Earlier this week I was on Adelaide Street (Toronto) for a morning meeting. This is further north than my typical routine.
For those of you not familiar with Toronto, Adelaide is a one-way street with separated bikes lanes. These “cycle tracks” were installed as part of a pilot project that launched back in summer 2014. As I’m sure you can imagine, they were highly controversial at the time. Many heated debates.
But if you stand on Adelaide Street during the morning rush, as I did earlier this week, I think you would be amazed to see just how widely used these lanes actually are. Here’s a video of Adelaide (just east of Spadina) in action. It is by Gil Meslin and was filmed sometime between 840 and 855am on a weekday.
However, I will say that I was far more impressed by the volume of bikes I saw in person. I wish I took a picture. They easily outnumbered the cars when I was there, which speaks to the latent demand for this sort of infrastructure. I can’t imagine a faster way to get across downtown in the morning.
So if you haven’t already, check out Adelaide (or Richmond Street, which is also part of the cycle tracks program).
Earlier this week I was on Adelaide Street (Toronto) for a morning meeting. This is further north than my typical routine.
For those of you not familiar with Toronto, Adelaide is a one-way street with separated bikes lanes. These “cycle tracks” were installed as part of a pilot project that launched back in summer 2014. As I’m sure you can imagine, they were highly controversial at the time. Many heated debates.
But if you stand on Adelaide Street during the morning rush, as I did earlier this week, I think you would be amazed to see just how widely used these lanes actually are. Here’s a video of Adelaide (just east of Spadina) in action. It is by Gil Meslin and was filmed sometime between 840 and 855am on a weekday.
However, I will say that I was far more impressed by the volume of bikes I saw in person. I wish I took a picture. They easily outnumbered the cars when I was there, which speaks to the latent demand for this sort of infrastructure. I can’t imagine a faster way to get across downtown in the morning.
So if you haven’t already, check out Adelaide (or Richmond Street, which is also part of the cycle tracks program).
Hövding – a Swedish company best known for its radical airbag cycling helmets (definitely check these out) – is currently crowdsourcing unsafe conditions and cyclist frustration in London.
Working with the London Cyclist Campaign, they distributed 500 yellow handlebar buttons. Cyclists were then instructed to tap these buttons whenever they felt unsafe or frustrated with current cycling conditions.
Hövding – a Swedish company best known for its radical airbag cycling helmets (definitely check these out) – is currently crowdsourcing unsafe conditions and cyclist frustration in London.
Working with the London Cyclist Campaign, they distributed 500 yellow handlebar buttons. Cyclists were then instructed to tap these buttons whenever they felt unsafe or frustrated with current cycling conditions.
Here’s what the button looks like:
The following paragraph is a great way to describe urban cycling and to explain how our built environment can explicitly invite certain behaviors:
“If you want people to drive, build more automobile infrastructure. If you want people to bike, build better bike infrastructure. In San Francisco, as in most US cities, we’ve treated the idea of bike infrastructure as secondary to optimizing traffic flow, and have wound up protecting parked cars with bike lanes instead of the opposite. Because of this our bike lanes are plagued with double-parking. While enforcement is an important piece of the puzzle, we usually fail to admit how inviting a striped space between parked cars and traffic appears to an Uber driver. Our built environment invites a driving behavior that causes cyclists to spend much of their commute pushed into traffic, encouraging a culture of every-man-for-himself cycling behavior, adding to the discouraging perception that bikes are for the young and fearless only. This perception is elevated by the fact that bicycling deaths in San Francisco are hovering at least four times higher than the average rate in Copenhagen, a city with ten times as many cyclists.”
This snippet is from a blog post written by Alex Schuknecht (urban designer with Gehl). In the posts he also contrasts the cycling cultures of San Francisco and Copenhagen – two cities of similar size and density, but with fundamental differences. It’s a good read.
Many of us probably assume that we are agents of our own lives. We decide what we do and when we do it. We’re our own boss. That’s at least how I want to feel.
But the built environment is distinct from the natural environment in that we design it. It is not a given. And the environments we collectively choose to fund and build will ultimately have a significant impact on the way we “choose” to live our lives.
This gets back to the first line of the above quote: build more of this; get more of that. It’s also related to the startup mantra: “you make what you measure.” If all we’re measuring is traffic flow, then that’s the kind of city we will make. And that’s certainly be done.
I don’t think a lot of us think in these terms. But we should.
Every time the button is hit, the data point gets logged to a public map and an email gets sent to the Mayor of London reminding him of his promises around cycling. Both of these things happen via the rider’s smartphone.
Here’s what the public map looks like at the time of writing this post:
Not only does it tell you pain point locations, but it also seems to suggest the primary cycling routes. I think this is a brilliant initiative because, it’s entirely user-centric. It’s telling you how people feel on the ground.
Supposedly, Hövding is actively looking for other cyclist groups around the world to help them distribute their buttons. So if you’re a group in Toronto or in another city, I would encourage you to reach out to them. The more data the better.
The following paragraph is a great way to describe urban cycling and to explain how our built environment can explicitly invite certain behaviors:
“If you want people to drive, build more automobile infrastructure. If you want people to bike, build better bike infrastructure. In San Francisco, as in most US cities, we’ve treated the idea of bike infrastructure as secondary to optimizing traffic flow, and have wound up protecting parked cars with bike lanes instead of the opposite. Because of this our bike lanes are plagued with double-parking. While enforcement is an important piece of the puzzle, we usually fail to admit how inviting a striped space between parked cars and traffic appears to an Uber driver. Our built environment invites a driving behavior that causes cyclists to spend much of their commute pushed into traffic, encouraging a culture of every-man-for-himself cycling behavior, adding to the discouraging perception that bikes are for the young and fearless only. This perception is elevated by the fact that bicycling deaths in San Francisco are hovering at least four times higher than the average rate in Copenhagen, a city with ten times as many cyclists.”
This snippet is from a blog post written by Alex Schuknecht (urban designer with Gehl). In the posts he also contrasts the cycling cultures of San Francisco and Copenhagen – two cities of similar size and density, but with fundamental differences. It’s a good read.
Many of us probably assume that we are agents of our own lives. We decide what we do and when we do it. We’re our own boss. That’s at least how I want to feel.
But the built environment is distinct from the natural environment in that we design it. It is not a given. And the environments we collectively choose to fund and build will ultimately have a significant impact on the way we “choose” to live our lives.
This gets back to the first line of the above quote: build more of this; get more of that. It’s also related to the startup mantra: “you make what you measure.” If all we’re measuring is traffic flow, then that’s the kind of city we will make. And that’s certainly be done.
I don’t think a lot of us think in these terms. But we should.
Every time the button is hit, the data point gets logged to a public map and an email gets sent to the Mayor of London reminding him of his promises around cycling. Both of these things happen via the rider’s smartphone.
Here’s what the public map looks like at the time of writing this post:
Not only does it tell you pain point locations, but it also seems to suggest the primary cycling routes. I think this is a brilliant initiative because, it’s entirely user-centric. It’s telling you how people feel on the ground.
Supposedly, Hövding is actively looking for other cyclist groups around the world to help them distribute their buttons. So if you’re a group in Toronto or in another city, I would encourage you to reach out to them. The more data the better.
