Elizabeth Press
Recent Posts
Ten Years After Redefining BRT, What’s Next for TransMilenio?
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Three years ago Streetfilms brought you a comprehensive look at Bogotá, Colombia’s TransMilenio, the world’s most advanced Bus Rapid Transit system. TransMilenio changed the way Bogotá residents think about public transportation, becoming indispensable to the 1.7 million people who use the system daily. If anything, the bus network became a victim of its own success, […]
Riding Bogotá’s Bountiful Protected Bikeways
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Since 1998, Bogotá, Colombia has built more than 300 kilometers of protected bikeways. Streetfilms recently had the chance to explore the city’s bike network with the man responsible for building it, former mayor Enrique Peñalosa. “When we build very high quality bicycle infrastructure, besides protecting cyclists, it shows that a citizen on a $30 bicycle […]
The Biggest, Baddest Bike-Share in the World: Hangzhou China
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Anyone who claims that bike-sharing is a European-style transportation innovation has clearly never set foot in Hangzhou, China. The 50,000-bike system in this southern China city of almost 7 million people (about 1.5 million people fewer than New York City) blows all other bike-shares off the map. As Bradley Schroeder of the Institute for Transportation […]
Moving Beyond the Automobile: Parking Reform
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In the tenth and final video in Streetfilms’ Moving Beyond the Automobile series, we are talking about parking reform. From doing away with mandatory parking minimums, to charging the right price for curbside parking, to converting on-street parking spots into parklets and bike corrals, cities are latching onto exciting new ideas to make more room […]
Moving Beyond the Automobile: The Right Price for Parking
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You might be shocked at how much traffic consists of drivers who have already arrived at their destination but find themselves cruising the streets, searching for an open parking spot. In some city neighborhoods, cruising makes up as much as 40 percent of all traffic. All this unnecessary traffic slows down buses, endangers cyclists and […]
Guangzhou, China: Winning the Future With Bus Rapid Transit
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Guangzhou is one of the fastest growing cities in the world. The economic hub of China’s southern coast, it has undergone three decades of rapid modernization, and until recently the city’s streets were on a trajectory to get completely overrun by traffic congestion and pollution. But Guangzhou has started to change course. Last year the […]
Moving Beyond the Automobile: Highway Removal
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In this week’s episode of “Moving Beyond the Automobile,” Streetfilms takes you on a guided tour of past, present and future highway removal projects with John Norquist of the Congress for the New Urbanism. Some of the most well-known highway removals in America — like New York City’s West Side Highway and San Francisco’s Embarcadero […]
Moving Beyond the Automobile: Bus Rapid Transit
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Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) provides faster and more efficient service than an ordinary bus system. While a proper BRT route operates like a surface subway, the cost is much lower. In the latest installment of “Moving Beyond the Automobile,” Streetfilms explains the key features of bus rapid transit around the world and how BRT helps […]
Moving Beyond the Automobile: Bicycling
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For the second chapter in our Moving Beyond the Automobile series we’ll take a look at bicycling. More and more people are choosing to cycle for at least part of their commute in cities across the world. Leading the way in the United States, Portland, Oregon is up to a daily bike count of 17,000 […]
Chicago’s Bus Tracker: Taking the Guesswork Out of Waiting for the Bus
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One of the encouraging trends for American transit riders, in an otherwise bleak landscape of service cuts and fare hikes, is the growing number of agencies experimenting with ways to bring better information to their customers. Last summer Streetfilms explored how open transit data is helping to make riding the bus or the train more […]
Revisiting Donald Appleyard’s “Livable Streets”
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You may have wondered, while watching a Streetfilm or reading a post on Streetsblog, where we got the term “livable streets.” The answer can be found in the work of Donald Appleyard, a scholar who studied the neighborhood environment and the ways planning and design can make life better for city residents. In 1981, Appleyard […]
Traffic Calming: Postcards from London
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In this Streetfilm, you’ll see some of the new street designs in London shopping districts and residential neighborhoods. In many cases, these traffic calming treatments — including raised crosswalks, traffic diverters, and chicanes — go further than what we’ve seen in New York City so far. The attention to detail has created a truly balanced […]