September 22nd, 2011
Imagine it’s a beautiful autumn day in Hong Kong. The summer’s humidity has vanished and you’re out enjoying the fine weather, bicycling along Victoria Harbour. You pass the Star Ferry pier, the new government headquarters at Tamar, then Victoria Park, all the while gazing out at the jade green water.
That was the vision presented by a group of cycling advocates at the Harbourfront Commission on September 7th. The Hong Kong Cycling Alliance is urging the commission to include a 16-kilometre cycleway in its plans for a continuous public promenade along the shoreline of Victoria Harbour. Its members argue that cycling would enliven the waterfront while also creating an easy way to travel between its different nodes of activity.
“Cycling is the most convenient, efficient mode of transportation known to man — and it’s just right for the harbourfront, which we want to be peaceful and well-connected,” says Martin Turner, a member of the Cycling Alliance. “I can see a family going there and hiring bikes for an afternoon. And commuters won’t have to sit on a bus for 45 minutes at the start of the morning. They can get some fresh air and improve their health.”
Turner and other cycling advocates hope that giving bikes a place on the waterfront could encourage cycling not only as a recreational activity but as a convenient way to get around the city. That would bring Hong Kong into line with cities as diverse as Hangzhou, New York and Paris, where cycling has become increasingly popular — and where local governments enthusiastically promote it as a healthy, ecologically-friendly form of transport.
“Our goal is to make cycling a part of everyday life in Hong Kong,” says Cycling Alliance member Philip Heung. For that to happen, though, cycling advocates must face the mother of all obstacles: changing government policy, which does not consider bicycles a means of transportation, even as cycling appears to grow more popular in both the New Territories and the urban areas of Kowloon and Hong Kong Island.
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December 13th, 2009
The tensions had to bubble to the surface at some point. That’s the consensus that has emerged since underground cylcing activists literally took their fight to the streets, reclaiming a fourteen block stretch of bike lane that had been removed in Brooklyn earlier this year — at the possible behest of the area’s ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community.
The removal occurred on a stretch of Bedford Avenue, the main artery of Williamsburg. For the uninitiated, the neighborhood is roughly split between a gentrifying playground for youngish hipsters to the north and a tradition-bound, family-oriented Hasidic district to the south. The contrast between the two Williamsburgs can be stark, especially on Saturdays: whereas the northside is often packed with revelers, the storefronts of the southside are shut, and, save for families walking to and from synogogues, its sidewalks deserted.
Neither part of Williamsburg could remain contained within its own sphere for very long, and a culture clash was probably inevitable. The city cited safety concerns — including a prevalence of double parking and an increasing number of pedestrians being hit by bikes — as its reason for removing the lanes, but cycling advocates blamed Hasidic complaints that bikers’ skimpy attire was an affront to their moral sensibilities.
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July 22nd, 2009
Photo by cagliostro
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.”
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April 1st, 2009
Evening rush hour near Xuanwu Gate metro station
February 19th, 2009
I’ve never had much use for bike lanes. While I appreciate them in certain situations — like when they let you ride legally against the flow of traffic — they generally strike me as a half-measure that lull both drivers and cyclists into complacency. They give the illusion of safety when they are in some ways more dangerous than ordinary street riding. Bike lanes have their place in the city, but they’re less important than developing a universal cycling culture and a street environment that is safe for cyclists in any situation.
But what if you were to bring your own bike lane? “Instead of adapting cycling to established bike lanes, the bike lane should adapt to the cyclists,” write the guys behind the Light Lane, a laser-based safety light that projects the image of a bike lane onto the street behind a moving bicycle. “Our system projects a crisply defined virtual bike lane onto pavement, using a laser, providing the driver with a familiar boundary to avoid. With a wider margin of safety, bikers will regain their confidence to ride at night, making the bike a more viable commuting alternative.”
It’s a nice idea, one that enshrines the notion that a bike is an equal partner in traffic, not just a toy that can be relegated to a handful of recreational paths and bike lanes. For now, though, it remains just that—an idea—and even if the concept is workable, I’m not sure how effective it would be. Something tells me it isn’t so easy to make a lightweight, high-powered laser that can be visible even on rough and uneven pavement. But please, feel free to prove me wrong.
January 19th, 2009
En arrivant pour la première fois à Karlsruhe, en Allemagne, j’ai été surprise par le nombre de bicyclettes aux alentours de la gare centrale. Il faut dire qu’avec ses 65 millions de cyclistes, l’Allemagne – et ses villes – se doivent d’être adaptés aux vélos. Et la majorité des villes le sont ; Karlsruhe est une des ces villes adaptées aux bicyclettes, ce qui, concrétement, ce traduit par des facilités pour les cyclistes : pistes cyclables et parkings à vélos.
Parking à vélos à côté de chez un coiffeur
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January 16th, 2008
“I am now betting this bike path will change radically the lifestyle and quality of life of many Montrealers.”
- André Lavallée, member of Montreal’s executive committee, quoted in the Montreal Gazette, November 7, 2007
“It could turn downtown into a ghost town.”
- Sal Parasuco, retailer, quoted in the Montreal Gazette, September 10, 2007
« Assez vite aussi, j’ai eu l’impression que ce que ces flèches au sol disaient au fond aux cyclistes, c’est ” Par ici, la mort “. »
- Rima Elkouri, columnist in La Presse, September 20, 2007, on the St. Urbain bike lane
According to the United Nations, it was this year that the world became a place more populated by city dwellers than country folk. Today’s world is an increasingly urban place.
Of course, cities are inherently complicated, layered entities. More than their inhabitants, more than their buildings, people have over time built themselves a vast transportation infrastructure to connect themselves to each other – these may be streets, of course, but also include underground metro systems, freeways, maglev trains. Indeed, cities around the world are defined by elements of their transportation systems: what is Paris without the Champs-Elysées, or London without its Tube, or San Francisco without its trolley lines?
It is clear to me, as it must be to the vast majority of Urbanphoto readers, that the Montreal of only ten years hence will bear the imprint of, and perhaps be wholly defined by, what is perhaps the most important transportation development in the Western world of the twenty-first century: the de Maisonneuve Bike Path.
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