Ever dreamed of making the streets outside your abode more livable, pedestrian-friendly, and community-oriented?

City Repair in Portland, Oregon hosts an annual Village Building Convergence where hundreds of people come together to build diverse projects for the benefit of their communites and to take back their streets via a process known as the Intersection Repair.

This involves painting streets with a high-visiblity mural that creates a public square for residents to gather and one which gently encourages drivers to slow down when approaching these spaces. Over time the neighbors further enhance the transformation by adding amenities like benches, community bulletin boards, and introducing gardens & art. As you’ll see, the possibilites are endless.

StreetFilms visited three of the Intersection Repairs and spoke with Mark Lakeman co-founder of City Repair, Greg Raisman, the Portland DOT Liason, and scores of residents & volunteers about why they were doing it.

Let’s go Mets! Let’s go bikes!

The StreetFilms team cycled with over 100 baseball fanatics during Bike Week on an amazin’ jaunt to Shea Stadium. The 4th annual ride was organized by the NYC Department of Transportation and the great spirits at Transportation Alternatives provided the valet bike parking.

After adding up the numbers, I declare that sometime today we had our 100,000th viewing of a StreetFilm since going live on March 1st! Thanks to everyone who has helped contribute - our crew, webmasters, musicians, volunteers, people in the community, fellow bloggers helping to spread the word and our partners at TOPP, T.A., PPS and, of course, Streetsblog.

Please keep the comments and feedback coming. Our plans for other short films are almost overwhelming at times as we continue to promise to keep showing NYC the way to turn its streets more livable and people-friendly - while providing advocacy groups outside New York with fodder to change their own communities. In the next few months look for more pieces on Congestition Pricing, an amazing livable streets experience from Burning Man, a visit to the only Platinum-rated bike city in America Davis, California, coverage of Make Music New York and lots of other goodies.

And if you are lucky, maybe the sasquatch will make another appearance.

Taking the Clarence: The Traffic Calming Maniac concept one step further…

This time in Portland, Oregon where Dan Kaufman from Crank My Chain! Cycle TV goes searching for the long lost bigfoot in an area well known for its traffic calming. He stumbles upon the ever-elusive, mythic character and finds that safer streets have coaxed him out of the wild.

If you own a car and store it on the streets of New York City you probably don’t realize how much you directly harm the environment.

Glenn McAnanama of Upper Green Side explains the chain reaction of the consequence of free on-street parking, what it means to the health of New Yorkers and how it all contributes to world greenhouse emissions.

Just returned from City Repair’s 7th Annual Village Building Convergence in Portland, Oregon where hundreds of neighbors, students, and volunteers are taking back their streets to make them more livable, and community-oriented. Of the dozens of seminars, celebrations and building projects going on, StreetFilms loves the Intersection Repair.

An Intersection Repair usually involves painting an intersection with an elaborate design that creates a community gathering space and hopefully cajoles drivers to slow down; to give them a signal that they are entering a neighborhood. But it goes far beyond the paint on the asphalt as neighbors at some locations further enhance the experience over time by adding benches, establishing community bulletin boards, introducing gardens & art, etc. - all of which entice neighbors interact more and care about the commons outside their homes.

When City Repair first attempted some of these events many years ago, the Portland Office of Transportation (PDOT) did not sancation it. Undaunted, communities went ahead and did them anyway! Thankfully, today times have changed: PDOT has an official liasion to City Repair who helps coordinate permitting and street closures and also oversees some of the design standards. Yup, there is a StreetFilm in the works that may post by the end of the week, but for now enjoy the photos below.

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StreetFilms was out at I.S. 89 in Manhattan last week working with Brooke DuBose and Graham Beck of Transportation Alternatives. The middle school students, with the help of Manhattan Youth’s Bob Townley, organized an after-school speed gunning event in response to two recent accidents involving motorists and students crossing the West Side Highway on their way home from school.

All involved had a great time and took the opportunity to bring attention to the problems that face I.S. 89 and Battery Park City in a constructive way.

On the closing day of New York City’s historic C40 Climate Summit, Lord Mayor Clover Moore of Sydney, Australia and Copenhagen’s Mayor of the Technical & Environmental Administration Klaus Bondam took a lunch break to ride bikes with Transportation Alternatives in a symbolic loop around Central Park. As usual StreetFilms brings you the best coverage.

At many locations in the Bay Area you’ll find electronic, on-demand Bike Link locking facilities where you can park your bike securely for between 3 to 5 cents per hour! The lockers were created by eLock Technologies, which runs the Bike Link facilities.

While not ubiqutous just yet, one can see the amazing potential for this technology on the streets of New York City. Imagine a bike locker on every corner, not having to carry multiple heavy locks, and - most importantly - being able to ride even the most expensive model bike and know it’ll be there when you return.

StreetFilms likes to dream, but seriously folks, this could be a moneymaker in NYC. I’d pay lots more than pennies per hour to lock my bike!

In this segment of our interview with Sam Schwartz, he draws upon his decades of experience as a transportation engineer to explain how eliminating cars from the Central Park Loop Drive will not result in long-term traffic nightmares for the surrounding neighborhoods or NYC in general.

“Gridlock Sam” Schwartz served as NYC’s Commissioner of Traffic from 1982-86 and is a former Chief Engineer/First Deputy Commissioner at the NYC DOT. He also writes a daily transportation column for the NY Daily News.

Bike Month continues with a great 30-day exhibit called Why I Ride: The Art of Bicycling in New York. Many artists are featured at four sites in Manhattan, including The Lower East Side Girls Club. There is also a diverse on-line gallery to experience.

StreetFilms stopped by the gala opening to ask people why they ride.

Our “Interview with Enrique Penalosa“ has been translated into Portuguese at dotsub.com. As a result it’s also subtitled in English for the hearing imparied. Please give it up for Bruno Santos and his zeal to spread the word!

If you live in Boston, don’t miss our hour long StreetFilms presentation there this Wednesday at the next Livable Streets event.

StreetFilms just added as part of the Bike to Work Week events in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Today, over 100 cyclists turned out for Brooklyn Greenway Initiative’s annual ride. For nearly a decade, they have been working with numerous community & government groups to bring a Hudson River-style recreation path from Greenpoint to Sunset Park. In the next few years, much of the 15-mile route will finally become reality.

The tour highlight: it was the first public bike tour to be allowed to ride on the piers the future Brooklyn Bridge Park will occupy. Riders enjoyed vantage points of lower Manhattan few have ever seen.

StreetFilms conjured up this short video essay to bring you the highlights.

The StreetFilms crew was on Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan a while back and discovered this delivery truck eating up an already meager sidewalk. Pedestrians, many of whom were forced out into the street, seemed to regard the obstruction as a common occurrence. Just one example of the thousands of intrusions per day a cars-first policy inflicts on the citizens of a city.

Dave Campbell of the Bicycle-Friendly Berkeley Coalition gives us a quick tour of the Berkeley Bikestation where bike parking is safe and free. This is just one of many innovative bike parking facilities on the West Coast that NYC could implement at key transit hubs like Penn Station, Grand Central, the Staten Island Ferry and Atlantic Avenue Terminal.