Memo to Nawbany: "How Cities Can Reclaim Their Streets From SUVs."

 

Something seldom considered hereabouts: “Safety of people outside the vehicle — pedestrians, cyclists, or other motorists — is obviously a legitimate object for regulation.”

How Cities Can Reclaim Their Streets From SUVs, by David Zipper (CityLab)

Pickup trucks and large sport-utility vehicles have flooded the streets of U.S. cities, a trend that’s been lethal for pedestrians and bike riders. Here’s what urban leaders could do about it. 

 The American fetish for SUVs and trucks isn’t just an environmental disaster. It’s an urban safety crisis. Larger vehicles that share streets with pedestrians and cyclists are more deadly than compact or mid-sized cars, both because their greater weight conveys more force upon impact and because their taller height makes it likelier they will crash into a person’s head or torso rather than their legs. Worse, because SUV drivers sit so much higher than similarly sized farm-near-me/">minivans, blind spots can prevent them from seeing people standing in front, especially children.

Typically, The Onion gets down to the heart of the carnage.          

Conscientious SUV Shopper Just Wants Something That Will Kill Family In Other Car In Case Of Accident (The Onion)

“I don’t need anything fancy, just a practical, midsize SUV that gets good mileage and will easily slaughter a family of five during a 60-mph crash. The last thing I want is a flimsy sedan that takes out Mommy and Daddy in the front seat but leaves behind a couple of orphans in the back.”

Do you think a single New Albany city official has so much as considered this issue? Most of them OWN vehicles like these, don't they? 

It makes this sentence particularly poignant: "If local leaders want to make a statement about the importance of safer, smaller automobiles, they could start by looking at the vehicles the city buys." 

I can't stop laughing. Or is it crying? It's so hard to tell the difference here in His Town.

According to this study, distracted DRIVING is 100 times worse than previously thought, but pedestrians are easier to blame.

I won't say "distracted walking" doesn't happen, because I've seen it and done it a few times myself. The point to remember is that someone like me, walking "distracted," carries poundage in the hundreds rather than the thousands.

Drivers are elevated for coddling in many and varied ways, but the point stays the same: they're capable of wreaking far greater havoc, their responsibility is greater, and the law enforcement apparatus should prosecute accordingly.

The state of Indiana hired a consultant to determine why pedestrian deaths have risen, and the result is mostly car-centric bilge and claptrap, but at least one good point emerges.

Increase In Indiana Pedestrian Deaths Follows Concerning National Trend, by Sarah Fentem (WBAA)

Retting says the combination of a good economy and lower gas prices mean more drivers on the road: going to work, traveling on vacations and visiting restaurants—and bars.

“At a minimum, half of pedestrian fatalities are alcohol related,” Retting says. “And that doesn’t begin to take into account drivers and pedestrians that are impaired by alcohol, just not at that high of level.”

As an aside, "more drivers on the road" also helps to explain why the added traffic lane never actually reduces congestion. It's called induced demand, and you can look it up during cigarette breaks while you lobby for 10-lane highways to get you to work, when just leaving a few minutes earlier costs taxpayers so very much less.

Getting back to the heart of the matter:

100 times worse than we thought: Insights from a Zendrive’s 2018 Distracted Driving Snapshot

Distracted driving is far worse than we thought. How bad? 100 times worse than the most reliable data available. Zendrive’s 2018 Distracted Driving Snapshot reveals that 69-million drivers use their phones behind the wheel every day, far higher than the 660,000 daily distracted drivers reported by government data.

We also know that we really shouldn’t be playing with our phones while driving, as it contributes to 26 percent of all collisions. But until now, we didn’t have accurate data on the extent of the problem. To mark Zendrive’s 100-billionth mile of driver data analyzed, we tried to quantify how bad the distracted driving problem is in the US ...

 ... Zendrive estimates that 69-million drivers use their phones each day
Compare our findings to previous research by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA): NHTSA estimates that 660,000 drivers use their phones during daylight hours. Based on our experience on the streets everyday, these numbers seemed low, and our analysis found that they were low, really low.

A few more choice words: "What Martin Luther King Actually Thought About Car Commercials."

At YouTube:

What Martin Luther King Actually Thought About Car Commercials: A different portion of the same Martin Luther King speech used in the recent Dodge RAM commercial.

And this:

FIAT CHRYSLER'S 'MARTIN LUTHER KING' AD DRAWS SOCIAL MEDIA BACKLASH, by E.J. Schultz (Ad Age)

The MLK ad drew heat on social media with some critics accusing the automaker of appropriating the civil rights leader's words for commercial gain.

Meet Dongho Chang: "Seattle’s chief traffic engineer is less concerned with how fast cars are getting through the city and more concerned with how people — on foot, on bike, in buses and cars — interact with the streets."

A boy can dream. I had such high hopes for Larry Summers, and maybe he'll be able to rally, but in the end -- so predictably, and so sadly -- Jeff Gahan's dull mediocrity corrupts everyone and everything it touches.

We could have been contenders, alas. Meanwhile, try to imagine our city hall functionaries walking or riding bikes.

Can't do it, can you?

Perhaps they don't feel safe. If only they had some way of correcting this fear ...

Meet the man striving to make Seattle’s streets safer, more efficient, by David Gutman (Seattle Times)

Seattle’s chief traffic engineer is less concerned with how fast cars are getting through the city and more concerned with how people — on foot, on bike, in buses and cars — interact with the streets.

Dongho Chang’s Twitter feed is boring.

You want caustic political opinions or an endless cavalcade of bad news? Look elsewhere.

What you’ll get from Chang, the city of Seattle’s chief traffic engineer:

Pictures of plastic speed bumps outside a West Seattle elementary school. New crosswalks in Lake City. New curb ramps in South Park. Protected bike lanes all over the place.

Chang’s feed is a catalog of changes to Seattle’s street grid and urban landscape. Almost all those changes are small, but when taken together, they paint a picture of a city in transformation, one less focused on fast car travel and more focused on making streets safe and reliable for walkers, bikers, bus riders and drivers.

Seattle isn’t building many new streets these days. Chang, along with dozens of engineers and technicians, works to make the streets we have function better, rejiggering speed limits and lane lines, trying new ideas to make the streets more welcoming and more efficient.

The results, like them or not, are apparent: Seattle’s not getting easier for drivers anytime soon. But it’s one of the safest cities in the country for pedestrians. And while downtown neighborhoods have added 45,000 jobs in the last six years, the rate of drive-alone commuters has declined, and transit use has spiked.

Distraction kills: "We all know what’s going on, but we don’t have a breathalyzer for a phone."

When you're walking, the scale of the problem quickly becomes evident.

In a sad auto-centric world, it's important for walkers and bicyclists to at least have the safety mechanism of making eye contact with drivers.

Eye contact can't be made through tinted windows, or when their heads are down gazing at phones.

Smartphones Are Killing Americans, But Nobody’s Counting, by Kyle Stock, Lance Lambert, and David Ingold (Bloomberg)

Amid a historic spike in U.S. traffic fatalities, federal data on the danger of distracted driving are getting worse.

 ... Over the past two years, after decades of declining deaths on the road, U.S. traffic fatalities surged by 14.4 percent. In 2016 alone, more than 100 people died every day in or near vehicles in America, the first time the country has passed that grim toll in a decade. Regulators, meanwhile, still have no good idea why crash-related deaths are spiking: People are driving longer distances but not tremendously so; total miles were up just 2.2 percent last year. Collectively, we seemed to be speeding and drinking a little more, but not much more than usual. Together, experts say these upticks don’t explain the surge in road deaths.

There are however three big clues, and they don’t rest along the highway. One, as you may have guessed, is the substantial increase in smartphone use by U.S. drivers as they drive. From 2014 to 2016, the share of Americans who owned an iPhone, Android phone, or something comparable rose from 75 percent to 81 percent.

The second is the changing way in which Americans use their phones while they drive. These days, we’re pretty much done talking. Texting, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are the order of the day—all activities that require far more attention than simply holding a gadget to your ear or responding to a disembodied voice. By 2015, almost 70 percent of Americans were using their phones to share photos and follow news events via social media. In just two additional years, that figure has jumped to 80 percent.

Finally, the increase in fatalities has been largely among bicyclists, motorcyclists, and pedestrians—all of whom are easier to miss from the driver’s seat than, say, a 4,000-pound SUV—especially if you’re glancing up from your phone rather than concentrating on the road. Last year, 5,987 pedestrians were killed by cars in the U.S., almost 1,100 more than in 2014—that’s a 22 percent increase in just two years.

It comes down to what is deemed acceptable. In my lifetime, attitudes toward driving intoxicated have become vastly more responsible -- drivers still drink and drive, but compared to 50 years ago, it's better.

“I use the cocktail party example,” he explained. “If you’re at a cocktail party and say, ‘I was so hammered the other day, and I got behind the wheel,’ people will be outraged. But if you say the same thing about using a cell phone, it won’t be a big deal. It is still acceptable, and that’s the problem.”

Autocentrism: Isn't it time to free ourselves from the chokehold of the car?

The underlined passage might as well refer directly to the colossal missed opportunity of New Albany's Downtown Grid Modernization Project. What Jeff Gahan has chosen to do constitutes the barest of minimums to (a) achieve paving on someone else's dime, and (b) declare victory.

$3 million (or more) later, we'll have climbed painfully into the 1980s. Just imagine what might have been, because if you can imagine it, that's considerably more than the suburban auto-centric mayor can conjure.

The car has a chokehold on Britain. It’s time to free ourselves, by George Monbiot (The Guardian)

Our insanely inefficient transport system is in thrall to the metal god. Electric vehicles are not the answer

We tell ourselves that we cherish efficiency. Yet we have created a transport system whose design principle is profligacy. Metal carriages (that increase in size every year), each carrying one or two people, travel in parallel to the same places. Lorries shifting identical goods in opposite directions pass each other on 2,000-mile journeys. Competing parcel companies ply the same routes, in largely empty vans. We could, perhaps, reduce our current vehicle movements by 90% with no loss of utility, and a major gain in our quality of life.

But to contest this peculiar form of insanity is, as I know to my cost, to be widely declared insane. Look at how advertising is dominated by car companies, and you begin to understand the drive to ensure that this counter-ergonomic system persists. Look at the lobbying power of the motor industry and its support in the media, and you see why successive plans to address pollution seemed designed to fail.

Suggest a neater system, and you will be shouted down by people insisting that they don’t want to live in a planned economy. But in this respect (and others) we do live in a planned economy. These days transport planners make a few concessions to cyclists, pedestrians and buses, but their overriding aim is still to maximise the flow of private vehicles. Rather than encouraging the more efficient use of existing infrastructure, they keep increasing the space into which inefficiency can expand ...

"The embedded violence of the automobile is something we take for granted."

It comes down to this: Speed and inattention kill, and our society routinely encourages both, whether by design, selfishness or neglect.

If you don't walk or bike in these settings, you simply can't ever understand it. Any city official or engineer who believes otherwise is delusional.

By extension, designing purported "solutions" in the absence of understanding constitutes a fool's errand.

The Everday Surrealism of Automobile Violence, by Bill Lindeke (Twin City Sidewalks)

... The only real conclusion here is that the embedded violence of the automobile is something we take for granted. Cars are deadly, and we’ve surrounded ourselves with them. At the flick of a foot, any drugged-up maniac can kill just anyone at any time, even someone minding his own business riding the city bus down Dale Street at seven miles per hour. Designing a society around the automobile is not only wasteful of our energy and collective resources, not only alienates us from each other and feeds our most misanthropic feelings, but it must result in senseless death. This is the only outcome when our cities practically require everyone to wield a weapon every day.

Like the jaywalker said: "People don’t obey the rules when they’re driving. Why should I?"

Yes, we've been here before.

MONDAY, JUNE 20, 2016
A contrarian asks: Should there even be "walk" signals for pedestrians?

FRIDAY, APRIL 22, 2016
Blaming walkers for street danger is like blaming the unarmed for gun violence with the shooter right in front of you."

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2015
The Modern Moloch": When cars were viewed as child-eating gods to be appeased.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2015
Video: "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime."

SATURDAY, AUGUST 22, 2015
Walking is not a crime: Dunman and others on the scourges of jaywalking in auto-erotic America.

Jaywalking isn't a crime. It's a defense mechanism to circumvent wheeled stupidity, plain and simple.

Fearless, defiant, detested: Meet the Boston jaywalker, by Maria Cramer (Boston Globe)

... The long-running tension between the city’s drivers and its pedestrians spilled into City Hall last week after Mayor Martin J. Walsh took to the radio and suggested people pay more attention when they walk and bike around the city. He was instantly slammed by cycling and pedestrian advocates who accused him of victim blaming ...

On the topic of annoyance versus causation:

“Boston is without question the most lawless city when it comes to pedestrians,’’ said Peter Furth, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern University. “It’s an annoying thing, but that is not the cause of our fatalities.’’

He said that Walsh’s comments that pedestrians should remove their headphones and quit darting in and out of traffic are undercut by data that show that at least four of the 15 pedestrians killed in Boston last year were older than 65. Two others were children under 3.

“The idea that pedestrians jaywalking makes for an unsafe environment is not borne out by the data,’’ Furth said.

In fact, a 2014 study that looked at 51 major metropolitan areas ranked Boston as the least dangerous city for pedestrians. The city’s chaotic streetscape, which lacks a traditional grid pattern makes the city safer for pedestrians, in a way, because cars are forced to drive more slowly, Furth said.

ASK THE BORED: Decades too late, but the two-way sanity project finally begins. That it took this long is an embarrassment.

Two or three times every year, mostly on weekends during fair weather, I'll be outside doing something, and I'll hear the approach of motorcycles.

Seconds later, two of them will fly past, one in each westbound lane on a one-way street built for drag racing. Accordingly, they'll be doing 60 mph, and probably higher.

I always look toward downtown to see if they made it past the curve at 10th Street. So far they always have. It's almost a disappointment.

But I don't want anyone getting hurt -- neither motorcyclists nor bicyclists, or the children playing on both sides of Spring on my block, and not even the truckers whose rigs are twice the size of a nearby shotgun house, usually driving faster than they should through a densely populated neighborhood.

No, save the torture for several generations of shortsighted, wind-bagged, thought-challenged New Albany politicians, who for 50 years were perfectly content to empower anti-social automotive behavior to the detriment of their own community simply because they couldn't imagine their way through a wet beer label with a squirt gun held to their heads.

In all sincerity, those many politicians and their functionaries can rot in hell for all I care.

At long last, the "grid modernization" project is under way. It should have been done years ago, and it might have been done far less expensively. Still, very soon I hope to be sitting in a lawn chair on my verge, gin and tonic in hand, laughing at the auto-centric fools who are red-faced and flatulent at having to expend an extra five minutes to pass through a city where few of them even live.

Here's an excerpt from last week's BOW meeting minutes.

---

Wes Christmas, Clark Dietz, explained that the work is on schedule for the grid modernization and paving and they will be wrapping up patching activity this week. He stated that the milling and paving on Spring Street will begin on Monday the 15th starting at the east end going west and it should be complete by the end of next week.

Mr. Nash asked if the traffic will remain in the same pattern while the work is being done.

Mr. Christmas stated that it will remain in the same pattern as it currently exists until they come through and put the new pavement markings in. He added that all the paving work will be done before the switch takes place and under the current paving schedule it should be finished by the end of June, weather dependent.

Mr. Nash asked about the status on the signal modernization.

Mr. Lincks stated that they are currently identifying utilities as well as boring from the potholes to detect the utilities to run the conduit in preparation for the paving. He added that they are currently on Spring Street doing that work and will continue that work until Spring, Elm and Market are complete.

Mr. Nash asked if the conduit goes in the paving to activate the signals.

Mr. Lincks stated the conduit runs from the detector housings to hand holes which are located near the signal pole locations.

Mr. Summers stated that the conduit allows for the wiring of the signals to go underground.

Mr. Lincks explained that this will be followed by the paving work and they do it this way so that the pavement doesn’t have to be disturbed later.

Mr. Christmas stated that once the underground work is complete on Elm Street they will jump over to Elm with the paving operations.

Mr. Thompson added except for the work at Breakwater.

Mr. Christmas stated that they started work in parking lane at 1st Street and Main Street yesterday and there is no real impact on traffic.