Tag: urban design

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Up To Speed

Bus rapid transit systems in the U.S. not keeping pace

Bus rapid transit systems in the U.S. not keeping pace.

Many American cities, Cincinnati included, are working towards enhancing their bus systems as ridership grows. Bus rapid transit systems consistently come up as potential solutions, but rarely are they true BRT systems. More from Greater Greater Washington:

The Institute for Transportation & Development Policy publishes BRT standards that describe minimum characteristics necessary for a bus route to qualify as BRT. Those standards establish three levels of BRT quality: bronze, silver, and gold. They include features like off-bus fare collection, high station platforms, and bus frequency.

So far, only 5 lines in the United States have scored highly enough to qualify as true BRT, and all 5 rank at the bronze level. Not one is even silver, let alone gold.

According to ITDP, the best performing BRT systems in the world are Bogota, Colombia and Guangzhou, China, which score 93/100 and 89/100, respectively. They are the gold standard.

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Development News Transportation

PHOTOS: $55M Waldvogel Viaduct reconstruction nearing completion

The reconstruction of the Waldvogel Viaduct was spared from the massive spending cuts at the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) last January, and has been able to continue on its scheduled path.

According to City of Cincinnati officials, the project will replace the existing, half-mile structure that connects the Sixth Street Expressway to Elberon Avenue, Warsaw Avenue and River Road in Lower Price Hill and Queensgate. The existing structure had been deteriorating at a rapid pace, and had been rated in “Poor” condition for several years leading up to the project.

The $55 million Waldvogel Viaduct reconstruction project is also preserving space for a future bicycle / pedestrian path planned for Cincinnati’s western riverfront.

As of this month, very little remains of the 73-year-old elevated roadway. UrbanCincy contributor, Jake Mecklenborg, visited the construction site last week to capture the visual progress being made in Lower Price Hill.

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News Transportation

City officials working to get Central Parkway back on [cycle] track

There had been hopes to build the region’s first cycle track, a fully separated bicycle facility, on Central Parkway in 2012. Internal disputes and the lack of funding, however, have delayed the project’s implementation.

The Department of Transportation & Engineering (DOTE) gave City Council’s Major Transportation and Infrastructure Projects Subcommittee an update on the project, in addition to the other bicycle investments being advanced, last week.

At that meeting, Mel McVay, Senior City Planner with the DOTE, stated that the Central Parkway cycle track efforts were in the preliminary investigation stage, but that there could be some challenges regarding the facility’s relationship to vehicular capacity and on-street parking along the 3.4-mile stretch of roadway.

The full length of the cycle track would extend from Ludlow Avenue, where the City installed the region’s first green bike lanes in November 2012, to Liberty Street in Over-the-Rhine, and would cost approximately $750,000.

Plans for the Central Parkway cycle track first came to light during episode eight of The UrbanCincy Podcast.

The hope now, McVay says, is to finish the preliminary analysis within the next month. Should that analysis show it feasible to finance and construct the Central Parkway cycle track, then design work would begin immediately.

The City’s Bicycle Transportation Program has installed nearly 40 miles of bicycle facilities to-date, with an additional 289.9 miles planned in a citywide bicycle network.

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Up To Speed

How Capital Bikeshare got started, and what Cincinnati can learn

How Capital Bikeshare got started, and what Cincinnati can learn from it.

What Washington D.C. has done with Capital Bikeshare is considered the nation’s best. It is the biggest, has the most riders, and is the most financially solvent as compared to the rest of the bike sharing systems in the United States. As Cincinnati prepares to launch its own bike sharing system, what can local leaders learn from the nation’s best system? More from Slate:

If you had been handed, a decade ago, a map of the U.S. and asked to predict where the novel idea of bike sharing—then limited to a few small-scale projects in a handful of European cities, might first find its firmest footing, you probably would have laid your money on a progressive hub like Portland or Seattle or the regional poles of walkable urbanism, New York or San Francisco—all of which were scoring higher, those days, in surveys like Bicycling magazine’s list of most bikeable cities.

Launching a sponsorless bike-share system intended to break even, or even make money, was unprecedented. And having no sponsor made raising capital a challenge, but D.C.-area governments scavenged for the money.

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Up To Speed

NYC’s Queens neighborhood aiming to transform stretch of railway into park

NYC’s Queens neighborhood aiming to transform stretch of railway into park.

The dramatic transformation of the High Line in Manhattan has been so successful that it has influenced other urban communities to re-examine what they’re doing with their unused railroads. Just across the East River, however, Queens is aiming to transform a stretch of train track, that has been abandoned for 50 years, into what advocates are calling the QueensWay. More from the New York Times:

Now, the three-and-a-half-mile stretch of rusty train track in central Queens is being reconceived as the “QueensWay,” a would-be linear park for walkers and bicyclists in an area desperate for more parkland and, with the potential for art installations, performances and adjacent restaurants, a draw for tourists interested in sampling the famously diverse borough.

Unlike the High Line, the QueensWay would welcome bicycles. While the trestles are relatively narrow, long stretches are wide enough — up to 25 feet — to accommodate walkers and bicyclists. New bike paths could connect the park to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park to the north, as well as an existing bikeway in Jamaica Bay to the south. About 250,000 residents live within a mile of the proposed park, and its backers see all kinds of ancillary benefits, from health to traffic.