Mathew Katz

The city will soon start a multi-million dollar overhaul of the Brooklyn Bridge, and while they're adding more space for cars, they're not doing anything about the havoc on the shared cyclist-pedestrian walkway.

Bike Pittsburgh has posted some great, sortable data about how commuters get to work in major American cities, drawn from a Census Bureau report. As you'd expect, New York comes in as the city where the least amount of people commute solo by car -- only 23.3 percent, followed by 37.2 percent in Washington, D.C. and 38.4 percent in San Francisco. Wichita, Kansas ranks as the place with the highest percentage of drivers: 85.1 percent of commuters use a car to get to work. The unfortunate national median for commuting by car is 74.15 percent.

If the American Dream of the Baby Boomers was all about being able to have a car and a house in suburbia, the new American Dream is having the choice between living in drivable suburban places and walkable urban ones.

It's probably a good sign that New York Magazine just published "The Everything Guide to the Bike Commute." When New York tackles a topic, it means it's becoming more mainstream for their own particularly affluent slice of the city's population. And the more people safely taking sustainable, clean forms of transportation to work, the better.

The Walk21 Conference starts tomorrow, and in addition to some amazing workshops, there's also a chance to meet and hear from leaders in the global push to make cities more livable.

The Walk21 Conference is coming up in a few days, and there's no shortage of interesting sessions to attend. One of the great parts of the conference is that it tackles issues shared by all cities, and with participants coming in from around the world, it'll be a good chance to talk about what works, what doesn't, and combine that into urban planning strategies that can be exported worldwide.

Next week, the Department of Transportation will host the tenth annual Walk21 Conference, an international conference devoted to walking, and achieving livable, sustainable cities. The conference will take place next Wednesday to Friday at NYU, and you can register for it here. The conference began in London back in 2000, and has been featured in a different major city ever since.

The Pulaski Bridge's walkway has seen more cyclists use it recently, but there's not enough space for both cyclists and pedestrians to use it safely and effectively.