News from Elsewhere

How a Philly shop built a bike — quickly and at a discount — for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

The buyer: Joe Biden.

Bilenky Cycle Works in Olney had less than two weeks to manufacture the bike.
Harold Brusker 11/6/21

Stephen Bilenky wasn’t sure what to think when he got an email from the U.S. State Department on May 23 asking whether he could make a bike — in less than two weeks.
That was a big request for Bilenky Cycle Works in Philadelphia’s Olney section, a small business whose customers may have to wait at least six months for a bicycle and sometimes up to 18 months, depending on how customised.
What’s more, the budget was just $1,500. Prices for the 75 or so bikes Bilenky makes annually start at $4,500.
Bilenky, 67, and his three employees pulled it off, finishing the custom frame made from Columbus steel and painting it by Memorial Day weekend. The goal was to have the bike ready as a gift from President Joe Biden to Johnson, an avid cyclist, at the G7 Summit in Cornwall, England. The summit starts Friday.

A technical glitch has seen dozens of roads in Oxford incorrectly appear closed on satellite navigation devices.
According to platforms such as Google Maps and TomTom, barely any routes appear open through the east of the city.
Oxfordshire County Council said it happened after it submitted data on new Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) to a Google “network management system”.
It said work was under way to resolve the issue “as soon as possible”.
Some road blocks and bollards are in place in Church Cowley, Florence Park and Temple Cowley as part of the council’s LTN scheme.
It is part of an attempt by the authority to create quieter, safer neighbourhoods.

In the 1960s, I-81 ploughed through a historically Black neighborhood in Syracuse, displacing hundreds. Organizers’ dream of seeing it torn down may get new life under Biden

Rachel Ramirez Fri 21 May 2021
Just south of downtown Syracuse in upstate New York, a stretch of highway has long divided surrounding neighbourhoods.
On the east side are large buildings where university students live, well-maintained green spaces, and a wall that blocks the highway from view. On the west side is a predominantly low-income and disinvested Black neighborhood where the pollution from the highway exacerbates many residents’ existing health conditions.

asthma than their white counterparts, according to a recent report by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU).

Gary Fuller 4/6/21
The decision to reroute instead of rebuild the earthquake-damaged Cypress Freeway in West Oakland, California, eased the air pollution burden experienced by local communities and opened new areas for housing and the creation of parks.
Other examples include the unbuilding of part of the Inner Loop in Rochester, New York, the removal of a 12-lane motorway in Utrecht, the Netherlands, to restore the canal that once surrounded the city centre, and the Cheonggyecheon River project in Seoul, South Korea; where a multi-lane expressway was removed to reveal a buried river, creating a green-transport corridor and a place to picnic and relax. These schemes could provide a blueprint for our major urban roads.

The roads funding plan came days after the government pledged £2 billion to boost cycling
Tuesday May 26 2020

We live in a disequilibrium world, where chaos is always close and business as usual an illusion. Model-based assessments are under challenge, says Phil Goodwin. In these circumstances, the roles of scrutiny and challenge are supremely important

Embedded in decades of transport modelling is the assumption that the future will be sufficiently like the past that any relationships observed (or thought to be observed), were stable enough to use as a guide to the future, and reliable enough to support decisions, with a few modest caveats. This philosophical starting point underpinned the rationale for the key transport models used to forecast future movement and support major projects. Brexit, Covid19, and climate change all challenge the credibility of that view.