Out of Town

 

Since we're talking about urban bike-sharing today, it's worth taking a quick look at Germany's Call-a-Bike program. The remarkable thing about this system is that you don't even need to leave the bicycles in a set parking spot. Using your cell phone you call the phone number on the side of the bike, a magic ray beam shoots out of the sky an unlocks the bicycle's rear wheel (I may not have the technological details correct there), and when you're done riding you call the number to close your transaction and leave the bike standing at any street corner in the city. It costs 6 cents per minute. Call-a-Bike is run by the Die Bahn, the German national transportation agency.

David Haskell, executive director of the Forum for Urban Design, and organizer of last week's New York Bike-Share Project demonstration in Soho, says it's time for New York City to ditch the London model and take a closer look at the traffic-reduction techniques Paris has implemented without congestion pricing. An op/ed in today's New York Times focuses on one aspect of the Paris approach, bike-sharing:

Depressed about the direction Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan is heading? Cheer yourself up by starting to plan for Park(ing) Day 2007. Friday, September 21 is the day when urban dwellers the world over pop quarters into parking meters and take over on-street spaces, temporarily transforming them into miniature parks, playgrounds, cafés and community spaces.

Mayor Richard Daley has been aggressive in transforming Chicago into a more livable city, cracking down on sociopathic motorists, encouraging traffic-calming, promoting bicycling and paying attention to the nitty gritty environmental impacts of street design. The Chicago Tribune recently reported on the Mayor's latest effort to fund citywide park-improvements projects using revenues from city-owned parking garages:

On Sunday in Paris, more than 10,000 bicycles became available at 750 self-service docking stations. The bike program, called Vélib (for "vélo," bicycle, and "liberté," freedom) is supposed to double in size by the end of the year. Pierre Aidenbaum, mayor of Paris's trendy third district, said "For a long time cars were associated with freedom of movement and flexibility. What we want to show people is that in many ways bicycles fulfill this role much more today." The New York Times reports:

Transport for London is out today with its fifth annual Congestion Charging Impacts Monitoring Report. If you've never seen any of the previous reports, it's worth a look. The 279-page document -- you can download the whole thing here -- provides a remarkably detailed assessment of the overall performance of London's surface transportation system (Compare it to the DOT section of Mayor's Management Report here in New York City and you will understand how much catching up we have to do).

Jacobs Babtie, one of the UK's leading consultants in sustainable transport, is banning its own employees from commuting on bicycles or motorbikes after declaring them too dangerous. On the company website, where there is actually a picure of a young boy signaling a right turn on his bicycle, Jacobs boasts that it has an "impressive track record in the rapidly growing field of sustainable transport." This is surely a weak point in that track record. The Times of London reports (via TreeHugger):