Copenhagenizing NYC
About DOT from Nicholas Whitaker on Vimeo.
Here's a great little film about the copenhagenization of New York City featuring the city's Transport Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. She explains the efforts being made to created more liveable spaces in the city, including bike lanes.
Jan Gehl is a consultant for the city and here's hoping his successful efforts in revitalising the centre of Copenhagen are mirrored in NYC.
13 thinking out louds:
As I said before, they should get you on board to promote cycling in New York. :)
I was in NYC a couple of weeks ago and the bike lanes in Manhattan are very, very poorly designed. They need to flip flop the position of the bike lanes and on street parking so that the cab don't have to/cant pull into the bike lanes to pick up fares along the left side of the road. This would also eliminate the possibility of a car exiting the on street parking hitting a cyclist while pulling through the bike lane to get into the car lanes. Nice idea stupidly executed. I had to occupy the left car lane most of time because it wasn't safe to ride in the bike lane unless traffic was very light.
thanks for the repost on my video. I love your town and have been trying to figure out a way to work and live there for ages.
keep up the good work
"They need to flip flop the position of the bike lanes and on street parking"
They're doing just that.
It's a progression. Please don't call our other lanes stupid or poor; those are making way for future protected lanes, and they're awfully useful to me in the mean time.
It is funny that there is an emphasis on seating space. The last time I was in NYC, all of the benches had been taken out and the city had signs up everywhere saying it is illegal to sit on the stoop or fire escapes (which I remember as being one of the great things about NY neighborhoods in the evening). I got in trouble for sitting on a curb because I was so exhausted from walking all day with no where to sit with my (then) 3 year old. I am glad they are getting back to their roots as a city of the people, not a city of the machines!
thanks angus... make some calls, will you? :-)
i think new yorkers should be proud and thrilled that there are even people who are planning and building bike lanes.
copenhagen took forty years to build what we have. it can be done quicker but it has to start somewhere.
my pleasure, nick.
I wish Los Angeles has bike lanes as "poorly designed" as those in New York City. We have so few, and they're so random distributed, as to be all but nonexistent.
I live in New York City and as others have alluded to, the majority of NYC's bike lanes are still simply white lines on the pavement that motorists routinely drive in and out of, and double park in.
Enforcement is lax and in some cases, drivers just simply park their car in the lane and run off to shop.
The city is building some separated bike lanes, but progress has been slow and opposition sometimes formidable. It will take time. Still, as a New Yorker, I think the city is trying and I really appreciate that.
I think our crown jewel so far is the Hudson River Greenway, a nearly finished separated bike path that will run the entire length of Manhattan, on its west side along the Hudson River.
It's a bike path, but still quite useful for commuting. The entire length of Manhattan with no cars and only a few traffic lights. (There are some spots with crossing traffic though so if visiting, please ride carefully.)
It is great to read, from a commenter who I'm believe actually knows a little bit about biking, that the white paint lines are stupid. As I've been trying to make just that case in my hometwon. Here in Milwaukee, WI the bike organizations think that the curb separated lanes are "dangerous". So many cities have so much to learn from Copenhagen.. Thanks for the video.
there is a little sub-cultural group who claim that curbed, separated bike lanes are 'dangerous'. fortunately, they only have a theory inherited from their 'leader'.
separated bike lanes, on the other hand, have decades of statistics behind them - and large groups of people who use them.
Oh, you loose me a little on insisting that curb separated bikelanes are the always best approach. It is one of many approaches to providing bicycle access to streets that can actually be more dangerous if used in the wrong locations.
Places like the avenues in Manhattan are good candidates but a suburban street with many curb cuts to accommodate driveways are not since driver and bicyclists cannot see each other until the last moment due to the parked cars blocking the sightlines.
The New York City examples are some of the best engineered protected bikelanes anywhere in the world. If they only put them on the right side of the road, I would say they are just about perfect.
the portland group who visited looked at driveways/bike lanes and were suprised to see how well it works.
the bike lanes are next to the curb, not on the other side of the parked cars, so visibility is fine.
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