New bike and pedestrian ordinances in Boulder

A city-scale bike and pedestrian omnibus bill is coming before City Council.  Among other things, it creates a well-defined cross walk speed limit for bikes (8 mph), requires bikes and peds to activate the blinking lights at mid-block crossings, and legalizes back-in angled parking, which the city wants to experiment with on University, near the intersection with 17th, to make the bike lane safer.

Revisiting Junction Place, the TVAP and Multi-Way Boulevards

Antisocial Facades

Last fall I and other representatives from Community Cycles participated in a discussion with the city and various stakeholders regarding upcoming redevelopment along Pearl Parkway.  I wrote about the experience and the Transit Village Area Plan (TVAP) more generally from the perspective of a human-powered urbanist.  Mostly, we looked at different possible streetscapes for Pearl Parkway between 30th and the railroad tracks.  The property at 3100 Pearl Parkway is slated to be developed in the near future, as a 320 unit rental apartment complex, and as one of the first major developments in the area plan.  The city is interested in experimenting with novel street treatments in order to try and make the place special and attractive.  Community Cycles got involved largely because the TVAP “Connections Plan” had, with minimal fanfare, superseded the Transportation Master Plan (TMP) and removed the bike lanes which had long been planned along Pearl Parkway in favor of off-street only infrastructure.  We felt that this change was not necessarily in the best interest of cyclists, and wanted to ensure that whatever did end up getting built would be safe and efficient.

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The First 2011 PLAN Boulder Council Candidate Forum

The Candidates

Friday September 9th PLAN Boulder County held the first of their City Council candidate fora at the Boulder Public Library. The room was packed, with people standing in the back, listening to Tim Plass, Daniel Ziskin, Jonathan Hondorf, Ken Wilson and Kevin Hotaling define their platforms. John Tayer acted as moderator.  Each candidate was first allowed to introduce themselves for 90 seconds.  This was followed by about an hour’s worth of pre-selected questions from PLAN Boulder, and the last half hour was dedicated to audience questions vetted by Alan Boles

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Pasadena Bicycle Master Plan Meeting October 1st

Message from the City below, linkage courtesy of yours truly.  Unfortunately I’ll be out of town, so hopefully others will be able to attend and take notes and post them on the web, as I have done here, and here, and here (okay, actually that third link goes to a rant…).  I’m posting the info here because strangely, it does not seem to be posted anywhere on the City’s website.  Funny that.

Ryan Snyder Associates, consultant, will provide a progress report on the development of the City’s new Bicycle Master Plan. An open forum will be held to gain public comment on the proposed improvements to the current bikeway system.

When:

Thursday, October 1, 2009 – 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.

Where:

Jackie Robinson Center
1020 N. Fair Oaks Ave.
Pasadena, CA

Hosted by Department of Transportation and
the Bicycle Master Plan Advisory Committee

More Info:

Contact Rich Dilluvio at (626) 744-7254 or rdilluvio@cityofpasadena.net.

An updated plan will look at the full range of actions (PDF) Pasadena could take to improve conditions and encourage bicycle riding

Will there be no more public Pasadena Bicycle Master Plan meetings?

That’s what the advisory commission rumor mill is saying anyway.  I hope we can ensure that the gossip is wrong.

In February the Pasadena Department of Transportation said that we would have four (count ’em: 4) public meetings or workshops throughout the spring to get input on the Pasadena Bicycle Master Plan, and that a draft would be finished by around June.  I posted a summary of the meeting.

We have so far had one workshop, in May, which many people felt was not adequately publicized beforehand (the City did not, for instance, send an e-mail to the list of interested parties it had collected at the first meeting, which it did use to get more than 1000 responses to the online Pasadena cyclists survey).  At the workshop we were told that a second draft of the new plan’s goals, objectives, and actions would be posted on the web within one week, incorporating our feedback from the workshop.  I posted the first draft of these items with commentary.

No Cars In The CityNo Cars in the City (CC-BY Zane Selvans)

Continue reading Will there be no more public Pasadena Bicycle Master Plan meetings?