Great: Local news mag show Chronicle just aired a piece on Northampton MA, and featured the city’s planned redesign of Main Street for ped and bike safety!

Greater: That proposed redesign includes the sweet double-tree-row portico for bicyclists!

Remember like ten years ago when protected bike lanes were only smattered about in a few big cities and ultra-progressive university cities, and now low-key cities of 29k people like Northampton are doing premium-quality reconstructions like this?

@bikepedantic also Northampton is an ultra-progressive university city. They have Smith College. (One of the 5 colleges in the area) Easthampton (next door) has a private highschool that costs $90k a yr.

Not to rain on your parade. I'm really excited too, it's just been a lot. There's a ton of other awesome in the pipeline for the Pioneer Valley. Holyoke should look like this in 5+ years too. The progress being made in Hadley is also impressive.

Now if we could just get Springfield on board.

@alexisdyslexic @bikepedantic I don't think even the big cities have caught on yet to how Paris or even Jersey City has shifted the conversation from being about a hypothetical cross-section on a few blocks "late next year maybe" to having a usable low-stress bikeway network throughout the city right now. Portland has certainly been too slow to build too little separation, every city is missing their #VisionZero goals by a decade or more at this rate.

@alexisdyslexic @bikepedantic I get that people need to see a built example of what it could be like, but what actually decides whether you have bike ridership or car congestion, is the A to B experience for all trips being easy and convenient by biking, walking, and transit, and not having free / cheap parking everywhere particularly at the expense of the exact locations where you could have a usable bike network. I don't see how we'll get there politically or otherwise except comprehensively.