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.
The Market Street Prototyping Festival is just finishing up in San Francisco. The festival, which is now in its 3rd year, is centered around urban interventions that can be rapidly prototyped and tested. The goal is to discover new ideas that could be used to transform and improve Market Street – the city’s civic spine. It is a joint effort of both the San Francisco Planning Department and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Here is a list of all the prototypes. You can “like” projects, but I wish they would have made it easier to filter and see which ones are the most popular.
One project that I liked is Vote With Your Feet. It consists of two doorways and a single crowdsourced YES/NO question above it. You vote by choosing a doorway. Once you walk through, you are then shown the results. Here’s a Boomerang video of it in action. I like it because it provides a frictionless way to acquire lots of ground-up feedback. Imagine placing something like this at the exit of a busy train station or transforming the existing doors.
Tactical urbanism can be a great mechanism for investigating and instigating positive change. This is hugely important considering how slow moving and bureaucratic city building can be. It’s not the same format, but NXT City here in Toronto has similar ambitions. They source new ideas for our public spaces from young people. I am thrilled that both of these initiatives exist.
The New York Times has an interesting article up talking about how Vancouver and Seattle are trying to more closely align themselves and create a unified tech corridor.
BC premier Christy Clark and Washington governor Jay Inslee recently signed an agreement to that effect, which included more research collaboration between the University of British Columbia and the University of Washington.
Seattle wants this because its companies need talent (read: foreign workers) and Vancouver’s borders are more open. Vancouver wants this because its tech industry is relatively small (go Hootsuite!) and it could benefit greatly from being more proximal to Seattle.
On a side note, Seattle is an interesting case study. In terms of venture capital dollars invested, it is below top tier cities such as San Francisco, New York, Boston, and so on. But in terms of the companies it has birthed (Microsoft, Amazon, Zillow, Expedia…) it is certainly a heavy hitter.
One of the key factors will be physical connectivity. There’s talk of high speed rail and/or a dedicated lane for autonomous vehicles. However it’s done, I think bringing this trip to < 1 hour would be the ideal scenario. There’s a psychological barrier beyond that.
If any of you live/work in either of these cities today, I would be curious to hear your thoughts.
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.
The Market Street Prototyping Festival is just finishing up in San Francisco. The festival, which is now in its 3rd year, is centered around urban interventions that can be rapidly prototyped and tested. The goal is to discover new ideas that could be used to transform and improve Market Street – the city’s civic spine. It is a joint effort of both the San Francisco Planning Department and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Here is a list of all the prototypes. You can “like” projects, but I wish they would have made it easier to filter and see which ones are the most popular.
One project that I liked is Vote With Your Feet. It consists of two doorways and a single crowdsourced YES/NO question above it. You vote by choosing a doorway. Once you walk through, you are then shown the results. Here’s a Boomerang video of it in action. I like it because it provides a frictionless way to acquire lots of ground-up feedback. Imagine placing something like this at the exit of a busy train station or transforming the existing doors.
Tactical urbanism can be a great mechanism for investigating and instigating positive change. This is hugely important considering how slow moving and bureaucratic city building can be. It’s not the same format, but NXT City here in Toronto has similar ambitions. They source new ideas for our public spaces from young people. I am thrilled that both of these initiatives exist.
The New York Times has an interesting article up talking about how Vancouver and Seattle are trying to more closely align themselves and create a unified tech corridor.
BC premier Christy Clark and Washington governor Jay Inslee recently signed an agreement to that effect, which included more research collaboration between the University of British Columbia and the University of Washington.
Seattle wants this because its companies need talent (read: foreign workers) and Vancouver’s borders are more open. Vancouver wants this because its tech industry is relatively small (go Hootsuite!) and it could benefit greatly from being more proximal to Seattle.
On a side note, Seattle is an interesting case study. In terms of venture capital dollars invested, it is below top tier cities such as San Francisco, New York, Boston, and so on. But in terms of the companies it has birthed (Microsoft, Amazon, Zillow, Expedia…) it is certainly a heavy hitter.
One of the key factors will be physical connectivity. There’s talk of high speed rail and/or a dedicated lane for autonomous vehicles. However it’s done, I think bringing this trip to < 1 hour would be the ideal scenario. There’s a psychological barrier beyond that.
If any of you live/work in either of these cities today, I would be curious to hear your thoughts.
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