10 years ago today, people said we were crazy to pedestrianize Broadway. Today, it would be crazy to bring the cars back. Times Square wasn’t just a public space project, it was the start of a global revolution in how cities think about their streets.
Public transportation carries 10x more people than airlines yet Congress thinks it needs $1 billion less aid. Not everybody rides transit but everyone is dependent on those who do. Here's why transit recovery is national economic recovery.
The future of urban transportation isn't driverless cars, flying cars and drones. The most inspiring trend before, during and after the pandemic has been the rise of the 'car-free' city, where people, not cars , are the central planning principle.
Cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam haven’t always been “pedestrian meccas,” says
@JSadikKhan
. It took years of work. Other cities can learn from them.
Our conversation from today’s GPS:
10 years ago today we installed NYC's first Citi Bike station. They said that bikes would bring traffic chaos, danger & lawsuits. What happened instead was history: 178 million trips, 100k rides daily on 28k bikes, turning NYC into one of the world's great cycling cities.
Ship happens: A system that's one mishap away from breaking down isn't much of a resilient system. As we dig out from the worst year ever, it's time to make our transportation networks as diverse as the people using them.
"Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to cycle and he will realize fishing is stupid and boring."
–Desmond Tutu
Rest in peace, in power and forever in our hearts.
Freedom isn’t being able to get anywhere in your car.
Freedom is being able to get anywhere without one.
Nashville is first-in-the-nation to declare transportation independence.
The future of cities is based on the people who live, walk, bike, work and eat on its streets — and not just on the cars parked along it. It's time for pandemic-era outdoor dining to become a permanent, and it's also time to meet a higher standard.
Dear Transportation, Tech and Media Companies,
Cities need people-friendly mobility options that reclaim streets from the damage caused by cars, not gimmicks that dance around the damage.
Love,
Janette
The bikelash is dead, long live the media bikelash!
@nytimes
takes a break from ignoring ~3,700 daily global traffic deaths to focus on Paris—one of the world's safest cities aftr yrs reclaiming roads & where 1 million bike daily despite safety perceptions
Cars move just 24% of Manhattan's people but generate 100% of its traffic congestion. NYC has a generational opportunity to invest in better transit service and reimagined streets for the 75% of people who rely on bus, train, bike and walking. The time is now.
Today, the MTA Board voted to approve the Traffic Mobility Review Board's recommendations on congestion pricing.
This kicks off the state's toll-making process and brings us one step closer to making congestion pricing a reality. Read the report:
Not the death of the car as much as the rebirth of the city. When you give people transportation choices, you give them transportation independence. Now is the moment to build the post-COVID future we want, w/bikeable, walkable & transit-accessible streets
No matter how you slice it, a driverless car is still a car. An electric car is still a car. An e-hail car is still a car. All the techie fairy dust in the world can't turn cars into the liberators of all the street space they dominate.
When you give people a choice, they choose better streets. After opening 10 new plazas in one year, Milan received 65 applications from neighborhoods asking to be next. The cycle of street life continues.
10 years ago they said New York City wasn’t Amsterdam or Copenhagen. Today, New Yorkers have taken Citi Bike for 75 million rides—triple the population of the Netherlands and Denmark combined. Today, other cities are saying they’re not New York. Enjoy the ride!
NEWS: Citi Bike riders have officially taken 75 MILLION rides in NYC! 🎉
Thank you to our incredible community for pedaling with us on this journey and helping make Citi Bike what it is today.
Where did our streets Gogh wrong? Two views of the same French café 130 years apart is a contrast of people beneath a starry night and of cars stealing the scene. On the eve of Van Gogh's birthday, let's remember the masters who reflected the beauty of the street life we lost.
MansPLANning: The compulsive, dismissive act of designing cities for cars despite its failure to reverse congestion or improve street life. On
#InternationalWomensDay
, let’s change lanes with my streetfighting sisters in this Man Man Man Man Man world.
Cars don't just consume energy, they consume space. Electric cars are still cars, leaving the same footprint on cities. The urban revolution won't be cleaner cars or better apps but cities designed so you don't need to drive in the first place. 🚌🚇🚲🚶🏾♀️
The spectacular growth of protected bike lanes in New York is more awe inducing than any interstate expansion. It only looks inevitable in retrospect. We need to grow these tendrils of street life to fill the city map.
So I made this animated map of the growth of NYC protected bike infrastructure last summer and put it on Wikipedia. I hope this encourages people who support this infrastructure, and I'd love feedback for how to make it better if I do a second version.
Every inch of Elon Musk’s underground tour-de-farce is a mile in the wrong direction—and every story about it distracts from the sprawling urban mobility crisis that no car tunnel will ever be wide enough or long enough to fill.
Bike lanes aren't just good policy, they're good politics. From New York to Milan, the world's most ambitious mayors keep winning reelection as the cries of backlash prove not to be the voice of voters.
For most people, driving isn't a choice, it's a non-negotiable fact of life. We need to change the structures that encourage and entrench driving in cities and bring real transportation independence—the freedom not to drive—to more people.
New cyclists, new city. More than half the cyclists on Paris's pop-up Covid bike lanes are new riders, many of them female. With every lane reclaimed, we see that city streets are merely future bike paths only temporarily occupied by cars.
Rue the day: The same Paris street with people on free and equal footing in 1877 has designed people out of the picture today. This Bastille Day, celebrate all streets as living, democratic spaces, not as a still life of cars.
So many streets in the world just make you want to shake your head at the wasted space. With 25+ street transformations in two years, Milan's spectacular street hacks would win everyman Khaby Lame's blessing for elegant simplicity. A great street, like great humor, is universal.
AVs aren’t sexy. You know what is sexy? Streets designed to work for everyone. In checking out the future of mobility, we can’t turn our backs on the fundamentals of great cities.
#NACTO18
If there's a war on cars, why are pedestrians the ones who are disproportionately paying with their lives? Traffic deaths aren't unexpected, random episodes, they're the inevitable, systemic byproduct of roads designed to move cars at all costs.
If you want a safer city, build more bike lanes.
If you want a longer life, use the bike lanes.
Study shows cyclists can pedal past many major health risks:
Pay no attention to the man behind the tunnel. A century of building more room for cars is what got us into the mess we’re trying to get out of. When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
If you want to change the world, you can start by creating a bike lane. Announcing BICI, a partnership of
@bloombergdotorg
and
@GlobalCities
, offering 10 cities grants up to $1M to build the next generation of innovative cycling infrastructure.
For New Yorkers, dining in the street was love at first bite. For 10,000 restaurants, the street is a lifeline. NYC makes outdoor dining permanent, an example of the rules catching up with the wildly successful reality.
Black Panther is one of the first movies to get urbanism right, with a transit-friendly, walkable Wakanda. The future will more likely have active streets, not just flying cars.
Today, the e-mobility market, tomorrow the street! Electric bikes keep outselling electric cars even though city streets aren't built for them. If cities responded with safe lane networks, e-bikes could beat all car sales.
When women design the street, the world looks different. Women are the infrastructure of change in cities in Bogotá and beyond, creating safer, inclusive and accessible street designs, and protecting the next generation of female bike riders.
#MasMujeresEnBici
Supercommuting isn't a lifestyle choice, it's a life sentence for increasing numbers of workers who can no longer afford to live in cities. To solve the climate crisis—and the transportation crisis—we must address the housing crisis head-on. h/t
@dfirgs
138 years after the Brooklyn Bridge opened, a new bike path takes a lane and
@NYC_DOT
takes biking across the East River to its logical conclusion. The only question is if one lane will be enough.
Plan a city like you mean it. Here's what it could look like if we put the design, safety, mobility, climate, utility and economic pieces together. Perfecting the city street isn't impossible, it merely awaits those who dare.
When it comes to traffic safety, what scares us and what endangers us often aren't the same thing. While some fear scooters, bikes and helmet-less riders, that's not what's killed 3.75 million Americans since 1899. We need safety by design and active mobility.
#VisionZeroCities
First Mexico City, now London readies ban on new parking spaces. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. If you find yourself with too much traffic, stop building more parking.
“Let them drive cars.”
The CDC telling workers to drive alone assumes that everyone owns a car and that cities can handle the traffic.
This is a fever dream.
There’s no reopening cities w/o reopening transit. Ruling it out doesn’t make it safer.
If a street can go car-free for 100 hours, it can go car-free for 100 years. Tokyo Governor
@ecoyuri
shows that even on glitzy Marunouchi Street, the wealth of a city is a street lined with green, not gold. Streetfight arrives in Japan!
The first non-driver death of the autonomous age and police are already blaming the victim. “Crossing outside of the crosswalk” was never a valid excuse for traffic deaths, and it provides no cover for autonomous mobility companies.
To see the future of cities, look to the streets of Paris,
City of bikes
School streets
Green streets
People streets.
Mayor
@Anne_Hidalgo
& Deputy Mayors
@C_Najdovski
and
@David_Belliard
are restoring the city by restoring people to their rightful plâce.
The Milan miracle: 250,000 sq ft of street space converted into 38 community piazzas in less than three years. Half of residents now live w/in walking distance of new, active public space. Milan reclaims roads and recovers an entire city for its people.
Traffic crashes are the
#1
global killer of kids and young adults aged 5-29 worldwide—even more than violence, drugs or disease. We need to lead by design and pave the road ahead with new possibilities.
As Uber & Lyft add to city traffic, lose $billions, and undermine transit, we need to ask ourselves what transportation problems they solve. New data from TNCs show that they are convenient cabs, not the transportation revolution they promised.
Stay in your lane
@WhoopiGoldberg
, and keep your SUV out of the bike lane. Street design is why ~2,000 more NYers didn’t die in car crashes in the 22 years
@TheView
has been on air.
@NYC_SafeStreets
shows us that Whoopi’s annoyance is everyone’s lifesaver.
If you have no choice but to drive everywhere, you haven’t failed, your city has failed you. Transit isn’t just about buses and trains, it’s about designing a city that works for everyone and that is more walkable and accessible
#Streetfight
in Nashville.
#freedomtomove
New research shows that fear of transit may be a bigger threat than riding it. As cities reopen, transit agencies must reframe the narrative to regain the passengers they lost. Cities won’t recover by adding a traffic crisis to the health & economic crises
In 5 years, Citi Bike went from zero to
🚲750 stations
🚲12k bikes
🚲58M trips
🌞104M miles ridden—more than the distance to the sun
🏈70k avg daily trips in May—more than Super Bowl attendance
In 5 more years, we’ll still be trying to keep up With Citi Bike’s success 🚴🏾♀️
I 🚶🏻♀️NY: A new sign of the times in a new Times Square. Celebrating a car-free Broadway with some of those who were beside us from the start 10 years ago. In a city without seats, a beach chair can be king.
If you design a street that works for kids, you design a street that works for everyone. Designing Streets for Kids shows the way forward with designs that are safe accessible, healthy and inspiring.
#NACTO2019
Seeing The Matrix for the first time 20 years ago today is like the first time seeing the street life possible between the lanes.
You take the car pill—the story ends, the street remains the same. You take the people pill, and you’ll see just how far that street can take you.
Cities of tomorrow can be built to the human-scale of Wakanda in Black Panther, or left to rot like LA in Blade Runner 2049. We need a new
#Oscars
category for Best City, recognizing art that inspires streetlife.
In our world of social distance, streets opened to people are the glue that will hold us together. Car-free streets can unlock space for city residents to keep their sanity—and keep a safe distance from one another during this crisis.
We didn’t stumble into the automotive age, we strode right in with guns blazing. A rogues’ gallery of misjudgments created our traffic mess and keeps us from seeing the people-focused road ahead a century later.
We need safer streets, not just better defenses against streets designed for cars. As pedestrian deaths spike 46% since 2009, let's ditch the proposals for brighter headlights and more crosswalk buttons and instead build streets that save lives.
What do you get with round-the-clock speed camera enforcement? A 30% drop in speeding tickets in a single year, and reductions in death/injury on the city's most dangerous streets. Cameras help ensure drivers operate at the speed of life, not death.
When women design our streets, the world starts to look different. With the historic changing of the transportation guard in Washington, women aren’t just at the heart of the fight for better cities, they’re leading the revolution.
From road bed to recess: Street design transforms a school’s front door from a place to fear into a place to stop, stay and play. Inaugurating Milan’s newest public space, Piazza Spoleto, where kids, not cars, rule the road. Plaudits to Mayor
@BeppeSala
and his team.
Want to transform parking lots into public spaces? Just follow the people. Thanks to
@EnriquePenalosa
, the
#Plazoletas
program lets Bogotanos take the lead in designing their city, their communities and their streets
#G
ózateLaCalle
Governments and media rightly raise the global alarm for coronavirus, but hit the snooze button on traffic deaths, which kill 1.35 million people a year--more than the world's armed conflicts combined. A wake-up call for a silent global health crisis👇
London Mayor
@SadiqKhan
unveils 5-year cycling action plan to double ridership and ventilate London smog with a tripling of its citywide cycle-track network. Walking & Cycling Commissioner
@WillNorman
sets an ambitious agenda for a bike-able London.
The challenge we face isn’t whether cities will survive. The question is whether we have the imagination and vision to transform streets to bring about the safer, more accessible, and more resilient cities we’ve needed all along.
No matter what city you live in, arguments against bike lanes fall into the same old categories. The winning move is not to play their game and to frame projects in your terms, not theirs.
The street abides. Forget autonomous vehicles and ride apps. Bike lanes, transit and safe walking infrastructure are what really tie the city together.
In a city where 84% of trips are transit, walking or biking, Tokyo needs a revolution to rebalance its streets. Where better to start than Shibuya, the world’s busiest crossing, where peds outnumber cars 10:1? Talking
#Streetfight
with the Ministry of Land, Infra & Transport.
The Great Pandemic Reset Continues: SF mayor recommends permanently banning cars from a park road pedestrianized in 2020. NYC's Central Park went car-free in 2018. Driving through a park is a personal convenience. A park without cars is a public service.
The road to our global health, economic and environmental recovery runs along our city streets. Milan reveals one of the world's most ambitious plans to reclaim street space for people during the pandemic recovery and beyond.
Whether tearing down highways or building up bike and pedestrian infrastructure, Montreal is a shining example of urban transformation. Now Montreal has a Mayor for Mobility in
@Val_Plante
standing up for new transit options.
#RVCV19
Transportation policy is climate policy. It's economic policy. It's policy for equity, access and opportunity. Creating more space for biking and walking on NYC's signature bridges unlocks our infrastructure—and the city—for those who need it the most.
Reclaiming city streets for people is never easy, but it will never be easier than it is right now. Last year's global revival of street life was just the start; surrendering it all back to cars would be a historic blunder.
What's even worse than charging people to drive into the busiest part of the city? Letting them do it for free at rush hour. If ever there was an equity argument for transportation, it's congestion pricing.
Yes we Khan! For all the politicians who think that running against low-emission zones and low-traffic neighborhoods will win votes, Sadiq Khan's election to a third term as London's mayor is a message that it's time to look for another issue.
The map of the future of transportation is a map of bike lanes. After five years of bold roadway reclamations, Milan outlines a regional cycling network to bring 80% of residents within 1 km of a protected lane, setting a new global standard.
Lead with the bike lane, win with the bike lane. Since this story, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante were both overwhelmingly reelected—backed by a strong record of reclaiming streets. More evidence that bike lanes are political pathways to victory.
Bike lanes aren't just good policy, they're good politics. From New York to Milan, the world's most ambitious mayors keep winning reelection as the cries of backlash prove not to be the voice of voters.
Justice rides a bicycle: Whether bike lanes, bike share or bus lanes, one by one, every lawsuit to reverse better streets in NYC has failed. The courts have spoken, and environmental law can't be twisted to stop safer streets.