Even in 1932, Copenhagen Was a Cyclist's Paradise - Feargus O'Sullivan. Copenhagen's fame as a bike-friendly city is old news. It's at least 82-years-old in fact, judging by a recently unearthed 1932 newsreel. The short film, entitled "The Wheeled City – With Eve in Copenhagen" is one of over 80,000 old clips from the British Pathé newsreel archive uploaded to Youtube this month. It records the wild popularity of cycling among 1930s Copenhageners, and reveals its British filmmakers in dizzy "What will they think of next? " mode. "Cyclists in hundreds – thousands, (millions it seems to our cameraman!) The two-wheeled lunacy doesn't stop there. Reaching back further into the archive, there is some even earlier evidence of Copenhagen's cycle friendliness. Both films come courtesy of a wonderful playlist compiled by Youtube user laxbikeguy, which also contains a clip - this time from Amsterdam - showing that, even in bike friendly cities, the problems remain the same.
Can Atlanta Go All In on the BeltLine? - Rebecca Burns. ATLANTA—It's not often one can use the terms "transit-oriented development" and "magical" in the same sentence, but that's what came to mind during last September’s Lantern Parade. Ten thousand people watched a procession of giant glowing puppets and fanciful blazing lanterns wind along once-abandoned and kudzu-choked train tracks. A thousand marchers passed through five neighborhoods, where celebratory onlookers clustered on back porches and crowded restaurant patios, or perched themselves on former rail embankments.
That magical TOD experience came courtesy of the BeltLine: Atlanta's multibillion-dollar, 25-year project to transform 22 miles of railroad and industrial sites into a sustainable network connecting 45 inner-city communities. The project envisions wide walking and biking paths, access to nearby neighborhoods and businesses, parks and green space, and new homes, shops, and apartments. I ask Gravel if he walked the full 22-mile loop when researching his thesis. "Wow. "No. The Importance of Running True BRT Through Downtown - Eric Jaffe. One of the reasons so-called Bus-Rapid Transit projects have been so contentious in U.S. cities is that urban street space is a precious commodity.
Unwilling to give BRT exclusive lanes along the median, many cities route the buses into curbside lanes with mixed traffic. There, BRT must share the curb with turning cars, double-parked trucks, and other traffic conflicts — forcing the buses initially sold to the public as "speedy" to a crawl. In other words, what feels like a compromise is really a critical error. American cities that fail to extend true BRT through the downtown area ensure that the systems receive their greatest visibility in places where they experience their lowest effectiveness. The result can be to sour public opinion on BRT at large, making subsequent expansions — there or elsewhere around the country — all the more difficult.
Space is the biggest battle, says Weinstock, but the problem is largely illusory. In technical terms, any street 40-feet wide can handle BRT. Public Transport and / or Multimodal Information Systems. Topic of the practice - Although significant emphasis is put on securing quality of public transport in Aalborg, delays do still occur, and sometimes passengers report feeling uncertain if the bus is delayed, or if they themselves arrive too late at the bus stop. Uncertainty about planned and actual departure times and the location of bus stops are some of the barriers that discourage potential passengers from using public transport.The availability of Real Time Passenger Information prior to getting on a bus and on board information (via screens. At the same time the systems contribute to improving the image of public transport as a modern means of transport and thereby helping public transport to appear as an attractive alternative to car use.
The complete IT infrastructure for delivering RTPI including busPc and back offices system with prognoses algorithms in Aalborg were planned as part of EU project VIKING and implemented during the CIVITAS I VIVALDI project. Bolivie : le plus long téléphérique urbain du monde pour rallier la Paz. La route entre la capitale Bolivienne La Paz et la ville voisine d’El Alto est l’une des plus fréquentée du Pays. Si les deux villes ne sont situées qu’à quelques kilomètres de distance, il faut parfois plus d’une heure pour se déplacer entre celles-ci, la seule voie d’accès étant une petite route sinueuse construite à flanc de montagne. La Paz – Cable Car – Martin Alipaz/EPA Les habitudes des habitants des deux localités seront très prochainement bouleversées par l’ouverture, en mai, du plus long téléphérique urbain du monde qui permettra aux voyageurs de se déplacer entre les deux villes par les airs !
Composé de trois tronçons bien distincts, le nouveau téléphérique devrait considérablement réduire les temps de déplacement et les niveaux de pollution de la région en accueillant quelques 200 000 voyageurs par jour. Soit 18 000 passagers par heure pour parcourir les 11 kilomètres qui séparent les deux cités boliviennes. La Paz – Cable Car La Paz – Cable Car – Photobucket user ZPLAQ. Have U.S. Light Rail Systems Been Worth the Investment? - Yonah Freemark. Five U.S. metros (Buffalo, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, and San Jose) opened light rail systems in the 1980s to great fanfare. The mode offered many of the benefits of subway systems for far less public money; San Diego's system, per mile, cost about one-seventh of Washington, D.C.'s Metrorail. Light rail cities like Portland became transportation models for the country, pointing toward a transit-friendly urban future.
Thirty years later, light rail remains the most appealing mode of new public transportation for many American cities. Billions of local, state, and federal dollars have been invested in 650 miles of new light rail lines in 16 regions, and today 144 miles of additional lines are under construction at a cost of more than $25 billion. Many more lines are planned. No region has invested in a new heavy rail subway system, on the other hand, since 1993. The three other early-adopter light rail cities didn't do much better. But spending on new lines is not enough. Never Miss The Bus Again With This Street-Projected Public Transport Tracker. TransitScreen makes public transportation more accessible thanks to digital signs in universities and offices that display schedules and other key information for trains, buses, and even bike sharing services.
Now they want to provide the same service to the general public, with projections on sidewalks, walls, and other areas that would include aggregated transport information, and even how to get to the access point for your chosen method of transportation.Ryan Croft, one of TransitScreen’s co-founders, told FastCoDesign that building owners and business improvement districts are interested in how the technology can activate public spaces. “It’s a dynamic use of real-time information that cities haven’t seen before,” said Croft. “They really like it because it’s something that has such broad reach.”
Unlike similar services, there is no need to download a specific app, which may not even cover all of your chosen transportation methods. TransitScreenSource: FastCoDesign. The Key to Saving the U.S. Transportation Program - Beth Osborne. The U.S. transportation system, vital to our economic success, has some big problems. The most immediate is that by this summer it will run out of money to reimburse the states for projects they have taken on with the promise of federal funds. Meanwhile, Congress is due to renew the program this fall, allocating dollars for transportation infrastructure for the next several years. But with gas tax receipts slowing and coffers emptying faster than they can be filled, it's not clear how lawmakers will pull this off.
The biggest problem, I would contend, is that this huge program, which provides one of the most critical and influential functions of federal government, is almost invisible to the people upon whom it depends — its customers, the taxpayers. This came home to me in unexpected ways over the last five years, when I served as one of the leaders at the U.S. Department of Transportation. They say all politics is local, and that goes double for transportation.
How China Will Dominate the U.S. Electric-Bus Market - Todd Woody. The country is emerging as an innovator in green tech. Todd Woody Next Monday, a battery-powered, 40-foot bus is set to roll off the assembly line in a former recreational vehicle factory in Lancaster, California, a blue-collar desert community north of Los Angeles, and be delivered to the local transit authority. There’s no missing the symbolism—a defunct manufacturing plant that once made massive, gas-hogging RVs is reborn to produce carbon-free transportation (and local jobs)—as the world tips toward climate catastrophe. But here’s who’s driving this $800,000 bus: China. The owner of the factory and the technology that lets the eBus go 155 miles on a charge is BYD, the $38 billion Chinese conglomerate that makes everything from electric cars to LED lighting to solar panels. As I wrote in The New York Times last October about BYD’s move into Los Angeles: THERE’S a newcomer to this city’s auto row.
Media attention, though, has focused on BYD’s rocky entry into the U.S. market. LED tram energy saving specified. LRT Line Extension Project. Syarikat Prasarana Negara Berhad (Prasarana) is currently extending the Ampang and Kelana Jaya lines, as part of the LRT line extension project in the Klang Valley of Malaysia. The two lines are expected to meet at an integrated station at Putra Heights, located approximately 25km from Putrajaya and 35km from Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Environmental Impact Assessment of the LRT extension project was approved in 2009. Construction of the line extensions commenced in 2010 and is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2016. RapidKL, a subsidiary of Prasarana, will operate the extension project being undertaken under the 'Prasarana campaign of Bringing Transport Convenience Closer to the People' programme.
The construction cost is estimated to be RM7bn (approximately $2.1bn). Details of the Malaysian LRT line extension project The Kelana Jaya Line and Ampang lines are part of Kuala Lumpur's light rail transit (LRT) network. Construction of the LRT extension Rolling stock. The bike-share report: Connectivity and bike lanes key to successful bike-sharing. Safe, connected bike lanes in New York City fosters use of the city’s bike-share systems. Photo by Ted Eytan/Flickr. Peter Midgley joins us as the author of the Bike-share report series, exclusive to TheCityFix. We invited Peter to share his vast knowledge on bike-sharing gained through his experience tracking the growth of bike-sharing systems since 2007. Peter formerly worked as the Urban Mobility Theme Champion for the global Transport Knowledge Partnership (gTKP).
The previous post in this series focused on lessons from the collapse of the Bixi system. How important are bike lanes to successful bike-sharing? Growing out of the lane: Networks the way to mobility Too many cities have bike lanes that go nowhere, end in unsafe conditions, or pass through dangerous intersections. The numbers don’t lie: Safety prompts ridership It’s not enough for bike lanes to be connected to one another and to bike-sharing systems, they also need to be connected safely.
Resources for design and policy. A Cautionary Tale for Cities That Want Their Own High Line. Sitting at a café with beer in hand, Simone Rots is completely relaxed. With her short brown hair swept back from her face, it would be difficult for the average passerby to guess the amount of blood, sweat and tears this woman has put into 1.9 kilometers of Rotterdam real estate. Her efforts can be seen in the soaring arches under a disused, elevated railway that have recently been reclaimed as one of the hippest destinations in the city.
With subtle architectural intervention and sweeping programmatic changes, this once-dangerous area, known as the Hofbogen, has become the new creative backbone for the local community. But the arduous journey to this point – which isn’t even the point Rots and her team were originally aiming for – also illustrates the difficulty of getting big urban projects done in a tough financial climate. The 28.5-kilometer Hofplein railway was completed in 1908. It carried trains for a century, but its tracks have been unused since 2010. Waterfront Streetcar in Brooklyn and Queens Is a Big Idea, But Is It the Right One? New York Times architecture-turned-urbanism critic Michael Kimmelman has a new transit idea for the city: Build a mixed-traffic streetcar along the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront, connecting waterfront neighborhoods from Red Hook in Brooklyn to Astoria in Queens.
The proposal is a take on an older idea, put forward by urban planner Alex Garvin, for a light rail line connecting the same neighborhoods. There is an easily-graspable logic to the idea – the subways don’t reach the waterfront, where there is a lot of new construction and some existing housing and jobs. Kimmelman speaks of the “desire line” for travel between the neighborhoods, and proposes the streetcar as a solution: Right now, it’s easier by subway to get from Long Island City to Midtown, or from Downtown Brooklyn to Wall Street, than it is to get from housing projects in Fort Greene or Long Island City to jobs in Williamsburg, or from much of Red Hook to — well, almost anywhere.
Then there’s the issue of cost. Ecovia in Monterrey -- How Bus Rapid Transit is Transforming Urban Mobility | Transport for Development. Follow the author on Twitter: @shomik_raj One of the shiny new Ecovía buses Listening to Juan Ayala rave about how they only let the most talented bus drivers operate the shiny new buses on the Ecovía Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, we realized how fantastic our job is. Not only do we have the privilege to help plan and implement transformational projects such as Monterrey’s first BRT line, but we actually get to see the results of our work firsthand. One should not underestimate the importance of Ecovía, a new 30-km BRT corridor crossing Monterrey from east to west.
The original goal was to create a high-speed, high-quality mass transit system that could provide rail-like performance at a fraction of the cost. If the first six weeks are any indication, Ecovía certainly has achieved that. As Monterrey enjoys its first BRT line and starts planning extensions, it is worth highlighting five key transformations induced by the system: Level boarding at Ecovía 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Better public transport makes for a smarter Sydney. Sydney: A knowledge economy without the transport system to go with it. Photo: Nick Moir Sydney could pay a high price for its lousy public transport. As cities across the world wrestle with globalisation and the advance of technology, effective mass transit systems are proving valuable. Fast-growing knowledge industries are clustering together rather than spreading out.
Individuals, businesses, cities and nations stand to gain from this process which economists call “agglomeration". The challenge for Sydney is this far-reaching economic trend suits cities with good public transport better than those with new freeways. “The knowledge economy is increasingly a public-transport driven economy,” says Tim Williams, the chief executive of advocacy group the Committee for Sydney. Advertisement Sydney’s economy has fundamentally shifted in a generation.
The economic forces stoking demand for Sydney’s knowledge-intensive firms have been at work across the globe. Which transport is the fairest of them all? City Mapper: An Idea Worth the Big VC Bucks. 5 creative ways people get around cities. London's Bike-Share Program Unwittingly Revealed Its Cyclists' Movements for the World to See - Leo Mirani. The mobility pass in Strasbourg, interview with Roland Ries | UITP - Advancing Public Transport.
How Disney Imagined the American Highway of the Future, 50 Years Ago - Jenny Xie. Data-driven buses are ready to roll in Boston - TheTransitWire.com. Un standard pour les plans de métro des grandes métropoles mondiales. Le transporteur Deret démontre que l'on peut rouler vert et en tirer profit. MapZero optimise les trajets des conducteurs de véhicules électriques. Quel transport métropolitain pour Los Angeles ? Politique de transport et mobilité(s) à Los Angeles. Santiago du Chili et son nouveau système de bus à haut niveau de service. The World's Best Cities for Commuters. Glow-in-the-Dark Roads Are Finally Here - Jenny Xie. Melbourne Airport link endorsed. New Starts: China Signs HSR Agreement With North Korea, Riyadh and Guangzhou Get Tons of Metros. !NAT refait les plans des métros. Métropole du Grand Paris : la droite veut imposer le pouvoir des communes. A Painstakingly Recreated S-Bahn Map From a Divided Berlin - Mark Byrnes.
The urban mobility portal - Show news - Trams and trains powered by green energy in Rhine-Neckar Region (Germany) Cheema - hero of metro bus project. Going the last mile: Does connectivity influence sustainable transport usage? A Journey Into the 140-Year-Old Tunnels Below Calcutta. Métro et RER, deux chantiers pharaoniques (enfin) lancés à New York. Free transit: Three reasons it is an idea whose time has come. Un standard pour les plans de métro des grandes métropoles mondiales.