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An Unfinished Freeway Revolt: Car-Free Vancouver Day
I’m just back from a fantastic five-day visit to Vancouver to help celebrate and publicly ponder Car-Free Vancouver Day. The event started six years ago along East Vancouver’s Commercial Drive (“the Drive” as it is often called there). It has grown to encompass five separate neighborhood street closures, one being the very wide 4- to 6-lane Main Street where it is closed for about 17 blocks. To San Franciscans the event has a certain familiarity, combining something of our venerable tradition of street fairs with the newer excitement of “Sunday Streets.” But unlike the well-established and highly commercial street fairs, or the city-sponsored Sunday Streets, Car-Free Vancouver Day is a product of grassroots organizing, with hundreds of volunteers working hard for months to produce an exciting day of urban reinhabitation.
June 22, 2010
San Francisco May Get Its First Green Bike Lane on Fell Street
San Francisco would get its first green bike lane under a new MTA proposal (PDF) to fix the troubled intersection of Divisadero and Fell streets near the entrance to the Arco station, where drivers queuing up to get gas obstruct the bike lane and block the sidewalk, creating hazardous conditions for people who ride bikes and walk.
March 19, 2010
Streetscast: Google Engineer Scott Shawcroft Explains Google’s Bike Map
The wait for bicycle directions on Google Maps has finally ended as the company announced a beta version of its new bicycle directions feature at the League of American Bicyclists National Bike Summit in Washington, D.C. this morning. The new mapping software includes an elegant overlay of bicycle routes based on priority bicycle streets and paths in the 150 cities where Google is debuting the service.
March 10, 2010
Eyes on the Street: Market Street Bike Lane Puts the Squeeze on Cyclists
Cyclists traveling inbound on Market Street are being squeezed into an unnecessarily narrow bike lane as a result of safe-hit posts installed to enforce the new required right turn at 10th Street. The posts, put in place by the MTA to the left of the existing bike and right-turn-only lanes, have shaved what was already a skinny passage for cyclists.
February 24, 2010
Delhi Turns to Bike Lanes to Tame World’s Most Dangerous Traffic
Space is at a premium on Delhi’s streets. Photo: DaveBleasdale/Flickr Delhi, home to over 12 million people and the seat of India’s national government, is widely considered to have the most dangerous traffic in the world. As the Guardian wrote recently, traffic safety in Delhi basically consists of “good horns, good brakes, good luck.” Nationally, … Continued
January 26, 2010
Eyes on the Street: A New Sidewalk Emerges on Valencia Street
Business owners on one block of Valencia Street can see the light at the end of the tunnel after months of painful construction that made their stores less accessible to customers. Street trees, bicycle racks and pedestrian-scale lighting haven't arrived yet, but between 16th and 17th Streets, a sparkling new widened sidewalk is beckoning shoppers and diners back even before DPW crews have finished resurfacing it.
January 6, 2010
Eyes on the Street: Work on Clipper Street Bike Lane Starts
DPT crews have begun striping a new bike lane on Clipper Street between Douglass Street and Portola Drive. Streetsblog tipster Nick sent us these photos of the work, which is expected to take a week to complete, according to Damon Curtis of the MTA's bike program. Nick points out that many residents on Clipper Street support the bike lane, part of a traffic calming project in the Bike Plan.
December 18, 2009
Hopenhagen or Carbonhagen, We’ll Still be Cycling Regardless
I caught Mikael Colville-Andersen's inspiring talk on urban cycling from the Copenhagen context at San Francisco's SPUR on the last Friday of October. I suggested we could do an interview when I came to Copenhagen in December and he graciously agreed, stepping outside into the drizzling snow at a December 10 awards ceremony he was hosting. (The title of this post is a quote from him when he was on stage at the ceremony, and is a new tag line on his blog too.) They were handing out prizes for the best new designs for the next generation of Copenhagen's bikeshare program. He is well known for his blogging at Copenhagenize and Copenhagen Cycling Chic. The photos throughout were taken by me in Copenhagen during the last couple of weeks there.
December 17, 2009
SF Gets First Protected Bike Lane! Drivers Already Violating It
DPT crews installed San Francisco's first physically separated bike lane this morning on a westbound stretch of an existing bike lane on Market Street between 9th and 10th, and before workers had even finished putting in the final safe-hit post, some drivers began disrespecting it, rolling into the lane, causing bicyclists to merge into auto traffic.
December 3, 2009
Paint-Happy MTA Crews Prepare for Physically Separated Market St Lane
Though it might sound incredible to San Franciscans who have followed bicycle issues for the past three years, not only are more bicycle infrastructure improvements coming, they might be better than anyone imagined. Streetsblog has learned that in addition to the lanes striped today on Mississippi and Howard and seven more bike lanes expected in the next few weeks, the MTA will install a separated bike lane on Market Street.
December 2, 2009