Seemingly everywhere there’s a crunch on housing and there’s a surplus of roads, so let’s change some car space to sleeping space. If we take away even just one lane of parking for cars we can create towers of housing for people. Cities can benefit from increased revenue since housing
Continue readingTag: bicycle
Things Are Good: Bike Riding is Not Just a Phase
Every cyclists knows that riding a bike equals freedom, you can go where you want when you want and don’t need trillions of dollars of infrastructure to operate one. Electric bicycles are getting more affordable every year and more and more people are buying them instead of getting a car.
Continue readingThings Are Good: The Largest GPS Bicycle Reminds us Bicycles are Rad
The most efficient form of transportation is the bicycle, and to remind us how great the two wheeled vehicles are a couple drew a giant bike in Europe. They used a GPS to record their trip as they rode through multiple countries, and that meant riding in giant circles to
Continue readingThings Are Good: E-Bikes Replacing Cars at Increasing Rate
It’s clear to anyone who has to buy a car because they live in low-density suburban communities that cars are expensive and kill the environment (and people). This awareness of the dangers of the automobile is growing and people are turning to e-bikes. Anecdotally we see places which have encouraged
Continue readingThings Are Good: France Pays People to Stop Driving and Start Riding
Car drivers take up way more road space than they need since the size of their vehicles are disproportionate to their usefulness. Smart countries aim to limit the number of single occupant vehicles on the road for this reason and to ensure that all people can easily get from one
Continue readingThings Are Good: Another Urban Myth Busted
Road users always complain that other people are breaking the law, every group of road users accuess another of breaking the most traffic rules. Truckers think cars are the worst, car drivers think cyclists are the worse, and cyclists think all vehicles are bad. When it comes to an objective
Continue readingThings Are Good: This Parking Space Technique Holds 10 Times More Vehicles
There’s a fiction that cars are needed in cities and we should provide parts of our limited land in urban centres so one person can leave their car. This fiction perpetuated by car brains hurts our cities and is really not good, to solve this problem the city of Rotterdam
Continue readingThings Are Good: 13 Year Long Study Confirms Bike Lanes Make Streets Safer for Everyone
Bike lanes not only protect cyclists from negligent drivers, they protect drivers and pedestrians too. A longitudinal study reveals that it’s not the cyclists which make the streets safer, rather it’s the infrastructure that separates cyclists from giant metal slabs that matter. Bike lane only made of paint did nothing
Continue readingThings Are Good: Get Paid to Report Bike Lane Blockers
Austin spent millions on improving their infrastructure and now they are looking to citizens to enforce the rules of using that infrastructure. Anybody who reports a vehicle blocking a bicycle lane will now get a bounty when the driver of the vehicle is charged. Yes, it’s a Wild West bounty
Continue readingThings Are Good: This Library Wants You to Ride a Bicycle
An active group of academics want more people to be fit and have fun. The Urban Cycling Institute has set out to educate the average person on the multitude of benefits that riding a bicycle has for people and the communities they live in. One of the initiatives they launched
Continue readingThings Are Good: Milan’s Massive Mobility Mission
The Cambio project in Milan aims to get more people on two wheels while also improving the cityscape. Milan once had a reputation as an industrial city clogged with traffic, but now with cleaner air and easy streets the city’s attracting more people. To improve life within the city they
Continue readingThings Are Good: We can Save 200,000 Lives a Year Replacing Car Commutes with Bicycles
A simple modification to our cities can save a lot of lives: add more and better bicycling infrastructure. Researchers looked into quantifying how many lives we can save by replacing car journeys with bicycle use and the results aren’t surprising, but will hopefully influence people. The harms vehicular traffic does
Continue readingThings Are Good: BIKEPOC Wants You on a Bicycle
Bicycles are the best form of urban transportation and more people should be out there riding on two wheels. In Toronto, like many North American cities, cyclists in the city are predominately white males (for a variety of reasons). With people stuck at home due to the pandemic there has
Continue readingThings Are Good: Weather Doesn’t Matter Where There’s Good Bicycling Infrastructure
People opposed to multiple transit solutions often argue that it’s not worth building bicycle lanes because nobody rides in the rain. They couldn’t be more wrong. A new study from Germany looked into the use of bikes during poor weather and found that places with good bicycling infrastructure had more
Continue readingThings Are Good: Bike Lanes Save Lives in Toronto
Here in Toronto we’ve seen little to no changes in our urban space during the COVID-19 pandemic. Other cities have been closing streets and making more room for people while in Toronto we’ve closed a couple streets on the weekend and gave up sidewalk space to private enterprise. Neighbouring communities
Continue readingThings Are Good: Next Step: Intermodal Bicycles
Every delivery person knows that driving a truck through a city is stressful and dangerous. Our current delivery logistics tend to rely heaveily on trucks to transport goods to their ultimate destination, which clogs up roads and pollutes our cities. DB Schenker, one of the largest delivery companies, has decide
Continue readingThings Are Good: We All Benefit When We Build Safe Streets
The climate crisis requires solutions at all levels and that includes the streets. Safe streets for pedestrians and cyclists ensures that more people will use sustainable transit (and not drive polluting cars). New York City has earned a reputation for redesigning their streetscape to be for people instead of cars,
Continue readingThings Are Good: Toronto’s Bloor Bike Lanes Boost Local Businesses
Despite being only 2.4 kilometres long the bike lane on Bloor street in Toronto was heavily contested. It was debated in local politics for decades and was only declared permanent recently. During the debate car drivers demanded the “right” to occupy land at the expense of others while maintaining an
Continue readingThings Are Good: How Bogota Convinced People to Give up Cars Once a Week
Not Bogota, but a nice place nonetheless. Every Sunday the city of Bogota stops cars from entering the city and they let the streets be used by everyone. Once cars are out of the equation it’s amazing what communities can do to make life more enjoyable and help their culture
Continue readingThings Are Good: Big Data Proves Bicycles are the Fastest Mode of Transportation
Regular readers of this site already know that in urban settings using a bicycle is the best way to get around. Thanks to an on-demand food delivery company there is now more evidence that bicycles are the fastest mode of transportation. The company knows this because their delivery algorithm takes
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