As traffic deaths climb, NTSB chair calls for ‘fundamental rethink’ of transportation planning

Sept. 14, 2021By Jason Plautz, Smart Cities Dive It is possible to achieve zero traffic fatalities if we “fundamentally rethink” the nation’s approach to transportation planning, even as traffic deaths continue to climb, said U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chair Jennifer Homendy at the Governors Highway Safety Association’s (GHSA) annual conference in Denver on Monday.  An estimated 8,730 people died in motor vehicle crashes in …

On commuting, what our jobs or employers require, and what we give or take back

Excerpt from The Myth of the Productive Commute, by Anne Helen Petersen, Sept 19, 2021 …Anyone who’s actually commuted will tell you: these are fantasies. Or, at the very least, they were available to a vanishingly small portion of the office-working population. None of these bikes have kid seats on the back. None of these dudes are carrying large backpacks …

Banning of trucks on (and major pollution from) a highway

The high levels of asthma in the neighborhoods around the I-880 freeway, which carries the highest volume of trucks in the San Francisco Bay Area, stem from the trucks emission of nitrogen oxides and particulate matter. Truck traffic along the I-880 worsened significantly when trucks were banned on the nearby I-580, which runs through the predominantly white Oakland Hills. Special Route …

Riding a Bike Has One-Tenth the Impact of an Electric Car: A full life-cycle analysis shows that EVs still have a significant carbon footprint

By Lloyd Alter, March 31, 2021, Fact checked by Haley Mast A recent study with the unexciting title The Climate Change Mitigation Effects of Daily Active Travel in Cities comes to the unsurprising conclusion that “cyclists had 84% lower CO2 emissions from all daily travel than non-cyclists.”1 The lead researcher, Christian Brand, jazzed it up a bit in his summary in The Conversation, …

Ability to walk in a safe, comfortable, and dignified manner…

The Real Reason Red America Loves Cars (Streetsblog USA), by Kea Wilson, Sept 3, 2021 Republican-leaning voters are more likely than Democrats to trade a walkable community for a large home, a new poll finds — but that result may say more about car culture’s stranglehold on the American imagination than how either group really wants to live. In a viral article for …

Success of Drunk Driving Laws is Limited … If Drivers Have No Alternatives

Study: Success of Drunk Driving Laws is Limited … If Drivers Have No Alternatives (Streetsblog USA) By Kea Wilson, Aug 16, 2021 Lowering the threshold for how much a driver can drink before he gets behind the wheel may not actually make our streets safer — at least if communities don’t provide drinkers other ways to get around besides driving, a …

Many who worked from home during COVID want to keep it that way, with no commute, increased productivity, and fewer interruptions

As large swaths of the office-worker community went remote during COVID and showed that it could work, many want to keep it that way, including folks who took the latest What’s Working survey on working from home. Most respondents did at one time or another during the pandemic (73.7%) and still do (63.2%).   https://coloradosun.com/2021/08/14/work-from-home-remote-jumpstart-united-airlines-jobs/ Increased productivity was key, said Linda Chadwick-Wirth, …

There is no mandatory federal crash-reporting standard and the standard that NHTSA recommends is deeply flawed and much is left up to officer discretion. We can fix this!

A recent study conducted by advocates in Portland, Ore., for instance, compiled law-enforcement data alongside hospital records, media reports, roadway measurements, and even manual inspection of adjacent land uses on Google Maps. Similar efforts are underway in San Francisco. Some advocates say the MMUCC should include many of those factors its next edition (2022) — and the burden of collecting the data should …

The latest U.N. climate report underscores a need for cities to reclaim roadways, get people back on public transit, and grow active mobility infrastructure

Curbing climate change requires an end to driving in cities, Smart Cities Dive, Aug. 13, 2021, by Wayne Ting Wayne Ting is CEO of micromobility company Lime. On Monday morning, we awoke to a highly anticipated, but alarming, landmark report. The United Nations’ climate panel issued a “code red for humanity” stemming from the severe threat of human-caused climate change. The report …