Bike Infrastructure ← The Urban Country ← Page 3

Bicycle Infrastructure Pessimism in North America 8

Mar

2011

Separated bike lane in China (2010). Photo by James D. Schwartz / The Urban Country Only in countries without an established bicycle culture would you have bicycling advocates who would lobby *against* bicycle infrastructure because they feel our culture is so dismissive of bicycles as a legitimate means of transportation that it’s impossible for the ...

Online Guide For Safe Bicycle Facilities 4

Mar

2011

Last week at the National Bike Summit in Washington DC, the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) released its new online Urban Bikeway Design Guide. The bikeway design guide is an online resource providing cities with solutions to create complete streets that provide enhanced safety for bicyclists. The design guide was unveiled by NYC ...

Snow Traffic-Calming Measures 6

Mar

2011

Photos by James D. Schwartz / The Urban Country Sometimes the best traffic engineering ideas are the ones that appear naturally. While visiting a client yesterday, I encountered this pile of snow that was blocking the entire right lane of this street (as you can see in the photo above). The only traffic calming measure ...

McGill’s Bicycle Ban & Pedestrian Fear 31

Feb

2011

Photo “Message to McGill University cyclists” courtesy of Polly Peterson Trying to make sense of the phenomenon of pedestrians’ fear of bicycles in North America. In May 2010, McGill University in downtown Montreal became a car-free pedestrian-only zone. The eradication of automobiles on the school campus was a great step forward, but like most progress ...

Tensions Escalating in New York City 7

Feb

2011

Photo by James D. Schwartz / The Urban Country The City of New York has had tremendous success in the last 4 years of building a network of bicycle infrastructure to improve safety and comfort for New Yorkers to use bicycles as transportation. These policies, spearheaded by NYC Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and ...

NYC Snowstorm Aftermath, Deliveryman Hit-and-Run 4

Feb

2011

All Photos by James D. Schwartz / The Urban Country This past weekend I took a trip down to New York City with a few friends. More than a foot of snow was dumped down on the city the day before our arrival. Given that we are now in the middle of a similar snowstorm ...

Ghettoize Me, Please 11

Jan

2011

All Photos by Marc van Woudenberg / Amsterdamize In an article in yesterday’s Ottawa Citizen entitled “We’re not all hard-core cyclists”, writer Kate Jaimet explains that a proposal to invest in physically separated bicycle infrastructure in Ottawa is at risk of being quashed by a group of vehicular “hard-core” cyclists. Vehicular cyclists are against bicycle ...

Bicycle Infrastructure Ignorance 57

Jan

2011

Photo of Vancouver’s Hornby St Bike Lanes courtesy of Paul Krueger An article in the Toronto Star newspaper yesterday brought to light a plan to bring a modest segregated bicycle network in Toronto’s downtown core. This news would have been significant even with Toronto’s previous mayor, the “bike-friendly” David Miller. What makes this news drastically ...

Dreaming of Segregated Bicycle Facilities 6

Dec

2010

Photo by James D. Schwartz / The Urban Country In bike-unfriendly cities all over the world, politicians slap some paint down on the streets to carve out some space for bicycles so they can claim “mission accomplished” – as if painted bike lanes are the “be-all end-all” answer to urban bicycling. Unfortunately, most of these ...

Montreal Bicycle Ridership Up 35-40% 22

Dec

2010

Photo courtesy of zmtomako / Flickr A new study finds that bicycling is on the rise in Montreal. In 2010, the city experienced a 35-40% growth in ridership over its 2008 bicycle ridership counts. This is an encouraging sign that the city’s significant infrastructure investments and bike sharing scheme have contributed to an increase in ...