To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net
A man rides his bike in a bicycle shed near Central Station Amsterdam.
Amsterdam is currently tackling a problem most cities can only dream of having: It has way too many bikes.
So massively popular is cycling in the Netherlands' largest city that
the city center has run out of places to put them all. Amsterdam’s
daily two-wheeled commuter flood fills downtown with more bikes than it
has space to park, forcing the city come up with a drastic, visionary
solution. It’s going to park those bikes underwater. Oh, and on water,
too.
A women parks her bike in a bicycle shed near Central Station Amsterdam.
The city has just announced a plan to excavate a 7,000-space bicycle garage under the Ij, the former bay (now a lake thanks to the construction of the Afsluitdijk
barrier) that forms Amsterdam’s waterfront. The lake forms a sort of
moat around the city’s Central Station, its main transit hub and a place
where it could be possible to connect a subaquatic bike catacomb
directly via tunnel to the city’s metro system. Stacking a total of
21,500 new bike spaces around the station by 2030, Amsterdam also plans
to create two new floating islands with space for 2000 bikes each. Add
this to the 2,500 spaces already in place and you have what will
comfortably be the largest bike parking accomodations in the world.
This might seem like a pretty grand infrastructure overhaul just to
stow a few bikes, but Amsterdam’s cycling statistics are phenomenal. A
massive 57 percent of Amsterdammers use their bikes daily,
with 43 percent of them commuting to and from work using pedal power.
It helps that this is a city in which cycling is particularly easy to
do—the terrain is flat, the city compact and segregated bike paths make
it pretty safe, while central canals often make road widening to
accommodate cars impossible anyway.
The
problem is what to do with bikes when they arrive downtown. Inner
Amsterdam is densely built with often narrow streets, and bicycles
chained up randomly here and there can become a major headache. So
infested is Amsterdam with wrongly parked bicycles that in 2013 the city
had to remove a phenomenal 73,000
of them from the streets. This is expensive—it costs from €50 to €70
per bike, while owners pay €10-12 to retrieve them from the pound. The
city could increase the release fee, of course, but Amsterdam is also a
great place in which to buy a cheap used bike—there’s a sense that many
local scofflaws would simply buy another before paying a large fine.
All round, offering a lot more real parking places is a better and
ultimately cheaper option. But where to put them? Not only is central
Amsterdam full, but thanks to its marshy soil, it’s not an easy place to
create basements either. Plans a while back to give canal houses
parking places went as far as planning to temporarily drain the canals
to build vaults in the clay beneath them. In a tight, soggy space like
this, constructing under and on water is often the best solution, which
makes the plan for Amsterdam’s Central Station less surprising. It
should be impressive when it's finished. Within 15 years, the building
will bristle both above and below ground with so many stacks of bikes
that it may end up resembling some sort of vast brick pincushion.
The beginning (left) and end (right) of the southern section of the 210
Freeway as seen from Del Mar Blvd. towards California Blvd. in Pasadena
on Tuesday, October 2, 2012.
The City of La Cañada Flintridge will host a workshop on how to
submit effective comments for the draft Environmental Impact Report for
the 710 Freeway extension project, due to be released this month.
Topics will include a brief history of the California Environmental
Quality Act, the contents of an Environmental Impact Report, the
environmental review process and how to target your comments on the
draft.
Metro also announced that once the release occurred, community stakeholders would have 90 days to respond to findings. By law, Caltrans is required to allow a response window of only 45 days.
The workshop will be led by Delaine Shane, who has more than 34 years
of experience preparing environmental documents in both the public and
private sectors, according to a city notice.
The event will be held Saturday, Feb. 28 from 10 a.m. to noon at the
City Hall Council Chambers, located at 1327 Foothill Boulevard.
Space is limited and reservations for the event will be taken on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Attendees are asked to RSVP to Jan SooHoo at jan@soohoos.org
