I was riding my bike home from the office on a Sunday. The downtown San Francisco traffic was eerily quiet. I picked up speed on a slight downhill section of my standard route from the Financial District to the Marina, when I was suddenly pitched off my bike and into the street.

I had a few scrapes and bruises, but nothing serious.  The panicked driver, who had opened his door into me as I rode by, apologized and implored if I was okay, but I couldn’t focus on anything he said because I was laughing so hard.

It is strangely hilarious that I had just completed more than 1,000 miles on an unassisted bike ride from Beijing to Shanghai without a single scrape, but couldn’t last more than 48 hours back on US soil before getting into some kind of accident.

The goal of my trek was to gain a firsthand, in-depth understanding of the bicycle’s role in Chinese life, and to investigate how the cycling culture and bike infrastructure can be integrated into efficient and sustainable transportation design.

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NOLA native Sarah Markel on the levee bike path along the Mississippi. Photo: Catherine Markel.

Earlier this month, I spent a week in Madison, Wisconsin, where I sat through lectures by some of the world’s leading authorities on ways to make cities more appealing, functional, and sustainable. But the most valuable takeaways came not from inside the Madison Convention Center, but from the city itself; more specifically, from the helmeted, benevolent army that pedaled its way quietly and efficiently through the streets.

I’d heard about Madison being a bike-friendly city, but wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, never having been to Portland or Minneapolis or Davis, California, or any of those other places that usually get the highest praise for their bike-oriented principles. Read more…

Forever cementing its image as the champion of mobile telephony in emerging markets, Nokia launched a new product last week: a bicycle-powered cell phone charger. The idea isn’t new in the developing world—a couple of Kenyan students came up with a similar product last year—but Nokia’s will be the first commercially produced version. The device will initially be sold in Africa, for about $18, and will go on sale worldwide by the end of the year. Nokia wins all around: it adds to its eco-credentials with a great new sustainable product; and allowing people with limited access to electricity to charge a cell phone will not, I’m sure, harm Nokia’s already amazing sales figures in Africa, China, and India. Read more…

Now that green design has gone from a fringe concern to an absolute imperative for the architecture community, you have to wonder what, if anything, is the next frontier. The recent publication of New York City’s Active Design Guidelines suggests one possible answer: architecture to get people off their butts.

The Guidelines, which were unveiled at the Center for Architecture last Wednesday, outline how architects, city planners, and other design professionals can encourage daily physical activity among city dwellers. Strategies range from the simple (posting signs encouraging office workers to take the stairs) to the formidably complex (creating a vibrant streetscape with mixed land use, attractive public plazas, and designated bikeways). And although they’re specifically geared to New York, many of them would be relevant anywhere. Read more…

One of the great treats in working on our “1-5-10 Issue” was talking to experts and inviting them—urging them, really—to speculate on the future. Toronto-based Ken Greenberg—our urban-planning talking head—is currently working on a book, due out next year, on the future of cities, and he took the opportunity to ruminate on all of the changes he sees on the horizon. It was a fascinating and far-ranging talk. We took highlights from our interview for the print edition, but Greenberg’s expansive view of cities is worth a longer look online.

What do you see on the ground now in urban planning? What’s engaging you and the clients you’re working with?

I’m pretty convinced we’re in the midst of a transformation which is probably as profound as what happened immediately after the Second World War, when we got all excited about automobiles and in a sense turned our backs on cities. There are all kinds of things that are propelling this. Some of it has to do with the environment; much of it has to do with the cost of energy. I don’t know if you know the book that came out recently called Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller. It was written by Jeff Rubin, a former chief economist of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce who actually resigned to write this book. From an economic standpoint he is talking about peak oil and the effect it’s going to have on cities. Right now I’m in the midst of a series of skirmishes, as people adjust to this new reality and we change our entire tool kit when it comes to how we deal with cities.

How is that tool kit changing?

Almost everything that we’ve inherited and put into practice in the post-WWII decades has in some way become obsolete. Read more…

In my recent Q&A with Ryan Chin, of MIT’s Smart Cities research group, we talked about the similarities between his team’s proposed Mobility on Demand systems and the Vélib’ bike-share program in Paris. Basically, Mobility on Demand will be a souped-up version of Vélib’—using electric vehicles instead of bicycles and a sophisticated fleet-management system that incorporates GPS tracking. But developing the vehicles and pioneering the software is only part of MIT’s challenge, as an article in last Saturday’s New York Times made abundantly clear. Read more…

A rendering of the CityCar on the streets of Manhattan. Image: William Lark, Jr., Smart Cities

When I first saw computer renderings of the MIT Smart Cities research group’s CityCar a few years ago, I thought I was looking at a pie-in-the-sky vision of a distant (and idealized) future. This compact, stackable electric vehicle is supposed to dock at charging stations throughout a city, allowing lucky urban dwellers to simply swipe a card for an instant, on-the-go rental. But it turns out that a system like this—dubbed Mobility on Demand by the MIT researchers—could become a reality in the tantalizingly near future. The Smart Cities team has already developed three concept vehicles, including the CityCar—it’s currently working with General Motors on a drivable model—and it has an initial pilot program, using an electric bicycle, tentatively lined up for Boston next summer. Ryan Chin, a PhD candidate in the Smart Cities group, predicts that a full-fledged system will happen within the next five years. (A $100,000 prize awarded by the Buckminster Fuller Institute last June should help here.) Recently, I spoke to Chin about the principles of Mobility on Demand, his team’s fleet of lightweight electric vehicles, and the differences between car development in Cambridge and Detroit.

So what exactly is Mobility on Demand?

Mobility on Demand, at the highest level, is a very sustainable personal-mobility system for urban environments. How it works is you have a fleet of lightweight electric vehicles that are placed at charging stations throughout the city. And at each of these charging stations you can pick up or drop off one of these vehicles. You have either an RFID reader or an access card or a credit card that releases the vehicle to the user. And then you are allowed to drive any one of these vehicles to any other station in the city. So these stations would be distributed throughout the city at convenient locations, within reasonable walking distance. And the whole idea is that you can pick up vehicles and drop them off anywhere; you don’t need to return it back to the location you took it from. Read more…

Metropolis’s senior editor, Kristi Cameron, is contributing semi-regular posts on issues regarding livable streets in a feature we’re calling The Street View. Click here to read her previous posts.

I’ve suddenly developed a mild case of urban envy of…Washington, D.C. That’s right, as of today the not-exactly-progressive town has something New York is sorely lacking: a bike station. Funded by the District and the U.S. Department of Transportation and built by Mobis/Bikestation, the 1,600-square-foot facility offers secure parking for 130 bikes, a changing room, lockers, rentals, and repairs. An annual membership costs $100, or you can buy a daily pass for a buck. Cities like Seattle, Santa Barbara, and Long Beach, California, (where Mobis/Bikestation is based) have already had success with these facilities, but the D.C. station is the first of its kind on the East Coast. Which raises an important question: How useful is a bike station sans showers during warm, humid eastern summers? Perhaps I should reserve my jealousy for Chicago, whose McDonald’s Cycle Center offers showers and towel service. I could get used to the name.

Metropolis’s senior editor, Kristi Cameron, is contributing semi-regular posts on issues regarding livable streets in a feature we’re calling The Street View. Click here to read previous posts in this series.

As a volunteer at Summer Streets this past Saturday, my responsibilities were little more than to hold up a stop sign while standing in front of a working traffic light. Yes, I felt a bit redundant, but it was a great vantage point from which to witness the event. Last year I strolled along Brooklyn’s Bedford Avenue when it was first closed to cars, marveling at the disproportionate pleasure of a little extra elbow room, but I never made it out to Park Avenue, the spine of New York’s street-closing events. While Bedford takes on the vaguely Parisian flair of a street market, Park Avenue is more like an exercise highway with cyclists, rollerbladers, and runners far outnumbering any casual strollers. (The flaneurs seemed to stick to the sidewalks, save for a few forays into the road just to get a taste of the experience). Read more…

Starting today, Metropolis’s senior editor, Kristi Cameron, will be contributing semi-regular posts on issues regarding livable streets in a feature we’re calling The Street View. For her first post—or maybe it’s her second one?—Kristi checks in with our friends in Copenhagen.

Sundry scenes of Denmark’s superior bicyclists making Americans look bad, as usual. Photos: courtesy the Cycling Embassy of Denmark

Well, it’s official. Copenhagen has long been a model for other cities when it comes to bicycles and transportation planning. Representatives from Chicago and New York, for instance, took pilgrimages there before getting serious about improving their own streets. But in May the Danish capitol launched a Cycling Embassy. When I heard this, I pictured a fleet of ambassadors—fair-haired ladies and gentlemen spreading the word on two wheels, a kind of cross between Angelina Jolie and the Church of the Latter-day Saints. Turns out, the city is simply institutionalizing the leadership role it has already assumed. But the Cycling Embassy is not just a group of Copenhagen city planners. In addition to public space guru Jan Gehl, it comprises manufacturers, infrastructure engineers, and the cities of Aarhus, Frederiksburg, and Odense. It’s a one-stop shop for all things bike-related. I’m not usually one for proselytizing, but in this case, bring it on.