Montreal’s Public Bike System (PBS), also known as “Bixi,” provides a competitive alternative to the bikes-for-advertising business model. Photo by amlibrarian.
Aerial photograph of suburban housing in Maryland. Photo by Vidiot.
The BeyondDC newsfeed yesterday just blew my mind. Of yesterday’s five headlines, each and every one is about some part of Montgomery County embracing a more sustainable, more urban land use pattern. Let’s go through them one by one:
Times Square is transforming itself into a pedestrian- and cycle-friendly public space. Photo by Lorrie McClanahan.
I wrote yesterday about SmartBike DC, the capital’s new bike sharing program, and its plans to expand dramatically in the next two years.
It looks like New York City is also planning a major bike sharing program. Although their plans are still in the early stages, the New York City Department of Transportation has put out a long feasibility study outlining the benefits of bike sharing, best practices from around the world and what models would work best in New York. There’s a lot in there, but the headline is 89,500. That’s the number of bikes they expect their program to have. 89,500 bikes!
Transport and urban development policies in European cities are recognized as being more balanced than those of the rest of the world, resulting in competitive, attractive, denser and high quality urban environments. There are plenty of best practices, and in an energy- and carbon-constrained world, they show great examples on how to retrofit American cities and how to evolve developing cities.
On the Streets of China, Electric Bikes Are Swarming
June 14, 2009
By Austin Ramzy
In China, electric bicycles are leaving cars in the dust. Last year, Chinese bought 21 million e-bikes, compared with 9.4 million autos. While China now has about 25 million cars on the road, it has four times as many e-bikes. [Compare these staggering figures to more modest numbers from the United States, where more bicycles (2.6 million) were sold than cars and trucks (2.5 million) during the first quarter of 2009.] Thanks to government encouragement and a population well versed in riding two wheels to work, the country has become the world’s leading market for the cheap, green vehicles, helping to offset some of the harmful effects of the country’s automobile boom. Indeed, as engineers around the world scramble to create eco-friendly, plug-in electric cars, China is already ahead of the game.
But is the popularity of the e-bike in the world’s most populous country necessarily a good thing? Read the rest of this entry »
You may have seen SmartBike stations around downtown D. C. Although, you may not have noticed: For now, it’s just a pilot program (the first in the country, in fact) and there are currently only 10 stations and 120 bikes. It’s still a very small piece of the District’s transportation network. Increasingly, though, it is an important piece. EMBARQ produced a short video outlining SmartBike’s success. Read more at The City Fix DC…
At the core of Mobility Management are “soft” measures like information and communication, organising services and coordinating activities of different partners. “Soft” measures most often enhance the effectiveness of “hard” measures within urban transport (e.g., new tram lines, new roads and new bike lanes). Mobility Management measures (in comparison to “hard” measures) do not necessarily require large financial investments and may have a high benefit-cost ratio.
Students from Appalachian State University figured out how to make working bicycles out of recycled plastic bottles. Image from 2one2Design.com.
A friend of mine from high school was part of the winning team that took home the grand prize for the first annual Juicy Ideas Competition, sponsored by Google, for his and his teammates’ innovative and environmentally responsible bicycle design.
How would you define innovation? Environmentalism? Or entrepreneurship? The Juicy Ideas Competition asked college students to demonstrate all three. Attracting nearly 900 college students from roughly 30 schools, The Juicy Ideas Competition asked students to create an innovative product out of a “throw-away” item. They were then asked to post a video that illustrated these three factors and post it to YouTube.
Videos poured in from all over the country - we saw everything from blankets made out of plastic bags to coffee tables made out of Gatorade bottles. But none of the ideas stood out as much as the four students from Appalachian State University in North Carolina. Spencer Price, Ryan Klinger, Andrew Drake, and Justin Henry created a working bicycle out of used water bottles to win the Juicy Ideas grand prize trip to the Google Headquarters in Mountain View.
Yesterday, The City Fix wrote about the winners of the 2009 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, a design competition to “support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.”
At The City Fix, we were interested in sustainable transport ideas, so it was nice to hear that MIT students took home the top prize for their electric vehicle-sharing program. But one of the “honorable mention” teams also caught our eye for their socially responsible “pedal-powered” initiative to merge the use of recycled bicycles with healthcare delivery in rural East Africa, particularly Uganda. Read the rest of this entry »
Bicycling is not just for born-to-be-bad renegades. Photo by laureskew.
Kyle Boelte published an article in The Christian Science Monitor entitled “The Soul (and Sense) of Biking to Work.” While he makes both a wonderful, practical, and emotional appeal to would-be commuter bikers - which I am all for - he discusses biking as if it were a renegade counter-culture. This is, I understand, the case for some bikers, who like the feeling of defying cars, which Boelte calls “metal beasts of burden.”
But there are also those who like to feel the satisfaction of altruism in the form of burning leg muscles rather than fossil fuels. And there are those scrimpers and savers who have joyously come out of the closet now that championing thrift has become cooler. There are also those who are learning - or have been forced to learn - to find ways to cut $$$ corners. These too have opted for the bike in some cases. (As for me, I cut back on the Starbucks lattes and take the metro to work more often.)
Nevertheless, the joy and economic appeal that Boelte extols in his ode to renegade biking will be short-lived if we don’t make more permanent changes. Most people are not renegades for long, although they might play with fire from time-to-time just to test the water. And what goes down must go up: the economic recession won’t last forever. Read the rest of this entry »
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