Morning rush hour in Utrecht, the fourth largest city in the Netherlands, and there’s no traffic jams — just bikes. Lots of bikes.
Like most Dutch cities, bicycles enjoy pride of place in Utrecht, where they are used for roughly one-third of all trips made each day. What impresses me most about this video is not the sheer number of bicycles you see in this video, it’s what you don’t see: collisions, cyclist-pedestrian conflicts, helmets.
In North America, where cities like Montreal and New York are aggressively promoting bike use, there are constant complaints from drivers about unruly cyclists. What those drivers don’t seem to understand is the extent to which the rules of the road are stacked against cyclists. If someone on a bike is riding the wrong way down a one-way street, it’s because the street runs in a single direction for the benefit of drivers and no one else. If they fail to come to a complete stop at a stop sign, again, it’s because those stop signs exist to control the movement of cars — bicycles would do far better with a yield.
Utrecht suggests that having streets that are designed with cyclists in mind, as well as cars, buses and pedestrians, leads to a far better environment for everyone involved.
When Montreal’s Turcot Interchange opened in 1966, no one had seen anything quite like it. Floating one hundred pillared feet above the ground, its concrete spans swirled and swooped through the air, finally coming together in a knot of jaw-dropping proportions. It comprised over seven kilometres of road and spanned an area of seventeen acres. Underneath its four levels of overpasses and elevated ramps, boats floated on the Lachine Canal and trains chugged with freight. In an especially futuristic touch, two continuous bands of fluorescent lights glowed from the highway’s walls. Driving on it, the city unfolded before you: a skyline studded with smokestacks and steeples and the slow blink of the Farine Five Roses sign. More than a mega-project, the Turcot was a Modernist victory cry.
The Turcot still inspires, but, like any relic of a bygone era, its sheen has worn away. The railyards that once spread out from the interchange—and from which the Turcot took its name—were closed by Canadian National in 2002. Ordinary highway lights replaced the space-age illuminations when the aluminum wiring decayed. Winter road salt has soaked the structure in a corrosive brine, inflating steel reinforcement bars into rusted balloons ten times their original size, causing concrete to fall off in chunks.
In 2007, the Ministère des transports du Québec (MTQ) proposed tearing the whole thing down and building a new ground-level interchange in its place. According to the renderings, vehicular capacity would be increased by 20 percent, but the new interchange—projected to cost $1.5 billion over seven years—would require the demolition of two hundred homes, including an entire street of walkup apartments and a large loft building that housed more than four hundred people. Its embankments would cut off links between St. Henri, Côte St. Paul and the other working-class areas adjacent to the interchange.
We’ve always known there is a gulf between the city as experienced by tourists and the city lived in by locals. Now we have a fun visual representation of that divide. Using various types of data from Flickr, one user of the photo-sharing website, Eric Fisher, has created maps that indicate the spots photographed by tourists and those shot by locals. Local photographs are blue, tourist photos red and undetermined photos yellow.
There are some problems in the methodology. Whether a Flickr user is a local or a tourist is determined by whether they photograph a given location over a long period of time (like a local would) or in just a few days (like a tourist would). That seems fair enough, but not everyone geotags their photos, which could possibly skew the results one way or another. One person who obsessive geotags all of his or her photos could have a disproportionately large representation on the map. You can see this in Vancouver, where one person’s geotagged cycle routes are prominently displayed.
Still, just by looking at the maps you get a strong intuitive sense that they are close to reality. In the Montreal map, tourists overwhelmingly stick to Old Montreal, St. Joseph’s Oratory and the Olympic Stadium while locals take photos throughout downtown and the Plateau, with an especially notable cluster of local shots around Lafontaine Park, Maisonneuve Park and the Botanical Gardens (which, interestingly enough, are right across the street from the Olympic tourist hub).
To earn their hackney license, London’s taxi drivers must all famously master “The Knowledge,” a vast compilation of raw data about the best routes through the city’s streets. The memorization process takes an average of 34 months to study — and 12 attempts to pass. That means it’s a safe bet few licensed London cabbies are ever lost, and — since they’re also immune from central London’s congestion charge or from restrictions on private vehicles in places like busy Oxford Street — the patterns driven by the city’s trademark black cabs probably reflect the overall distribution of street traffic in the British capital better than any other proxy.
Part of the BBC’s visually absorbing Britain from Above series, which also includes this mesmerizing time-lapse of Britain’s busiest rail station, the video above examines the patterns tread by London’s taxis over the course of a day by combining GPS data about their location with satellite imagery of the city, telling the story of Londoners’ movements by tracing their routes in light.
Matin de soleil discret et de fraicheur prenante. J’ouvre le double battant de cette vieille fenêtre. J’y prend, le temps d’un instant suspendu, une large bouffée d’air. Au loin, des bruits sourds. Cris stridents. Voitures agressives. Cinq heures le matin : la ville se réveille déjà. Aurore violet. Je regarde la rosée qui suinte le long des vieilles pierres de ce palazzo.
Enivrement baroque.
Après une arrivée tardive, j’avais installé temporairement ma vie dans un gîte trouvé à la hâte sur internet. B&B Da Lucia. Un espace central, à partir duquel je pourrais poursuivre ma découverte de Catania.
« Je suis à peine débarqué de cet avion trop petit que je pose mes pieds sur la piste. Le bus m’attend sous une pluie froide battue violemment par un vent gonflé d’une chaude humidité. On embarque, on débarque. Dix mètre à peine, tour de bus inutile et paresseux.
Les douaniers me parlent avec mollesse et estampillent mon passeport canadien sans me jeter le moindre regard. Je ne comprend rien de leur anglais, et ils n’essaient même pas de me parler en italien. Traitement éclair, acceptations hâtives. On me force à dégager le maigre espace dédié aux étrangers et je m’engouffre dans les couloirs du terminal, les secousses du vol encore au ventre.
Fagstein has really upped the ante on his Montreal Geography Trivia. For the latest installment (the sixty-fifth!), he posted a map of the Montreal suburb of Côte St. Luc and asked why it has two exclaves, which pretty much stumped everyone, even those who knew about the exclaves. With the help of the Gazette’s archives, which were recently made available on Google News, he was able to chart the political wheeling-and-dealing that led to the two stray bits of CSL.
What might be more interesting than how they came into being is what kind of an impact they’ve had on the city. One of the exclaves encompasses a portion of Macdonald Avenue, right on the border of Montreal and Hampstead. I’d always wondered why Macdonald was lined by big apartment blocks while the streets around it were much lower-density. Now, thanks to Fagstein, I know it’s because CSL saw the exclave as an opportunity to reap the profits from high-density development without making a single one of its suburban citizens upset, because the only people who would object to a bunch of apartment towers sprouting in their backyard lived in Hampstead and Montreal.
A city was reunited twenty years ago. There’s plenty to read about the demise of the Berlin Wall, which fell on November 9th, 1989, but what occupies my thoughts is Robin McMorran’s 1985 photo, which I originally posted in 2007. It says a lot about the arbitrariness and absurdity of separation walls, which in the case of Berlin passed right through the middle of streets and neighbourhoods like a clumsy butcher’s cleaver. McMorran returned to photograph that same spot in 1990, and though the wall is gone, the void it created isn’t.
When I saw this fun Berlin-commie-block-as-Tetris video, I immediately thought of Habitat 67, Moshe Safdie’s experimental modular apartment building. When it was built, by assembling prefab housing cubes into a jumbled whole, it looked more or less like what you see in this video. Unfortunately, Safdie’s vision of customizable, prefabricated apartment construction wasn’t as feasible as he had hoped, so instead of the deconstructionist cubes of Habitat 67, we have a world filled with lookalike boxes.
Below is an excerpt from Stuart Cooper’s 1977 movie The Disappearance, starring Donald Sutherland as a hitman who lives in Habitat 67. There’s plenty of great shots set to a very appropriate soundtrack.
Drinking fountains are everywhere in Rome, quite useful in a city where temperatures hover above 35C in the summer. These cast-iron fountains are known affectionately as nasoni, or “big noses,” due to the Pinocchio-esque appearance of their spouts. The design dates back to 1872, when the first twenty fountains were installed. Today, there are over 2,000 in the city, most of them emblazoned with the ancient Roman motto SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus).
The launch of Bixi, Montreal’s new bike-sharing system, has been nothing short of spectacular. Despite early problems — faulty lock mechanisms have led to the theft of dozens of bikes — it has been more successful than anyone imagined. In fact, Montrealers have taken so well to Bixi that Stationnement de Montréal, the municipal agency that runs the system, has decided to bump up an expansion that wasn’t planned until next year. Next month, an additional 2,000 bikes will be added at 100 new stations in Villeray, Little Burgundy and Côte des Neiges.
Just as the public has quickly taken to Bixi, the bike-sharing service has already engrained itself in the city. “Bixi has truly changed the urban landscape here,” notes On Two Wheels, the Gazette’s cycling blog. “There is a new, yet already familiar ‘blink’ on the bike paths; downtown it seems like every third bike is a Bixi. This program is clearly doing some heavy lifting toward getting more people using bikes that might not have otherwise.”
