Month: July 2012

B’ Spokes: I just discovered this blog called Bickeyface, it’s really cute, here is a sample (click the pic for the original page):

Posted by Jonathan Mau, Bike Portland
"Survey results suggest that patrons who arrive by automobile do not necessarily convey greater monetary benefits to businesses than bicyclists, transit users, or pedestrians. This finding is contrary to what business owners often believe."
https://bikeportland.org/2012/07/06/study-shows-biking-customers-spend-more-74357

B’ Spokes: Here are some excerpts from this great satire piece by By Matt Meltzer on Miami Beach 411 (pertains to Maryland as well I think):

Turning right on a red? As long as there’s no cars go for it. Doesn’t matter if a family of five is trying to cross. If they live in Miami, they know to stop. Crosswalk without a stop sign? That’s what we in Miami call a colossal waste of street paint. Nobody’s slowing down, and cars are a lot bigger and faster than you. Chance it if you like, because you think you have some sort of “right of way.” But the consequences if you’re wrong aren’t worth trying us.

LAWLESSNESS = EFFICIENCY

Now some would complain and say this makes Miami a dangerous city. I say it actually helps us be more efficient. Traffic here – especially street traffic – is bad enough as it is. And what with the new red light cameras curtailing our trademark “Four to a Red’ move, it’s getting even slower. Could you imagine if our drivers had to wait for slow-moving tourists to cross the street too? We’d never get anywhere.

Read the full article: https://www.miamibeach411.com/news/miami-pedestrians

by Angie Schmitt, Streets Blog

We have to thank Network blog Copenhagenize for pointing us to this video, from a 1954 episode of the classic detective series Dragnet. In this installment, Los Angeles Police Detective Joe Friday and his team investigate a hit-and-run collision that killed a young boy and his grandmother as they were crossing the street.

Apparently the attitude toward traffic deaths among law enforcement officials has changed quite a bit since 1954, notes Copenhagenize’s Mikael Colville-Andersen:

As Sergeant Joe Friday puts it [6 minutes, 18 seconds in]: “How much difference, for example, as far as moral guilt is concerned, is there between the following: #1 the man who plans a killing, takes up a gun, finds his victim and shoots him to death. And #2 the man who thinks he has to look out for no one’s welfare but his own, gets behind the wheel of a car, disregards the ordinary rules of safety and proceeds to commit homicide with a motor vehicle. Often times the crime masquerades under the guise of an accident. Morally, no matter how you spell it, it adds up to murder just as surely as if the person had taken a gun and shot his victim down.”

Imagine. Look at how much air time was given to a hit & run. Things have certainly changed. Maybe lucrative car commercials ended up weeding out bad branding like this storyline.

Contrast that with modern-day New York City, where the family members of hit-and-run victims have to sue the police department for failing to investigate a very similar crime. Where’s Joe Friday when you need him?

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Continue reading “What a Difference 60 Years Makes: Dragnet’s Hunt for a Hit-and-Run Killer”

by BruceMcF, Daily Kos

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What The Big Highway Lie Is Not, Part I

There are some people who labor under the misconception that gas taxes fund highway maintenance cost.

The notion is quite absurd on the face of it. The share of the federal highway fund that goes to roadworks is greater than the share of driving that takes place on funded highways, so obviously driving on unfunded streets … mostly urban and inner-suburban city streets … yields gas taxes that cross-subsidize driving on funded highways.

For example, here is the 2008 FHA Highway Statistics on highway revenues as a percentage of total disbursements:

• 46.61% Motor Fuel and Vehicle Taxes
• 5.11% Tolls
• 4.57% Property Taxes and Assessments
• 22.19% General Fund Appropriations
• 9.60%  Investment Income and other Receipts
• 10.95% Bond Issue Proceeds

Of course, the gas tax and vehicle tax revenues are collected for all road uses, and only directed to qualifying highways. While qualification of urban streets for state gas tax funding varies by state, urban streets that do not qualify for national or state highway designation are excluded from federal highway gas taxes.

Of course, over half a century of subsidy has channeled traffic onto these federally funded highways (that is, Interstate, National, State, County and Township highways), but still, according to the introduction to the 2011 CBO report on alternative approaches to highway funding:

About 25 percent of the nation’s highways, which carry about 85 percent of all road traffic, are paid for in part by the federal government.

… so the direct gas tax and vehicle tax proceeds from driving on federally funded highways is at most 85% of 46.61%, or about 40%.

And, of course, this is also a substantial overstatement, since that is about 15% from Federal gas taxes and about 25% from state gas taxes. And in most states, gasoline is exempt from state and local sales taxes, so that only a portion of state gas taxes are an actual additional user fee, with much of the state gas tax simply being a diversion from the general fund. It would be as if alcohol sales in a state charged a “drinks tax” which went into providing infrastructure in support of drinking parties ~ and were exempted from state sales tax.

I don’t have any recent figures on how much of total state gas tax revenues is an increment over what would be the sales tax proceeds on sales tax exempt gasoline sales, and how much is a diversion, but if the additional user tax component is between 40% and 60% of total state gas taxes, then total “farebox cost recovery” of the highway system is between 30% and 35%.

While “nobody serious seriously believes that gas taxes fully fund our nation’s highways”, anybody who has read the Tea Party Parade that fills many online newspaper comments sections when a rail project is covered knows that lots of people are happy to make the absurd claim.

Now, that absurd claim is simply wishful thinking. It collapses immediately when presented with the publicly available Federal Highway Administration figures. The fact that it is confidently stated by so many serves to establish how many people are happy to state facts that are blatantly false, often passed on from someone else equally misinformed because it sounded like something that ought to be true.

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https://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/06/17/1100829/-Sunday-Train-The-Steel-Interstate-and-the-Great-Highway-Lie

B’ Spokes: It’s worth noting that the bulk of the “farebox cost recovery” of the highway system goes to interstate highways. And I will assert that in terms of simple dollars analogy all the money that cars pay in “user fees” go toward the interstate highway system… roads that cyclists are prohibited from using. So when it comes to roads that all modes use, we all help pay for. If cars get a specific “user” tax then why can’t we treat our sales tax as a user tax that helps fund the roads? Keep in mind that outdoor recreation spending is near twice that of motor vehicles (and a portion of motor vehicle spending is exempt from sales tax.)

the farebox recovery ratio above is not a ratio of physical cost imposed upon the highway system by driving, but a ratio of revenues to our inadequate highway spending. From the ASCE report cited above (p. 99), 5yr road spending of $380.5b can be set against total investment needs of $930b, for a 59% shortfall.

by Jonathan Maus, Bike Portland
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According to the report, Americans spend more on bicycling gear and trips ($81 billion) than they do on airplane tickets ($51 billion). That $81 billion is spread between $10 billion on bikes, gear, and accessories and over $70 billion on bicycle "trip related sales." The direct economic impact of that spending supports 772,146 jobs. The report claims that the "ripple effect spending" of all this bicycling activity is over $198 billion and supports 1,478,475 jobs.
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The OIA says outdoor recreation is an "overlooked economic giant." With annual spending at $646 billion, it’s third in total annual consumer spending behind only financial services/insurance and health care spending. By way of comparison, total annual spending on motor vehicles and parts is just $340 billion.
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https://bikeportland.org/2012/06/20/outdoor-recreation-report-says-bicycling-pumps-81-billion-into-u-s-economy-each-year-73608