London Soon To Have More EV Chargers than Gas Stations

According to a recent story from Inhabitat, London may soon have more EV charging stations than conventional gas stations.

As of fall 2010, London had 250 charging stations for about 2,000 electric vehicles registered in the city.

The new EV charging network, called Source London, announced in May 2011 that 1,300 EV charging stations will be installed in the city by 2013. These new stations will be installed along residential streets as well as near supermarkets, public parking garages, and shopping malls.

The real questions here are 1) does London truly need 1,300 EV charging stations?; and 2) will this new public investment help supplant San Francisco's role as the global leader in EV charging infrastructure?

Source London will pay for the maintenance of the new charging stations by having EV drivers subscribe to an annual membership fee of about $160. There's no such thing as a free lunch, I guess...turns out you still have to pay to fill up your car even if by electric charge.

EV drivers shouldn't complain too much, however. Per Mayor Boris Johnson, they are exempt from the city's congestion charge of between $8 and $15 to enter the city during rush hour.

What is truly groundbreaking about Source London is that with 1,300 charging stations in the city limits, drivers will be far more likely to encounter an electric charge point than a conventional gas station. This could have long-lasting implications on driver behavior, as one of the biggest flaws of electric vehicles - so-called "range anxiety" over where and when to recharge the batteries - will have been eliminated, at least for London residential drivers.

A link to an interactive map of London charging stations is available here.

Whether electric charging stations become viable infrastructure for cab drivers, service vehicles, and delivery trucks - all of which demand a battery range of greater than 100 miles to be practical - remains to be seen.

Five Things Every Mayor Should Know Before Starting a Bike-Sharing Program

With all the focus I've given on this blog to bike-sharing programs around the world, I figured it would be good to share this piece on what city leaders need to do to make sure their bike-sharing program is a success. The author, Paul DeMaio, is the founder of MetroBike, LLC, perhaps the world's only "bike-share consultant." As I'm looking into graduate schools for a Masters in Urban Planning, bike-sharing is emerging as one of the most important trends sweeping across the world's cities. It's definitely something I'd like to become more involved with as the programs grow from their incubation periods into a fully mature part of our transit infrastructure. This post originally appeared on Shareable:

Interest in bike-sharing services is growing around the world. With each successful service, there is more interest from communities within a region, state, province, and country for more bike-sharing services. Before implementing a bike-sharing service, it’s important for public officials and staff to consider the following:
1) Be a bike-friendly community first.Your community should be bike-friendly first with a dense network of bike facilities, such as cycle tracks, bike lanes, and trails. This network of bike facilities will enable bicycle riders and your future bike-sharing customers to easily and safely travel through your community by bike. The League of American Bicyclists’ Bicycle Friendly America Yearbook offers examples of what other communities have done to become bike-friendly. Many communities with bike-sharing services also have high Bicycle Friendly Community ratings and include: Arlington, VA, Washington, DC, Minneapolis, and Denver. As you implement a bike-sharing service, your community should strive to be at least a bronze-level Bicycle Friendly Community.
2) Bike-sharing is not cheap, so secure sufficient funding.By implementing a bike-sharing service, you’re launching a new transit service. It may be less expensive to purchase and operate than a bus or rail service, but sufficient funding is required to make it successful. While the types of bike-sharing systems vary, costs can be up to $5,000 per bike for capital and operating expenses can range from $100 - $200 per bike per month. A service with a couple hundred or thousand bikes is pricey. However, while implementing a service is not cheap, bike-sharing can be a cost-effective public transport option.
3) Size and density matter.A bus service with a solitary bus or just a couple of stops will only be accessible by a limited number of people—those living, working, or playing near the stops. The same can be said for bike-sharing, as the greater the number of bikes and the wider the network of stations translates into a more successful service. Station density should be such that a customer can find a station every couple of blocks. In fact, a bike-sharing service’s usefulness will increase geometrically with each additional station as each station expands the reach of your service by better connecting places into this new transit system.
4) Get private sector sponsors.Bike-sharing lends itself to public-private partnerships. Private organizations can assist the implementing agency by sponsoring the service or purchasing a station for outside of their worksite. They also find bike-sharing good for providing their employees a healthy commuting option, making their location more accessible to customers, being environmentally healthy, and promoting a green service. The public benefits by having some of the costs of buying and operating a service covered by private organizations. Whether the implementing agency is a local government or non-profit, both have successfully taken advantage of sponsorship to help expand their service’s reach.
Barclays Bank sponsored Barclays Cycle Hire in London to the tune of $40M. BlueCross BlueShield of Minnesota sponsored Nice Ride Minnesota in Minneapolis with $1.75M and has offered up to a $1.5M match for expansion of the service. For bike-sharing implementers, private engagement can expand a service in a cost-efficient way -- creating a win-win for both parties.
5) Don’t do it alone, work regionally.Bike-sharing can produce the greatest benefits when done regionally, which is why the Paris and Washington, DC areas have regional services. For commuting trips, bike-sharing is ideal for the first-mile/last-mile challenge of getting folks to and from longer haul transit services. Implementing a service takes a lot of work, but sharing the workload, and expenses, among multiple jurisdictions helps a great deal. Additionally, it’s important that jurisdictions within a region have the same, compatible service, so riding from one jurisdiction to another is smooth and makes for a pleasant customer experience.
With the number of bike-sharing services in the U.S. and worldwide rapidly increasing each year, bike-sharing has proven effective at serving the public well for short urban trips as well as complementing other modes of transit. However, like any other transit mode, there are pitfalls both shared with other transit modes and unique to bike-sharing which should be avoided to ensure a successful and well-used service. Following this advice will get your jurisdiction rolling in the right direction.

Via: The Bike Sharing Blog

Bike-Only Boulevards: This Would Be Portland's Idea...

In Seattle, late February marks the unofficial start of biking season, because let's be honest, everyone except the most hardcore bike commuters and Critical Mass-types among us has pretty much had their bike sadly rusting away in storage since late October.

So in honor of this, I dusted off my 15-year-old Trek hybrid bike, which had been sitting in my apartment's front doorway almost unused since I moved here in...gulp....September! I'm a terrible cyclist - terrible, terrible, terrible. Bicycling used to be a big part of my life, the one type of exercise I never wanted to quit, the way I discovered new neighborhoods anywhere I went. Hell, a 60-mile ride around Lake Washington was a "training ride" at one point for me not so long ago. I promise to redeem myself this year by doing two things:

1) Train for and do STP, the annual 10,000 rider-strong race from Seattle to Portland. I did STP two years and absolutely loved it!!! There's free food and drinks every 20 miles (a drop in the bucket compared to the 200 miles between the two cities), and my favorite part about it - getting tranced out on my iPod the whole f*cking way there. Wouldn't do it any other way :-)

2) I will devote more space on Green My Fleet to bike-related issues, like bike infrastructure, bike sharing, upcoming rides and events, and bicycle cultures from around the world.

Riding through one of my favorite cities in the entire world - Valencia, Spain

In deference to ultimatum #2, I found a pretty interesting trend that's emerging among the more left-leaning green circles of - where else ?- Portland, Oregon: bike-only boulevards. What's that, you ask? A street where only bikes are allowed - in America??? Impossible. It has to be the psychotic dream of some deranged  hipster twat with chronic anomie and gauged ears! (see below in case you missed the latest episode of Portlandia):



You'd be wrong in thinking that bike-only boulevards are doomed to be an idea of the loony fringe, however. Portland happens to the be the US city with the largest bicycle mode share of 7% (planner-speak for the proportionate ways we get from point A to point B), but it pales compared to bike-friendly cities internationally. European cities take the cake on bicycle population - some 30-35% of all trips are made by bike in most Dutch cities, as well as many cities in France, Germany, and Scandinavia. That most US cities, including Seattle (2% bike mode share), fall way behind Portland is an indictment of our unsustainable transportation system in general.

Portland achieved the success it did by allocating more bike infrastructure - bike lanes, sharrows, bike racks on buses and light rail trains - than any other American city for many years. Portland pioneered the neighborhood bicycle boulevard and the traffic-separated bicycle track that were a first in the US, though hardly elsewhere. A large portion of Portland's large biking population is due not only to its relatively flat geography and outdoorsy culture, but also its 15 neighborhood bicycle boulevards, where traffic is calmed to the point where cyclists almost begin to take precedence over cars.

Recently installed traffic-separated bike track on Manhattan's 9th Avenue, photo courtesy of Seth Holladay of http://www.nycbikemaps.com

Recently, though, Portland's bicycle hegemony may be slipping. Portland was bested by Minneapolis as the most bike-friendly city in America by Bicycle Magazine this past spring. New York City has laid 250 miles of bike lanes in the past three years alone under the partnership between Mayor Michael Bloomberg and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. Meanwhile, bike-sharing systems are sprouting up like weeds across the US, from Washington DC to Denver, San Francisco, and Miami, and Portland is nowhere to be found on this important trend.

Bike-only boulevards represent one of the great bits of uncharted territory for bike infrastructure that Portland and other cities are now looking to tap into. How exactly do you make the transition to a street completely dedicated to bikes? This is something no city in the US can match, and only the densest parts of Amsterdam have any experience with. One of the most important ways to encourage more people to hop on their bikes is to eliminate the threat of riding in traffic, a danger that deters an estimated 60% of "would-be cyclists", that is, people who say they would like to ride their bikes as their primary mode of transport but choose not to.

So by this measure, all of the previous bike infrastructure we've ever experimented with doesn't even come close to meeting people's needs. Bike lanes are often narrow, rarely continuous, and provide zero safety if cars are speeding just inches away from you at 40 miles an hour or more. Most streets lack the space for a dedicated bicycle track, so this option does little for us. Bike paths built on railroad spurs, like Seattle's Burke Gilman, are fun recreational spaces but impractical as commuting paths because they are difficult to integrate with the street network and can only be built where there was once a railroad. Sharrows don't even pretend to give you any space as a cyclist - rather than allocating any street width for bikes, they just paint a bicycle on the asphalt to "warn cars" that bikes might be nearby. Big help that is...

There's already a great deal of evidence in support of bike-only boulevards. The city of Bogota, Colombia, regularly sees almost two million people use its 100-mile plus system of bicycle boulevards that are closed on Sundays as part of its Ciclovia (Spanish for "bike-highway"). Los Angeles copied the event with its own CicLAvia series and likewise saw a huge increase in people out on their bikes. Why? Because the bike-only boulevards remove car traffic and finally make people feel safe being on their bikes.

As cities grapple with how to become more sustainable, we're set with some very big goals to achieve. San Francisco aims to have 20% of its residents moving by bike in just ten years, by 2020. Portland is aiming even higher, 25% bicyclists by the same year. It might just take something otherwise considered radical to hit targets like these. The San Francisco Bike Coalition is lobbying the city's Board of Supervisors to install 27 miles of bike-only boulevards that connect the most important commercial and transit hubs. I can only suspect a proposal like this would cost far less than what the city has spent so far on who knows how many bike lanes.

The bike-only boulevard trend is even spreading to cities as ass-backwards as Seattle. A "neighborhood greenway", borrowing Portland's granola terminology, is planned for the NE 45th St. corridor in Wallingford.

Will these bike-only boulevards work as truly functional transit arteries, and not just a fun Sunday recreational pastime? If the two boulevards installed in London recently are any indication, we needn't worry about that. Bicycle traffic went up 70% in less than a year since installation, which speaks volumes about the difference good infrastructure makes in our transportation choices.

In case you needed any more motivation to be on the look out for bike superhighways, check out this statistic:

According to a report from the Political Economy Research Institute, a think tank based out of the federal Department of Transportation, construction on bike and pedestrian infrastructure creates TWICE the number of jobs per dollar spent than road construction. Take that, Tea Party assholes!

Even Santa Claus Likes Bike-Sharing

The Santa population of London has taken to the streets in favor of the new bike-sharing system there, Boris Bikes. 



Nicknamed after London's mayor, Boris Johnson, the system began this past July, with 5,000 bikes at 315 stations in Central London. Boris Bikes has the enviable distinction of being the only public transit program in decades to actually make a profit. So far the program has been exceedingly popular - over 90,000 Londoners are now members, and one million rides were taken by the end of September - a great start for this brand new program.

If you are with your family this Christmas season, you may want to hide ya kids, hide ya wife...because there's no good way to explain 30 Santas riding bikes to your six year old!

Drury Lane station, with 27 bikes

EV Charging Stations Go Wireless!

One of the biggest developments to come out of the world of electric vehicle charging station technology is a new crop of wireless charging systems soon to hit the market.

If a new partnership between Delphi Automotive and WiTricity works out, electric vehicle owners may soon be able to charge their cars simply by pulling up to a parking spot.

Whereas most EV charging stations to date have involved plug-in technology, this new system involves no cables or cords; it’s embedded in a parking lot or placed on a parking garage floor, and after drivers park over the system it transmits energy wirelessly to their vehicle to charge it.

According to the designers at WiTricity, the wireless charging stations can transfer 3,000 watts through to the parked vehicles above them, about the same as a plug-in charging station. 

A startup in London, HaloIPT, has already launched successfully in the UK a similar wireless charging station that is suitable for all vehicles - including scooters, electric cars, and electric bikes. 

Known as the Inductive Power Transfer System, allows a car fitted with a simple integrated receiver pad to be charged automatically when parked or driven on roads with HaloIPT’s special charging pads beneath their surface. This IPT method could give new meaning to the phrase "electric highway" by enabling charging technology to be directly embedded into the roads we drive on.

Via: Inhabitat, Autoblog Green