Bicycle Friendly University - UNAM Mexico City

It was a long-time coming this little film. It's about the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and how bicycle friendly the university is. I shot it when I visited Mexico City last year and spoke at UNAM's architecture faculty about promoting bicycle culture.

I figured I'd whip it together after reading James' article on The Urban Country about how McGill University in Montreal has banned bicycle riding on their campus.

After rolling my eyes and lamenting the lack of rationality at such an esteemed place of learning I revisted the footage from UNAM.

The main campus, by the way, is stunningly beautiful and is a World Heritage Site. The campus is largely car-free and as far back as 2004 they started a bike share programme called BiciPuma. It has since grown and the university has wonderful bicycle infrastructure all over the campus.

The university's bicycle friendly policy and resulting infrastructure and facilities are the yardstick by which all other universities should measure themselves. Bicycles mix easily with pedestrians and the bike lanes have priority when running through car parking areas. It's all calm and relaxed.

McGill's anti-bicycle policy is an embarrassment. It's another example of rules being written by people who don't ride bicycles and who haven't bothered to do their research into the subject. Instead choosing to ban bicycles based on personal perception of danger and risk assessment. We're used to that in cities, but this is a university...

Universities should be the first bastions of bicycle culture, not just because they are places of learning that often (not always) set examples, but also because they tend to be unique, autonomous zones in the position to dictate traffic rules and policies.

Golf carts could be traded in for three-wheeler cargo bikes for maintenance people to get around, bicycles could be made available for staff use and students who choose to ride a bicycle should be encouraged, embraced, thanked profusely and welcomed at their place of study.

Addendum: The League of American Bicyclists (LAB) just fired off this link to their Bicycle Friendly University programme, so I'd better include it here in a jiffy...

7550 New Bike Parking Spots at Copenhagen Central Station

For all of Copenhagen's badassness as a bicycle city, there remains one thing that the City still completely sucks at. Bicycle parking at train stations. At Copenhagen Central Station there are only about 1000 bike parking spots. Danish State Railways can't even tell us how many spots they have. They're not sure. Even in Basel they have 800+. In Antwerp they have this . Don't even get me started on the Dutch. 12,500 bike parking spots are on the way in some place called Utrecht . Amsterdam has a multi-story bike parking facility, floating bicycle barges round the back and are planning 7000 more spots underwater . Even at the nation's busiest train station, Nørreport, the recent and fancy redesign failed miserably in providing parking that is adequate for the demand . Architects once again failing to respond to actual urban needs. It is time to remedy that. Here is my design for 7550 bike parking spots behind Copenhagen Central Station. Steve C. Montebello i...

The New Question for 21st Century Cities

It's all so simple if we want it to be. For almost a century we have been asking the same question in our cities. "How many cars can we move down a street?" It's time to change the question. If you ask "How many PEOPLE can we move down a street?", the answer becomes much more modern and visionary. And simple. Oh, and cheaper. Let alone the fact that the model at the top can move 10 times more people down a street than the model at the bottom. When I travel with my Bicycle Urbanism by Design keynote , I often step on the toes of traffic engineers all around the world. Not all of them, however. I am always approached by engineers who are grateful that someone is questioning the unchanged nature of traffic engineering and the unmerited emphasis placed on it. I find it brilliant that individual traffic engineers in six different nations have all said the same thing to me: "We're problem solvers. But we're only ever asked to solve the sam...

The Copenhagenize Desire Lines Analysis Goes to Amsterdam

Nine intersections. 19,500 cyclists. Nine hours. All in a city considered as a model for many urban planners. The Copenhagenize Design Company Desire Lines analysis tool headed south to Amsterdam to study bicycle user behaviour and how it interacts with - or is affected by - urban infrastructure. In ca lose collaboration between Copenhagenize Design Co . and The University of Amsterdam in the guise of Marco te Brömmelstroet - and for the City of Amsterdam - nine intersections in the city were filmed during the morning rush hour in order to complete the world's largest study of bicycle user behaviour. We're pleased to reveal the results of our study and showcase some of the data, analyses and desire line maps. The bicycle infrastructure in the City of Amsterdam is rather different from the typology used in Copenhagen ,where we did the first anthropological studies of the cyclists - The Choregraphy of an Urban Intersection, and others. It was t...

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