Hello, You are invited to the following event: GreenScape 2013: A Green Schools Summit Event to be held at the following time, date, and location: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 from 5:00 PM to 8:30 PM (EDT) Baltimore Polytechnic Institute 1400 W. Cold Spring Lane Baltimore, MD 21209 View Map Attend Event Share this event: GreenScape 2013: A Green Schools Summit GreenScape is a free for-youth-by-youth celebration of student environmental leadership in Baltimore. All are welcome to attend, including kids and adults. GreenScape will feature recognition for schools newly certified as Maryland Green Schools and schools that have completed projects to save energy, clean stormwater runoff, green their schoolyards, recycle waste, and much more. There will be local food, music, games, art, DIY learning stations, info on summer opportunities, and forums for students and their supporters to learn from each other. A light dinner will be provided. Read More Please feel free to forward this invitation to anyone you know who would be interested -- you can also share this event on Facebook and Twitter. We hope you can make it! Sincerely, The Student Environmental Leadership Action Team (SELAT) and the Baltimore Office of Sustainability

[B' Spokes: this is what happens when the police are well connected with the cycling community... good safety advice that benefits all road users. And just in case you have missed MDOT's answer to this question 6. Can a driver cross a double-yellow line to pass a bike?" we have essentially the same thing but with no public announcement. This kind of information should not be top secret!]

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by Angie Schmitt, Streets Blog

In 2010, 4,280 pedestrians were killed in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and another 70,000 were injured. That’s one death every two hours.

It’s impossible to quantify the human toll of traffic fatalities, but as David Nelson at Project for Public Spaces points out, AAA estimates that traffic crashes cost America $300 billion annually in the form of medical expenses, lost wages, pain and suffering, and other factors [PDF]. That works out to three times the annual cost of congestion reported by the Texas Transportation Institute. But while we’re spending billions “fighting congestion” with expensive new roads, getting a handle on pedestrian deaths and injuries is almost a non-issue at your average state DOT.

Nelson says the silence about pedestrian fatalities arises from a tendency he calls the “accident axiom” — a set of assumptions that presume no fault, or assign culpability in simplistic and stereotypical terms, when a pedestrian is struck:


Given that all forms of transportation begin and end with walking, this is essentially a right to be a pedestrian—a right severely restricted by expensive and counterproductive high-speed roads that we’ve built. A key problem in defending this right is that very few laws motivate law enforcement to consider killing a pedestrian as a crime. Involuntary Vehicular Manslaughter is a potential charge, but it’s hard to prove constructive manslaughter since a little speeding is rarely seen as a crime, and the threshold for recklessness is hard to meet. Anecdotally, drivers who kill a pedestrian are better off waiting for the police to arrive, because hit and runs really are about the only time the police reliably pursue these drivers with any prejudice. New laws specifically dealing with pedestrian-vehicle crashes are needed.

In my opinion, our local media outlets are exacerbating the problem. Their stories discount the human loss and reinforce widely held misconceptions. First and foremost, underlying all of the poor media coverage is what I call the “Accident Axiom.” This is the widely-held (but almost never-question) belief that accidents are an unavoidable and innocent consequence of modern motorized society. The assumption here is that crashes not involving excessive speed, alcohol, or gross negligence are presumably the fault of no one, but an unfortunate systemic fluke.

This axiom has two corollaries: the Inherent Risk Corollary and the Reckless Driver Corollary. The former states that in this world of unavoidable accidents, pedestrians and cyclists are senselessly putting themselves in harm’s way by traversing concrete and asphalt. If they get hit, it is a deserved consequence of their poor decision making. And the latter states that those rare instances when a driver is at fault, it is the result of that driver being a reckless and careless individual, a deviant member of society. All blame is attributed to the individuals involved. The road network and driving culture are given immunity.

http://streetsblog.net/2013/05/02/the-epidemic-of-pedestrian-deaths-in-america-and-why-it-barely-registers/

6. Baltimore, Maryland

Baltimore has the unlucky distinction of ranking sixth when it comes to violent crime and sixth place on the list overall. It also has a relatively high number of sex offenders per capita. Adding to their woes, Baltimore witnessed a terrifying year when a spate of makeshift firebombs randomly hit the city, creating a sense of fear and paranoia among residents.

http://www.parenting.com/gallery/most-dangerous-cities-in-america-2012?pnid=559432

Via Coloradoan

A confrontation between a sheriff’s deputy and bicyclist in Fort Collins last month led to a $22 ticket for the rider and an internal investigation into the deputy’s behavior.
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Malisani ticketed Baker for failing to move to the right as the deputy passed the cyclist.
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Alderden repeatedly told cyclists they needed to get out of the way of drivers.
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The ticket given to Baker says he failed to move to the right when being overtaken. But the current law no longer requires that.
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“We all need to understand what the rules are, what the laws say. And the rules in this case are very clear,” said bicycling advocate and safety instructor Rick Price,
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Malisani, Baker said, passed by him and his bike with inches to spare.

“I just rode off, but the shocking thing was when the officer then passed by me ... he was about a foot, maybe nine inches away,” Baker said. “It’s unbelievably different when the car that’s stalking is you an officer who is supposed to serve and protect.
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Fort Collins police officers have received specific training on bike laws. Sheriff’s deputies have not.

http://www.coloradoan.com/article/20130501/NEWS01/305010039
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[B' Spokes: As much as I would love to require every police officer to get training on bike laws, maybe a compromise position would be to prohibit those officers who have not received bike law training from giving tickets to cyclists.]

by Angie Schmitt, Streets Blog

This is one of the worst parts of biking on a typical American street: You’re riding your bike and you hear a car coming up from behind you. It’s loud; you can tell it’s going fast. Does the driver see you?

WHOOSH … the car passes you at arm’s distance. Nothing like a little trip through the blood pressure spectrum first thing in the morning.

Discourteous, dangerous and illegal passing by cars is uncomfortably common, according to a new study out of Baltimore [PDF], even as three-foot passing laws are beginning to become the norm. But it looks like plain old painted bike lanes make a difference. Seth at Baltimore Velo files this report:

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future at the Bloomberg School of Public Health published a study this week that takes a look at how well the law is being followed by vehicles. Unfortunately, the answer is not very well.

Here are some key findings of the groundbreaking study:

• Overall, bike lanes in Baltimore improve cyclist safety
• Without bike lanes, drivers had trouble sharing the road with cyclists
• One in six Baltimore drivers, or about 17 percent, violated the 3-foot law
• Researchers found a 20 percent increase in motorist adherence to the 3-foot law for bike lane streets compared to standard streets

Having this quantifiable data makes a very compelling case for the city to continue (and increase) its funding for dedicated bike lanes around the city.

http://streetsblog.net/2012/04/13/study-in-baltimore-one-in-six-cars-pass-cyclists-illegally/

[B' Spokes: From testimony it appears that tucks want to be able to pass cyclists in this situation without crossing the double yellow. While their testimony mentioned "safe" passing I don't see how that's even possible with a truck. So while other places make trucks pass cyclists with greater clearances, Maryland seems to want to say to motorists anytime you can't safely pass a cyclist you can still pass. An interpretation I don't think will hold up in court, BTW.]

[B' Spokes: This has relevance for Maryland and the so called "rain tax" as our roads and poor use of public lands should be taxed along with other impervious surfaces. Well we can't have government tax itself but we can try to get better policies so we don't pay the price of governments ineptness. (I'll note other places have a tax for this too but the more common way is just an addition to the sewer tax.) I will also point out in my travels in Arizona they use water retention areas to form a grade separated road crossing for trails. It's really cool not have to cross hardly any roads when on the trails in Arizona. ]
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Via Switchboard of the Natural Resources Defense Council

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Does suburban sprawl – spread-out, automobile-dependent strip malls, big-box stores, wide arterial roadways, and unending large-lot housing – cause flooding? Absolutely not. (Sprawl doesn’t make it rain, although I can put together a very plausible theory about increased driving, tailpipe emissions, global warming, and severe weather events.) But does sprawl aggravate flooding? Oh, yeah. Here’s how:

When it rains, the water needs somewhere to go. Ideally, that someplace is a forest or meadow, which filters and absorbs the water into the ground. But when, instead of natural vegetation, we have rooftops and pavement, the natural process is broken and the water runs off, gaining volume and velocity. If the rainfall is hard enough and/or steady enough, flooding occurs; and floodwaters increase as runoff increases. Nature, already overburdened by severe precipitation, is prevented entirely from doing its job at limiting the accumulation of flood waters when impervious surface is in the way.

What does this have to do with suburban sprawl? Spread-out, low-rise development contributes more rooftops and pavement per unit of development to the watershed than do walkable neighborhoods. Imagine a 200,000-square-foot, one-story Walmart Supercenter surrounded by 15-20 acres of surface parking. When it rains on Walmart's property, there’s no way the water can get into the ground through naturl filtration processes. Now multiply that by all the other parking lots required for strip malls and office parks, and all the widened and extended road surfaces needed to accommodate traffic heading to the retail and spread-out housing.

Now imagine a different scenario: The same amount of floor space is accommodated by a combination of even two- to four-story buildings, and housing built more compactly to a walkable scale. Imagine that the pattern reaches sufficient critical mass to support decent transit service and the substitution of walking, bicycling, and transit use for some of those car trips, thus reducing the amount of road surface needed. Where there is parking, imagine that some of it, rather than spread out on surface lots, is placed in multi-story, above- or below-ground garages such as those found in urban areas. With rainwater hitting a smaller footprint of pavement and other hard surfaces, there is less runoff.

Would the difference be great enough to prevent flooding altogether during the most severe weather events? Probably not. But it could make a difference in the volume of water running off into the flood.

EPA has done some calculations on the residential part of the issue. Suppose your metropolitan area is going to grow by 10,000 homes over the next several years. If those homes are built one to an acre, a hypothetical storm might produce 187 cubic meters of runoff; but reducing the watershed coverage to an average of four homes per acre, the runoff from those same new homes would be reduced to 62 cubic meters. Build the homes at eight to an acre, and the runoff would reduce further, to 49.5 cubic meters. The main reason for the difference is the amount of roadway required to service the homes is much greater at low densities than at moderate densities.
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http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/before_the_next_deluge_midwest.html

By Doyle Rice, USA TODAY

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Increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and other gases caused by the burning of the oil, gas and coal that power our world are enhancing the natural "greenhouse effect," causing the planet to warm to levels that climate scientists say can't be linked to natural forces.

Carbon dioxide levels were around 280 ppm prior to the Industrial Revolution, when we first began releasing large amounts into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels.

For the past 800,000 years, CO2 levels never exceeded 300 parts per million, according to Scripps, which measures CO2 levels along with several other agencies, including NOAA. Records of past levels of CO2 are found in samples of old air preserved as bubbles in the Antarctic ice sheet, Scripps reports.

"The 400-ppm threshold is a sobering milestone, and should serve as a wake up call for all of us to support clean energy technology and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, before it's too late for our children and grandchildren," said Tim Lueker, a Scripps oceanographer.
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http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2013/04/24/carbon-dioxide-keeling-curve-global-warming/2110445/