baltimorespokes

[B’ Spokes: An overview of topics (with some highlights)]
by Charles Marohn, Streets Blog
We’ve been looking at the instincts of today’s transportation agencies. While on an individual level it is clear that these organizations are filled with people who are professional, competent and want to do the right thing, the institutional inertia is carrying them in wayward directions.
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It is to those people that I offer my thoughts on the principles and understandings that a Next Generation DOT should embody when making that inevitable course correction.
1. Transportation spending is not economic development.
2. Transportation spending is not job creation.
3. We need to budget based on what we have, not what we want to do.
4. The most unsafe condition we can build is a STROAD. Our primary design goal must be to eliminate them.
A STROAD is a street/road hybrid. It is all too often the default design of our highway system. A STROAD combines elements of a street — intersections, turning traffic, dramatic speed differentials, parking, pedestrians — with the high speed geometries of a road. Professionally, we all understand that this is the most dangerous type of environment we could construct.
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[B’ Spokes: I’ll note this concept even goes as far as trying to put freeway (where bikes and peds are prohibited) design elements in the urban environment where bikes and peds are frequently encountered. The most notorious is the right turn channel where motorists don’t even have to stop.]
5. We must build differently within a city than we build outside of it.
6. We need to improve travel time by eliminating access points outside of cities.
7. We must stop using traffic projections to give a veneer of expertise to something we have proven incapable of doing: predicting the future.
8. We need to build transit, but only through a value capture funding approach.
9. We must remain humble in the face of adversity.
https://dc.streetsblog.org/2013/01/04/the-next-generation-dot/

By Bob Mionske
A reader recently asked an interesting question. If a car causes a cyclist to crash, but doesn’t actually collide with the rider, is the driver still at fault?
In a recent incident, a husband-and-wife tandem team ran into an abutment after a driver violated their right-of-way. Police officers told them, incorrectly, that it was “not legally an accident because there was no collision between bike and car.” The officers refused to take contact information from a witness even though the driver admitted fault at the scene. They also informed the couple that it was their responsibility to control the bike. In another incident, a driver failed to yield before ­making a right turn and nearly struck a­ cyclist. The rider crashed, and wonders if his insurance company will pay.
Although neither vehicle touched the cyclists, the drivers operated in a way that caused a crash. In fact, the only ­reason there was no contact was because the ­cyclists took evasive ­action. Here’s how to avoid this kind of situation, and how to handle it if you do hit the pavement.
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https://bicycling.com/blogs/roadrights/2013/01/02/the-no-contact-crash/

This story is being discussed by some of my friends College student’s turtle project takes dark twist where some drivers go out of there way to run over turtles.

But it seems a fair amount of my cycling friends are helping turtles get to the other side of the road safely.