traffic

A Delivery Service Which Improves Traffic Flow in Gothenburg

- Adam Clare

Gothenburg has a delivery service that pools together deliveries for businesses and it’s making a huge difference on the streets. The streets of Gothenburg used to be clogged with vehicle traffic and thanks to this delivery service people in Gothenburg are better able to get around. This makes for more efficient transfer of goods in the city while taking many delivery vehicles of the road, which means cyclists and pedestrians can have the space they deserve.

To facilitate the needs of smaller businesses which are not able to organise early-morning drop-offs, the city of Gothenburg helped launch Stadsleveransen (the City Delivery) to pool together deliveries for shops and businesses within a central zone stretching about 10 streets. Private transport companies leave their packages at a freight consolidation terminal from where Stadsleveransen’s fleet of two electric cars and two cargo bikes carry the goods the final couple of kilometres. There is also a small electric van assigned for transporting fresh fish from the harbour to Gothenburg’s Fish Church market.

Read more.

Thanks to Janet!

Paris to Spend €100m on Bike Lanes While Reducing Car Traffic

- Adam Clare

Paris has had a tough time with traffic and pollution in the city due to the number of cars. They have launched many environmentally friendly intitaves to curb the use of cars while making alternative transit solutions to cars more appealing. It’s working and is already inspiring other cities to follow suit. Still, traffic in France’s capital is still quite bad so the mayor as launched a new program investing €100m on new bike lanes!

“I want diesel cars out of Paris by 2020 and, if possible, beyond the peripherique,” said the mayor, referring to the city’s constantly choked ring road.

“Today, 60 per cent of Parisians don’t have their own car, whereas in 2011, it was 40 per cent. It’s moving quickly,” she said.

In proposing a raft of anti-pollution measures, Ms Hidalgo is building on the efforts of her predecessor and mentor, the former Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe.

He championed bike and car rental schemes, expanded bus and bicycle lanes, and reduced speed limits, as he sought to wean Parisians off cars in a bid to make the city more liveable.

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Reducing Highway Size Doesn’t Negatively Impact Congestion

- Adam Clare

Nobody likes being stuck in traffic and in the recent past the solution was to build more roads (or add more lanes). Ironically this makes traffic worse as an increase in traffic capacity means more people will drive places. These narrow-minded solutions are still applied in some places like Toronto where Crack-Mayor removed bike lanes. Hopefully the next time transportation options are being looked at crack-voters will come to understand that the best way to make traffic flow better is to not cater to car drivers.

Whenever some city proposes taking lanes away from a road, residents scream that they’re going to create a huge traffic snarl. But the data shows that nothing truly terrible happens. The amount of traffic on the road simply readjusts and overall congestion doesn’t really increase.

For instance, Paris in recent decades has had a persistent policy to dramatically downsize and reduce roadways. “Driving in Paris was bad before,” said Duranton. “It’s just as bad, but it’s not much worse.”

So where did those other drivers go? Many of them switched to public transit, which in Paris has increased by 20 percent in the last two decades. Other trips have simply been avoided, or done on foot. It’s not just Europeans who are eager to get out of their cars. San Francisco removed a highway section, called the Central Freeway, that carried nearly 100,000 cars per day in 1989. The boulevard that replaced it now only carries around 45,000 daily cars and yet they move. (Yes, I’ve been stuck in traffic on Octavia Boulevard, but it’s not like you never get through.) Perhaps the biggest success story has been in Seoul, South Korea, where the city tore down a highway that was considered a vital roadway corridor, carrying 168,000 cars per day. After replacing the cars with a river, parkland, and some smaller roads, traffic didn’t get worse and many other things, including pollution, got better.

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Car-Addicted LA is Getting on the Bike-Train

- Adam Clare

Los Angeles is known to be a car-addled and car-addicted place but not for much longer. They have consciously set out to make their city more pedestrian and bike friendly. LA as also put efforts to make their transit better. The results are clear: people love to ride bicycles rather than put up with car traffic.

Angelenos have been among the most car-dependent U.S. commuters, with 67 percent getting to their jobs driving alone in 2009, compared with 24 percent for New York and 51 percent for Chicago, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In Detroit, home of the U.S. auto industry, the figure was 71 percent.
…

Villaraigosa, a 60-year-old Democrat elected in 2005, championed a 2008 ballot measure that raised sales taxes in Los Angeles County by half a percentage point for 30 years, with the projected $40 billion in proceeds earmarked for rail lines, expanded rapid bus service, widening highways and adding carpool lanes. Twenty percent of the revenue was devoted to highways, with the largest share, 35 percent, for rail and bus rapid-transit lines.

Read more at Bloomberg.

Copenhagen Gets Bike Superhighway

- Adam Clare

Copenhagen is known as the most bicycle friendly city on the planet and they keep getting better. Recently, the capital of Denmark has created a bicycle superhighway that is separated from car-dominated roads. The network of highways is designed to get people in the suburbs to get out of their pollution producers and commute more sustainably.

Other cities like London have committed resources to encourage suburbanites to commute via bicycle. Hopefully this inexpensive pro-cycling attitude will one day get to the traffic-clogged car-centric cities of North America.

The cycle superhighway, which opened in April, is the first of 26 routes scheduled to be built to encourage more people to commute to and from Copenhagen by bicycle. More bike path than the Interstate its name suggests, it is the brainchild of city planners who were looking for ways to increase bicycle use in a place where half of the residents already bike to work or to school every day.

“We are very good, but we want to be better,” said Brian Hansen, the head of Copenhagen’s traffic planning section.

He and his team saw potential in suburban commuters, most of whom use cars or public transportation to reach the city. “A typical cyclist uses the bicycle within five kilometers,” or about three miles, said Mr. Hansen, whose office keeps a coat rack of ponchos that bicycling employees can borrow in case of rain. “We thought: How do we get people to take longer bicycle rides?”

They decided to make cycle paths look more like automobile freeways. While there is a good existing network of bicycle pathways around Copenhagen, standards across municipalities can be inconsistent, with some stretches having inadequate pavement, lighting or winter maintenance, as well as unsafe intersections and gaps.

“It doesn’t work if you have a good route, then a section in the middle is covered in snow,” said Lise Borgstrom Henriksen, spokeswoman for the cycle superhighway secretariat. “People won’t ride to work then.”

Read more at NY Times, be careful though, they have a paywall.

Thanks to Janet and Matt!

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