An occasional update on items from the Velo-city.
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MAYOR IN A TANK
Everyone I know sent me a link to this. But just in case someone out there hasn’t seen it:
Vilnius Mayor A.Zuokas Fights Illegally Parked Cars with Tank
UPDATE: Eric Britton details on World Streets how this clip went viral from the moment it was posted on August 1, to receiving two million viewers in four days.
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NEWS FROM DOWN SOUTH
Bike use up 14 percent in NYC: According to Mayor Bloomberg’s latest press release, nearly 19,000 cyclists populate the streets of NYC on a daily basis – that’s 2,300 more than last spring. The growing popularity makes the soon to be unveiled bike-sharing system looks promising.
Chicago Completes Installation Of First Protected Bike Lane: The Chicago Department of Transportation on Monday announced the completion and official opening of the city’s first protected bike lane, located along a half-mile stretch of Kinzie Street between Milwaukee Avenue and Wells Street on the city’s near north side.
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WIGGLE ROOM
For those who think San Francisco is too hilly to cycle, Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius begs to differ:
This week I rode The Wiggle. It only reinforced the inevitable conclusion: Bikes are the future. We need to do a better job of dealing with it.
After all, more people than ever are pedaling the streets of San Francisco. According to the Municipal Transportation Agency, which does an annual bicyclist count, bike traffic went up 58 percent between 2006 and 2010.
The Wiggle is nothing new to dedicated bikers. It’s a route from Market Street to the Panhandle that avoids our notoriously steep hills – one of the main obstacles that discourages people from biking San Francisco. …
The city is halfway through installing the marked paths and bike racks called for in the comprehensive bike pathways plan, and Shahum said the Bicycle Coalition’s urban bike education classes are “jammed, with 40 to 60 in a class. We are turning people away.”
Now bicycling is for grown-ups.
It’s time everyone acted like it.
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Speaking of “Wiggle Room”… For several years I regularly and obediently followed the Gladstone bike route southbound up the steep hill from Trout Lake. Then one day I discovered that VanMap (http://vancouver.ca/vanmap/) has an elevation overlay with contour lines as close as 1 metre. What a great tool to find where the hills are – and aren’t!
Using Vanmap I was able to come up with a route that avoids the steep hill up the south ridge:
– South on Woodland (official bike route)
– East on 13th
– South for 2 blocks on the lane just east of Commercial Drive
– East on 15th
– South on Findlay
– continue south across the Commercial/Victoria Diversion to North on Commercial Street (not “Drive”)
– East on 22nd Ave
– South on Sidney (alternatively, use the lane just east of Victoria which is better paved)
– East on 28th Ave
– South on Gladstone (rejoins official bike route)
This works beautifully and has cyclist-activated lights at all the major streets except 13th & Commercial Drive. It does wiggle, yes, but it really isn’t any longer than the official bike route and all the streets are quiet. Commercial Street is a little busier, but it’s wide enough that it doesn’t feel unsafe to me.
For those that aren’t already aware of it, the regional cycling planner, http://www.cyclevancouver.ubc.ca/cv.aspx, created by the ‘Cycling in Cities’ research group at UBC is a great tool for figuring out routes that have minimum elevation gains, in addition to options like most vegetated route, shortest distance, least traffic pollution, etc.
Great point Sean: I don’t have the skills, but I’d love an app that offered wiggly bike routes. Vancouver’s straight bike boulevards often have the most ridiculous climbs followed by downhills. They feel like they were designated by a driver in an office, not a regular suited-and-booted commuter or shopper seeking the easiest route.
I don’t know about that. I’d rather climb a bit of a hill (and most of them are just “a bit”) than to have to snake through the neighbourhoods.
We need to balance flatness with ease of following the routes and having a reasonable grid.
Perhaps that’s a reasonable statement for people who don’t ride in a particular area often. But for those who regularly bike a given route, ease trumps simplicity. Once you’ve figured out a better way to go and ridden it a couple of times, finding your way is not an issue.
And let’s not forget that hills dissuade people from cycling too – probably even more than indirect routes do. It’s one of the comments you hear most from people critical of bike infrastructure – “Vancouver has too many hills, so there will never be enough cyclists to justify such-and-such a bike lane/route”. If the Powers That Be can place a bike route on a less hilly street, they should.
A good example of this is Vanness Ave. in East Vancouver. It’s narrow, rough, and has so many ups and downs that visibility is awful. Why they chose this street as the bike route rather than the much wider and flatter Euclid Ave. only one block away is a complete mystery to me.
To add to Sean’s list, Lakewood is my most hated bike route in the city. Choose any of the other nearby streets, all travelling in a straight line but not designated as bike routes and not beneficiaries of the same level of traffic calming, and you’ll find the grade is far, far easier to deal with, especially for inexperienced cyclists. I think that’s part of the reason I see so few cyclists on there and myself choose to cycle Victoria instead.
While I too prefer straight to wiggly, the hillyness of many of the official roots is problematic and could do with a review.