Since 1956 we’ve spent $10 trillion on highways in the United States. For that astronomical sum we have 2.9 million deaths; streets, roads, and bridges that are commonly described as “crumbling;” epic and ever-growing highway congestion; and the single largest sectoral contributor of climate pollution. Now we have ample evidence that this approach is both ineffective and costly. We also …
Safety stop for bikes
making the Safety Stop legal statewide. We enjoyed the conversation and are always excited to have such engaging dialogue about our policy initiatives. As promised, we wanted to follow up with you all with some resources and recordings. Here is the recording from last night’s conversation. Please forgive me: I forgot to hit record until we were a couple minutes into …
People take better care of public places when they feel like they have a stake in them. Most “pedestrian” infrastructure projects are remedial and performative; their real purpose is to serve faster car traffic.
January 27, 2021, Suzanne Shu, John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing, Cornell University Takeaways People can feel “psychological ownership,” a sense of personal attachment, even for parks and other public places. These feelings lead them to see property they don’t own as being more valuable and boost their sense of responsibility to take care of it. A recent series of …
What Would Providing Every City with High-Quality, Zero-Emissions Public Transportation Look Like? Also first USDOT Ped Safety Plan
A major investment in transit would be pricey but would drastically improve access and quality. Improving transit quality in every urban area to, at minimum, conditions in the Dallas region would cost an additional $2.2 billion annually. This would be a 4.5 percent increase nationally in operating budgets but would expand per capita transit service by 30.3 percent for the …
US Court of Appeals has found the program Edward Snowden blew the whistle on was unlawful – and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth
Reuters, Sept 2 2020, U.S. court: Mass surveillance program exposed by Snowden was illegal, by Raphael Satter (Reuters) – Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful – and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it …
How bike-friendly slow streets are changing cities
How bike-friendly ‘slow streets’ are changing cities, BBC, Nov 19, 2020 by Mark Johanson Moving around Bogotá can be a bit of a Jekyll-or-Hyde experience. On one hand, the city is infamous for having the world’s worst traffic. Yet, on the other, its cycling infrastructure is considered an exemplary model of sustainable urban mobility, according to the Copenhagenize Index, which ranks bike-friendly …
Increasing speed from 25 to 40 mph, note the authors, causes a drop in safety rating from 4.4 to just 2.5. This corresponds with more than a doubling in both crash rates and risk of death
Posted on September 15, 2020, By Chris McCahill, SSTI, Crash prediction tools target high-speed roadways The United States Road Assessment Program (usRAP) offers a tool that transportation agencies can use to evaluate road safety without detailed existing crash data. A recent study in the Transportation Research Record validates the tool using crash data in Utah and highlights vehicle speed as a key factor in the …
Why Your City Doesn’t Map Its Worst Car Crashes: The idea of a “High Injury Network” isn’t new. But a surprising number of cities don’t bother to map it
By Kea Wilson, StreetsBlog, Sep 29, 2020 Time for a pop quiz! (Don’t worry, it’s open book: feel free to hop on Google.) What are the 10 most dangerous intersections or corridors for pedestrians in your city, and what percentage of total crashes occur in these areas? If you don’t know the answer, and can’t easily can’t find it using the …
Want to Stop Car Crashes? Study the Near-Misses
A pilot program in Bellevue, Wash. is using anonymized video and big data to stop crashes before they happen By Kea Wilson Jul 15, 2020, on Streetsblog For once, something intuitive turns out to be true: near-miss car crashes are a very good predictor of actual crashes on that same roadway — and cities can save lives by changing road designs in high-conflict …
New Study Shows That SUVs Remain ‘Disproportionately Likely To Kill’
By Lloyd AlterUpdated July 16, 2020 Ford has just proudly introduced a new, updated version of the Bronco, the company’s Jeep-like off-road capable SUV that was killed in the late 90s. It might seem like an odd time, in the middle of a climate crisis; as Aaron Gordon notes in Vice, “every driver who ‘upgrades’ from a sedan to an SUV is …