Cities, Counties, and Countries

Bike to Work Day is underway in Alameda County, and this year's riders already broke last year's record by 12.3 percent.

As early as this September, Oakland residents won’t have to look west with parklet envy anymore.

I’ve been bicycling in San Francisco since the late 1970s so I vividly remember when almost all bicyclists could recognize each other on the streets of the city. There really weren’t that many of us even as recently as the beginning of the 1990s, just two decades ago. We’ve come a long way, and one of the less recognized aspects of this bicycling boom has been the incredible expansion of bike rentals and bicycling tourism.

In Philadelphia, your water bill used to be based only on your water consumption, as in most cities. Now, under the city’s Green City, Clean Waters initiative, your bill is a more accurate reflection of your water footprint, including the amount it costs the city to manage stormwater runoff from your property. This has been a hard pill to swallow for owners of parking lots and other entities that spread a large swath of asphalt on the city.

There's a place just outside Houston where the vinyl siding and attached garages thin out and recede into grasslands.

San Mateo County's first Streets Alive event may have had bad luck with the weather last April, but many Peninsula cities are eager to get another shot at celebrating car-free streets with an even bigger event in 2011.

Golden Gate Bridge directors today tabled their staff’s surprise proposal for a 10 mph speed limit for bicycles after outraged cycling advocates denounced the plan as everything from a “half-baked idea” to a “solution in search of a problem.”

Our daily urban lives shape our imaginations in so many ways. Few things box us in like our everyday transit options, and the patterns of traffic that shape our sense of public space. These patterns themselves are historical of course. A quick look back at the famous Market Street film shot a few days before the 1906 earthquake shows how chaotic and unpredictable the flow of traffic was when San Francisco's main artery hadn't yet been paved and standardized. Similarly, leaving the U.S. and visiting other countries provides a fantastic opportunity to experience other assumptions and possibilities for urban space, and surprisingly perhaps, a different range of vehicles.

Nobody would accuse the Houston region of lacking auto infrastructure. Now local bicycling and pedestrian advocates are fighting to protect their tiny slice of the pie. They're anxiously awaiting a final decision tomorrow about a pro-road money grab by the Houston-Galveston Area's Transportation Policy Council.