Transportation Policy

An outraged reader points us to Benepe's Bike Blog where journalist, cyclist (and sister of New York City's Parks Commissioner) Jennifer Benepe has been working to improve bicycle access to the George Washington Bridge.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer is holding a day-long forum on Manhattan's transportation future. Enrique Peñalosa, former Mayor of Bogota, Colombia, will be the keynote speaker. This should be a great event. Peñalosa is the inspiring and visionary politician who transformed his city of 7 million into a model for sustainable urban transportation.

After Copenhagen, I visited Holland for a few days as a part of my German Marshall Fellowship. I will be writing more about some of the people I met and spoke with there, but for now I just wanted to share these photos from Amsterdam:

The Department of Transportation's Bicycle Group is hiring. Know anyone good for the job?

Panelists on suburban sprawl: Eugenie Birch, James Russell, Robert Bruegmann and Alexander Garvin.

Copenhagen, Denmark is not a natural bicycling city. In the early 1960's it was very much of a car town. In 1962 the city created its first pedestrian street, the Stroget, and every year since then Copenhagen has allocated more and more of its public space to bicycles, pedestrians and people who just want to sit and take a load off. The result is a remarkably pleasant city. Danish urban designer Jan Gehl says that the single biggest key to the change has been the development of the city's extensive bicycle network and that the Copenhagen of great public spaces that we see today would not be possible without bicycles.

For the last two years or so Transportation Alternatives' Karla Quintero has been working on a New York City-based update of the famous "Appleyard Study" examining the social costs of traffic. Karla presented the study's preliminary findings last year at a forum I helped organize in Brooklyn and it was really interesting. This event is sure to be a good one. From Transalt:

How do you measure a city's bike-friendliness? Do you count the number of lane miles, daily commuters or annual injuries? Here is one set of metrics that I found in Copenhagen: