Category: Biking Elsewhere

From The League of American Bicyclists

https://capwiz.com/lab/issues/alert/?alertid=53440771

This year, around $700 million of Federal transportation funds, which in reality is less than 2 percent of total transportation dollars, will be spent on bicycling and walking.  In 2012 that figure might be a big fat zero.

In the next few days, Senator Coburn and Representative Cantor will ask Congress to eliminate the federal Transportation Enhancements program – the primary funding source 
for the past 20 years for bike lanes, trails, bike racks on buses, bike education etc.  This isn’t safe or smart; it’s not good for the economy or the environment; this is bad health policy and bad transportation policy. But they are going to try because they don’t think bicycling matters.

Even though bicycling projects create more jobs per dollar 
than highway-only projects and cutting enhancements won’t impact the deficit – the money just won’t be spent 
on bicycling – some Members of Congress want to  force us backwards to a 1950s highway-only mindset: as if oil embargoes, congestion, smog, the obesity epidemic and climate change never happened.

Now is the time to Save Cycling.  As we expect the Senate to move first, we are asking you to contact your Senator and urge them to support continued funding for biking and walking. Don’t let them take away this vital investment program for smart, sustainable, safe transportation choices.

Please Take Action today.

Thank You.

https://capwiz.com/lab/issues/alert/?alertid=53440771

Pursuing speed & efficiency, we careen around thoughtlessly colliding. W/ each collision, our shared sense of civility dies a little more. – @PlatoH on Twitter

From Cracked.com By:David Christopher Bell

#6. Every Post-Apocalyptic Film — Bicycles (Seriously)

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We’ve seen it in The Road, Terminator Salvation, Dawn of the Dead, Book of Eli, The Walking Dead, Mad Max, Falling Skies and many, many others. One of the main problems of living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland is that the survivors have to be constantly on the move, because otherwise it would just be two hours of watching people slowly die.

Whether they’re trying to reach some sort of fabled vestige of civilization, looking for resources or simply trying not to be eaten by zombies, the survivors are always moving from point A to point B, and that means either walking over insane stretches of possibly radioactive desolation or fighting other people for gas. That’s just the way it is, though, because if the whole world has gone to shit, how else are you gonna get around?

Of course.

So What’s Missing?

How about grabbing a bike? In most of these films, there always seems to be a gap between having a vehicle and gas and being shit out of luck, as if no other possibility existed.

“If only there were some sort of middle ground between cars and easily spooked animals!”

Why don’t they ride bikes? Did all the zombies eat them? Did the nukes somehow specifically target bicycles but miss all the cars? Bikes are cheap, fast and easy to maintain, plus they require no fuel and they’re freaking everywhere — literally the only reason we can think of for why they are never used in these films is that they would look kinda ridiculous.

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Bikes: Worse than being eaten by a zombie.

In The Road and Book of Eli, the protagonists spend pretty much the whole movie walking across hostile territory and never so much as consider looking for some bikes. It’s like they never even existed. And before you tell us that Eli wouldn’t be able to ride a bike due to his condition — if you can aim a bow and arrow and win a machete fight, you can ride a damn bike.

There’s blind and then there’s Daredevil blind.

Not only are bikes considerably faster than walking — the average human walking speed is roughly 3 mph, and the same effort applied on a bike is 15 mph — but they are also much more discreet than cars. In Terminator Salvation, the characters can rarely get into vehicles without attracting giant murder robots, which you’d think would at least make them consider building some bicycles out of Terminator scrap parts.

In The Walking Dead, the Dawn of the Dead remake and pretty much every zombie film ever, the protagonists use motorized vehicles to get around, and they inevitably break down, leaving the characters to run. Again, there is no situation in which traveling by bike or at least keeping one strapped to the roof of the car wouldn’t be beneficial.

“Yes. This is absolutely the best plan for this situation.”

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Continue reading “Technologies Conspicuously Absent from Sci-Fi Movies”

Abstract
Objective To quantify the effect of the introduction of 20 mph (32 km an hour) traffic speed zones on road collisions, injuries, and fatalities in London.
Design Observational study based on analysis of geographically coded police data on road casualties, 1986-2006. Analyses were made of longitudinal changes in counts of road injuries within each of 119 029 road segments with at least one casualty with conditional fixed effects Poisson models. Estimates of the effect of introducing 20 mph zones on casualties within those zones and in adjacent areas were adjusted for the underlying downward trend in traffic casualties.
Setting London.
Main outcome measures All casualties from road collisions; those killed and seriously injured (KSI).
Results The introduction of 20 mph zones was associated with a 41.9% (95% confidence interval 36.0% to 47.8%) reduction in road casualties, after adjustment for underlying time trends. The percentage reduction was greatest in younger children and greater for the category of killed or seriously injured casualties than for minor injuries. There was no evidence of casualty migration to areas adjacent to 20 mph zones, where casualties also fell slightly by an average of 8.0% (4.4% to 11.5%).
Conclusions 20 mph zones are effective measures for reducing road injuries and deaths.
Continue reading “Effect of 20 mph traffic speed zones on road injuries in London, 1986-2006”

by Mark Plotz (highlights)
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The implied threat of being sued for building anything other than the same old incomplete street, is a tool deployed far & wide by DOTs to shutdown discussion and give cover for eliminating crosswalks (might encourage pedestrians to cross a dangerous road); paved shoulders and sharrows/bike lanes (might encourage bicyclists to use the public roadways); and sidewalks (might encourage pedestrians to walk in the auto recovery zones). When confronted with the ‘L’ word, take a deep breath (and recognize that lawyers aren’t born with kung-fu grips, so they’re not so scary); stand your ground; then consider Gary’s translation of what is really happening:
"I watched this happen many times during my career at NJDOT. What I began to learn, however, was that most of the transportation professionals who cited liability had never been sued or even consulted with an attorney."
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Lastly, when faced with the liability argument, it is entirely appropriate to ask: "What’s the cost of maintaining the status quo?" The purpose of starting the conversation about roadway design is to ensure the needs and safety of all anticipated users will not be overlooked and can be reasonably met. Removing a crosswalk or leaving a shoulder out of a design will not prevent pedestrians from crossing the road or a bicyclist from riding to work in a transit-deficient area. The story that follows explains the aftermath of what happens when transportation planners and engineers design roads for cars, then look the other way.
Continue reading “PLACEMAKING: HOW TO ENGAGE YOUR TRANSPORTATION AGENCY (Part 3)”

Excerpts from New Urban Network – The Source for Urban Planning, Walkable Communities & Smart Growth by Charles Marohn

Driving across the Irish countryside, I was impressed and — as an engineer trained in the United States — actually quite stunned by how they handled the transition from country road to town street. Driving along the highway at a high speed, I would be channeled into a traffic calming section — a roundabout with a small radius or a dramatic lane narrowing was most common — and find myself suddenly in town driving at a very low speed.

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To prove the point, today I’m going to present photos of Highway 61 all taken within the city limits of Grand Marais. I have cropped each image to reveal only the highway, removing all of the adjacent land use. Your challenge is to go through and identify the speed limit for each section. You have three to choose from: 55, 40, and 30 mph.

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Continue reading “Name that speed”

from Switchboard, from NRDC by Kaid Benfield, Director, Sustainable Communities, Washington, DC
In a recent post on his firm’s excellent blog, PlacesShakers and NewsMakers, Scott Doyon reminds us of the “popsicle test” of a well-designed neighborhood: if an 8-year-old kid can safely go somewhere to buy a popsicle, and get back home before it melts, chances are it’s a neighborhood that works. Note that there’s no planning jargon in there: nothing explicitly about mixed uses, or connected streets, or sidewalks, or traffic calming, or enough density to put eyes on the street. But, if you think about it, it’s all there.
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[B’ Spokes: Yet too many are essentially saying "No, we don’t want that, we want to go fast in cars first and other peoples kids come last."]
Continue reading “The popsicle test”

[B’ Spokes: While this is in San Francisco this seems to be almost a universal problem. ]
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Excerpts from SF Streets Blog by Bryan Goebel
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“I can’t imagine a situation where a citation would be more blatantly called for, you know what I mean? Somebody lying under the sign [No Right Turns] and a car there at an angle, obviously just made the turn, you know?”
But there was no citation issued. “Impairment is not suspected. No citation issued at this time,” a spokesperson for the San Francisco Police Department, Sgt. Michael Andraychak, wrote in an email to Streetsblog. He described the collision itself in cop talk that seems forgiving of the driver, with no mention that the turn was prohibited.
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Lax Enforcement
As this latest case illustrates, drivers routinely get away with causing collisions and injuring bicyclists and pedestrians at Market and Octavia without so much as a slap on the wrist.
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Continue reading “Driver makes illegal turn, hurts cyclist … Impairment is not suspected. No citation issued at this time.”

Excerpt from Infrastructurist. by Eric Jaffe
Morris makes some strong points here — without even mentioning the fact that a gas tax increase, unlike higher fuel-economy standards, will also generate revenue for the Highway Trust Fund. (If anything, raising CAFE will hurt gas tax revenues, since fuel-efficient cars don’t have to be filled up as often.) The gas tax is also better for congestion, and consequently the accident rate, and we still get the benefit of a cleaner fleet over time, because high gas costs will create a demand for fuel-efficient cars.
Continue reading “What’s Better for the Environment: Raising the Gas Tax or Fuel-Efficiency Standards?”

[B’ Spokes: It looks like we missed this but maybe next time.]

https://www.rolloveramerica.eu/

“Look at the garage as a transportation tool box.” – Does it have the right tool for the job?