads seem to mostly tolerate the inconvenience. The police largely ignore the whole thing. Helping matters is that each of the rides is theme-oreinted: one month it might be to celebrate Mexico’s Independence.  Another week it could be comic books. This month was particularly fun since it was all about celebrating the Day of the Dead!

Streetfilms would like to thank Guadalajara 2020 for making it possible to make the journey to document this wonderful event & sponsoring the film.  And to Gil Penalosa, Executive Director of 8-80 Cites, for organizing the details

In the Dutch city of Utrecht, kids start learning about traffic safety long before they prepare for a driver’s license. And they pick up a lot more than just “look both ways before you cross the street.”

The school curriculum includes regular field trips to the local “traffic garden.” The City of Utrecht has used this facility, a streetscape in miniature, to teach kids the rules of the road since the 1950s. Students take turns as cyclists, pedestrians and car drivers, learning how to take other types of street users into consideration. The hands-on experience navigating the traffic garden gives kids the skills and confidence to get around the city under their own power as soon as their early teens.

In many US cities, Departments of Transportation are thinking about how biking fits in as a viable mode of transportation.  In this second video from the Bikes Belong delegation to the Netherlands, Streetfilms was able to talk one-on-one with US Consul General, Julie A. Ruterbories.  This American in Amsterdam learned to use a bicycle to commute in Amsterdam. She also values how cycling not only helps make people healthier but in cities where biking is prevalent, it has a positive effect on the health of the city. “It is great to see societies embracing the greater good,” says Julie Ruterbories, in reference to Dutch culture mainstreaming cycling.

Groningen is the largest city in the northern region of the Netherlands. With 57 percent of all trips in the city made by bike, it has acquired the title “World Cycling City.” In Groningen, even the large multi-lane roads have been claimed for safe cycling.

At this intersection on the main ring road around Groningen, cyclists get their own green phase. When the bike signal says go, cyclists at any point in the junction can travel in any direction. Engineer Hillie Talens explains how it works in this short video, which kicks off a series of Streetfilms we made on a trip to the Netherlands with a delegation from Bikes Belong.

Three years ago Streetfilms brought you a comprehensive look at Bogotá, Colombia’s TransMilenio, the world’s most advanced Bus Rapid Transit system. TransMilenio changed the way Bogotá residents think about public transportation, becoming indispensable to the 1.7 million people who use the system daily. If anything, the bus network became a victim of its own success, handling more passengers and crowding than its planners anticipated. Today, ten years after TransMilenio launched, we revisit this groundbreaking transit system and examine how it must improve as it matures.

The first cable-stayed bridge of any kind in the state, it’s breathtaking, even to the people who have been riding it for years. It provides a safe, continuous crossing and offers up a glorious view of the downtown skyline (especially at sunset!). The sleek Hiawatha light rail line runs beneath it, and there are benches to sit on and take everything in.

Used by an average of 2,500 riders a day, peak use can hit 5,000 to 6,000 per day on some gorgeous summer weekends, according to Shaun Murphy of the Minneapolis Department of Public Works.

The bridge was named in honor of Minneapolis’ Martin Olav Sabo, a former U.S. Representative from the 5th District who helped secure much of the $5 million needed to build it. Thanks to the Bikes Belong Foundation for enabling us to feature this majestic piece of bike architecture and to show that investing is cycling and walking is well worth every penny for our communities.

“When we build very high quality bicycle infrastructure, besides protecting cyclists, it shows that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally as important to one in a $30,000 car,” said Peñalosa. And as mayor, he walked the walk, extending the network of protected bikeways to every community.

Now the investment in cycling infrastructure is paying off. After starting off with hardly any bike commuters, Bogota is pushing a five percent bike commute mode-share.

Nice Ride MN is a hit. The Twin Cities bike share recently celebrated its one year anniversary in June. And in July they started an expansion by adding more stations and bicycles to the network.

We talked with Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak about the decisions that went into getting Nice Ride MN off the ground:

You gotta go big or go home. You can’t put a few around. You’re hopping on that bike, it’s like a trapeze, you’re not gonna swing on that trapeze unless you know there’s another one to grab. You’re not gonna hop on that bike and cross town, unless you know there’s a place to go.

Thanks to the Bikes Belong Foundation we’re able to provide this short snapshot of the Nice Ride MN system, how it works, and where it’s headed.

Anyone who claims that bike-sharing is a European-style transportation innovation has clearly never set foot in Hangzhou, China. The 50,000-bike system in this southern China city of almost 7 million people (about 1.5 million people fewer than New York City) blows all other bike-shares off the map. As Bradley Schroeder of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy said, “I don’t think there is anywhere you can stand in Hangzhou for more than a minute or two where you wouldn’t have a Hangzhou Public Bike go past you.”

Hangzhou’s 2,050 bike-share stations are spaced less than a thousand feet from each other in the city center, and on an average day riders make 240,000 trips using the system. Its popularity and success have set a new standard for bike-sharing in Asia. And the city is far from finished. The Hangzhou Bicycle Company plans to expand the bike-share system to 175,000 bikes by 2020.