Moving Beyond the Automobile

I'm discovering an untapped resource for all things nerdy and dear to my heart :)

The folks at Streetsblog, through their film organ, Streetfilms, have been releasing films for years that get to the core of many of our most pressing urban problems in a fun and visually stimulating way.

Many of their subjects are ones I've already tackled here at Green My Fleet, like car-sharing, bike-sharing, electric cars, congestion pricing, walkability, and public transit. Others are more far-reaching and poignant than I could possibly get on this blog.

My favorite part about their new series, Moving Beyond the Automobile, is their roundtable of celebrity (kind of :p) panelists who talk about the steps they are taking to move their cities in a progressive, less car-dependent direction.

Here's their promo:

Today is an exciting day here at Streetfilms as we are officially announcing the debut of our 10-part series "Moving Beyond the Automobile" (MBA).  Each Tuesday over the next ten weeks, tune in to Streetfilms as we'll be posting a new chapter about smart and proven strategies to reduce traffic and improve street safety for all users. 

We'll be tackling many fascinating topics in the next few months from "Bus Rapid Transit" to "Congestion Pricing" to "Car Share" to show how each can help people to use cars less - or not at all. 

We've been out talking to the experts.  Well-respected voices like former Bogotá mayor Enrique Peñalosa, Tri-state Transportation's Kate Slevin, Commissioner of NYC Department of Transportation Janette Sadik-Khan, Portland's Mayor Sam Adams, former 4-term Mayor of Milwaukee, and President of the Congress for New Urbanism John Norquist and dozens of other transportation authorities across the country to get their input and advice. 

At about the halfway point of the series, we'll also be posting a MBA curriculum that includes lessons and discussion points for each of these fun and important films. Streetfilms would like to thank The Fund for the Environment & Urban Life for making this series possible.

MBA_Trailer from Streetfilms on Vimeo.


If you have a spare moment, I'd definitely encourage to check out their weekly web series, starting every Tuesday on February 15th!

New York City's Sadik-Khan Hits Another Home Run

New York City's Transportation Commissioner is not only responsible for the city's biggest expansion of bike lanes in history and the largest (planned) bike-sharing program in the US.

She's also taking charge of one of the simplest infrastructural changes you could think of, one that turns out to have a dramatic influence on the quality of our experience as pedestrians.

In a Lower Manhattan pilot project, Sadik-Khan has installed "pop-up" cafes that take up the space where parked cars would normally sit. Because land uses in cities are generally determined by what developers call the 'highest and best use,' it bears questioning whether having a six-foot swath of highly-trafficked streetscape devoted to parking our cars is truly the highest and best use.

It comes down to a question of priorities - do we build our cities to move traffic or to move people? Increasingly, progressive leaders like Sadik-Khan are choosing the latter.

The locations in Lower Manhattan were so successful that this pilot program is being expanded to 12 additional locations across the city. Each pop-up cafe is just six feet wide - the width of an ordinary parked car - and roughly five cars long.

Each pop-up cafe is sponsored and maintained by a neighboring business across the sidewalk, generally a restaurant or coffeeshop. These stores are reporting a 14% increase in business when the sidewalk tables and chairs are installed. Although they are privately financed, the spaces are considered as public as any park.

Originally inspired by similar "parklets" in San Francisco's Castro and Potrero Hill neighborhoods, this type of "guerrilla park design", if you will, is destined to become a permanent fixture wherever it's installed. Simply by provoking thought about the purposes of our street space - how much space for parked cars, and how much for people - seems to be enough to provoke people to take back the public space that is rightfully theirs.

A similar transformation, albeit on a larger scale, took place in NYC's Madison Square Garden. Take a look!