By TRAFIK
Trafik brands themselves as Global Fixed Gear Culture, which makes this more of a how-to-lifestyle-music video than anything original or clever; nonetheless, some redeeming visual quality is salvaged through variations on urban infrastructure.
Via The Economist
Shifting up a gear: Cycling in cities
Thin air, thick smog and bad drivers make Mexico City hard going for cyclists. But a new fleet of 1,200 smart red “Ecobici” pay-as-you-go rental bikes, at 85 docking stations, marks the most ambitious recent addition to a global trend of municipally endorsed cycling. Since February 7,000 people have signed up, and between them they have taken more than 200,000 trips.
A low-tech scheme started in the French town of La Rochelle in 1974. Copenhagen launched the first big automated project in 1995. German cities, including Berlin, have tried versions paid for by mobile phone. But the most successful is the “Vélib” in Paris, with 20,000 bikes available for users with swipe-cards. In London the transport authority and Barclays Bank will launch a 6,000-bike programme on July 30th. Users can pay at one of the 400 docking stations, or use a key with a chip.
The vulnerability for most schemes is theft. Thousands of the Parisian bikes disappeared in the scheme’s early stages, turning up as far afield as Romania and Morocco. Portable locks have proved a weak point: the mandatory use of docking stations is more secure. “We were expecting people to steal them, but that hasn’t happened,” says Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico City’s mayor. Only one of the 1,200 bikes in the scheme has gone missing to date.
The paradox of urban cycling is that bad traffic is both deterrent and incentive. When demonstrations or traffic-signal failures bring Mexico’s streets to gridlock, businessmen can be seen strapping their briefcases onto Ecobicis.
Cyclists in places like London and Mexico City yearn for proper cycle lanes, of the kind commonplace in countries such as Germany. A second-best solution is the right to ride (gently) through parks and on pavements without being fined. On that score at least Mexico’s traffic police, the scourge of motorists, are charm itself.
For now, the hope is that new bike-hire schemes help raise cyclists’ numbers enough to change motorists’ behaviour—and thus erode the perception of danger that keeps people off their bikes.
Via Streetsblog, by Clarence Eckerson, Jr.
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.
Via boston.com:
A rough week for Guatemala
In just the past seven days, residents of Guatemala and parts of neighboring Honduras and El Salvador have had to cope with a volcanic eruption and ash fall, a powerful tropical storm, the resulting floods and landslides, and a frightening sinkhole in Guatemala City that swallowed up a small building and an intersection. Pacaya volcano started erupting lava and rocks on May 27th, blanketing Guatemala City with ash, closing the airport, and killing one television reporter who was near the eruption. Two days later, as Guatemalans worked to clear the ash, Tropical Storm Agatha made landfall bringing heavy rains that washed away bridges, filled some villages with mud, and somehow triggered the giant sinkhole – the exact cause is still being studied.
The sinkhole caused by the rains of Tropical Storm Agatha in Guatemala City is estimated to be 30 meters wide and over 60 meters deep. The sinkhole formed Saturday, swallowing a clothing factory about three miles from the site of a similar sinkhole three years ago. The clothing factory had closed only an hour before it plunged into the Earth.
Gazing down into the giant sinkhole that opened up in Guatemala City, swallowing an intersection and a 3-story building, seen on June 1, 2010.
Top two photos: REUTERS, bottom photo: JOHAN ORDONEZ/AFP/Getty Images. Read the rest, here.
Via NY Times, by John Branch:
To most people, the area under the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge, in the shadows of the off ramps and against the hulking stone structure of the famous East River crossing, is not a place to stop. It is a place to leave.
It is a long, sloping plaza covered in smooth red brick, with a few trees stretching for rare beams of sunlight. Those who amble into this area generally are children passing to and from a nearby school, or misplaced tourists looking for the bridge’s pedestrian walkway to Brooklyn.
But for generations of skateboarders, and an increasing number of BMX bikers, the place carries an iconic name and a sacred meaning. It is the Brooklyn Banks. It is the place to go, to be, and to be seen.
“It’s the best skate park in the world,” the professional skateboarder Mike Vallely said near the end of a popular YouTube video posted earlier this year to pay homage to the threatened Brooklyn Banks, “because it wasn’t supposed to be a skate park.”
It is about to become little more than a construction zone during a four-year renovation of the Brooklyn Bridge. Any day now, a new fence will slice the Brooklyn Banks roughly in half, giving construction crews a staging area for trucks and equipment until 2014. Sometime this summer, the entire area will be closed off for about six months while an overhead ramp is painted, the city said.
Skateboarders are used to being displaced from public spaces. But the Brooklyn Banks has a decades-long history and a cultivated status as a sort of skating Mecca. Besides, it was already saved once, with help from the city, just five years ago.
Read the rest here.
From The Economist print edition, Apr 29th 2010:
When it comes to making theme parks work, China’s record is rather a poor one. In the suburbs of Shanghai weeds entwine the railed-off entrance to an abandoned amusement centre, called American Dream, a $50m venture that spectacularly failed to inspire. In the same city on May 1st China opens its greatest such project to date with a lavish ceremony attended by Chinese and foreign leaders. Called the World Expo, Shanghai has gambled billions on it, hoping to make it a huge tourist attraction and a symbol of the country’s rising power. But problems lie ahead.
The city’s lavish spending on the expo is all the more striking given how lacklustre a brand World Expos (or World’s Fairs as they are sometimes known) have become in the developed world. Few even remember the last such event held in Aichi, Japan, in 2005, let alone the one in Zaragoza, Spain, in 2008, which in the arcane terminology of the business, dictated by the Bureau International des Expositions in Paris, did not actually count as a full-scale “universal” expo.
Shanghai, however, is hoping to attract 70m visitors to its six-month fair, more than three times as many as went to Aichi and 12 times more than to Zaragoza. It says it has spent $4.2 billion on the event alone—more than twice as much as Beijing spent on the Olympic games in 2008—plus tens of billions on accelerated improvements to the city’s infrastructure.
Officials tend to avoid the term “theme park” to describe the expo, but that is what it is. Long gone are the days of the Great Exhibition in London of 1851, the progenitor of all expos, when the point was to show off manufactured goods (and British industrial strength). Shanghai’s expo grandly states its purpose as being to stimulate discussion of “urban maladies”. “Better city, better life” is its slogan. Sometimes officials call it China’s “economic Olympics” as if it were a huge trade fair where business deals are struck (it is not). A better explanation was given by a senior expo organiser last year. Visitors, he said, were supposed to experience “the sensation of being in a fantastic movie of light and sound, or entering a theme park full of colour and attractions”. Fun is a central objective.
Another is instilling patriotic pride, a motive very familiar to expo organisers of yesteryear. More than 190 countries have put up displays or pavilions, often bizarre architectural follies. But these are dwarfed by the 63-metre-high China pavilion (above) a colossal edifice resembling an ancient imperial crown. It is painted in the oxblood red of Beijing’s Forbidden City and is intended to awe visitors in much the same way. The eco-friendly themes that some other countries have tried to convey with their pavilion designs have been eschewed by China in favour of a demonstration of power and might.
But the organisers face difficulties. Only about one-eighth of the 400,000 visitors expected on average each day will be able to get into the Chinese pavilion (though unlike most of the other structures, this will not be dismantled after the expo). Prior booking will be necessary. Others, despite having spent between 160 yuan ($23) and 200 yuan on tickets, will have to content themselves with the more modest foreign offerings. But most visitors will be interested in only a handful of these.
Trial runs have found massive queues forming at the popular pavilions. The American and British ones are among the biggest draws. Waiting has been taking two or three hours. One day a Chinese visitor could be heard rebuking an American official outside the American pavilion, closed because of a technical hitch. “I came to this pavilion first as a sign of respect to your country,” he fumed. Organisers will be praying that no more hiccups occur. The vast scale of the site, 20 times bigger than the one at Zaragoza and more than twice as large as Aichi’s, means covering long distances between pavilions, and there are also queues for buses. In Shanghai the weather in summer is extremely hot and humid. Tempers could easily fray.
Selling the “better city” theme is also an uphill task. For all its eco-friendly talk, Shanghai has shown the same disregard as other Chinese cities for those displaced by its relentless development. Some 55,000 people had to make way for the expo site on the banks of the Huangpu River. Thousands more are now being moved to make way for another, more conventional, theme park: Disneyland. Shanghai Daily, a government-controlled newspaper, this week said the Disneyland project would be “another new bright spot” of the city’s development after the expo.
Ground zero of this is the village of Zhaohang, about 15km (9 miles) east of the expo site. Late last year a government pamphlet sent to residents hailed the Disneyland plan as a “major move” in Shanghai’s service economy. In recent weeks much of the village has been reduced to rubble. But a few families are holding out for better compensation, even as demolition crews tear down their neighbours’ houses. “The government is very cruel to us,” says one such resident, over the crash of tumbling masonry. A red banner hanging over what remains of a nearby street calls on the village to “happily welcome the grand gathering of the World Expo with our civilised new image.”
From The Economist print edition, Apr 15th 2010:
The new model: Is Oregon’s metropolis a leader among American cities or just strange?
THE city most comparable to Portland might be Vancouver in Canada, reckons Sam Adams, Portland’s mayor, although “we look to Amsterdam, Helsinki and Stockholm” for ideas. Ethan Seltzer, a professor of urban planning in Portland, thinks little Freiburg, in Germany, is the best comparison, with its similar obsessions about recycling, sustainability, public transit and bicycling. Others pick Zurich, which, like Portland, has a view of snow-capped mountains, orderly (bordering on staid) streets with trams, even the same peculiar fondness for direct democracy and tolerance of assisted suicide.
This might seem odd for a city on the American West Coast that once was the terminus of the Oregon Trail and has a cowboys-and-rodeos heritage. The locals, in fact, enjoy feeling odd: “Keep Portland weird”, say bumper stickers on the city’s cars, which all seem to be hybrid-electric vehicles. “Keep Portland sanctimonious,” mumble a few contrarians, while others savour the irony that Portland had to steal the slogan from Austin, Texas. But on the whole, Portlanders not only love their city but believe that it is, and ought to be, a model for the rest of America.
Mr Adams has personally contributed by becoming the first (though no longer the only) openly gay mayor of a big American city, and even surviving a recall attempt after a sex scandal (he is now confronting another). Mr Adams has a vision of progressive urbanism: a city where most people cycle or ride the streetcar, recycle what they consume, exist in harmony with nature and live in communities rather than the suburban sprawl of cities like Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix or Atlanta.
Nature, in fact, is the main draw for the mostly young and single newcomers to this city, almost the fastest-growing on the West Coast, says Joe Cortright, a Portland economist: the ocean to the west; the Cascade mountains to the east; and the high desert beyond them. The vineyards of pinot noir and chardonnay along the Willamette Valley are all within a manageable drive. In Portland, “business casual” means wearing a fleece. The area’s main industrial cluster is “activewear”, led by Nike and Columbia Sportswear and including thousands of smaller companies.
The environment is also the main theme of public policy. The biggest force in local politics is not a party (Democrats in effect rule without opposition) but cyclists. The bike lanes are impressive and getting even better now as streets get “bioswales”, patches of turf and shrub that capture and filter storm water and simultaneously calm traffic and separate pedestrians and cyclists from the Priuses. Those who can’t bike are encouraged to use public transport, which is free downtown.
Mr Adams says Portland’s success is “totally replicable”. But much of it seems to be an unintended consequence of land-use policies dating back to 1973. Back then, Oregon adopted “urban-growth boundaries” (UGBs) to preserve the farmlands that were then the mainstay of Oregon’s economy. Over time the rationale for UGBs changed to “don’t Californicate Oregon”—ie, don’t become Los Angeles, a freeway sprawl with no centre. The result has been unusually compact living, which is in turn easily served by public transport.
But cities with sprawling, California-style layouts will find it harder to make people use public transport. Phoenix, for example, has an excellent light-rail system, but it is often empty. And it may be even harder for such cities to get their residents to live more closely together.
Joel Kotkin, a Los Angeles-based demographer and author, thinks that places like Portland, San Francisco and Boston have become “elite cities”, attractive to the young and single, especially those with trust funds, but beyond the reach of middle-class families who want a house with a lawn. Indeed Portland, for all its history of Western grit, is remarkably white, young and childless. Most Americans will therefore continue to migrate to the more affordable “cities of aspiration” such as Houston, Atlanta or Phoenix, thinks Mr Kotkin. As they do so, they may turn decentralised sprawl into quilts of energetic suburbs with a community feeling.
That is not to belittle Portland’s vision. It is a sophisticated and forward-looking place. Which other city can boast that its main attraction is a bustling independent book store (Powell’s) and that medical students can go from one part of their campus to another by gondola, taking their bikes with them? Other cities will see much to emulate. Minneapolis, for example, this month displaced Portland as Bicycling magazine’s most bike-friendly city (“they got extra points for biking in the snow,” grumble Mr Adams’s staff). Adam Davis of Davis, Hibbitts & Midghall, a Portland polling firm, says that Oregonians like to consider themselves leaders but also exceptions. They are likely to remain both.
