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Tag bicycles

When It Comes to Walkability, Mexico City Is Miles Ahead

Pedestrian Street in Mexico City

  This piece was coauthored by Nolan Gray and Katarina Hall. It’s like Los Angeles, but worse. To many, that’s the mental image of Mexico City: a city of unending traffic, unbearable smog, and unrestrained horizontal expansion. Yet when one walks the streets of Mexico City, a distinct reality comes into view: a city of wide sidewalks and integrated bike lanes, lush parks and cool street tree canopies, and dense, mixed-use urban neighborhoods. As a matter of fact, nearly every neighborhood within Mexico City’s giant ring road—the Circuito Interior—has a walkscore above 95. Many major U.S. cities lack even one neighborhood with such a high score. Even on the outer fringe of Mexico’s sprawling Distrito Federal, neighborhoods often have walkscores upwards of 70, qualifying as “very walkable.” What makes Mexico City so walkable?   The first thing an American might notice about Mexico City is just how busy the city’s sidewalks are. It’s a city of 21,339,781, and it shows. But this busyness isn’t a mere side-effect of size; it’s a natural result of the city’s generous sidewalks and high-quality pedestrian infrastructure. Many downtown roads host spacious sidewalks, accommodating an unending sidewalk ballet of commuters, tourists, and street vendors. Wide medians along major boulevards offer both refuge for crossing pedestrians and a public space in which people are encouraged to meet and relax. Many of the city’s busiest downtown areas have been closed to automobile traffic. Mexico City’s main road—Paseo de la Reforma—is reserved on Sundays for pedestrians and cyclists. “Jaywalking” is normal and in many cases is assisted by traffic police—a stark contrast to the near persecution pedestrians often face in U.S. cities. The ample space for pedestrians attracts not only foot traffic but also the people watchers who come to enjoy the vitality, in turn keeping many downtown […]

Aaaand the bike lobby finally descends into self-parody…

Since I’ve spent the last couple of days pounding the O’Toole/Kotkin/Cox trifecta pretty hard, I figured it was time for a left-wing target: bike lanes. To be honest, I’ve always been a little annoyed with the bike wing of the urbanist lobby, but it was this article in Streetsblog, “How Ad Dollars Help Explain the Media’s Bike Backlash,” that pushed me over the edge. An excerpt: Now national media outlets have picked up the bike lane story, tucking it inside the parallel narrative of a trumped-up “war on cars”. In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, humorist P.J. O’Rourke, who often waxes nostalgic about the masculinity of the lost muscle car culture, derides cyclists as antiquated relics relying on a dead technology, as silly children playing in the streets who somehow represent an existential threat to “innocent motorists” in two-ton vehicles, and, of course, as pawns in an Orwellian plot by the Department of Transportation to enslave us all. O’Rourke and Wall Street Journal prefer that most Americans are instead enslaved by auto lenders. O’Rourke’s piece cannot be seen as a simple appeal to libertarian readers of the conservative paper of record; it must also be seen as desperate bid to retain the love of the automakers, who keep the wheels of the presses rolling, and who are appropriately frightened of the prospect of a transportation system that gives more people more choices in getting around. Could it be that the bike lobby actually has alienated the rest of America (and even New York), playing into stereotypes (Stuff White People Like #61) of spandex-wearing, pasty-legged effete liberals who think that the bicycle is a reasonable tool for, say, intra-Brooklyn house moves? No, says Streetsblog – it must be some sort of advertiser-driven conspiracy. (Does The New Yorker even have an auto section? How many car […]

The “Systemic Failure” of US transportation policy

Today I stumbled upon a blog that’s gotta be the best one I’ve found in a while. It’s about US transportation policy by a blogger who seems to be based somewhere in the Bay Area, and it’s called, fittingly, Systemic Failure. The post that first got my attention was this one about London’s bike sharing system likely being profitable in the future, which made me realize that this would be a great first government transportation program to privatize, especially considering that the government is keeping the price extremely low (it’s free for trips under 30 minutes) and the system is struggling to keep up with demand. I assume the reason that private companies didn’t try this earlier was that city governments have no framework for renting out small parcels of public space for use as bike racks – this despite having a vast infrastructure in place for renting similar parcels to drivers on a short-term basis (i.e., on-street parking!). But beyond that, (s?)he does a great job covering a range of transit issues, from the misguided attempts at federalization of transit safety by Obama after the WMATA Red Line crash in 2009 (1, 2, 3, 4) to the inanity of helmet laws (1, 2). The “Drunk Engineer” also offers blistering critiques of American protectionism in transit procurement, including one in which he describes the horrible inefficiency of Buy America provisions, which wreaked havoc on a Houston streetcar project and caused a Bay Area transit authority to have two completed Japanese pilot cars disassembled and shipped to the US where they would then be reassembled to conform with the law (another example here). Another interesting post that I found was this one about Senator Barbara Boxer’s insistence that Metrolink trains have two conductors onboard for safety reasons, despite the lack of […]

Bike Sharing

My Other Bike is a Public Transportation System by Greg Beato at Reason.com: A bike delivers a strong sense of autonomy, too—stronger even than a car in many ways. It doesn’t, for example, require a license, registration, insurance. You aren’t beholden to routes or schedules. You go where you want, when you want. Unless the bike you’re riding is part of a bike-sharing program. Then your usage is more proscribed. Take, for example, SmartBike D.C., America’s first high-tech bike-sharing program. Launched in August, and, like Velib, funded by an advertising company (Clear Channel Outdoor in this case) in return for the right to advertise on the city’s bus shelters, the program currently consists of 120 bikes and ten docking stations, all of which are clustered within a relatively small radius downtown. For a $40 annual fee, users get a smart card that allows them to unlock a bike from its docking station and start contributing to America’s energy independence. Sounds like a great free-market solution. Right? Greg doesn’t think it’s so great: it’s like you own the bike, except you don’t. You’re not permitted to let someone else ride it. You’re not permitted to put too much stuff in the front basket. (The baskets are for “light goods” only.) You aren’t supposed to ride it in “inclement and dangerous weather.” You have to return it to very specific places at very specific times. If something on your bike breaks while you’re riding it, you aren’t supposed to take it to the nearest bike shop or attempt to make the repair yourself. Instead, you have to call SmartBike’s customer service line and wait for a repair person to respond to your request for help. At least when a bus breaks down, you can abandon ship and take destiny in your own […]

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