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ENGINEERS SHOULD NOT DESIGN STREETS


BY CHARLES Martin, Strong Towns

...
DEIGNING ROADS

Engineers are well-suited to constructing roads....



BUILDING STREETS

Engineers are not good at building streets nor, I would argue, can the typical engineer readily become good at it....


http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/5/22/engineers-should-not-design-streets
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Assistance in educating engineers on the flexibility in the Green Book


"AASHTO should provide guidance to state DOTs and other users of the Green Book regarding flexibility in design...This guidance should assist in educating engineers and designers on the flexibility inherent in the Green Book, as well as new and additional guidance on specific design issues... and This guidance should address designing in and for a multi-modal transportation system..."
—AASHTO Standing Committee on Highways May 25, 2016 Direction on Flexibility in Design Standards Resolution: http://bit.ly/1PikhNT

from CenterLines, the e-newsletter of the National Center for Bicycling & Walking.


[B' Spokes: IMHO our state is overly generous to cars and stingy to cyclists in designs they approve to get state/federal money for bike facilities. Take Roland Ave for example, per ASHTON the minimum width for cyclists is 5 feet and for cars it's 10 feet. So what do we get? Cars get 10.5 feet and cyclists get 4 feet. I hope this new resolution will help us.]
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SEATTLE, WA: GATES FOUNDATION CUTS DRIVE ALONE FROM 88% TO 30%


-> When the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation opened its new offices in Seattle, it simultaneously launched a coordinated transportation program to promote carpooling, transit, and biking, while disincentivizing driving alone. The program featured a commute-logging online system that rewards employees for not driving, and allows them to pay for parking on a more flexible basis, as to not commit to driving for a full month at a time. In just five years at the new office location, the Gates Foundation was able to more than halve its drive-alone mode share, from 88 percent to 30 percent of employees. http://bit.ly/22xtdkQ


from CenterLines, the e-newsletter of the National Center for Bicycling & Walking.
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Got bike?


by Toby Hill, Bicycle Retailers

20Collective says a 'Got Milk" for cycling could boost participation — and sales at all levels of the industry.
SAN JOSE, Calif. — A group of retailers dubbed the 20Collective has launched an initiative to grow cycling participation by establishing an industry-funded “Got Milk”-style marketing campaign for cycling targeted at the general public.

“We’re lacking any sort of direct marketing to consumers outside of the point-zero-five percent of consumers who watch the Tour de France,” said Ian Christie, 20Collective president and owner of Summit Bicycles with four stores in Northern California.
...

http://www.bicycleretailer.com/north-america/2016/02/19/retailer-group-looks-launch-industry-funded-marketing-campaign-cycling

[B' Spoke: And our Alex Obriecht (20Collective vice president) is mentioned as well.]
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SURVEY IDENTIFIES MAYORS’ BIKING INFRASTRUCTURE PRIORITIES


-> Among the key findings in the recently released "2015 Menino Survey of Mayors" (http://bit.ly/1nxr8Xu), Mayors cited the need to fix crumbling roads, grow mass transit, and repair water infrastructure, as well as a desire to improve pedestrian and bike infrastructure: "Mayors express strong support for improved accessibility for cyclists even if it means sacrificing parking or driving lanes, in addition to naming bike infrastructure as key funding priority. More than 70% of mayors supported the tradeoff favoring improved bike accessibility in their city, even if it comes at the expense of parking and driving lanes. Democratic and Republican mayors differ in their level of support for street designs that favor cyclists over drivers, with 44% of Republican mayors and 81% of Democratic ones endorsing improved bike accessibility. http://bit.ly/1PRXlza

from CenterLines, the e-newsletter of the National Center for Bicycling & Walking.
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Don’t demonize driving—just stop subsidizing it


By Joe Cortright, City Observatory

At City Observatory, we try to stick to a wonky, data-driven approach to all things urban. But numbers don’t mean much without a framework to explain them, and so today we want to quickly talk about one of those rhetorical frameworks: specifically, how we talk about driving.

Our wonky perspective tells us that there are lots of problems that stem from the way we use cars: We price roads wrong, so people over use them. Cars are a major source of air pollution, including the carbon emissions that are causing climate change. Car crashes kill tens of thousands of Americans every year, injure many more, and cost us billions in medical costs and property damage. And building our cities to accommodate cars leads to sprawl that pushes us further apart from one another.

But the problem is not that cars (or the people who drive them) are evil, but that we use them too much, and in dangerous ways. And that’s because we’ve put in place incentives and infrastructure that encourage, or even require, us to do so. When we subsidize roads, socialize the costs of pollution, crashes and parking, and even legally require that our communities be built in ways that make it impossible to live without a car, we send people strong signals to buy and own cars and to drive—a lot. As a result, we drive too much, and frequently at unsafe speeds given the urban environment.
...

http://cityobservatory.org/dont-demonize-driving-just-stop-subsidizing-it/
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USDOT to shut down nation’s roads, citing safety concerns


By Daniel Hertz, City Observatory

WASHINGTON, DC – Citing safety concerns, today Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx announced he was contemplating the closure of roads to all private vehicles in nearly every city in the country until he could assure the nation’s drivers that they would be safe behind the wheel.

The announcement comes on the heels of comments by Secretary Foxx that the Department of Transportation may shut down the Washington Metro heavy rail system because of ongoing safety issues.
...

http://cityobservatory.org/usdot-to-shut-down-nations-roads-citing-safety-concerns/

[B' Spokes: What if our road system was run like Washington's Metro and the loss of life was a concern?]
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5 Strategies for Equitable Active Transportation Planning and Advocacy


by Naomi Doerner, Streets Blog

[B' Spokes: Just the headings]

Acknowledge that bicycle infrastructure is wrapped up in larger development processes spurring gentrification, which has in many cases been done on purpose.

Engage people and communities in a real way.

Be an advocate for communities, not just bikes.

Advocates and planners need cultural competency training and education.

“Stay Woke or Wake Up”

http://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/03/18/5-strategies-for-equitable-active-transportation-planning-and-advocacy/
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Why Isn’t It a Crime To Kill a Cyclist with a Car?


BY Andrew Zaleski, Next City

...
His fear would soon turn to anger when he realized that local police had no interest in pursuing charges against the woman who nearly killed his wife. After the State Highway Patrol’s investigation concluded that there were no grounds for felony charges, the district attorney also demurred from pressing charges.

“As far as the state of Mississippi goes, you could be an armadillo hit on the road, and the state treats you just the same as a… cyclist,” Morgan says.

“When we turned around. Her boyfriend was screaming, ‘Oh my God, she’s run over her!’”
...

“She should not have been found guilty of a crime because she did not commit a crime,” said Norton’s attorney, C. Marty Haug. “Criminal law punishes bad intentions and bad acts, not traffic accidents.”

...
In a country where the national highway system was designed for the automobile, it’s unsurprising that the legal system also prioritizes the car. Still, the number of Americans who commute by bicycle jumped by 64 percent — to 765,703 — between 1990 and 2009, and in many parts of the country cyclists ride on dedicated bike lanes and lock up on publicly subsidized bike racks. But the laws protecting them lag behind. In most states, for instance, the only law explicitly addressing bike safety is a safe passing law requiring drivers to give cyclists a cushion of anywhere from two to four feet. In only three states is it a felony offense to maim or fatally injure a biker or pedestrian if you are behind the wheel of a car. And in nearly every state, getting police or the courts to prosecute a negligent driver for harming a cyclist is a serious challenge, attorneys and cycling advocates say.
...

By all indicators, New York’s low prosecution rate is not an anomaly, but rather a reflection of national patterns. Yet there is no sure way to know. While the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration keeps track of cyclists killed by motorists — 726 in 2012 — there’s no corollary database of how motorists were charged, if at all. For state governments, there are no guarantees that transportation officials are in touch with law enforcement officials who track court cases.

“Many states do not aggregate citation statistics in a manner that makes it easy to understand how laws protecting cyclists, such as three-foot laws, are being enforced,” says Ken McLeod, a legal specialist with the League of American Bicyclists.

The absence of data, compounded with the patchwork of local laws and varying understandings of cyclist rights across the country, means few solid protections for the Jan Morgans of the world. A fine of $100 is the penalty for a first-time offense of the three-foot rule in Mississippi, even if the offense endangered a life. For a third offense, a $2,500 charge is levied along with seven days in the county lockup if, that is, the police and courts decide the charge is worth the time. Even with the law, however, there is no state database keeping track of three-foot violations and subsequent enforcement.

“What happened to Jan is not an accident,” says Peter Wilborn, a trial lawyer and founder of Bike Law, a South Carolina-based firm that represents cyclists in court. “This is what happens when drivers are lawless.”
...

“Generally, our lawmakers, our judges, our officers tend to just think that car accidents happen — they’re the inevitable product of living in a modern society with cars and trucks,” says Juan Martinez, general counsel at Transportation Alternatives, a New York-based non-profit that advocates for better road safety for cyclists and pedestrians.

Martinez argues that traffic accidents are entirely preventable, if only the causes of them were actively enforced. The New York City Police Department, for example, issued more than 96,000 citations to drivers in 2012 for excessive window tinting, which wasn’t an influence in any fatal or injurious crashes. By comparison, according to a October 2013 Transportation Alternatives report, the NYPD issued fewer than 12 summonses a month in 2012 to drivers who failed to yield, one of the leading causes of injurious crashes in New York.
...

“I can’t walk into a courtroom and expect twelve jurors to be sympathetic to a cyclist. The first thing that goes through their mind is: What did the cyclist do wrong?”
[B' Spokes: Combonded with some think (not artticulated) the law is, where ever a cyclists was if they could have been somewhere else out of the way then the cyclists is at fault.]
...

https://nextcity.org/features/view/how-much-is-a-cyclists-life-worth-anyway
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