Biking and the World Class City

(A very long piece about bicycling and saftey by Alan Durning of the Sightline Institute, Safe Streets: Not bicycling is dangerous to your health.)

And Portland Oregon is adding smart bike rentals. See "City gives bike rentals a spin: Bids to launch a 500-cycle fleet are due today, with subsidies, ads to be decided," from the Portland Tribune.

Montreal too. See "Montreal pedals way to 'self-serve' first." From the article:

The city of Montreal plans to be the first North American city to set up a large-scale "self-serve" public bike rental service. Following in the footsteps, or pedalling along the same path, as European cities such as Paris and Lyon where such systems have recently exploded in popularity, Montreal hopes to get its project started by next fall and fully operational by late 2009...

The first city-issue self-serve bicycles will start to appear at specially designed outdoor bike stations in the fall of 2008, By the fall of 2009, he said, there should be 2,400 bikes available for rent for as little as $1 per half-hour of use at 300 stations around the city's central neighbourhoods, he said.

The idea is to encourage Montrealers and tourists to use the public bicycles instead of cars for short, inner city trips, allowing them to pick up a bike at one station, use it for half an hour or an hour, and then drop it off at any other station of their choice.

The city wants to use locally designed bikes and bike stands, but the set-up will likely mimic the one introduced in Paris last summer, Lavallee said. Paris started with 10,000 bikes at 750 stations in mid-July, but demand for the bikes has been so strong that the city is adding 10,600 more bikes and moving to 1,451 stations by the end of 2007.

He said the city is responding to an observed changed of attitude among Montrealers towards cycling. "We used to see cycling as recreation, but now thousands of people are using bikes to get to work, or school. This summer, we actually saw traffic jams of cyclists on some of our new bike routes, like St. Urbain. Something is changing right now in Montreal and we all have to come along on this wave."

Although I guess it's gonna be a race with DC, which will be the first major city in North America with such an offering, when it launches the first 10 rental locations in the downtown area this coming Spring.

But Montreal merchants aren't happy about the loss of parking spaces to a bicycle lane. See "Time running out: merchants." The accommodation of bicyclists with a new bike path isn't going smoothly, as the construction caused great hardship when an error closed a subway line for a time. See "Paths pose no threat to business," and "We still have much to learn from Paris," (Cited articles are from the Montreal Gazette.)

From the latter article:

Another initiative has been launched by about 30 Montreal businesses and organizations including Parks Canada, Hydro-Québec, McGill University, Plateau Mont Royal borough and the city of Montreal. The institutions provide their employees and students with bicycles, to encourage a method of transportation that is non-polluting and physically active.

Unhappy trader: Jean-Jacques Trudel, manager of the Wm. Layton Audio store on Ste. Catherine St., stands on the concrete barrier for the new bike path on de Maisonneuve Blvd. that will cut parking. JOHN MAHONEY, THE GAZETTE.

Of course, as Kim Smart writes in a letter to the editor of the Montreal Gazette:

Drivers are not to blame for the sad parking and traffic situation in downtown Montreal. No blame rests on the shoulders of all those drivers who bring their cars into town - no passengers, just them - in their four-doors and SUVs. No blame rests on drivers' daily peregrinations trying to locate a parking spot as close as possible to the office/restaurant/store because it's cheaper than a parking lot. No blame lies with those who drive to work, even though they live close to a métro station or on a good bus route.

No, no - the lack of parking causing the beleaguered businesspeople to lose custom because their clients can't park their cars right in front of their doors is solely the fault of uncaring city planners and cyclists.

Take a bus, take the métro, or - gasp! - walk.

And if dear Sal Parasuco wouldn't be caught dead doing any of those things, he could always take a taxi to that high-end restaurant. He would arrive relaxed and on time, without having wasted 20 minutes in the rain trying to find a parking spot or fiddling with a meter.

But the entitlement culture about driving, as well as fear of change and the other, makes it difficult to move forward on improving cities.

There is an article in Der Spiegel about the "Slow City" movement from Italy, "Taking Life Easy in Urban Italy."

Like the "Keep Austin Weird" independent retail campaign, it doesn't sit well with me that great livable places or independent retail is marketed as odd or weird or different behavior. Instead, quality of life should be what matters most and should be the primary goal when creating any city-urban policy.

Shouldn't a focus on placemaking and livability be considered "standard operating procedure"?

What's weird about that?

Speaking of calling your city world class, Charles Landry makes a point in his latest book, The Art of City Making, and presentations, that to be world class isn't only what the city does for itself, but how the city in turn contributes to the world.

Paris, by introducing the bicycle rental system (even though other cities like Oslo and Lyon have already done so), has given cachet and sanction to this type of transportation offering, and has made it acceptable for other cities to consider the adoption of similar systems. Now cities are "competing" to accommodate non-automobile forms of mobility.

I think that's the kind of contribution that Landry is referring to when writing and talking about what it means to be a "World Class City."