from Streetsblog Capitol Hill by Tanya Snyder

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In 2011, the low economy and high gas prices helped showcase the need for affordable transportation options, and people flocked to transit – only to find troubled systems facing budget cuts, fare hikes, and service reductions.

The American Public Transportation Association reported a bump of nearly 86 million transit trips over the first six months of the year. Did Congress respond by thanking transit agencies for doing yeoman’s work to keep American households above water during a time of economic hardship? Not on your life! Congress kept flailing and bickering over a transportation bill that keeps slipping further and further out of reach while hardworking transit agencies withered on the vine. According to APTA, more than half of U.S. transit agencies have raised fares or reduced service in the past year, and many more are planning to do so soon.

Somehow, increased ridership didn’t translate into more robust funding or even a little begrudging respect.

Continue reading “Streetsies 2011: Who’s Naughty, Who’s Nice?”

from an article by Ted Johnson
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I nicknamed the car Haig, after Reagan’s Secretary of State.
(It was General Alexander Haig, old people will recall, who contributed to the “vital national interest” rationale for military action in order to protect America’s access to all the world’s yummy oil. …)
https://www.commutebybike.com/2011/12/28/a-car-named-haig-driving-seen-decreasingly-as-compulsory/
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And now my tangent:
[B’ Spokes: When I moved to NYC in the 80’s they had a diabolical scheme in "the vital city interest" to get me to leave my car at home and take mass transit. This scheme was simply to offer a discount on tokens purchased in bulk. And once you pre-purchased a bunch of rides you were likely to use them. So each morning I would look at my car and look at my mitt full of tokens and think "I really should use some of these up." and the car would stay home.
This is much the way the lure of a car works, you prepay for everything so you dissociate all those prepaid costs with the trip you are about to embark on as it’s already paid for.
But let’s imagine for a moment something different, a car where you pay just for the miles driven and nothing is prepaid beyond your current trip. So on your 18th birthday the state would deliver your free car to your door with a slot for dollar bills. If you want to go somewhere you simply put in a dollar per mile* for the trip you intend to take and off you go.
Under this scheme a trip to the local store just a mile away for a loaf of bread would cost you $2 (there and back.) We use a car for short trips because it is "so convenient" which doesn’t look so convenient under this scheme. Under our current scheme we prepay that $2 through, car payments, insurance payments, fill the tank payments and repair and maintenance payments and we then dissociate all those costs with this "simple" trip to the store done over and over through the life of the car. But non the less this is what we pay one way or the other for the convenience of using the automobile for everything under the sun for our own personal transport.
But more to the point I want to highlight is that policies around motoring in the United States could be simply put to keep the cost per mile driven as low as possible for each user. We spend trillions on wars just so we can have access to "cheep" oil but then talk about cutting social security to help pay for those wars so we can have cheep gas. On the state level we talk about cutting education, recreation and mass transit budgets to help pay for roads.
The result is we "need" more road capacity then we have the ability to pay for. We "need" more money spent for the benefit of personal auto travel then what we have the willingness to pay for. This alone should say volumes about our policies and the need to get the cost per mile traveled by personal automobile to reflect more accurately the true costs incurred by driving or reduce demand for auto travel to what we can afford.
Reducing demand will happen through high gas prices (eventually), congestion and traffic delays due to accidents are other factors that are already at play that will reduce demand proved that there is a choice of travel mode.
So it is becoming increasingly important that alternate transportation be given it’s fair share of due consideration.]
* The dollar per mile figure comes from here: https://commutesolutions.org/external/calc.html
Continue reading “A Car Named Haig”

Once again, Seattle Police seem to be targeting jaywalkers and ignoring crosswalk-charging drivers, while collision numbers climb.
By Eric Scigliano
… Another car wheeled off Denny onto Boren and straight in my path. I pivoted and waved madly, and it slammed to a stop a foot or two from my front wheel and 10 feet from the cop. As I reached the far curb, he rolled down his passenger window, leaned over, and told me, “You’re lucky.”
“Lucky?” I replied. “That was a crosswalk!”
“Yeah, he was completely at fault,” the officer said, and drove off before I could ask, “So why didn’t you bust him?”
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The result: More than two-thirds of Seattleite pedestrians killed or fatally injured by vehicles were where they were supposed to be, in crosswalks or even on sidewalks. Just 3 to 4 percent of the people involved in collisions are pedestrians, but 36 percent of those killed or seriously injured are. By contrast, drivers are by definition involved in 100 percent of collisions but compose just 42 percent of the victims. Pardon my saying so, but what would Jesus drive? He’d walk, because then he’d have a chance to die for somebody else’s sins.
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But Seattle’s police have reverted to their old ways — to that familiar 6:1 ratio. In 2010 they issued 1,570 jaywalking tickets, up from 1,274 in 2009, and just 197 failure-to-yield citations, down from 406.
If that approach reduced accidents, it would make more sense. But it didn’t. According to the Seattle Department of Transportation, the number of collisions with pedestrians rose 10 percent in 2010, to 529, even as the total number of collisions fell 11 percent, reflecting a decade-long pattern of decline. In 421 of those pedestrian collisions, the drivers failed to yield in crosswalks.
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Recently, I flagged down another police car that came barreling at me as I crossed Rainier Avenue at night. “Don’t you know that’s a crosswalk, and the pedestrian has the right of way?” I asked.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you have to be out in it!” that officer snarled, and roared away.
Continue reading “Crosswalk carnage: Why do cops still ignore drivers who won’t yield?”

Excepts from Strong Towns Blog by Charles Marohn
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I had a city council member last week say that people did not want walkable neighborhoods because they were afraid of child abductions, that people prefer the "safety" of their cars. Sad to say, but I think he is right, despite being completely ignorant of the facts. In a single year, the U.S. has around 7,000 children die in auto accidents (many, many more injured severely) but only around 100 children kidnapped.
We love our cars but, like all one-way relationships, our obsession has made us completely irrational.
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After perinatal conditions, which are problems that occur near or in the immediate months after childbirth, the leading cause of death amongst children ages 0 to 19 is auto accidents. For accidental causes of mortality, there is no close second. Even drowning, which we are militant about here in terms of baths, pools and time at the lake, is just a fraction of auto accidents. Imagine two 9/11 attacks each year that killed just kids and you still would not have the number of child fatalities America has each year from auto accidents.
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… but what I am doing putting them in a car so often?
The answer is that I am an American, so I drive everywhere. In my town I really don’t have an alternative. Even the people who live in the traditional neighborhoods have to drive out to the edge of town to get groceries (don’t worry, the city has spent millions making that trip fast and easy). But is this really acceptable?
If we are serious about wanting what is best for kids, shouldn’t we be doing everything we can to reduce the number of auto trips people are required to take each day?
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The best thing we can do for the safety of our children is to get them out of the car by building mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods.
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Continue reading “Best of Blog: Do we really care about children?”