Urban Design

The MTA's response to the annual Pokey Awards ceremony is always worth looking out for. Rather than using the publicity generated by the event to build political capital for some bus service improvement or another, the Transit Authority's response falls somewhere between defensive and infuriated. This year's statement is a doozy and reminiscent of Mayor Bloomberg's famous remark, "We like traffic, it means economic activity, it means people coming here." Here's what the MTA had to say:

Sketches from an internal BRT Study depicting the three general types of stations: A) Major Station: Includes extended canopy with windscreens and seating. Icon and full platform pavement treatment. B) Standard Station: Shelter with Icon and full platform pavement treatment. C) Minimum Station: For locations with narrow sidewalks: Icon and platform edge strip only. Bigger image here.

Check out my favorite new web site, MyBikeLane, by Greg Whalin.

In the aftermath of September 11th, concrete and steel barriers sprouted like  mushrooms around big buildings in New York City. It almost seemed to me to be a kind of status symbol. You knew you worked in an important building if your landlord had hardened it against truck bombs.

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:

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: