News

Riding bikes with the Dutch

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 04:00 GMT

Amsterdam’s new neighborhood: where bikes and pedestrians rule the road

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 04:00 GMT

During a period of unprecedented momentum for urban bicycling in the U.S., the Bikes Belong Foundation is leading a fact-finding trip to the Netherlands to bring home European transportation best practices. Eleven city leaders from the San Francisco Bay Area will spend a week in four Dutch cities between August 29 and September 4. This trip is part of Bikes Belong's Bicycling Design Best Practices Project. Transportation writer and editor Jay Walljasper is accompanying the delegation on the trip to the Netherlands to chronicle the events, observations, and inspirations gained by the tour. The BIkes Belong newsfeed will feature his blog posts this week.________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________The experience of biking through four Dutch cities has provided a team of transportation leaders from the San Francisco Bay Area with plenty of clear examples for what they can do back home to make cycling more safe, popular, and pleasurable. Bridget Smith, for instance, director of the city of San Francisco’s Livable Streets Program, is excited about using more color on the roadways as an inexpensive but dramatic way of making sure everyone can tell bike lanes from car lanes. But this opportunity to actually pedal the streets of Utrecht, the Hague, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam alongside Dutch cycling experts also fuels the imagination about what the future of cities might look like. Today we explored Amsterdam’s Java Island, a development built over the past 10 years in what was once the city’s harbor. It’s a scenic waterfront location with strikingly handsome modern architecture in a pleasing variety of styles. Although brand new, it exudes a charm reminiscent of the city’s famous canal neighborhoods—which for my money are one of the most vibrant and downright pleasing urban quarters on earth. Like old Amsterdam, Java Island enjoys a picturesque waterfront setting. But it shares another trait with the city’s medieval districts that you would never expect in a newly built housing development—it accommodates bicycles more easily than cars. Traffic is shunted to the side of each cluster of apartment buildings in underground parking garages, while pedestrians and bicyclists have free reign of the courtyards that link people’s homes like a green commons. This results in a place that is more than just lovely—Java Island represent a bold new vision of urban planning where people’s movements matter more than that of motor vehicles. You felt a sense of ease moving about these new neighborhoods—and so do the residents. I’ve never seen kids—even really young ones—who looked so completely free running around their neighborhoods, not even in my own childhood during the days before autos so thoroughly ruled the road. We passed two elaborately staged tea parties, one of them taking place on a blanket just inches from the joint biking/walking trail. Amsterdam city council member Fjodor Molenaar, who met us on Java Island, explained the Dutch call this an “Auto Luw” development, which translates as “car light” or “car sparse,” adding that this planning idea is now the official policy of the city. Pascal van den Noort, a transportation consultant leading our tour through the city, urged the elected officials and transportation planners from California to “try and imitate this,” noting that 60 percent of the traffic in central Amsterdam is bikes, and that only 7 percent of area households use a car every day.

Something hopeful in Rotterdam

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 04:00 GMT

Secure bike parking makes a difference in decision to ride for short trips

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 04:00 GMT

During a period of unprecedented momentum for urban bicycling in the U.S., the Bikes Belong Foundation is leading a fact-finding trip to the Netherlands to bring home European transportation best practices. Eleven city leaders from the San Francisco Bay Area will spend a week in four Dutch cities between August 29 and September 4. This trip is part of Bikes Belong's Bicycling Design Best Practices Project. Transportation writer and editor Jay Walljasper is accompanying the delegation on the trip to the Netherlands to chronicle the events, observations, and inspirations gained by the tour. The BIkes Belong newsfeed will feature his blog posts this week.__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________On tour with a dozen transportation leaders from the Bay Area seeking ideas about how to promote bike travel in their communites, we landed today in The Hague—the seat of the Dutch government. Bikes account for 27 percent of all trips around this city of 500,000—exactly the average for the Netherlands as a whole. Den Haag (as its known here) is spending 10 million euros a year (roughly 14 million dollars) to improve those impressive numbers. Hidde van der Bijl, a policy officer for cycling in Hague’s city government, outlined their strategy about improving bicycle speed and safety by separating bike paths as much as possible from city streets and creating bike boulevards where two wheelers gain priority over four wheelers. In spots where there is not space for anything more than a painted bike lane on the road, they intend to color the pavement red so everyone will understand this portion of the street is for bikes. These are practical innovations that could make a dramatic difference in every American town. But the Hague is not stopping there. Realizing that safety and speed are not the only things that prevent people from riding bikes more frequently, they are tackling the little discussed issues of bike parking. This might seem trivial to Americans who seldom find it hard to park their bikes when less than one percent of all urban trips around the country are made on cycles. But it is actually a major discouragement for many would-be bikers on both sides of the Atlantic (and the Pacific, too).“The car is parked out in front of the house on the street, while the bike is stuffed away out back in a shed or they have to carry it down the stairs from their apartment,” van der Bijl explained. “So people choose the car because it is easier.”People also worry about their bike being stolen from in front of their home or outside work and other destinations. That’s why expanding secure bike parking in residential neighborhoods, commercial districts and workplaces is a priority for Hague’s transportation planners. The city is busy expanding the number of parking facilities watched over by attendants, building them in the basement of new office developments and strategic outdoor locations throughout the center city. You can park your favorite bike there for a nominal fee, confident that it will still be then when you return. (Groningen, the Netherlands biking capital with 59 percent of urban trips made on two wheels, debuted the first secure parking facility in 1982 and now sports more than 30 in a town of 180,000.)Meanwhile in high density residential neighborhoods, where most people live in apartments, the city is beginning to install bike racks and small sheds on the sidewalks to make life easier for bike commuters, sometimes taking over auto parking spaces to do it.Ed Reiskin, San Francisco’s director of public works, likes the idea. “We don’t have the same critical mass of bikes as the Hague,” he noted, “but it’s an issue for me because I always have to carry my bicycle down to the street.”

Kids just wanna ride bikes

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 04:00 GMT

During a period of unprecedented momentum for urban bicycling in the U.S., the Bikes Belong Foundation is leading a fact-finding trip to the Netherlands to bring home European transportation best practices. Eleven city leaders from the San Francisco Bay Area will spend a week in four Dutch cities between August 29 and September 4. This trip is part of Bikes Belong's Bicycling Design Best Practices Project. Transportation writer and editor Jay Walljasper is accompanying the delegation on the trip to the Netherlands to chronicle the events, observations, and inspirations gained by the tour. The BIkes Belong newsfeed will feature his blog posts this week._______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ As you marvel at the parade of Dutch bicyclists of all ages whizzing past you on the cycle paths of Utrecht, one question arises: Why is biking a way of life in the Netherlands and only a tiny portion of the transportation picture in United States? A group of California transportation leaders found the answer yesterday at a suburban school. Principal Peter Kooy of the DeSpits primary school told a delegation of visiting elected officials and planners from the Bay Area public that 95 percent of older students—kids in the 10-12 age range— at the DeSpits primary school bike to school at least some of the time. Compare that to the 15 percent who either walk or bike to school in the United States, down from 50 percent in 1970.This not only helps explain the mounting childhood obesity epidemic in the U.S., but also why so few Americans ride a bike to work or to do errands—a mere one percent of trips compared to 12 percent in Germany, 20 percent in Denmark, and 27 percent in the Netherlands.“I came to the Netherlands to have my mind blown about biking,” declared Damon Connolly, vice-mayor of San Rafael, California. “And that sure happened when I heard that 95 percent of kids bike to school.”This impressive commitment to biking is not uniquely imprinted in the Dutch DNA. It is the result of a conscious push to promote biking that has resulted in the doubling of bicycle use since the oil crisis of the1970s.And a large part of that success can be attributed to what happens in the schools. Kids learn how to bike safely as part of their education said Ronald Tamse, a city planner who led our tour group along the bike paths of Utrecht to the DeSpits school. A city program sends special teachers into the schools to conduct bike classes, and students go to Trafficgarden, a miniature city complete with roads, sidewalks, and busy intersections where students hone their pedestrian, biking, and driving skills (in non-motorized toy cars). At age 11, most kids are tested on their two wheel skills on an extensive tour of the town. “To make safer roads, we focus on the children,” Tamse explained. “Because it not only helps them bike and walk more safely, but it helps them to become safer drivers who will look out for pedestrians and bicyclists in the future.”These kinds of programs could make a huge difference in the United States, where 60 percent of people report in surveys they would like to bike regularly if they felt safer—but only eight percent actually do bike regularly.

Bay Area leaders seek bicycle facility innovations in the Netherlands

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 04:00 GMT

During a period of unprecedented momentum for urban bicycling in the U.S., the Bikes Belong Foundation is leading a fact-finding trip to the Netherlands to bring home European transportation best practices. Eleven city leaders from the San Francisco Bay Area will spend a week in four Dutch cities between August 29 and September 4. This trip is part of Bikes Belong's Bicycling Design Best Practices Project. Transportation writer and editor Jay Walljasper is accompanying the delegation on the trip to the Netherlands to chronicle the events, observations, and inspirations gained by the tour. The BIkes Belong newsfeed will feature his blog posts this week.______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________By Jay WalljasperOn a rainy night in Utrecht, a batch of latter-day explorers gathered in a hotel basement to meet one another and prepare for their quest: discovering what American communities can learn from the Netherlands about elevating bicycles from the vehicle of choice for a tiny, hard-core sliver of the population into a true component of the transportation system used daily by men, women, and children. Patrick Seidler, vice-chairman of the Bikes Belong Foundation, sponsor of this fact-finding mission for public officials from the Bay Area, announced we were in search of the “twenty-seven percent solution”—the health, environmental, and community benefits to be discovered in a nation where more than a quarter of all daily trips are made on two wheels.Of course, the bicycle enjoys certain advantages in the Netherlands, including a remarkably flat landscape, a long cycling tradition, and a densely packed population (16 million people in a country only twice the size of New Jersey). But the idea of learning from the success of the Dutch is not at all far-fetched. It resembles the United States as a prosperous, technologically advanced nation where a huge share of the population owns automobiles. They simply do not choose to drive them each time they leave home, thanks to common sense transportation policies where biking and transit are offered as convenient and safe options. Seidler pointed out that a delegation of public officials from Madison, Wisconsin, recently returned home from a Bikes Belong tour of the Netherlands, and within three weeks were implementing what they learned on the streets of the city. The current team of explorers includes the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (city council) and the city’s director of public works, chief traffic engineer and director of the livable streets program. From San Jose, come a city council member, the chief traffic engineer and representatives of the business community. Suburban Marin county is represented by city council members from its leading cities, San Rafael and Mill Valley, as well as transit agency and real estate leaders. They are joined by Bikes Belong transportation experts Patrick Seidler, Bruno Maier, Zach Vanderkooy, and Kate Scheider (who will be tweeting from the streets of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and the Hague).I will be blogging regularly about all that we discover. I have been writing about transportation issues for more than twenty years as the former editor of Utne Reader and currently as contributing editor of National Geographic Traveler, senior fellow of Project for Public Spaces, editor of OnTheCommons.org, and author of the Great Neighborhood Book. Stay tuned.

Bikes Belong Awards $15,000 in Grants

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:00 GMT

Bikes Belong is delighted to make funding awards to three great projects in our Summer 2010 grant cycle. These projects will build bike paths and increase advocacy to provide better connectivity and more options for seasoned, new and emerging riders.The Bikes Belong Grants Program is funded by our Employee Pro Purchase Program. Thanks to participating members and their employees for making these awards possible.Austin Metro Trails and Greenways 2010 Advocacy Initiative (Austin, TX)This $5,000 advocacy grant will help the Austin Metro Trails and Greenways (AMTG) organization to promote a new transportation bond package, which is up for voter approval in November. Included in the bond package is $40 million in funding for a diverse mix of 15 bike and pedestrian projects, totaling more than 50 miles of facilities. Projects will include bike lanes, trails, parking, an underpass, a bridge and streetscape improvements. One goal of the project is to increase bicycling in underserved areas by improving bike connections in lower-income neighborhoods. Many of the projects will connect to existing trails—popular with Austin residents for both recreational and transportation riding—such as the Lance Armstrong Crosstown Bikeway and the Barton Creek Greenbelt, significantly improving the integration of Austin’s regional trail network. After the November election, this grant will also help AMTG build community support for future bicycling initiatives.More about the Initiative...Housatonic Covered Bridge Bike Trail (Salisbury, CT)The Housatonic Covered Bridge Bike Trail will extend for 45 miles along New England’s scenic Housatonic River Valley, eventually linking more than 100 miles of trail, dozens of town centers, one high school, two elementary schools, a major prep school, and six-dozen heritage sites. The wide, flat trail will provide cyclists with relief from the region’s hilly topography. In addition to this $5,000 grant from Bikes Belong, the National Park Service has committed one year of technical assistance to the trail’s development. The trail will be part of a system running from New Milford, CT, to Pownal, VT, and will connect to the East Coast Greenway in the future.More about Housatonic...Kings Mountain Gateway Trail (Kings Mountain, NC)The first two miles of the Kings Mountain Gateway Trail opened in November 2009, and already the trail has become a popular recreation destination for Kings Mountain bikers, hikers, and walkers. This $5,000 grant will fund a 2.8 mile extension of the multi-use trail, including stream and rail crossings. The new trail will allow cyclists to start their ride from downtown Kings Mountain and improve connectivity within the town as well. Future phases of the trail will connect to nearby state parks, the Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail, the Kings Mountain National Military Park in South Carolina, the cities of Shelby and Cherryville, NC, and the Carolina Thread Trail. Land has also been allocated along the Kings Mountain Gateway Trail for three future singletrack mountain biking trails.More about Kings Mountain...Since the Bikes Belong Grants Program began in 1999, we have awarded 215 grants in 49 states and the District of Columbia, granting more than $1.7 million in cash and leveraging close to $650 million in federal, state, and private funding. Our facilities grants alone have helped finance 1,500 miles of bike paths and trails that link almost 8,000 miles of bike facilities.

Bikes Belong launches new website

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 04:00 GMT

Bikes Belong has launched a new and improved website that provides more in-depth and easily accessible information and an updated look. The website caters to a variety of audiences, including Bikes Belong members, journalists, government leaders, grant seekers, bicycle advocates, and the general public. The key features of the site include a searchable statistics library of bicycling facts, an interactive map of the community grants we've awarded, a sortable list of Bikes Belong members, and an improved news feed with a new blog called "staff posts." In addition, the website features an expanded resources section, including a new press kit for journalists, tip sheets on how to make bicycling better in your community, bicycling photos and videos, and more.

Transportation bill on hold, but federal support for bicycling growing

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 04:00 GMT

The next multi-year federal transportation bill -- the key funding legislation for U.S. bicycle infrastructure projects and programs like Safe Routes to School -- is unlikely to be seriously considered by Congress until early 2011. While bike money continues to flow thanks to a series of funding extensions approved by Congress, the delay is not good news. Why? The Administration, the Secretary of Transportation, a growing number of members of Congress, and a dozens of big-city mayors are ready to make additional, cost-effective investments in bicycling, but they can't, because the dollars simply aren't available.Despite the federal budget deficit and tight economy, federal bike project investment surpassed $1.3 billion during fiscal year 2009. This unprecedented sum is proof that bike projects are viewed positively by senior government officials as job creators, road congestion-reducers, and beneficial to public health and quality of life.The next federal transportation bill will be crucial for the future of bicycling in the United States. Bikes Belong and our partner members of the America Bikes Coalition are working to ensure that new legislation increases cost-effective investments in bike facilities, supports Complete Streets policies and Safe Routes to School, and makes new, concentrated investments in Active Transportation networks in many of the largest U.S. cities. Our Bikes Belong Foundation launched the peopleforbikes.org campaign to increase the clout of the pro-bike perspective when this legislation is considered.During the first half of 2010, a new, high-profile champion for U.S. bicycling emerged. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood led the development of positive new DOT bike policy guidelines. He regularly praised bicycling in his official Fast Lane blog. His rousing closing speech was a highlight of the 10th National Bike Summit. He has gone so far as to make the case why people who never bike should enthusiastically support investments in bike facilities.

New staff join the Bikes Belong team

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 04:00 GMT

Bikes Belong has two new faces this summer. Sarah Murer started in June as our Office Administrator, providing a much-needed hand with managing Bikes Belong office operations. She coordinates mailing, travel, event coordination, and anything else we can throw at her. Sarah's past experience in marketing and public relations has given her the chance to work closely with a wide range of companies and non-profit organizations. She enjoys cooking, snowboarding, and being outside as much as possible. Zoe Kircos joins us in August as our Grants Manager. She will administer the Bikes Belong Grant Program, as well as help us to secure grant funding for Bikes Belong programs. She has more than 10 years experience in the non-profit sector, writing grants and managing grant programs. She enjoys running and reading, preferably not simultaneously unless she's really pressed for time.You can reach Sarah at sarah@bikesbelong.org and Zoe at zoe@bikesbelong.org.