baltimorespokes

A 94 mile bike ride from Baltimore to Washington, DC.

Many thanks to Bob W. of the Baltimore Bicycling Club on putting on another great event! Not to mention taking the pictures and the rolling cometary on each one, you almost feel as if you were there. Thanks Bob for the mention and I miss you from time to time as well. I would like to point out what got me started on the route was that no one was willing to drive to DC to see the cherry blossoms, so I biked it.

Think about it, people are starting to go more places and do more things because of the bicycle and the car limits where you want to go because of traffic or parking.

A great showing by a super diverse group of riders. After the morning roll-out we gained at least another 10 riders along the way.

More photos here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/27976837@N00/sets/72157626631332716/with/5680782790/

This update is to point out the Baltimore Brew article. Our previous coverage is below the divide.

The point I think the Brew is making; is imagine going into the city’s planing offices and turning off all the elevator indicator lights so you would have no idea if the button you pushed worked or not, wouldn’t that be a great improvement to calling the elevators?

So why do these same people think a button that fails to meet 20th century standards and frustrates the heck out of people is appropriate for people crossing a busy road? Did you forget to press the button or is the button broken because people are banging the heck out of it as it does not do a darn thing when you press it? You don’t know do you? Good, now try and cross the street…. gotcha it wasn’t safe to cross and you almost got killed, ha ha ha.

It really feels like a sick joke when so called “traffic engineers” make these kind of :”improvements” by now requiring people to push a button that came straight from the 1936 film Flash Gordon:

look closely at the rocket ship control panel, those are are crossing buttons used in Baltimore. 😉

“City Department of Transportation deputy director Jamie Kendrick acknowledged there’s been a change – “we repaired the pedestrian push buttons and vehicle detectors” — but says it’s for the better.

“Pedestrians again, as before, now have to push the button to get the walk indications,” Kendrick wrote, in an email to The Brew. ”

Yep, still using 1936 technology because we never got the memo we should think about upgrading. :s

Rebecca Smith, founder of the Downtown Baltimore Family Alliance writes a wonderful letter to Michael Dresser explaining the problem with the problem with the new pedestrian signals.
https://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/traffic/2011/04/fells_point_fights_pedestrian.html

The problem is much like what David Hembrow wrote about in The significance of signal timing that treats bicyclists and pedestrians as second class road users
https://www.baltimorespokes.org/article.php?story=20110417203902165

But here the pedestrian signal timing is such that you can’t cross when the signal is green for cars and you can’t cross when the signal red and then finally you have 4 seconds to get across the road, that is assuming you pressed that button.

Seriously, don’t walk in Baltimore, we have the highest count of pedestrians in traffic crashes then any other county.

42% of our traffic fatalities are pedestrians.

Like Rebecca we are wondering where is the City’s Complete Street Policy is in all this.
Continue reading “Fells Point installs pedestrian crossing with delays now 6 times longer for peds then for cars.”