Commuting
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Bike to Work Day Open Thread
How was your ride to work today? Bike traffic on the Manhattan Bridge seemed heavier than usual. After I took a few pictures of the Sands Street bike path, I got onto the bridge approach with a platoon of about a dozen people on bikes. At the end of the bridge, an apple from the TA breakfast table really hit the spot. Later I overheard this snippet in the elevator: "It's like national ride-your-bike-to-work day."
May 21, 2010
Bike to Work Day Preview: Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer Rides Again
I think Al Roker's Brompton ride to victory last week pretty much sealed the deal: Bike to Work Day has never been bigger. In San Francisco, where they observed the occasion last week, bikes accounted for 75 percent of morning rush hour traffic on Market Street, and most of the legislative and executive branches of local government rode to work. Tomorrow in the nation's capital, Rep. Earl Blumenauer and several high-level federal officials will ring in Bike to Work Day at Freedom Plaza.
May 20, 2010
Rage-Free Rush Hour in Utrecht
From Infrastructurist by way of Buzzfeed comes this video of bike commuters in Utrecht. With a population of around 300,000, Utrecht is the fourth largest city in the Netherlands, and has a 33 percent bike mode share. According to the write-up accompanying the YouTube post, this intersection handles "no less than" 18,000 bicycles and 2,500 buses per day.
May 17, 2010
Al Roker Bikes to Victory in 2010 Commuter Race
This morning, the hosts of the Today Show played this segment for their 5.4 million viewers. It's this year's edition of Transportation Alternatives' annual Great Commuter Race, where cyclist, transit rider, and motorist vie to see who gets to work first. TA's Wiley Norvell emailed us to explain how the race made the transition to national TV:
May 14, 2010
Transit Check: Most New Yorkers Take Green Modes to Work
Everyone knows that public transit, not auto travel, is New York City’s transportation workhorse. Thus it was a little unsettling to get halfway through the ostensibly transit-friendly story in today’s Times, "Take a Taxicab to Work? More New Yorkers Walk," and read that mass transit doesn’t even account for half of the city’s commuting.
May 10, 2010
Building an App to Help Neighbors Ride Together
Of all the ways to improve your bike commute, riding with a friend might be the simplest. Not only do you have someone to talk to at red lights, you also become more visible and therefore more safe. With that in mind, Transportation Alternatives is working on a new tech solution called Bike Buddy to help New Yorkers find someone to ride with.
March 5, 2010
Congestion Pricing Can Help Save Working NYC Families $2,300 Per Year
Without bold action from legislators to fund transit, middle-class New York families will have to spend $2,300 more per year
to get around the city even as the quality of the service they're
paying for declines, according to a new analysis released today by John Petro of the Drum Major Institute.
February 16, 2010
High Hopes — And Higher Standards — for Bloomberg 3.0
Our series on the next four years of NYC transportation policy continues with today's essay from Joan Byron, Director of the Pratt Center for Community Development's Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative. The Rudin Center for Transportation Policy recognized Byron's work at the Pratt Center with the 2009 Civic Leadership Award. Read previous entries in this series here and here.
November 17, 2009
Fun With Data: How Workers Commute
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.
October 9, 2009
How Much Would Most People Pay For a Shorter Commute?
As Washington conventional wisdom has it, raising gas taxes or creating a vehicle miles traveled tax to pay for transportation is impossible during the current recession. After all, who would want to squeeze cash-strapped commuters during tough economic times?
September 10, 2009