Tag: urbanism

Decluttering England

“The proliferation of signs, barriers and crossings could be making our streets more dangerous. We’re not suggesting that removing them all is the answer. But for too long we’ve been designing streets for traffic; they’ve become noisy, congested and cluttered, with people herded behind traffic barriers, ostensibly for their own benefit. Solving the problems of speeding and pedestrian safety doesn’t mean more and more signs telling you to slow down and more protective barriers, it requires clever design thinking.”

this one is for rekha.

NYC Bike-Sharing

the French capital is making for its massive municipal bike-sharing program that he decided he had to get New Yorkers interested in the possibility of launching such a project here.

more on the background of bike share nyc.
2011-09-14: this is awesome. this will do more for tourism and quality of life in nyc than pretty much any other change in the short term.

With this announcement, NYC DOT and Alta have clearly signaled that they are going big. Once bike-share launches, it will change the way New Yorkers get around the city, extending the range of the transit system and adding point-to-point convenience for short trips.

This will be so amazing.

It will still be months before they are available for rent, and a few days before their precise locations will be revealed. But the 10K bicycles in New York’s much anticipated bike-sharing program have a name: Citi Bike.

2013-07-01:

The credit card reader is fiddly and slow, and has one of those punch screens. you know, “touch” screens with such terrible recognition you need to hit them hard. getting the bikes out of the locking mechanism works 80% of the time. Most bikes are in good shape, with the occasional flat tire. i’d estimate less than 5% of bikes are not in working order. the ride is pretty smooth and it is easy to adjust the saddle height. distribution of stations is decent but could be improved by making each station half as big and putting them into twice as many locations. a maximum walk of 2 blocks would be ideal and would lead to much more usage.
2013-12-05: crucial: a station within half a block. nyc has a ways to go there.

If you want to have a great bike-share program in your city, a few factors are key

  • Lots of densely situated stations, ideally no more than 325m apart
  • Many bikes (10-30 per 1000 residents in the coverage area)
  • A sweeping coverage area that’s more than 13km2
  • Solid, usable bikes with hardware that discourages theft
  • Easy-to-use stations and payment systems

2014-10-28: 12k bikes (up from 6k) and 705 stations (up from 330) make NYC still the biggest in the us, but only 20% of chinese cities: Wuhan has 90k bikes, and Hangzhou has 60k bikes.
2016-10-19: Citibike essay

When Jay Walder became CEO of Motivate, the parent company of Citi Bike, in 2014, he overhauled the foundering NYC bike share system and turned it into a well-established, fast-growing alternate mode of transportation. By the end of 2016 Citi Bike will have more than 600 docking stations and 10K bikes. In 2015, the bike share program logged over 10M total rides. Here, Walder discusses how, as a means of transportation, a bike share network better serves 21st century demands for movement around the city, and what needs to be done to make Citi Bike an equitable piece of city infrastructure.

By mapping and sharing individual ride data, while actively maintaining system distribution, wide-ranging riders reclaim and forge new desire lines of movement and interaction across the city. The open platform of Citi Bike data has spawned a Citi Bike NYC Hackers forum: an online community platform that engineers the generated data to reveal how the network is behaving. A heightened understanding of the city in motion can help satisfy personal transit needs — for example, to engineer real-time notifications when a certain station has available bikes or docks. This kind of hands-on participation is more than just avoiding jams by passively signing onto a car-traffic app. Directly participating in the bicycle system’s optimum function and interconnection, while using virtually no fuel and occupying only a tenth of the space that a car would, each cyclist rebalances the city’s energy and movement equation, and contributes to empathy on the street.

2018-07-03: Lyft acquisition

Lyft’s announcement nods to how the deal could work out for cities; taking over all those contracts with city halls should further reign in the notion that the ride-hailing company is a rogue operator. “Bringing together Lyft and Motivate will accelerate our collaboration with cities and deliver even better experiences to our passengers and riders”. As ride-hailing runs up against the limits of road congestion (maybe even contributing to its increase), transportation watchers are waiting to see what happens now that both of the 2 major ride-hailing companies have skin in the bikesharing game.

Open Streets

DOT presented its renovation plan for the intersection of Ninth Ave. and 14th St. to Manhattan Community Board 4 on Wednesday evening. Ryan Russo, DOT’s Director for Street Management and Safety, explained that the agency is taking advantage of a scheduled repaving of Ninth Ave. in mid-July to respond to long-standing community request to remove the 2-block northbound contra-flow traffic lane from the avenue, which has been blamed for several pedestrian fatalities

the NYC DOT seems quite pragmatic, coming up with workable solutions in months rather than decades.
2008-07-31:

For Mr. Tsao, taking over a piece of the bridge for a dinner party, as he did Friday night and likes to do at least once each summer, is an act both political and personal, a conscious gesture of civic engagement and a way to lay claim to a terrific party space. He is captivated and inspired by the persona of the 19th-century flâneur “the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.” Being a flâneur “is all about taking in the world we’ve been given; we want to embrace it and engage with it.”

more take back the streets stuff.
2011-01-06: nice! astor place is currently a downside of living in the east village. not much longer.

2013-10-09: janette is one of my heroines. she is responsible for a huge quality of life increase in nyc in the last 5 years. in this video she talks about how she made even that pimple on nyc, times square, bearable.

2020-04-30: Restaurant reopening could include seats on closed streets. Perhaps this will trigger a longer-term change in street usage, which would be a great thing.
2021-01-28:

The New York City Council voted Thursday to approve Intro. 1116-B, the legislation that will create 4000 new permits for street vendors in the city over the next 10 years.

This is a tiny step in the right direction. The future of much of NYC is in the street, we shouldn’t limit these permits at all. Let a million flowers bloom.

Skyscraper Museum

Founded in 1996, The Skyscraper Museum is a private, not-for-profit, educational corporation devoted to the study of high-rise building, past, present, and future. Located in New York City, the world’s first and foremost vertical metropolis, the museum celebrates the city’s rich architectural heritage and examines the historical forces and individuals that have shaped its successive skylines. Through exhibitions, programs, and publications, the museum explores tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence.