Cycling for Cities to Bring Innovation to Urban Streets

A new effort called Cycling for Cities has just been launched to help speed the transformation of American cities into places where bicycles are chosen more often by more people for a larger share of their daily trips.

The effort, announced by a network of transportation officials from some of the nation's largest cities known as the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), is supported by national bicycle industry group Bikes Belong and the SRAM Cycling Fund.

As part of the program, a website has been created where the best practices in making cities more usable for bicyclists from around the country and the world are listed. Among the innovations described on the site are "Shared Lane Markings" like the Sharrows that the City of Cincinnati put in place this year on Madison Road in O'Bryonville and on Clifton and Ludlow Avenues in Clifton. The City of Cincinnati applied for and received Federal permission to put Sharrows in place as an experiment.

The increased interest in bicycling as transportation in the U.S. in recent years has spurred city planners and engineers in places as different from one another as Portland, OR and New York City to develop new approaches to making their streets work for bicycles as well as for cars. Federal policy has been criticized for lagging behind and in some cases impeding progress at the local level. NACTO also hopes their program will spark change in Federal policy.

Innovative approaches are especially important for the older cities that make up the core of our region and are retrofitting their streets for bikes - not only Cincinnati proper, but also Newport, Covington, Norwood, and other 'first suburbs'.

Here's hoping that our cities not only move quickly to adopt best practices from elsewhere, but also do some innovation on their own.