Archinect - News

Californians can now trade in their old cars for e-bikes

2019-09-09T18:00:00-04:00

SB 400, adds bikeshare and e-bikes as mobility options in the Clean Cars 4 All Program, which will provide a strong incentive for Californians to switch from car to bike travel.

Regarding the bill's impact, California state senator Thomas J. Umberg, the author of SB 400, said, "Senate Bill 400 helps California reduce our state’s greenhouse gas emissions. E-bikes are proving to be a reliable mobility option for not only replacing car trips, but also more widespread access to clean transportation,” adding, “As an option within Clean Cars 4 All, e-bikes would help California create a more holistic approach to tackling the issues of pollution and traffic.”

London to regulate wind design for new skyscrapers

2019-08-20T09:00:00-04:00

Tougher building rules for skyscrapers have been drawn up by the City of London because of concerns that a high-rise, urban microclimate will generate winds capable of knocking over cyclists and pedestrians. Developers will have to provide more comprehensive safety assessments of how proposed buildings will affect people on street level, with more robust testing of roadways and pavements using detailed scale models in wind tunnels and computer simulations.

After a series of high-profile skyscraper design controversies, including documented incidents of pedestrians being knocked off their feet and cyclists being pushed sideways into the path of vehicles due to strong skyscraper-generated winds, London is moving to regulate the wind-driven impacts of new high-rise towers in the city.

Moving forward, the city will require tower projects to meet a tougher set of wind regulations at the start of the design development phase, according to The Guardian. Those tests will be coupled with later “micro-level” examinations of a given tower’s design that will test the magnitude and degree of wind generated by the forms of new skyscrapers, as measured from “36 wind directions, using separate consultants for computer and physical simulations,” according to The Guardian.

Under the new rules, the speed of downdrafts created by new towers will be capped at 18 miles per hour. Measured speeds at that level and above will be classified as being “uncomf...

A smog-cleaning bike, a kite-charging dike: Studio Roosegaarde's creative design solutions to infrastructural challenges

2017-08-22T15:03:00-04:00

In the unofficial category of "Creative Pollution Solutions," the Dutch firm Studio Roosegaarde is angling to be the winner: the firm has several projects that introduce innovative solutions to existing infrastructural challenges. First up, in partnership with bike-sharing firm OFO, the studio has announced to develop a bicycle that "inhales" smog and then releases purified air by virute of pedaling.

The project, which was initially announced at a TED forum, has now advanced to the first stage of design. The bikes, which release clean air around each cyclist as they are pedaled, are not only environmentally friendly but culturally attuned: Daan Roosegaarde wanted to reference the iconicity of the bicycle in China while simultaneously improving air quality.

In addition to the bicycles, Studio Roosegaarde has also undertaken the redevelopment of the Icoon Afsluitdijk. As the architects explain: "It is the government-scale landscape innovation project on the legendary Dutch dike, whic...

Steven Fleming's Velotopia paints a city built for cycling

2017-08-15T13:00:00-04:00

No disciples of Le Corbusier, Harvey Corbett, Robert Moses or Norman Bel Geddes have been to Velotopia. That means there are no highways and no racks of car-parking stations. Neither have any disciples of Ebenezer Howard been there to suggest that development be clustered around satellite towns with train connections back to the core.

Steven Fleming (previously featured in our Working Out of the Box series), founder of the Dutch bike-centric planning consultancy Cycle Space, recently published a new book that lays out an utopian city built around bicycles as the main form of transportation. In Velotopia people enjoy their daily commutes, the flow of traffic is smooth and the development is mixed use and compact.

Velotopia Photograph: Courtesy of cycle-space.com

Indoor bike parking spaces match the anticipated number of beds allowing trips to start inside the home. Photograph: Courtesy of cycle-space.com

An edited excerpt in The Guardian showcases Fleming's wry thought experiment. Velotopia is as circular as the topography has allowed, for the usual reason that citizens are always clamouring to live near the civic centre.Development has been restricted to level ground and city limits have been restricted to a diameter of 15km. That ensures average commuting distances of less than 7km and average trip times of less th...

Is biking good for you even if the air is heavily polluted?

2016-05-23T20:01:00-04:00

...Given all the harm we know air pollution can cause, does cycling actually help, or could it hurt? After all, I’m not breathing in the foul fumes of a truck when I’m sitting inside an air-conditioned train. I’m certainly not breathing them in deeply, as I would while huffing and puffing on my cycle. Air pollution kills more than 5 million people every year, yet there has been no analysis of the costs versus benefits of city cycling. Until now.

Long story short: keep biking. Researchers found that, in almost every city around the world, the health benefits of biking "far exceed" the damage than can be caused by breathing in dirty air. Even in the worst polluted cities in the world, you have to ride at least 60 minutes a day to be more harmed than helped.

For more on the dirty air polluting cities around the world, check out these links:

These fascinating GPS doodles were 'drawn' by cycling the grid of the city

2016-02-09T15:11:00-05:00

Stephen Lund considers the Canadian city of Victoria his canvas and a bicycle his brush. And the paint? Strava, a GPS tracking system which marks his routes with crimson lines. So far, he has pedaled around in the shapes of critters such as an angler fish, giraffe, giant anteater, and nine-banded armadillo; mythical and interplanetary creatures such as the Siren of the Salish Sea, the Sea Serpent of Haro Strait, and the Dark Lord of the Sith.

Take a look at some of Lund's intricate "GPS Doodles," also known as "Strava art:"

Head over to Stephen Lund's blog gpsdoodles.com to find way more of this goodness and watch him explain his approach in the video from the recent TEDxVictoria below.

In spite of sleet and snow, cycling prevails in Minneapolis

2016-01-18T13:33:00-05:00

Minneapolis, despite its frigid winters, has surged to the top of national rankings for urban biking and was the only U.S. city included last year on a global index of bike-friendly communities. Since 2000, the percentage of bike commuters here has jumped 170 percent [...] Minneapolis' bike-friendly reputation advanced on the saddle of key elected officials, grassroots advocates and critical investments that over the past decade helped transform it into a mecca for biking.

Car-free events significantly improve air quality

2015-10-22T20:29:00-04:00

CicLAvia [is] a series of one-day events organized by a local nonprofit in which neighborhood streets are closed to motor vehicles so that people can walk and cycle freely... Now, a study by the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health has found that the event significantly reduces air pollution along the CicLAvia route and even on other streets in the communities where the event is held.

For more information on CicLAvia, visit their website.

A bicyclist's perspective on the dangers and joys of riding in L.A.

2015-09-23T15:49:00-04:00

While you’re hypertensive in traffic listening to NPR, I have seen dolphins frolicking (and homeless men fighting over a shopping cart); I’ve smelled the taco trucks and heard all the languages of kids playing at morning recess. I sweat and shiver; I feel elation and real fear. In short, I feel alive. And so I ride.

Despite its annoyances, difficulties, and outright dangers, Peter Flax's take on bicycle riding in L.A.—prompted in part by the city's recent decision "to create hundreds of miles of new protected bike lanes, shrinking some streets in the process"—combines a reporter's clear-eyed sensibility with an enthusiast's joy. In what is apparently an all-too typical encounter, he describes an incident with a dangerous driver: "Once, on Curson near Pico, a black Mercedes swerved into my path and the side mirror grazed my hip. I rolled up to the guy’s driver’s side window at a red light; he had his phone on his lap, watching a video. Without saying a word, I just rode away, bewildered and angry."

Want to read more on bicycling developments in L.A. and beyond? Click below:

• LA Gets its First Parking-Protected Bike Lanes

• From California to Texas, car culture is losing its monopoly

• Protected bike lanes strengthen city economy, report finds

...

News cycle: August's noteworthy bicycle news

2015-08-19T14:59:00-04:00

Germany might still be a car-obsessed country, but it's starting to build an Autobahn for bikes.

From the U.S. to Germany, urban planners and major corporations are starting to purposefully design for bicycles instead of individually operated cars. In Munich, a proposed network of two-lane bike paths would radiate out from the city center to the surrounding suburbs, creating 400 miles of cyclist-only access. Meanwhile, according to WebUrbanist, international fast-food chain McDonald's has created an unfolding bicycle-oriented food transport container known as "McBike," which allows a bicyclist to visit the drive-through lane and comfortably transport a beverage and hot food home. The program was launched in Copenhagen, and may soon make its way to a Mickey Dee's near you.

As bicycle ownership in North Korea rises, Pyongyang introduces bike lanes

2015-07-14T12:59:00-04:00

North Korea has installed cycle lanes on major thoroughfares in Pyongyang in an apparent bid to cut down on pedestrian accidents, as more residents are able to afford to buy bicycles. Bicycles are an expensive but increasingly popular mode of transport for many in the country where private car ownership, although on the rise, is still rare. [...] As recently as 2014, cycling was still illegal for women, though the ban was much flouted.

Copenhagen Tops List of the 20 Most Bike-Friendly Cities

2015-06-02T18:19:00-04:00

The bicycle makes sense in cities. With rising urbanization, our cities need modern mobility solutions, and moving around on two wheels proves time and again that it can offer results [...] With each edition, the Copenhagenize Design Company’s Index of the most bike-friendly cities in the world evolves...This year, we considered cities with a regional population over 600,000 (with a few exceptions because of their political and regional importance, and to keep things interesting).

Copenhagenize is a design consultancy based in Copenhagen, Zurich, Brussels and Amsterdam that advises cities on how to become more bike-friendly, often through implementing strategies developed in the Danish capital (which consistently tops the list). These strategies are both infrastructural, for example creating dedicated and protected one-way bike lanes, as well as social, involving advocacy to increase social acceptance of bicycle culture.

This year, Copenhagen regained the top place from Amsterdam:

Copenhagen
Amsterdam
Utrecht
Strasbourg
Eindhoven
Malmö
Nantes
Bordeaux
Antwerp
Seville
Barcelona
Berlin
Ljubljana
Buenos Aires
Dublin
Vienna
Paris
Minneapolis
Hamburg
Montreal

Baidu is building self-driving "smartbikes"

2015-05-15T16:30:00-04:00

After a flurry of speculation, the Chinese tech giant [Baidu] has confirmed it's gunning for driverless electronic bikes. Baidu is China's largest web services company—in the region, it commands upwards of 73 percent of the search market—and it has apparently pursued a "secret plan" to debut a prototype of a self-driving electric bicycle by the end of the year. Baidu calls it, simply. the 'smartbike.'

Copenhagen could ax its pioneering city bike program by month's end

2015-04-17T19:20:00-04:00

In 2013, Copenhagen—a city of ebullient cyclists—launched the mother of all city bike schemes. Its white bikes were fitted with motors and GPS-enabled tablets—expensive, but designed for a place whose people and visitors truly believed cycling was the best way forward. Now the city that pioneered its first shared bikes in 1995 is facing a stark possibility: no bike share scheme at all.

LA Gets its First Parking-Protected Bike Lanes

2015-04-07T17:26:00-04:00

Yesterday, the city of Los Angeles installed its first ever parking-protected bike lanes. They’re on Reseda Boulevard in Northridge, part of the mayor’s Great Streets Initiative. As of this morning, the project is roughly one-quarter complete. The new protected lanes, also known as cycletracks, are mostly complete on the west side of Reseda Blvd from Plummer Street to Prairie Street. The full one-mile protected lanes will go from Plummer to Parthenia Street.

Senator proposes mandatory helmets for California cyclists

2015-02-13T12:56:00-05:00

Sen. Carol Liu on Wednesday announced a bill, SB 192, that will require bicycle riders to wear helmets or face a $25 fine. “Any responsible bicycle rider should wear a helmet,” Liu said ... “This law will help protect more people and make sure all riders benefit from the head protection that a helmet provides.”

California law currently requires anyone under 18 to wear a helmet when riding a bike, nonmotorized scooter, skateboard, or wearing in-line or roller skates. Liu's SB 192 bill would extend this provision to everyone, not just minors, and also require cyclists to wear reflective clothing at night – requirements that no other state has adopted.

It might seem like wearing a helmet is the first-move for safe cycling, but Dan Snyder, head of the California Bicycle Coalition, disagrees: as quoted in the Sacramento Bee, “We know that the most important thing to protect people who ride bikes is to get more people out there riding bikes. Forcing people to wear crash helmets when they ride is counter productive to that goal.” This is the same reasoning behind ”Critical Mass": organized cycling tours that flood city streets with so many cyclists as to force car traffic into submission. Safety, for cyclists, is in numbers.

In countries with a hefty number of cyclists, where infrastructural adapta...

Boris Johnson greenlights London's "Crossrail" bicycle superhighway

2015-01-29T15:10:00-05:00

Boris Johnson today confirmed he would build Europe’s longest segregated urban cycle lane through central London after delays likely to be suffered by motorists were reduced. The Mayor approved the “Crossrail for bikes” protected route through Parliament Square and along the Victoria Embankment and Upper Thames Street after it won overwhelming public support.

New Jersey's first protected bike lane about to be removed again

2014-12-26T13:15:00-05:00

Mt. Prospect Avenue in Newark has New Jersey’s first protected bike lane, as far as we know. But unfortunately it looks like the Garden State will soon be back to zero. Andrew Besold at WalkBikeJersey is reporting Mayor Ras Baraka has ordered the removal of the bike lane, and in the meantime is allowing people to park in it.

Bike Louisville implementing Neighborways, a city-wide bike boulevard system

2014-11-11T14:06:00-05:00

Louisville is currently implementing such a system, what the city’s bike department, Bike Louisville, is calling “Neighborways.” The city hopes these new bike boulevards will encourage and enable bicyclists and pedestrians to take advantage of alternate-route options for moving safely around the city—and eventually lead to an uptick in biking overall.

h/t StreetsBlog

Ruination: City of Dust

2014-10-13T23:38:00-04:00

According to Jane McGonigal, a well-known game designer and researcher, “games build the kind of trust, relationships and social networks so critical to [collective action].” Playing games, people naturally weave a tight social fabric.”

Why a bike city? Why not a mix of biking and transit?

2014-08-14T14:20:00-04:00

I see nothing wrong with replacing the hegemony of cars with the hegemony I am proposing, of bikes. Those who need buses would be no worse off than they are now. But a problem would come if a city like Amsterdam had a bike modal share of 90 percent, as could achieved if end-of-trip strategies were built into all buildings to eliminate the problem of bike theft, and if shelter removed the inequity of cycling being the one mode remaining where people get wet.

Rise in cycling expands NYC's real estate market

2014-05-29T13:07:00-04:00

As the search for more affordable real estate in New York City pushes deeper into neighborhoods that were once considered out of the way, bicycle lanes are taking on new importance. Since 2007, the city has carved out more than 350 miles of bike lanes in the five boroughs, according to the Department of Transportation. As a result, the distance from the nearest subway or bus stop has become less of a drawback for the two-wheeled set, particularly in transit-challenged areas of Brooklyn.

Biking to work in the U.S. has increased 60% over last decade

2014-05-14T13:14:00-04:00

Many U.S. cities are seeing an increase in bicycle commuters, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released today. Nationwide, the number of people who traveled to work by bike increased roughly 60 percent over the last decade, from about 488,000 in 2000 to about 786,000 during the 2008-2012 period. This is the largest percentage increase of all commuting modes tracked by the 2000 Census and the 2008-2012 American Community Survey.

If you're feeling wonky, you can read the full U.S. Census Bureau report here. It's the Census Bureau's first report to focus entirely on biking and walking to work, with statistics since 1990.

You can also explore commuting statistics for every U.S. neighborhood in the Bureau's Census Explorer, an interactive map that breaks down commuting by commuter age, census tract, type of transportation, and total time.

The PeopleForBikes Green Lane Project celebrates national kick-off in Indianapolis

2014-04-29T18:19:00-04:00

The Green Lane Project, established in 2012 by non-profit group PeopleForBikes, continues its ambitious mission to expedite the process of building more protected bike lines with six new U.S. cities in tow: Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, and Seattle.

The program celebrated its national kickoff in Indianapolis today with transportation officials including U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx, who discussed the Department's prioritization on improving bicycle and pedestrian safety as more Americans are looking for alternative methods of commuting.

Back in March, the program selected the six cities out of 100 that submitted letters of interest. In addressing each city's current situation, The Green Lane Project will provide each city with financial, strategic, and technical assistance in constructing the bike lanes, which are valued at more than $250,000. The on-street lanes are separated from traffic by curbs, planters, parked cars, or posts to help organize...

Bike Lanes Don’t Cause Traffic Jams If You’re Smart About Where You Build Them

2014-04-16T13:45:00-04:00

New bike lanes certainly make life better for cyclists, but how do they affect drivers? This question is hotly debated, especially when a new bike lane replaces a lane used by vehicular traffic. It seems that unless a ton of people start commuting by bicycle, giving away a lane would cause increased car traffic. But is this really the case?

In Indianapolis, a Bike Path to Progress

2014-03-05T11:07:00-05:00

Before the path arrived, Indianapolis didn’t have a mainstream bike scene — just streets designed to improve traffic flow. Now, children and the elderly have joined the spandex swarms of longtime cycling enthusiasts... The public art along the trail accentuates the path’s role as a sculptor of the city’s evolving identity. For example, Donna Sink’s “Moving Forward” is a series of seven stained-glass-hued eco-friendly bus shelters covered in lines from poems by local writers.

BikeHive by Workshop XZ - Timber in the City competition entry

2013-10-24T13:21:00-04:00

"BikeHive" by Zijie Cao & Xin Wu of Workshop XZ gives a fun twist to the beehive concept. The proposal was one of over 1,000 entries that submitted to the Timber in the City: Urban Habitats competition where participants had to design a midrise, mixed-use complex that uses innovative wood construction and addresses the housing needs of the Red Hook waterfront neighborhood in Brooklyn.

In related news, the opening reception of the Timber in the City exhibition at Parsons The New School of Design in New York City will be today, Oct. 24 from 6-8 p.m.

Previously: Timber in the City Competition: Design Students Imagine a Mixed-Use Complex for Red Hook

Copenhagen's bicycle freeway network

2013-06-26T17:23:00-04:00

The solution, or so the city’s traffic planners hope, is to encourage people to cycle for longer distances by creating the cycling equivalent of freeways, which will provide fast, direct routes of up to 22 kilometers into the center. A total of 28 highways are planned, providing 495 kilometers of dedicated bike tracks... Nine routes are under construction and should be completed by 2015 at a cost of 208 million krone, or $36 million, divided equally between central and local government.

Bolts along Bay Bridge bike path fail

2013-05-29T15:37:00-04:00

Crews that built the railing committed what experts called a basic mistake - they welded the bolts in place firmly in their slots rather than leaving a small amount of room to accommodate a natural expansion of the bicycle path that happens in hot weather. As a result, scores of the 1-inch-diameter bolts have been sheared off along the 1.2-mile bike path on the southern side of the span's skyway section.

Dedicated Bike Lanes Can Cut Cycling Injuries in Half

2012-11-01T15:34:00-04:00

As it turns out, infrastructure really matters. Your chance of injury drops by about 50 percent, relative to that major city street, when riding on a similar road with a bike lane and no parked cars. The same improvement occurs on bike paths and local streets with designated bike routes. And protected bike lanes – with actual barriers separating cyclists from traffic – really make a difference. The risk of injury drops for riders there by 90 percent.