Guadalajara, Mexico is showing how amazingly transformative a ciclovia-style road closure can be for its citizens. In 7 years, their inaugural Sunday event Via RecreActiva has grown from just 7 miles with 35,000 participants to 41 miles with 400,000 users every Sunday. It goes from 8 am to 2 pm. It covers 6 municipalities. The diversity of activities features traditional ciclovia staples like aerobic classes and music, but also some new wrinkles including free haircuts for children and a city that clearly knows how to hula hoop!

Another unique aspect of this story is that one of the forces behind the success of the Via RecreActiva is a civil association called Guadalajara 2020, a group of primarily made of  business owners, real estate people and entrepreneurs who envision Guadalajara to be a healthier, greener and more humane city.

That mission includes bringing better transit to the city, making it safer to walk & bike and create equality and empowerment among its people. Perhaps it is best put by Guadalajara 2020′s President, José Palacios Jiménez, who told us:

“…we would like to be able to remove the cars from the entire city. Because with all the information we manage to get, we are able to understand that the biggest problem of humanity are the cars.”

Guadalajara does feature  public spaces on par with the greatest in the world, but also faces many extraordinary challenges with horrible traffic and unsafe pedestrian environments on nearly every street.  It’s refreshing to see business folks not only speaking out and understanding the real solutions, but investing their funds to create an organization like Guadalajara 2020.

People just have a lot of fun. You’ll see families, students, and older citizens heavily sprinkled throughout the critical mass. Drivers who usually rule the congested roads seem to mostly tolerate the inconvenience. The police largely ignore the whole thing. Helping matters is that each of the rides is theme-oreinted: one month it might be to celebrate Mexico’s Independence.  Another week it could be comic books. This month was particularly fun since it was all about celebrating the Day of the Dead!

Streetfilms would like to thank Guadalajara 2020 for making it possible to make the journey to document this wonderful event & sponsoring the film.  And to Gil Penalosa, Executive Director of 8-80 Cites, for organizing the details

In the increasingly heated competition to see who deserves the title of America’s most bike-friendly city, Minneapolis has plenty going for it. Last year Bicycling magazine anointed the city tops in the nation, knocking Portland off its long-held perch.

The Twin Cities are undergoing a steady transformation into a more bike-oriented region thanks to nearly 100 miles of greenways and off-street paths, giving residents safe and quick travel options. By far the best-known of those paths is the 5.7 mile long Midtown Greenway, which connects cyclists to destinations through the heart of Minneapolis, from east to west. As you’ll see, the path isn’t just giving people a great place to bike, walk, and run — it’s attracting development and new businesses as well.

Thanks to the Bikes Belong Foundation for funding this Streetfilm, our third in a series on innovations in Minneapolis. Check out the Nice Ride MN and Sabo Bridge Streetfilms if you haven’t already!

The first cable-stayed bridge of any kind in the state, it’s breathtaking, even to the people who have been riding it for years. It provides a safe, continuous crossing and offers up a glorious view of the downtown skyline (especially at sunset!). The sleek Hiawatha light rail line runs beneath it, and there are benches to sit on and take everything in.

Used by an average of 2,500 riders a day, peak use can hit 5,000 to 6,000 per day on some gorgeous summer weekends, according to Shaun Murphy of the Minneapolis Department of Public Works.

The bridge was named in honor of Minneapolis’ Martin Olav Sabo, a former U.S. Representative from the 5th District who helped secure much of the $5 million needed to build it. Thanks to the Bikes Belong Foundation for enabling us to feature this majestic piece of bike architecture and to show that investing is cycling and walking is well worth every penny for our communities.

Nearly three years ago Streetfilms took a day trip to Washington, D.C. to see their new bike-share system, Smart Bike DC, in action. We found the trial system a fun ride with great potential, but with only 120 bikes there wasn’t widespread use.

Flash forward to 2011. With more than 1,100 bicycles and 110 stations, D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare is testament to the imperative to “go big or go home” when deploying bike-share programs. Currently the largest bike-share system in the United States, the District’s second stab gives users much more flexibility and options to accomplish short errands and commute to work.

In fact, the next phase of expansion has just been announced, with 18 more stations and 265 more bikes coming this fall.

The handsome red bikes are easy to ride. With one swipe of a keycard you’re off and biking. During the morning and evening commutes (and lunch hours) you’ll see the bikes in very heavy rotation.  But what left Streetfilms most impressed was how many people were riding them in full business attire in the hot and humid summers around the capital. If that isn’t a sign of success, what is?

Streetfilms would like to thank the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) for partnering with us on this project.

Over the last four years, New York City has seen a transportation renaissance on its streets, striking a better balance by providing more space for walking, biking, and transit.

As with any departure from the status quo, it can take a while for everyone to grow accustomed to the changes. So Streetfilms decided to look at three of NYC’s most recent re-designs — Columbus Avenue, First and Second Avenues, and Prospect Park West — and show how pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers benefit from safer, calmer streets. We talked to transportation engineers with decades of experience, elected leaders, community board members, people on the street, and business owners to get their take on the new configurations.

The truth is, no matter how hard some media outlets try to spin it otherwise, these new street safety projects have broad community support. And while the story of these changes often gets simplified in the press, the fact is that the benefits of the redesigns go far beyond cycling. A street with a protected bike lane also has less speeding, shorter pedestrian crossings, less lane-shifting and more predictable movements for drivers, and the opportunity to add more trees and plantings. Injuries to pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and car passengers drop wherever the new designs go in. And on the East Side, these improvements have been paired with dedicated bus-only lanes with camera enforcement, making service more convenient and attractive for thousands of bus riders.

At 11 minutes, this is one of our longest Streetfilms. We cover a lot of ground here, and we hope it’s illuminating no matter what side of the issue you fall on.

What’s a road diet? Quite simply, traffic-calming expert Dan Burden told Streetfilms, “A road diet is anytime you take any lane out of a road.”

The first time people hear about a road diet, their initial reaction likely goes something like this: “How can removing lanes improve my neighborhood and not cause traffic backups?” It seems counterintuitive, but taking away lanes can actually help traffic flow smoother while improving safety for everyone.

Road diets are good for pedestrians: They reduce speeding and make vehicle movements more predictable while shortening crossing distances, usually through curb extensions or center median islands. They’re good for cyclists: Many road diets shift space from car lanes to create bike lanes. They’re good for drivers: Less speeding improves safety for motorists and passengers, and providing left-turn pockets allows through traffic to proceed without shifting lanes or waiting behind turning vehicles.

On a grey, chilly Sunday, an estimated 750 people, many of them on training wheels and balance bikes, turned out to ride the Prospect Park West bike lane and show their support for the traffic-calming redesign. Since the two-way, separated bike path debuted last summer, it’s become indispensable for many parents who use it to take their children to school and get around the neighborhood. On weekends, the lane is full of families heading to the green market at Grand Army Plaza and kids riding to Prospect Park.

The “We Ride the Lanes” event was the brainchild of Mitch Sonies, who rides the PPW bike lane with his six-year-old daughter and wanted to do something positive to highlight how much people appreciate having a much safer street in their neighborhood. “It was a real celebration of this great, safe bike path,” said Mitch. “When I first started kicking around the idea of a family ride, I never imagined so many people would want to take part. It’s a real testament to the popularity of the lane.”

As you can see, the ride was a hit with families and young children, who filled the entire length of the bike lane for more than 40 minutes as they paraded from Grand Army Plaza to Bartel Pritchard Square. The free cupcakes at the end of the ride didn’t last long.

This Streetfilm, by Clarence Eckerson Jr., is an important one for Los Angeles as we consider how our city and county are going to grow as a result of the expected transit boom in the coming decade(s). This film focuses on Transit Oriented Development, with a focus on how a light rail line transformed Jersey City with dense, mixed use, transit oriented development. Here are some of the lessons we should learn from Jersey City:

1) Transit Oriented Development should take advantage of many modes of transportation. In Jersey City, the developments take advantage of not only the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail and the bus system, but also a ferry system to move people across the water in to New York City. In Los Angeles, we don’t have ferries, but we do have a bus system that is constantly under attack because of operating shortfalls and of course we’re also working on creating a bicycle network.

2) Transit Oriented Developments should not have parking minimums. As a matter of fact, there is no minimum parking requirement in Jersey City, but a maximum one. It’s no wonder that car ownership around Jersey City’s T.O.D.’s hovers between 40% and 45%.

3) Zoning should support mixed use development. The Tri-State Transportation Campaign’s Kate Slevin explains that real mixed use zoning isn’t just for the gigantic new developments, but also would allow apartments and offices to be placed on top of first floor retail buildings along commercial corridors.

If you want to comment on anything I’ve written, just hit the comment button. If you want to comment on the film, please visit the Streetfilms website.

(Full disclosure: Slevin was my boss when I worked at TSTC)

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After you finish rubbing your eyes and wondering if you really just saw that, think for a minute: It’s fair to say that, wherever you live in the United States, you’ve never seen reporting like what you see in this clip — not even if the victims had died. Not even if they were high profile actors or members of society. Not even if dramatic video existed of the crash itself.

We’ve got a tough hill to climb if we want to see quality reporting on street safety using this kind of terminology. For instance, here in New York City we are dealing with a press that salivates any time they hear any mention of the word “bike.” Pavlov would be proud. The television and print media portray cyclists as if they were a menace to society, like bedbugs in need of extermination. The constant barrage of late has been unrelenting, depressing and biased.

In particular, CBS2 in NYC has devoted so much time to negative bicycling stories — constantly getting the facts wrong — you have to wonder how much of it is sloppy reporting and how much is a vendetta. After all, this is the same network that has chosen to use “Bike Bedlam” as their choice buzz phrase to file many of these stories under. Yet when pedestrians or cyclists are hurt or killed by reckless drivers, we don’t see them grouping these tragedies under banners like “Drivers Amok” or “Cars Out of Control.”

The big problem is that all television news crews have a bias that they cannot ignore: They drive nearly everywhere to file their stories. They see the expanding bike infrastructure and pedestrian plazas as eating up road space. To them this is a growing threat which makes it harder to drive their news vans and do their jobs. Thus, they have a vested interest in being critical of bike lanes, which affects who they decide to interview, what footage they use, the edits they make, the “facts” they accept.

I remember in August 2008, after being interviewed about the city’s upcoming Summer Streets, CBS anchor Don Dahler (shown here driving distracted in a report on distracted driving) turned to me and remarked that closing streets for these kinds of events makes it hard to get around the city.

Our press should be doing a much better job educating viewers and being aware of how their own bias is affecting their reporting. The Netherlands video is aptly titled “When Cyclists Matter.” So far here in the Big Apple, most of the media hasn’t gotten that message.

During a recent two-day swing through the Steel City, Streetfilms learned that, like many other metro areas across the country, Pittsburgh has a growing movement for better bicycling and more livable streets. We made this travelogue to show some of the ways the momentum is building. Among the cool things you’ll see…

• A newly renovated and pedestrianized Market Square, where two cross streets were eliminated to create a better place for people. The experts at Project for Public Spaces helped consult on the project.
• A morning commuter breakfast with the folks at Bike Pittsburgh, where we got to talk to cyclists about what they like about their city, and what could use some improvement.
• An unusual bike parking facility that uses retro-fitted shipping containers and is operated by a public-private partnership. For just $100 you can safely park your bike indoors for a year.
• The Over the Bar Cafe — a unique bicycle-themed restaurant serving great food and drink, and a frequent meeting place for rides and advocacy events. The walls are filled with cycling memorabilia and adorned with murals. It’s usually packed with riders and non-riders alike.

Streetfilms was out in Portland at this year’s Rail~Volution conference, putting our finger on the pulse of the sustainable transportation world. We spoke to a healthy dose of this year’s attendees, including advocates, bloggers, planners, transit industry reps and members of transportation agencies across the country. Among those we heard from was Congressman Earl Blumenauer, who helped push Rail~Volution — now in its twentieth year — to national prominence in 1995. Well over a thousand folks attended the four-day event.

In addition, almost 500 people came to Portland’s famous Bagdad Theater to watch a program of short films on the big screen, eight of which were Streetfilms! Our fan base continues to grow, and an event like Rail~Volution brings home how much people look to Streetfilms as an inspiration and educational tool. It’s a great feeling.

(As a lot of you know, I use a cargo bike to shuffle my son around the Westside.  With this being his first birthday, it seemed like a good time to post this homage to his favorite mode of transportation.  And of course we got it at Flying Pigeon L.A. – DN)

When you first visit Copenhagen, the first thing you’ll notice after being mesmerized by the sheer number of cyclists on the roads is the eclectic kinds of bikes, especially ones that carry groceries, baggage, furniture or other people & children.  As Copenhagenize‘s Mikael Colville-Andersen happily points out: for many in his city, the cargo bike is equivalent to the SUV.

Thus, for this final chapter in Streetfilms’ 2010 Copenhagen Triology (check here: for previous vids on bicycling & pedestrian space) we present this quirky look at some of the types of wonderful bikes that are used by the public.  We randomly spoke to folks gallavanting about town on their vehicles, attended the 2010 Danish Cargo Bike Championships, and got to speak with Hans Fogh, owner of Larry vs.Harry, a cargo bike-making specialty shop.  The result here is really just a melody of vignettes, which only ever so slightly touches on the vast cargo bike phenomenon.

But most impressive comes just over one minute in, where you will witness one of the more amazing bike feats we’ve ever seen on film: a father transporting four children, a bike, a half dozen bags, on what can only be described as a cargo bike plus.  It still makes us tired just watching it.

For those of you who do not yet know him – meet Zozo!  He’s Livable Streets’ big purple friend who loves anything that gets people out of cars and moving about the streets.  You might find him riding his ZoGo along the new PPW bike lane, sitting out in the pedestrian plaza in Union Square or catching the 4 train to amble about the city.  Or right here on Streetfilms in the next few months as he talks about the best “Way to Go!”

So, what better way to mark this year’s International Walk to School Day on October 6th, than to get the info directly from Zozo. According to our friends at the National Center for Safe Routes to School, this idea began in 1997 when the Partnership for a Walkable America sponsored the first Walk Our Children to School Day in Chicago.  Since 2002, it has become a worldwide event, with schools here in America in all 50 states leading the way for healthier children.  Make sure you get out for Walk to School and walk or ride your bike that day!

For more info, or to register your event that day go to www.walktoschool.org.  In 2009, there were great events in New York City & San Francisco that Streetfilms captured. ]]> http://www.streetfilms.org/zozo-wants-you-to-walk-to-school/#/feed/ 0 http://la.streetsblog.org/2010/07/16/cycling-copenhagen-through-north-american-eyes/ http://la.streetsblog.org/2010/07/16/cycling-copenhagen-through-north-american-eyes/#comments Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:39:52 +0000 Clarence Eckerson Jr. http://la.streetsblog.org/?p=56692 [...]]]>

While Streetfilms was in Copenhagen for the Velo-City 2010 conference, of course we wanted to showcase its biking greatness.  But we were also looking to take a different perspective then all the myriad other videos out there.  Since there were an abundance of advocates, planners, and city transportation officials attending from the U.S. and Canada, we thought it'd be awesome to get their reactions to the city's built environment and compare to bicycling conditions in their own cities.

If you've never seen footage of the Copenhagen people riding bikes during rush hour - get ready - it's quite a site, as nearly 38% of all transportation trips in Copenhagen are done by bike.  With plenty of safe, bicycle infrastructure (including hundreds of miles of physically separated cycletracks) its no wonder that you see all kinds of people on bikes everywhere.  55% of all riders are female, and you see kids as young as 3 or 4 riding with packs of adults.

Much thanks to the nearly two dozen folks who talked to us for this piece.  You'll hear astute reflections from folks like Jeff Mapes (author of "Pedaling Revolution"), Martha Roskowski (Program Manager, GO Boulder), Andy Clarke (President, League of American Bicyclists), and Tim Blumenthal (President, Bikes Belong) and Yvonne Bambrick (Executive Director, Toronto's Cyclists Union) just to name drop a few of the megastars.